Reading the title of this whole blog, "Self-Taught International Governmental Strategic Analyst" you may think I have some high powered Government job. Not at all.
It is a joking play on how people name jobs. Like how street cleaners have become "Waste Technicians" or how iPod sellers are "Apple Geniuses'".
I spend much of my time researching the historical and current events in the world, analysing them from a "strategic" view and not a humanist one.
The verbose/grandiose title is a little joke for my own morale more than anything else, to be honest.
So to be clear, what you will read in this blog is usually (not always) based on rational thought and strategic analysis. Any time I hear anything I think... "Cui Bono?" Or in English: "Who benefits?"
Whether it's the war in Syria, a car bombing in Iraq, a plane flying into a building or whatever else... I always consider a few things before I begin my analysis.
Think of a recent terrible event and have your brain really chew on these quotes for a while, try and apply each point to the situation:
- "Cui Bono?" - Who benefits?
- "Sequere pecuniam" - Follow the money
- "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" - The "bad" people often think they're doing "good"
- "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" - Voltaire (supposedly)
In short, I take a rational approach to the world around us.
Many people would agree with such things as "My Government would never knowingly kill an innocent citizen!" And yet it happens on a daily basis, either through direct action or intentional inaction. Usually to somebody in power's benefit.
We often feel that these people hold human life above all else. To be honest: they should. But often, unfortunately, they don't. Ideologies, money, power... these things all come above human life in these people's minds.
At it's best it is utilitarianism gone wrong. "I kill 50 people today to save 5,000 tomorrow"...
Very rarely does someone in a powerful place ask why anybody should ever be killed at all.
Are the medical insurance companies more bothered about profit or helping the injured?
A hypothetical situation (because it's my blog and I can):
You are the ruler of a country. You border a country who has a lot of farms for food. You don't have enough food for your people. They have no military, you have a large military. You don't have anything they need, so you can't trade for the food.
It's a no brainer, right? You take them over and share the food out. Everybody wins. The only difference for them is a change of Government.
But then the Welfare bill is too high and you're importing too much oil (for example). Everybody is fed, but you don't have enough fuel for your country,
...Hey! Look... there's a country next to you which produces a tonne of oil. More than enough for your country.. They're not very militarily strong and won't trade with us....Let's invade them?
That's all fine and dandy, but what do you tell the people? What do you tell your democratic society who elected you? Who can elect somebody else?
Do you tell them:
A. "We will invade because we need oil. Many of you will die for this resource we are already surviving without"
Or B. "The evil country next to us is planning to invade us. They hate us. They are jealous of our food. Their culture is inferior. They are a threat to us and therefore must be destroyed."?
Throughout history many many leaders have picked option B. The reason? Why tell the truth when the lie benefits you more? Option B, the propaganda option, gives you so much support for the war than option A.
In some ways it is extremely selfish. This is what they are thinking at the time:
How am I more likely to be reelected? By telling the people we are invading an innocent country, with thousands of our men dying for the sake of oil?....
Or by telling the people that I am defending them from a horrible threat? If it wasn't for my great leadership in pre-emptively attacking them, we would all have been wiped out.
Politicians use propaganda to spin things to benefit themselves or their friends, they spin situations to garner support for their actions so they may be reelected.
That is the unfortunate truth of the situation. And the reason I hate most politicians.
Propaganda and Cui Bono:
In World war 2 the USA began with a non-interventionist policy if it was not directly threatened.
Sure, I'm not debating that stopping Nazi Germany was a good thing. But a country going to war based on no threat to itself? There is obviously an ulterior motive. Especially when the public were falsely led to believe that they were under threat.
The American Government justified the financing of their war effort through propaganda and fear of children being conquered... even though the American children were under no threat at all at the time:
Now, I am not saying that the UK or Russia or Germany didn't employ fear-propaganda to fund their wars at all. The difference to me is that they were "under threat" from Germany. The Japanese/Nazi's were not landing in Florida or San Francisco. The fear mongering is rather unjustified and qualifies as propaganda here.
Propaganda to buy war bonds for a war which the country did not need to be involved in. The USA is by no means unique in this respect, un-needed involvement in war is extremely common in history, the USA is just the most recent example in a large scale war.
A large scale war which, on the whole, it benefited from. Industrialisation, lend-lease money, many more women workers, emergence as a super power, the capture of the type XXI Submarine and the German rocket scientists.... none of these things were what the public wanted though...
They were too busy buying bonds to stop Germany invading them and killing their children.
If you take anything away from this blog please take one thing:
Politicians have two reasons for every action: The reason they are performing the action and "the reason" they tell the public that the action is necessary. The two are often very different reasons...
