War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery... Ignorance is Strength...

(Stimulating the economy, one war at a time. Substack Image Generator)

“Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”

~ Frank Zappa (1940 – 1993)

Joel Bowman with today’s Notes From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

In the daily prize for “dumbest headlines,” the Wall Street Journal often finds itself standing, bewildered, upon the dais. Recently, and among tough competition, it climbed to the very top step. From the March 29 edition:

For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat

The country’s economic growth depends on the war in Ukraine, making a peace deal an economic risk for the Kremlin

Yes, dear reader, the very same economy that was going to crumble “within weeks” under the weight of rearmament, the pressure of western sanctions, and the inimitable force of Ukrainian flags in BlueSky bios, faces a new and existential danger: the imminent outbreak of peace!

To be clear, this particular Note is not about the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, per se, the sophmoronic “Us vs. Them” paradigm of the perennially propagandized. After all, war does not determine who is right, as the old saying goes... only who is left.

Rather, we aim to make a broader point, about an ideology that begins with a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world really works... and ends up in precisely the reductio ad absurdum you would expect, advocating for that Orwellian motto:

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

Peace Beware!

Indeed, the Journal makes the case for us perfectly, albeit inadvertently. Continued the braindead op-ed...

Against the odds, the Russian economy has weathered the war. The next economic storm on the horizon: peace.

Hmm...

“A bloodbath” ... “a quagmire” ... “hell on earth” ... we’ve heard war described a thousand different ways. But we’ve never heard peace portrayed as an “economic storm on the horizon.”

Apparently, Benjamin Franklin got it face-about-arse when he observed, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

And here we thought battle-weary soldiers on both sides, having been dragged through mud and trench by their spotless political leaders, yearned for “peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That, granted something like a Christmas Day Truce, as was the case on the Western Front in 1914 , sons and brothers might retire their bayonets and sing carols together, exchange gifts and even take up some impromptu football games in no-man’s land.

How... quaint!

For years we labored under the naive delusion that, as Randolph Bourne had it, “war is the health of the state,” not – as seemed far from the case – the health of the citizenry, who were, after all, busy dying en masse. Turns out, the real danger lurked in peacetime all along, where a brotherhood of man serves one and other’s needs, works together toward common goals and produces value through the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services.

Mars above! Spare those young soldiers the “economic storm” of peace, brewing ominously on the horizon. If only they would stick to building tanks instead of Teslas... churning out artillery shells instead of Taco Bells... manufacturing F-16s instead of iPhone 16s... the world would be all the richer for it. If only the young cannon fodder knew the true horror of peacetime, they might remain on the frontlines, coughing and hacking in the blood and the muck.

Thus does the myth persist that it was WWII that finally dragged the US out of depression... by stealing resources – including precious human capital – from the private realm of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and mandating that its flow be redirecting toward death, tyranny and the pursuit of misery.

And yet, it’s not merely hundreds of thousands of room temperature corpses at stake here...there’s a whole warped philosophy that undergirds such empty-headed, anti-human thinking. Continued the establishment mouthpiece:

Throughout the conflict in Ukraine, massive government spending on the military has propped up Russia’s output and blunted the impact of Western sanctions. Weapons factories geared up, while outfits from clothing brands to bakeries retooled to make balaclavas and drones. The transformation has made Russia’s economy reliant on the war for jobs, wages and growth. Weaning it off that military sustenance, in a peace deal being pushed by President Trump, is an economic risk for the Kremlin.

Bombs and Baby Rattles

And here we get to the cold, dark heart of the matter, the mistaken belief that true economic vitality is somehow tied to raw production itself, regardless of the underlying human value of what is actually being produced. As if the state knows best what its citizens need, rather than those self same individuals.

Who needs winter clothes and baked goods when you can have balaclavas and drones instead? Forget summer holidays with the kids and clear skies overhead. Try bomb craters full of child soldiers and skies darkened with predator drones. Death and destruction is what the people really want, right?

Of course, if you view the world through the slanted lens of Keynesian economics, this all makes perfect sense. It was John Maynard Keynes who advocated countercyclical government stimulus, designed to boost aggregate demand and thereby raise gross domestic product. Never mind whether the end product was a bomb or a baby rattle. Here he is, waxing nonsensical in his General Theory...

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."

~ John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)

This is precisely the kind of cart-before-horse “reasoning” that inspires the misfiring neurons of neo-Keynesian eggheads like Paul Krugman, who once proposed an alien invasion as a magic elixir for the ailing economy. Spake the ex-Enron adviser in an interview on CNN, back in 2011:

“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”

Professor Paul then went on to suggest that, even if we discovered we’d been misled and the alien threat had been manufactured by the government to stimulate faux spending, a la Orson Wells’s classic, The Outer Limits, we’d all be better off for having spent the money… budget deficits, inflation and opportunity cost be damned!

Stimulating Keynes

To Keynes, Krugman et al. the worst government spending program of all... is no government spending program at all. Whether it’s imaginary extraterrestrial invasions or the very real tragedy of war, as long as GDP is bolstered and the relevant indicators are stimulated, it’s all to the good.

On the manufacturing front, there’s nothing like goosing production figures by making things that are literally designed to blow up. Talk about planned obsolescence!

As for those employment numbers, what better than to keep the figures bolstered than by imposing nationwide conscription... then routinely decimating the entire workforce? The living work whether they want to or not...while the dead are too proud to show up on the unemployment rolls. Easy peasy!

In the end, war is Keynesianism gone wild, a voracious governmental ouroboros, feeding insatiably on its own tail, filling spreadsheets and trenches in roughly equal measure. When all you have is guns, everything starts looking like a duck… and when all you have is Keynesian economic quackery, everything begins to look like a government boondoggle-in-waiting.

And yet, this is the narrative that must be constantly pushed to “We, the People,” by “They, the Bureaucrats.” War “props up” the economy... rearmament is good for our industrial base... the real threat to us all – Russians and Ukrainians, Allies and Axis alike – is the sudden outbreak of peace.

Far from posing “an economic risk for the Kremlin,” peace would be an economic boon for all nations currently wasting precious resources on the scourge of war.

And that’s exactly why the establishment is eager to prevent it at all costs... up to and including the gravest cost of all.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Did you catch our “Save The Date” announcement?

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