When Google Meets The Pentagon

Above Photo: Defense Secretary Ash Carter meets with Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet and new chairman of the first DoD Innovation Advisory Board, during the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, March 2, 2016.(Photo: Tim D. Godbee/DoD)

What happens when you merge a psychopath with a killer?

Tapping innovation for the US military-technology nexus is, reports Reuters, necessary “to maintain the U.S. military’s competitive edge over Russia and China as they expand their militaries.” The rhetoric of maintaining a competitive edge is disingenuous. After all, the Pentagon’s wet dream is possessing full spectrum dominance— unchallenged dominance in all theaters of war: land, air, sea, and space, including cyberspace.

Halting the military-industrial-governmental complex

Pacifist scientist Albert Einstein stated, “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” He elaborated, “The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.”[17]

Einstein knows well of what he speaks since he is a scientist who wrote a letter to president Franklin Roosevelt that subsequently led to acts of genocide: dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In hindsight, Einstein expressed, what might be considered tepid, regret: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.”[18]

No one has been held accountable for the horrendous loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a superpower, the United States continues to violate international law and commit war crimes as if endowed with blanket immunity.[19] This immunity must end, and Nuremberg Law must be applied without prejudice to all malefactors. The prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, aggression, and genocide must be demanded by the masses of humanity and must be supported without patriotic bias. Courage is called for because people would be confronting elitist power, power that controls the security apparatus: the police, jails, courts, spy agencies, and the military.

Successful prosecution and punishment of American war criminals would signal a revolution of the international justice system and international order. To succeed mass action is a sine qua non. In 2009, the brave warrior Splitting the Sky attempted a solo citizen’s arrest of George Bush Jr. Splitting the Sky wound up being arrested. Sadly, Splitting the Sky is no longer with us, but if one man can muster the gumption to take action against the injustice of the system, then it behooves the rest of us to, at the very least, have each other’s back.

Finally, if the unlawful use of military force will henceforth be prosecuted with requisite zeal, then a resort to warring should be deterred with war being discarded as a heinous historical tactic. Disarmament would, therefore, seem the next logical step. If a world of peace is what the masses of humanity desire, and surely they do, then disarmament must transpire, and the military industry must be repurposed: away from killing and toward creating prosperity for the living.

Peace would bring about a change in the economic landscape. Why stop there? The world and people would also be better off without psychopathic corporations reigning.

ENDNOTES

1. Writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Somehow, even ‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.” An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2014, p. 78.
2. See Kieran Kelly, “The United States of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 30 September 2013.
3. Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States, Clarity Press, 2013. See review.
4. See Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, “The Imperialist Violence in Syria, Part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7,”Information Clearing House, January 2016.
5. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, 1983.
6. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 2002.
7. Meanwhile, Google has subsumed itself under a parent company Alphabet. The new slogan is “Do the Right Thing.” The rebranding technique also is used in the world of killers, as departments of war become departments of defense, as the US Army School of the Americas (commonly referred to as the School of Assassins) now calls itself Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and the Blackwater mercenaries for hire now prefers to be called Academi.
8. Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks, OR Books, 2014, location 378.
9. Assange, 2390.
10. Assange, 2242.
11. Assange, 3171.
12. Assange, 3185.
13. See Ronald Kessler, Inside the CIA, Pocket Books, 1992, p. 206.
14. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.
15. See Joel Bakan, the corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power, Penguin, 2004.
16. Bakan, p. 33-35.
17. Message sent to Congressman Robert Hale on 4 December 1946. Quoted in Einstein on Peace edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, 1960, p. 397.
18. From “Atoms: Einstein, the Man Who Started It All,” Newsweek, 10 March 1947.
19. See Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States, Clarity Press, 2008. Read review.