The problem with using national armies as colonial occupation forces serving corporate profit is that they run the danger of running away when the nations' voters turn against the occupation. Mercenaries like to say that government soldiers all too easily lose their will to fight. Duty, therefore, is not a strong enough motivation to oppress foreign nations. There is a force far stronger than duty, one which can drive a man to murder his mother: greed. The profit motive is a much better reason to wage unjust wars than fickle duty.
Knowing this,
Hurricane Katrina gave Bush the perfect opportunity to deploy mercenaries against American civilians at home. He gave Blackwater the job of securing New Orleans.
In both cases, scandals ensued when money-hungry Blackwater mercenaries massacred innocent civilians as a cheap way to boost the kill count they would be paid for. Sure enough, the scandals were quickly quashed by Bush (and Obama after him), a "justice" system criminal enough to fall for the Corporate line that justice is the interest of the rich, and the sycophantic corporate media.
In Bad Company, Dictel chairman Col. Tom Becket leads his corporate forces in an attempt to overthrow the American government and replace it with Dictel. In the sequel, Black Science, his brother and successor Richard proves to him that his panic was entirely unwarranted, that Obama is every bit as corrupt and servile as Bush, with the giant banks replacing the oil companies as the real rulers of the American Empire. If Dick Cheney was the shadow dictator of America under Bush, his successor under Obama is the now infamous and increasingly hated investment firm that rules Wall Street, Goldman Sachs & Co. Obama, who has recently been outed as a pathological narcissist of Nixonian proportions, not only broke his campaign promise to draw down the war against Iraq but has actually "Vietnamized" Pakistan and is about to do the same to Iran. The alleged "Muslim" with the Stalinesque personality cult turned out to be a very good friend of Dictel indeed. The mercenary corporations are even more profitable under Obama than they were under Bush, and will only get more so.
I'm one of those seemingly rare people who get more radical as they get older. I've grown ever more cynical about government over the years. Recently I concluded that government police agencies and the national military are actually nationalized mercenary corporations. The job of the military is to force other nations to bow to their supreme commander's will; the job of the police is to do the same to the civilian subjects at home and to protect the national elite from their subjects, the "threat from below" the elites are so irrationally paranoid about. It would be a simple matter for the banks, after they repossess the nation-states (which, I repeat, is inevitable once all the governments inevitably go bankrupt), to privatize the government police and military by selling them to some mercenary corporation flush with taxpayer money and loot from the war zone, which for purposes of illustration I'll call Dictel. Dictel can afford to buy the police and military because, post-repossession, it's getting all the taxpayer funds that would otherwise go to its "socialist" rivals. But unlike the Corporates of Europe during the Great Depression and World War II, today's financial elite is wary of mercenary forces: the Nazi Party, which consolidated all the Free Corps mercenary forces under one political gang, proceeded to trash all of Europe, provoking its rivals to trash Germany in turn. No, this time the Corporates are determined to drive Western civilization into the ground all by themselves. Dictel will act as the United Corporations' agent, but the banksters will not allow it to be the master.
The most fanatical class warriors on Earth today are the Corporates. Even more than the cult of Mammon, Social Darwinism is their fundamentalist faith. Sexually, they are in a permanent state of moral panic because they believe that the lower classes threaten the purity of their precious bodily fluids. They believe the bizarre prescientific notion (borrowed from the Brahmin priests and gurus of Hinduism) that blood, semen, brains, and money are one and the same thing, which explains their Jack D. Ripper hysteria about bodily fluids. They are devout practitioners of eugenics. They are perfectly willing to destroy the entire human race to preserve their dominion over everything. Meanwhile, the fighting spirit of the world's workers has been almost fatally weakened by the destruction of Communism by Stalin's successors and epigones, the trade union bureaucracy allied to the Stalinists, and the "liberal" parties that have been growing ever more corrupt and conservative (and, in a corporatist world, the two are the same thing) all the time. The workers are divided and conquered. Except for one thing: there is a limit to the crap the workers will take. The Corporate elites have been pushing that limit and trying to push beyond it. The result: the world is now in revolution. But the smart Corporate will see that the worker revolts are not yet united and the workers have not yet decided to overthrow their Corporate masters. America is not yet in revolt. Marxism remains dead — for now. During this short period of time (i.e., as of this writing), there is a window of opportunity during which the Corporates can use not just their national armies and police but the even deadlier mercenary corporations to crush the revolt and, as they would say, put the slaves back in their place, "teaching them a lesson" as they put it. Dictel and its nationalized counterparts will prove invaluable as the fist of Corporatism. But there's a danger there too: the enraged workers, fighting for their very existence, could decide to not just overthrow Corporatism but wipe out the Corporate caste altogether...
The mercenary corporations, both government and private, are the guardians of the elite against the ever-present threat from below, about which the Corporates spin elaborate conspiracy theories, some of them relying on a fictional character named Satan. Now here's the great secret of conspiracy theory: the Corporate conspirators themselves are the most paranoid conspiracy theorists of all! It is these conspiracy theories that drive the Corporates to build up their mercenary armies and repress their subjects ever more brutally. Class warfare and conspiracy theory go together for the Corporates. It's a conspiracy theory that drives Dictel to invade America in Bad Company; after its shocking rehabilitation, the Corporate belief that the workers are conspiring against them is a source of endless profit for Dictel in the sequels. But then, as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you; some prophecies are self-fulfilling.
Citizens of the civilized world, beware your friendly neighborhood policemen and soldiers! They will declare total war against you very soon, when the banksters repossess your nations, and they will be paid very handsomely for it. Corporatism may be ruled by a synarchy of banks, but it cannot prevail unless it can build the largest army in the world, an army that is a corporation. In Spanner, that army is Dictel Corporation. Stalin had his Red Army and his KGB; Goldman Sachs, dictator of the corporatist West, has Dictel. But remember that Stalin's legacy was stasis and stagnation that led to the total collapse of his empire. Communism's fate awaits Corporatism as well. This, too, is inevitable. After all, thieves will loot till there's nothing left to loot. The mercenary corporations' terrorism in service to the bankster thieves will only accelerate the collapse.
(Note: When I get back to writing Bad Company, I'll post an entry with specific details about actual companies, including new information from the famous Wikileaks release of secret Afghan War documents.)
Back to Spanner’s World...
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