working on the Cheney gang

[Gordon Fitch]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>> The "war on terrorism" is just the thing.  Even better than the "war
>>> on drugs" and the "war on crimes," you can bring the "war on
>>> terrorism" _everywhere you want to_ and keep it going _as long as you
>>> need to_, especially as social upheavals are bound to engulf many
>>> nations and bring many states down in the deflationary world (as they
>>> have already in many parts of the world), providing many fantastic
>>> pretexts and even some actually existing terrorists.

Michael Perelman wrote:
> >Why is everything a war.  We have wars on poverty, cancer ...., perhaps
> >suggesting that the framers of our rhetoric associate anything important
> >with a war.

Typically, those who frame the rhetoric are also involved in
statecraft (or a parody of it), and the State is, fundamentally,
organization for and by means of war, and war is the apex of
its purposes.  Exhortation to any great effort, then, especially
one which has no definite object in mind, is likely to include
military concepts and language, often to the detriment of
the effort.  (For example, poverty, as defined and perceived
by Americans of the 1960s, could have been eliminated only by
a patient, constructive accumulation of many mostly small
actions over an indefinitely long period of time, not a "war"
with heroic battles and crises followed by a final, total
victory.)

In this, one can observe the parasitic nature of the State and
its means.

-- Gordon