Skip to main content

Marc Faber's Prediction of War

I haven't said too much on politics lately, perhaps because the financial recklessness and lies of our leaders and central bankers leave me speechless. Also, all that really needs to be said about politics, has already been said by Mencken:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. (Gutenberg.org)
That would seem to cover the big news story these days, the saber-rattling with Iran. It's unusual to see so much agreement between Europe and America on an issue, and that alone should make one suspicious. In America the saber-rattling with Iran will be a mainstay of the seemingly-interminable presidential campaign.

It's an old idea actually: the Republicans think that the populace sees the Democrats as foreign policy sissies and that this should win votes for the GOP. In order for this to really work there needs to be an official bad guy, a Bogeyman, who hopefully can be compared to Hitler. All the usual suspects are behind this campaign for war. The war drums are being beaten loudest by the Yahwist wing of the Republican party, that is, neo-cons, Rapture Christians, and AIPAC. Such groups are proud of being super-patriots; but to which country?

Of course the Democratic president could fight back by out-sabre-rattling the GOP. But that could cause oil prices to climb, which is recessionary of course. Then the GOP would blame the Democrats for high unemployment and energy costs.

But what if saber-rattling's Nielsen ratings go down, with repetition, and the grand poobahs on both sides of the pond keep threatening the Iranians a little more each month until the world finally stumbles into war, as it so often has? This might be bad news for the sheep and peasants of each country, but it could be wonderful for the bankers and politicians. Financial chaos, high gasoline costs, and recessions would offer the grand poobahs the cover to do more of what they want to do, the only thing they know how to do, print money. The worse the news is, the more the American sheep will rally around their mighty Sword, the President, and the GOP will have been outfoxed. (No pun intended.)

What interests me is seeing if three years of deficit explosions have sobered Americans up. Do they still see trillion-dollar-wars as something that can be thrown easily onto the national credit card? Or have they come to fear reckless and endless wars in the Mideast more than the Islamic bogeyman du jour?

In the case of Europe, the politicians and un-elected bureaucratic elites need to distract the peasants from their crimes and assaults on the democratic principles of modern Western civilization. Like their American co-criminals, they could sense opportunity in major war: 'let no crisis go to waste.'

A year ago Marc Faber, a popular commentator on business channels and websites, predicted that the outcome of the financial crisis would be war. He meant big War, presumably, not just the smaller operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, etc. These other conflicts were rather modest after all, taking a decade to run the credit card up by a trillion dollars. At the time I thought that he was going over the top with that, and that he was just trying to be controversial and entertaining, which is what these news channels are all about, after all. It now seems as though he should take a bow. But he hasn't been as visible lately in the usual places.

Comments