Chomsky: Elites Have Forced America into a National Psychosis to Keep Us Embroiled in Imperial Wars!

• Chomsky: Elites Have Forced America into a National Psychosis to Keep Us Embroiled in Imperial Wars! 
  by Noam Chomsky, http://alternet.org/
  And most of our intellectuals are only too happy to participate in the propaganda.
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  “War is the health of the State,” wrote social critic Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America entered World War I:
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  “It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. … Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.”
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  And at the service of society’s “significant classes” were the intelligentsia, “trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends.”
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  They are “lined up in service of the war-technique. There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”
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  The role of the technical intelligentsia in decision-making is predominant in those parts of the economy that are “in the service of the war technique” and closely linked to the government, which underwrites their security and growth.
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  It is little wonder, then, that the technical intelligentsia is, typically, committed to what sociologist Barrington Moore in 1968 called “the predatory solution of token reform at home and counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad.”
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• Highly decorated General Smedley Butler says is his book, War is a Racket :
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  WAR is a racket. It always has been.
  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
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  A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
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  In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
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  How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
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  Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

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