From Depression to War...

Ominous Parallels

History schoolbooks used to treat the 1930s crisis and WWII as two different chapters with hardly any causality links made between the two. Yes, we were taught that the 1929 crisis had brought Hitler to power and that Hitler's uniquely belligerent regime had cause the war.
How one (the crisis) led to the other (the war) was never explored in details. One was expected to assume the latter as the ineluctable outcome of the former. Most of us would assume from that sketchy account of history that it 'had to' happen as if effected by a law of nature determining the rise to power of the psychopath leader and the eventual absorption into the planetary size conflict of many countries through some universal law of gravitation. In passing, we would learn that the latter also had the unexpected side benefit of resolving the former.

 

As many of us discovered long after leaving school, there was much more to that story than what we were taught and what was missing revolved around the uniquely nefarious role of the same global financial sector to which we owe today's misery.  

 

There are many ominous parallels between the 1930s depression and this one but none as ominous as those connecting austerity and war .. without a good sense of who and what helped the crisis turn into a war in the 1930s, it is difficult to draw from a specific connection point more than a vague warning. At least so far..

But as those connecting points accumulate, a picture emerges .. in the bright red color of a warning sign..

here are some of those connecting points …

-       Chicago was to be the site of both the G8 and NATO meeting this week until the G8 was moved to camp david for 'security concerns'  Organising the protest for both is still centred around the Cang8.org group in Chicago which hosts on its site, background documents explaining the links… see in particular

-       Overview of NATO and G8, including how they are linked, some things we can do to take back our future.

-       Labor Resolution against NATO/G8

 

The NATO parliamentary assembly publishes a number of very telling reports on its own site including

-       In  2009: The Global Financial and Commercial Crisis: Implications for the Transatlantic Community of Nations

-       In 2012 : Matching Capabilities To Ambitions: Nato Towards 2020

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That the Defense Spending of the US would be sure to grow at the expense of antipoverty programmes was baked in the cake but who would have guessed that the same heads of states forcing austerity on Greece would simultaneously insist on further indebting Greece by requesting that its already oversize military budget be further extended by mandatory purchases of tanks and fighter planes.

 

More soon…