“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

A photo is worth a million plus deaths, and the constant total awareness pogrom of capitalism under any dirty red or white or blue.

How many millions of pixels does it take for Amerikans to get the picture, yet?

By any means necessary!

Frantz Fanon
The phrase is a translation of a sentence used in revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s 1960 Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference, “Why we use violence”:

“Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.” —Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom: part 3, chapter 22, “Why we use violence”. 1960

Jean-Paul Sartre
The phrase is a translation of a sentence used in French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Dirty Hands:

“I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands: act 5, scene 3. 1963

Malcolm X
It entered the popular culture through a speech given by Malcolm X in the last year of his life.

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

— Malcolm X, 1965

Democrats Swoon Over George W. Bush, In Match Made in Hell

After George W. Bush gave a speech comparing 9/11 to January 6th, a parade of high-profile Democrats stepped over the grave of American liberalism to praise him

Matt Taibbi

Sep 13

A few years ago, George W. Bush was on track to be remembered as one of the worst presidents of all time, if not the worst. He was both more disdainful and more ignorant of the law than Nixon, his arsonist economic stewardship was rivaled only by Hoover, and intellectwise he made Chester A. Arthur look like Copernicus. He was also a worse and more destructive president than Donald Trump, and it wasn’t close. Trump talked big, but it was Bush who actually smashed norms on a grand scale, from international law to human rights to adherence to the most basic constitutional principles, in pursuit of policies that Brown University just estimated cost $8 trillion and led to 900,000 deaths.

President George W. Bush’s ‘promise’ to establish democracy in Afghanistan was a rhetoric for domestic consumption. The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud; the Taliban were a convenient target to satisfy a political lust for revenge for 9/11. An authentic military response to 9/11 might have seen U.S. bombs falling on the palaces of Saudi Arabia — most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, not least Osama bin Laden himself; not one was an Afghan.

Moral posturing over 9/11 had almost nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan; bin Laden had already left Afghanistan and the Taliban anyway wanted to get rid of him. To the U.S., Afghanistan’s usefulness had been as a battleground on which to bring down the Soviet Union. This had been achieved long before 9/11.

The suffering in Afghanistan has also been profitable. The American war industry has tested and deployed numerous new products there. A recent study tells us that if you purchased $10,000 worth of stock in America’s top five defence contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan — you would now be much richer.

— John Pilger is one of the world’s most acclaimed investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers. He is a recipient of several prestigious awards, including an Emmy and a BAFTA. He has contributed to various international publications and news services, including The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC World Service, and Al Jazeera. Mr. Pilger has directed more than 60 documentaries capturing some of the important events of 20th and 21st centuries. In 2003, he directed Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror. In this interview, he talks about the present political developments in Afghanistan, the war on terror, and the history of the Taliban. The following are edited excerpts from the interview. —The Hindu

$10,000 INVESTED IN DEFENSE STOCKS WHEN AFGHANISTAN WAR BEGAN NOW WORTH ALMOST $100,000 —

S&P 500

• Total return: 516.67 percent
• Annualized return: 9.56 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $61,613.06

Basket of Top Five Contractor Stocks

• Total return: 872.94 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase ($2,000 of each stock) today: $97,294.80

Boeing

• Total return: 974.97 percent
• Annualized return: 12.67 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $107,588.47
• Board includes: Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr. (former vice chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff), Stayce D. Harris (former inspector general, Air Force), John M. Richardson (former navy chief of Naval Operations)

Raytheon

• Total return: 331.49 percent
• Annualized return: 7.62 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $43,166.92
• Board includes: Ellen Pawlikowski (retired Air Force general), James Winnefeld Jr. (retired Navy admiral), Robert Work (former deputy secretary of defense)

Lockheed Martin

• Total return: 1,235.60 percent
• Annualized return: 13.90 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $133,559.21
• Board includes: Bruce Carlson (retired Air Force general), Joseph Dunford Jr. (retired Marine Corps general)

General Dynamics

• Total return: 625.37 percent
• Annualized return: 10.46 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $72,515.58
• Board includes: Rudy deLeon (former deputy secretary of defense), Cecil Haney (retired Navy admiral), James Mattis (former secretary of defense and former Marine Corps general), Peter Wall (retired British general)

Northrop Grumman

• Total return: 1,196.14 percent
• Annualized return: 13.73 percent
• $10,000 2001 stock purchase today: $129,644.84
• Board includes: Gary Roughead (retired Navy admiral), Mark Welsh III (retired Air Force general)

All stock return calculations were made with the Dividend Channel’s DRIP calculator for the period from September 18, 2001 to August 15, 2021. They reflect returns gross of any taxes and fees and are not adjusted for inflation.