For the past century, human beings had the agricultural capacity, the technology and the organizational skills to feed every last person on the planet. Yet, marching along into the 21st century, 80 percent of the world's population lives in absolute poverty - economically defined as missing one or more of the five fundamental necessities of life, i.e., food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Millions of people have died of neglect, disease, malnutrition and starvation. In large part they have died because precious funds went instead to feed the war machine, also called euphemistically as "military expenditures" or "milex." More recently these costs are referred to not even as military expenditures but as "defense expenditures." This change was wrought in 1947 when the extant Department of War was renamed to Department of Defense. George Orwell referred to these nefarious terminological twists as "doublethink" and "doublespeak."
The driving force behind the Cold War, which was continued by Ronald Reagan through the 1980s and continued to the extreme with 9/11, was fear. If a government can manage to instill high levels of fear into the populace, that government can do anything it wants, in the name of alleviating that fear. Hence the American people always said 'yes' to wars.
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |