Profit: the ‘peragamankaru’ of major wars ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 213th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

A friend confided in another friend about how he conducts his life: ‘for some years now I consider upekshava (equanimity) as my peragamankaru (forerunner, the vanguard, trailblazer).

It is a good way to live. It is good to take note of the vicissitudes of life. It is good to treat them with equanimity. It is good when one chooses equanimity as the guide, the framework of reference, the blazer of the path one has to follow.

There are other options. If it is about what one should follow, seek or pursue, here are some: joy, fame, praise and profit). Let’s leave aside their negative flips (sorrow - for masochists, disgrace — some people do revel in being ‘badass,’ blame — a form of masochism or penance — as would be loss).

Profit. That’s what I want to focus on. The pursuit of profit or rather the fixation over profit and its pursuit is far more likely to yield frustration, unhappiness and a sense of disenchantment, not to mention a lot of destruction, injustice and suffering that are the inevitable collateral, than would equanimity if one were to cultivate and use it as a guide.

I returned to my friend’s peragamankaru thesis several times over the last few days. I looked at people I’ve known and know whose lives are benign, self-contained and peaceful even in the midst of tragedy, severe loss, immense sorrow and so on. I realised that equanimity has been the peragamankaru.

But profit? Why profit? Why should I write about profit? What’s profit and peragamankaruwan?

Well, I just started reading ‘The concise untold history of the United States,’ a companion to the Showtime Documentary series. It is authored by legendary film-maker Oliver Stone and the historian Peter Kuznick. It is a history of wars. It is a story of profit. It tells us not only the profit-making underbelly of war but who the profiteers were and are.

When we think of the major wars of the 20th century we immediately go to the World Wars for the sheer enormity of it all and the immense suffering. And we think of countries. We talk of which blocs fought which other blocs of nations, those who were allied and those other nation-collectives fought against.

But what were they all about? Countries banding together to defeat a tyrant or a collective of tyrants? Saint Countries vs Rogue Countries? Thugs taking on thugs to determine which territories would go to which gang?

On the face of it, it’s all about national flags; that’s one way of putting it. That’s the popular and comfortable narrative. We could peel off the outer layer of the story and say it’s about a nation engaged in a profit-enhancing exercise. Conquest is a word that can be useful when trying to understand the story. Imperialism. That’s another useful term.

For my part, as I read about the complex, uncivilised and absolutely barbaric history of North America and Europe from 1800 to the end of the Second World War (that’s as far as I have got so far), I couldn’t help but return again and again to a telling episode from the 1981 American epic historical drama film, co-written, produced, and directed by Warren Beatty about the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who covered the Russian Revolution in the classic, ‘Ten days that shook the world.’

A question is put to Reed during a meeting of the Liberal Club in Portland, Oregon: ‘What would you say this war is about, Jack Reed?’

The war in question is the First White Tribalist War which the then US President Woodrow Wilson pledged he would not get his country involved in but did. Reed, played by Beatty, had a one word answer.

‘Profit.’

That was about Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Hungary, Turkey and the USA, right? Wrong. It was the bankers and other war profiteers that won the day. Eugene Debt said of all this wryly, ‘Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.’

That’s not how it happens though. Smelly Butler, who led troops into Beijing at the turn of the century would later confess in his book ‘War is a racket,’ that he was 'a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.’

'I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. In China I helped to see to it that Standar Oi went its way unmolested.’

Profit. A determined and compelling peragamankaru if ever there was one. Soldiers and civilians paid with their lives in the millions. The true racketeers raked in scandalous profits. Politicians sheltered them.The mainstream media looked the other way; spoke of countries, not bankers or weapons manufacturers. And ‘profit’ was carefully and deliberately white-outed (‘Tippexed’) from the story.

03 September 2023

Profit: the ‘peragamankaru’ of major wars

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