Sixty years ago, the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills noted: “Behind the increase in the military budget hides the great structural evolution of modern American capitalism towards a permanent war economy… The immediate prosperity of our country is linked to a war economy. » (1)
In his end-of-term speech in 1961, President – and General – Eisenhower then warned the United States: “In the assemblies of government, we must guard against unwarranted influence, whether solicited or unsolicited, exerted by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of abusive power exists and will persist. »
In 1989, the end of the Cold War jeopardized the American war economy. Then the attack of September 11, 2001 made it possible to launch a new “war on terrorism”, whose Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of Defence, announces that it will not have “no end point”. (2)
Immediately after, an episode prepares the transition between War on Terror and War on viruses, what I call the anthrax scam. It will have made it possible to pass “the US biodefense budget from $137 million in 1997 to $14.5 billion for 2001-2004” (3) and is the origin of the biodefense complex.
Let us recall the scenario of this scene:
The Patriot Act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), a 342-page piece of legislation pulled out of the drawers of the White House immediately after 9/11, reduces certain fundamental freedoms, and strengthens the power of intelligence agencies.
Attorney General John Ashcroft then insisted that Congress vote on this text within three days, otherwise it could be held responsible for any new terrorist attack. Who would have dared to step aside in these circumstances?
Especially after two senators – who would have initially questioned the procedure (5) – were encouraged by the anthrax bombs they received and which infected thirty-one people in Congress.
This is how microbes became instruments of terror, the risks of which had to be both anticipated and amplified, to the benefit of the security budget and the pharmaceutical industry.
According to US attorney Robert Kennedy Jr., ten years later, “War on Germs was already eclipsing the ‘War on Islamic Terror’ as the preferred engine of the security state cartel.” Since then, covid terror has again been replaced, by the war in Ukraine, as an instrument of fear. For how long ?
(1) C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956
(2) “Donald Rumsfeld’s biases highlighted by his memos”, Le Monde.fr, 1/11/2007
(3) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma: their global war on democracy and public health” (Ed. Resurgence, 2022)
(4) https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/07-525-m-01.pdf
(5) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ibid.