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In reply to the discussion: Thank you Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Leahy, Jeffords and all those who voted against the IWR [View all]
''The true value of a conflict is in the debt it produces -- you control the debt, you control everything''.
- Wars are never about any conflict on the ground. It's always about conflicts in the Board rooms.
- Wars are never about any conflict on the ground. It's always about conflicts in the Board rooms.
Like the Venetians, says Adams, the British laid the basis of their high fortune by piracy and slaving. Following the Spanish discovery of the Potosi mines, Sir Francis Drake and his followers robbed the Spanish fleet of a vast treasure. John Hawkins added to the flow of wealth by capturing the slave trade from the Spaniards and supplying the labour-hungry colonies in the West Indies. Together they monopolized Spanish silver and brought Elizabethan England to the status of a world power.
An expanding trade with the East gradually depleted this new supply of silver. The foundation of the Bank of England provided a temporary respite through the creation of paper but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, coin was again dangerously low. South American silver had been travelling steadily by way of Europe to India, where it accumulated in the vaults of the ruling princes. This flow was suddenly reversed when the East India Company, under the military leadership of Robert Clive, turned from trade to plunder. Millions of pounds were taken back to England, where they provided the financial impetus which led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire.
Adams realized that such massive military operations were extensions of the normal means whereby the moneyed classes maintained their power. One hopes that Adams compiled his own index, for it contains one of the books pithiest comments: War: see Police. Here lies another crucial difference which he sees between the Middle Ages and the ascendancy of the economic type:
Through this process the bourgeoisie gained another valuable monopolythat of physical force. The armed men whose salaries they paid protected their interests under the laws which they created. There were local pockets of resistance under surviving feudal lords, but these were gradually subdued. In the study of history, Adams thus provided a shift of focus from the succession of kings to the economic groups which used the monarchy as a means to centralization. The latter have been largely passed over, for, unlike a monarch, a bankers power was apt to be in inverse ratio to his notoriety. Fame and Glory are not words often heard in the Exchange.
If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interestsit can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art. This demands a thesis in itself, but Pounds references to the practice deserve a brief mention.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
An expanding trade with the East gradually depleted this new supply of silver. The foundation of the Bank of England provided a temporary respite through the creation of paper but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, coin was again dangerously low. South American silver had been travelling steadily by way of Europe to India, where it accumulated in the vaults of the ruling princes. This flow was suddenly reversed when the East India Company, under the military leadership of Robert Clive, turned from trade to plunder. Millions of pounds were taken back to England, where they provided the financial impetus which led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire.
Adams realized that such massive military operations were extensions of the normal means whereby the moneyed classes maintained their power. One hopes that Adams compiled his own index, for it contains one of the books pithiest comments: War: see Police. Here lies another crucial difference which he sees between the Middle Ages and the ascendancy of the economic type:
The basis of the secular society of the early Middle Ages was individual physical force. . . With the spread of the mercantile type, however, a change beganthe transmutation of physical force into money. Thus, from the time when the economic type had multiplied sufficiently to hire a police, the strength of the State came to depend on its revenue, and financiers grew to be the controlling element of civilization.
Through this process the bourgeoisie gained another valuable monopolythat of physical force. The armed men whose salaries they paid protected their interests under the laws which they created. There were local pockets of resistance under surviving feudal lords, but these were gradually subdued. In the study of history, Adams thus provided a shift of focus from the succession of kings to the economic groups which used the monarchy as a means to centralization. The latter have been largely passed over, for, unlike a monarch, a bankers power was apt to be in inverse ratio to his notoriety. Fame and Glory are not words often heard in the Exchange.
If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interestsit can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art. This demands a thesis in itself, but Pounds references to the practice deserve a brief mention.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
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Thank you Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Leahy, Jeffords and all those who voted against the IWR [View all]
cali
Jun 2014
OP
Iraq is now an unpredictable mess. What value did the war serve? Absolutely nothing.
Enthusiast
Jun 2014
#9
Iraq was a relatively stable country under Saddam Hussein. The people had HC, Education. And get
sabrina 1
Jun 2014
#25
Regime Change was the way to disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East between Political and
DhhD
Jun 2014
#20
the IWR didn't give Bush any authority or even the power to do what he ultimately did
bigtree
Jun 2014
#22
I lived through that era, began my internet activism a few months before that vote
bigtree
Jun 2014
#36
Out of curiosity, were you able to bring yourself to vote for John Kerry in 2004?
Nye Bevan
Jun 2014
#27
Were those who voted for the killing bamboozled or politically expedient?
Tierra_y_Libertad
Jun 2014
#29
I have become so cynical that I would say every vote taken was out of political expediency.
NCTraveler
Jun 2014
#33