Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11
Article first published by GR in August 2008
Wars in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by
executive fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who
will make the human and material sacrifices. Imperialist leaders have to
create a visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and
righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural
opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life
and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist
rule by the military.
The need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist
countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is
no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their
everyday life. The ‘enemy’ does not disrupt everyday normal life – as
forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who
would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their
participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule
that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?
The task of imperial rulers is to fabricate a world in which the
enemy to be attacked (an emerging imperial power like Japan) is
portrayed as an ‘invader’ or an ‘aggressor’ in the case of revolutionary
movements (Korean and Indo-Chinese communists) engaged in a civil war
against an imperial client ruler or a ‘terrorist conspiracy’ linked to
an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial Islamic movements and secular states.
Imperialist-democracies in the past did not need to consult or secure
mass support for their expansionist wars; they relied on volunteer
armies, mercenaries and colonial subjects led and directed by colonial
officers. Only with the confluence of imperialism, electoral politics
and total war did the need arise to secure not only consent, but also
enthusiasm, to facilitate mass recruitment and obligatory conscription.
Since all US imperial wars are fought ‘overseas’ – far from any
immediate threats, attacks or invasions – -US imperial rulers have the
special task of making the ‘causus bellicus’ immediate, ‘dramatic’ and
self-righteously ‘defensive’.
To this end US Presidents have created circumstances, fabricated
incidents and acted in complicity with their enemies, to incite the
bellicose temperament of the masses in favor of war.
The pretext for wars are acts of provocation which set in motion a
series of counter-moves by the enemy, which are then used to justify an
imperial mass military mobilization leading to and legitimizing war.
State ‘provocations’ require uniform mass media complicity in the
lead-up to open warfare: Namely the portrayal of the imperial country as
a victim of its own over-trusting innocence and good intentions. All
four major US imperial wars over the past 67 years resorted to a
provocation, a pretext, and systematic, high intensity mass media
propaganda to mobilize the masses for war. An army of academics,
journalists, mass media pundits and experts ‘soften up’ the public in
preparation for war through demonological writing and commentary: Each
and every aspect of the forthcoming military target is described as
totally evil – hence ‘totalitarian’ – in which even the most benign
policy is linked to demonic ends of the regime.