Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.

Anyone with eyes or ears, or any one of their senses for that matter, knows that there is an inordinate amount of violence in this world. There are wars and genocides outside of the Western world, inside the Western world, particularly in the U.S there are an obscene amount of homicides and psychotic gun wielding citizens. Most worrisome of all the most violent, militaristic government in the world and really in history resides in the bottom half of North America.

I'm saying all this because i think that most of violence in the world can be traced back to capitalist enterprises. Particularly with this new era of neo-liberal thought dominating the political landscape. If you've ever studied the birth and progression of capitalism you know that it's pretty hard to argue that capitalisms driving force doesn't lie within the capitlist class's ability to manipulate and exploit the laboring class. This exploitation creates conflict between these two groups, nobody likes to be exploited and usually if people find out they're being used they'll attempt to do something about. That's where the whole Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx comes in. I won't even get into that.

If you trace modern capitalism and then, i believe if you trace the violence and wars that have taken place in the world since it's inception they can be attributed to one or two things, a lot of the time these things are combined. One, the capitalist classes struggle to maintain their grip on the means of production, in other words their struggle to keep the laborers away from controlling how the factories are run, how goods and services are distributed and produced, and what is done with the surplus of goods that is created, etc. And two Colonialism and Imperialism. There have been two waves of this. The first starting with "exploration" and the discovering of the "new world" and the second, really, post WWII wave with the Unites States attempting to builds its mega empire on the expropriation of resources from countries in which the U.S military or the CIA overthrew progressive socialist governments in favor of brutal dictators who would allow their businessmen to by up anything worth anything that belonged to that country. Obviously this is a complicated process and i in no way did a good job explaining it but those are the two processes that i think are responsible for most of the violence and death in the world.

I'll try to give examples of these processes. An example of the colonial or imperial process would be the IMF, which was created by the United States to "help" third world and developing countries out of debt. The IMF will lend a developing country money in order for them to develop their infrastructure, so things like roads and industry. However, that money is only given with the stipulation that the companies that the given countries government hires to build this infrastructure have a certain high level of profitability. This eliminates the ability for any companies within the country itself to benefit and basically puts the money back into the hands it came from. Now the developing nation is in a helpless state of debt and it has developed infrastructure reliant enough to harvest valuable resources. I think this happens a lot in Africa, i know it has in Uganda, and we know what happens when countries become devastatingly poor, disease, famine, starvation, civil wars and corrupt governments. This is a different newer form of imperialism because due to globalization, a country no longer needs to send its military forces into a country to control it, they can do it through massive and corrupt economic transactions.

An example of the second process can be found in many South American and South East
Asian countries. The case of Chile is probably the most infamous. Where, much to the chagrin of the Americans the country was developing a socialist government whose aim was to nationalize resources. This isn't good for Capitalist countries because without cheap resources they'll lose much of their wealth. This is when the CIA started recruiting young Chilean University students to learn neo-liberal economics at the university of Chicago. They did this because they decided to become friends with General Pinochet, the violent leader of the opposition party in Chile, they would fund his overthrow of the current Chilean government and then install their Chicago trained sheep at important posts of the government. Anyway, Pinochet bombed and shot his way into power and them proceeded to perform an ideological genocide, killing or torturing any remnant socialist thinkers or activists. This happened all over South America, in Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru to name a few and in Indonesia in Southeast Asia. Millions and Millions of people dead and Millions more to come because somebody had to have their money.

It's no coincidence the U.S spends more money on the military than pretty much the rest of the world combined. The capitalists need to protect their interests, if anyone so much as suggests socialism or economic equality is a good idea, it can't stand because ideas like that bring people together and mean less money for countless morbidly obese, gluttonous, gray haired old men and more money for the single mother and her two kids living on food stamps. But don't worry it's justified because poor people are just stupid and lazy, obscenely rich people are angels themselves who would never so much as bend a hair on someones head. Nobody has any blood on their hands, it's survival of the fittest. Tell that to the countless graves, I'm sure if death could speak it would rupture every ear drum on earth with its response.

This is really long winded and if you got the bottom and are reading this you're either really confused because my writing made no sense or you're disgusted with anger because you think I'm a communist. I'm not. I just like the color red, a lot, probably too much.

I leave you with the lyrics to a great song by Blue Monday, that band embodied everything i love about punk music. The singer now sings in Circles and is one of the best lyricists in hardcore punk right now, check out both bands if you haven't already.

Bereaved

Black smoke a shroud over the city the epicenter is sullen no movement at all. While they hide in wretched shelter and smother their babies into breast. A clandestine murmur of sorrow resonated in the streets. When the sun rises in they pull their dead from the rubble. They pull their children from beneath the fucking rubble. And another world away a mother drops to the floor raises her face to the sky and cries "what the fuck for?" And those in power lead this masquerade to them it's only a game. As the innocent suffer. Religious zealots capitalize on these times spreading their drivel and lies. As the innocent suffer. Propaganda euphemizes brutality keeping the masses in line. As the innocent suffer. Nationalist lies create the perfect disguise for economic plunder. As the innocent suffer.