The Myth Of Capitalist Peace

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"War is bad for business" Unless your business is selling weapons and war machines to the highest bidder.

If capital feels threatened, it attacks the perceived threat. If it does not feel threatened, it expands. If it cannot expand, it cannibalizes itself. All three of these manifest as some of the most brutal violence mankind has ever experienced.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." ~ Major General Smedley Darlington-Butler U.S. Marine Corp

Pure Capitalism is the reason why Hawaii is a US State instead of its own country. Pro-American, capitalist businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian Queen and her Government and set the stage for Hawaii to be annexed by the US. Actually would be an interesting topic for an upcoming video.

Ahh. My weekly dose of anti capitalism content

Rule of Acquisition 34: War is good for business. Rule of Acquisition 35: Peace is good for business.

gotta love how capitalism turns every aspect of life into a market/ commodity.

The thing that capitalistic peace assumes, weirdly enough, is that "the economy" being damaged is what will hinder it. We have plenty of evidence in the US right now that the economy is bad actually, but since the stock market and profits are doing fine, everything must be dandy. As if people aren't starving in the streets or going homeless or unwilling to start families because they can't afford to. (Nearly every woman I know is grateful she doesn't have children because if she made the mistake of doing it a few years ago she'd be financially crippled and homeless now.) Capitalism is explicitly about having economic systems controlled by a echelon of wealthy families and banks. It's where the name comes from. People who wind up in that position or inherit it never have (or did not for long) care about the conditions that war would inflict on the populace as a whole. The costs of war are not borne evenly across a country, nationality, or corporation, and those that start the wars are almost never those who bear the burden of them. Lets not for a second pretend that these sociopaths won't start wars or reintroduce child labor, or organ harvesting from the living (yes really, look it up), or inflict any number of horrific things on multiple populaces so long as it makes the profit number go up.

"War is profitable and peace actively sucks butt." --Marcus Aurelius

As for politicians who are pro war, I'm going to quote Jon Stewart: "You don't support the troops, you support the war machine."

"There are three kinds of violence. The first, mother of all the others, is institutional violence, that which legalizes and perpetuates domination, oppression and exploitation, that which crushes and laminates millions of men in its silent and well-oiled wheels. The second is revolutionary violence, which arises from the desire to abolish the first. The third is repressive violence, the object of which is to stifle the second by making itself the auxiliary and the accomplice of the first violence, that which engenders all the others. There is no worse hypocrisy to call violence only the second, while pretending to forget the first, which gives birth to it, and the third which kills it." - Dom Helder Camara.

I just took my AP World History exam today, so this video is making me realize just how obvious the violence inherent to capitalism is. We spent months learning about how Europe colonized the New World and then Africa and Asia for profit, and how obvious it was that their ‘civilizing mission’ was just empty justification for killing people to gain wealth and power, but the teacher and the course never made the final crucial and very obvious step of connecting it to what capitalism does today. I know not everyone’s taken a college level history course and the school I go to is a privileged exception, but most people do learn about the history of colonialism, right? It’s such a simple and obvious conclusion to draw when you’ve got the basic facts, but we avoid it at all cost. I’m also just realizing how much we glossed over any American participation in colonialism. We went over US intervention in Latin American in the 1900s, but we also made sure to talk about how very much bad and evil the USSR and China were. Those were some very frustrating lessons to sit through. Anyways, thank you for making this video! The production quality and information are both great.

Top level writing. JT's writing team could do novels.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, humanity will know peace." - Jimmi Hendrix -

"It's never just one quick war" The way this was put calls to mind addicts justifying small doses of their substance of choice to hold them over while they're recovering from their addictions.

“Cops beat you up for being poor” So true!

The sarcasm in this video's intro was thick enough to be cut with a knife.

I think the idea is fairly straight. In an outdated economic system like capitalism, human welfare, global peace and cooperation and never ending profit margins for businesses simply CAN NOT coexist. One has to be prioritised over the other, not just for the sake of human beings, but for the planet as well.

Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.