, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States….What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations."
Mark Curtis concludes that "Crucially, the immediate beneficiaries of the rearmament programme were to be the large corporations within the military-defense sector of the economy. With guaranteed industrial production and a guaranteed market (the Department of Defense) they were able to achieve high levels of output and reap large profits."
The apparent contradiction between the public hysteria and the private admission that no threat existed can also be explained, Curtis argues, by a further advantage of a giant "red scare": its utility for hiding the fact that "Britain’s (and the USA’s) <@145>economic interests’ in the Third World in the post-war period have been synonymous with the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of local populations."
Since the end of the cold war, the propaganda system has searched long and hard for new threats which, unlike global warming, justify vast public subsidies to high-tech industry. Though strenuous attempts have been made, the world appears to have developed terror fatigue for international drug dealers, "New Hitlers" of the Middle East, single mothers, immigrants, and other demons. Spirits may have been partially lifted by a recent report in the London Sunday Times: "The Pentagon," Roger Dobson reports, "is to spend $500m developing a new defence system against cruise missiles. The decision, taken in the past fortnight, is to counter warnings that will be made this week by leading military experts who claim that high-tech cruise missiles costing as little as <@163>500,000 will soon become a threat to western nations."
Terry Taylor, assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in London, says "In Iraq they fitted out a pilotless plane and were planning to put biological weapons and a spray tank on it. Fortunately they didn’t get it working. That is the low end of the scale and some people would not call that a cruise missile, but I would."
In July 1996, the British Defense Secretary, Michael Portillo, announced that <@163>4 billion worth of defense contracts had been placed. Billions are to be spent developing Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, a new cruise missile and an anti-tank system. For good reasons, no mention was made of just who these weapons are intended to defend Britain from; the preferred justification being that 5,000 jobs will be created.
The press went along with the farce. "A replacement for the Nimrod patrol aircraft is urgently needed because it is simply getting old," David Fairhill of The Guardian (July 27, 1996) writes. It is irrelevant, then, that Nimrod was originally developed (or so we were told) to protect us from a massed nuclear superpower Soviet attack, and not, say, Iraqi pilotless planes armed with spray tanks. <N>
@HEAD 1 = When Goblins Walk The Earth
@PAR AFTERJ<@191>UB = In considering the failure of the West to respond to the very real threat of global warming, we need to remember that Western governments, academics and media joined whole-heartedly in promoting the Soviet "threat."
By contrast, the media has responded with indifference, scepticism, and a kind of wilful amnesia to warnings relating to global warming.
A prime example was the media response to an October 1990 UN conference at which an international panel of scientists reached virtual unanimity on the conclusion that global warming had occurred over the past century and that the risk of further warming is serious, ranging from significant to near-catastrophic. Not a single member of the panel agreed with sceptical views expressed in the U.S. press, gaining such headlines as "U.S. Data Fail To Show Warming Trend" (New York Times) and "The Global Warming Panic: A Classic Case of Over-Reaction" (cover of Forbes, Science, March 8, 1990).
In contrast to the "menace of international commun