WHY WAR IS THE FINAL SOLUTION TO A DEPRESSION 

                          
                             by Neville Raymond 

              Depression, it is said, is bottled up anger turned inwards.  

          So it is conceivable that aggressively acting out that anger can pull one out of a depression.  Certainly this works in a psychological context.   

          But what about that organized form of hostility known as war?  How does it pull us out of an economic depression?          

          Therein hangs one of the most grimmest, most pernicious myths of our time.

            Count me as a former believer in that myth.   For the longest time, I actually believed that World War II brought an end to the Great Depression.  All of FDR’s vaunted social programs couldn’t do it.  But by golly, the miracle of a world war did the trick.  The outbreak of a global cataclysm finally allowed Americans to put behind them the decade-long ordeal of misery and poverty known as the Great Depression. 

             Whenever I heard this piece of conventional wisdom bandied around, I found myself buying into it with a vague sense of buyer's remorse.  Hmm.  Yet another of great unsung virtues of war.  It sets factories humming again, puts millions of people back to work and boosts the GDP.  Never mind all those soldier sent home with missing arms or legs.  War can get a country on its feet again after the most crippling depression.

            It wasn’t until I reached a ripe middle age that my eyes were opened to the truth.  And then I felt like kicking myself for my stupidity and ignorance in believing such whopper of a tale. 

           

         But first, some context.  To debunk this whole fantasy of World War II ending the Depression, we have to go back to what actually started it.  The Great Depression was not a force of nature, like an earthquake or a tsunami or a meteor strike.   No Act of God wiped out our farmlands, threw people out of work or plunged them into the economic doldrums.  Everything was working just fine going into the 1930s.  Except for one thing that was being monkeyed around with behind the scenes.  The supply of paper money.  The international bankers had decided to drain the amount of money circulating in society.  They put their hands around the throat of the economy and squeezed it until it was down to its last breath.  Now there was almost no money left to carry out the basic tasks of an industrialized society, like buying goods, building factories and hiring people.  Eventually, the drastic decrease in paper money made it impossible for the U.S. economy to function, and it more or less shut down through the course of the decade.

            FDR came galloping to the rescue by borrowing money from bankers at higher rates of interest.  The money was spent on social causes - public works, putting people to work – what we like to call stimulating the economy today.  All this helped – but clearly not enough.

           

         The Great Depression was not about to end until the banksters said that it could end.  And that meant reversing their original course.  After all, they were the ones who caused the Great Depression by choking off the amount of money in circulation.   And the only way they could end it was by doing an about-face and expanding the money supply.   Whereas before they had caused the American economy to black out and collapse by draining the lifeblood of it,  all they had to do to revive it now was open the floodgates and let it flow.

           

         And so they did.  But why did the bankers become so generous all of a sudden?  What could have possibly motivated the financial powers that be to go on a spending spree, acting like money was no longer any object?  Why, the prospect of getting the members of the human species to butcher each other like there was no tomorrow. 

           Yeah, that’s right.  Money may be the lifeblood of the economy.   When it suited their purposes, the central bankers saw nothing wrong in wringing this lifeblood out of the economy and putting it into a dead faint.  But now the prospect of war got their juices flowing.  It got them pumping all the money back into the system.           

            Whereas a decade earlier, there was no money for food or houses, now there was money in abundance for Army barracks and K-rations.  Whereas before there was no money for a nation to feed and shelter itself and live the good life, now there was money aplenty to build bombs and airplanes to spread death and destruction all over the world.  And whereas before the banksters let crops rot in the fields, because they refused to extend the credit to harvest them, now there was money and then some to ramp up industrial capacity and production to harvest the killing fields in Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union.

            Sorry to disappoint all the warmongers.  World War II did not put an end to the Great Depression.  It was the banksters’ machiavellian withdrawal of money for people to enjoy the basics of the good life that got the Great Depression going in the first place.  And it was their sadistic preference to make money freely available for a fratricidal bloodbath that apparently put an end to it. 

         Doesn’t this tell us everything we need to know about how the power structure rates welfare and warfare?  They are positive killjoys when it comes to pulling the plug on the Good Life for millions of people.  But they dance on the rooftops and jump for joy when it comes to priming the pump for the Good War where millions suffer wholesale death and destruction. 

         They are tight-fisted in the extreme when it comes to bringing the human race material comfort and security, pleasure and leisure.  But they spend money hand over fist when it comes to plunging the human race into an abyss of violence, bloodshed and destruction.

         And you wonder why mankind fares so poorly at the hands of its so-called leaders!  Their obsession with funding the technology of death and destruction is in a sense the inevitable outcome of a readiness to take away everything that makes life worth living for the majority of the human race.

         Their fanatical commitment to economic warfare demands that they take away the livelihoods, the homes, and the savings of millions of innocent people and generally drive their lifestyles into the gutter.  And their no less fanatical commitment to military warfare simply takes that agenda to its logical conclusion by marching millions of innocent human beings to a premature grave.