The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
Excerpt From
All Art Is Propaganda
George Orwell
When I was translating documents for a company that made bricks, I discovered that in all their calculations, 5% was added in order to compensate for breakage. They knew that 5% of the bricks they made would crack and break before they could be shipped. Or that 5% would be damaged during shipping before they got to the customer.
KPMG has a neat pdf you can download which explains CoDB in terms of Primary Costs and Secondary Costs. Primary costs are things like labor, utility, real estate, cost of capital, borrowing interest rates, corporate tax rates. Secondary costs are related to the business environment, the ease of doing business, like the level of transparency, legal protection of property rights, and regulatory burden.
CoDB is a convenient acronym that every business person can latch onto without difficulty. For them it stands for Cost of Doing Business.
Do you think governments don’t think in terms of CoDB when they are engaged in war? Of course they do. There are whole departments within the military ministries dedicated to calculating the effectiveness of every penny spent. This has been reduced in common parlance to: More bang for the buck.
Maybe, we should look at the acronym in a different light when we apply it to politics and war. CoDB in war and politics actually becomes the Cost of Dead Bodies. How many dead does the conflict consume on a daily basis? When will the number of dead become a problem—for us, or for them? How many dead bodies will the war generate?
The more efficient and more potent the war machine, the more bodies of the opponents will cease to live. The casualty reports of the dead and wounded are calculated daily and never released in the current TV wars in Ukraine and Gaza. You can easily find some figures online. But they won’t be official figures from Russia or Ukraine or any of the parties engaged in a conflict. Those statistics are state secrets. Of course you have to choose a neutral source in order to assess the reliability of any numbers you do find. But even unreliable sources bring you figures that are shocking—if you still have any empathy or moral values.
You can be sure that these calculations are an integral part of the process of making war and of the politics that govern war. And you can also be sure that the numbers “for them” are going to be calculated by the partisans of each side on a different scale as the numbers “for us.” That is always because “they” don’t care about how many people they lose, since “they” are inhuman monsters. So killing as many of “them” as possible will always be justified, and every death will be celebrated as “another nail in the coffin” for “their” regime.
Since “we” are not monsters and regard every human life as precious (so long as they are “our” lives), every person, civilian or soldier who is “sacrificed” or is a “victim” of the evil perpetrated by “our enemy” must necessarily be mourned and placed in that part of heaven reserved for martyrs, heroes and patriots (all equal at last) so that prayers can reach them and they can use their heavenly influence with the deity (“our god”) in order to rid the world of the ghouls who cause “our hardship” and refuse to bend to “our will.” And of course “our” soldiers must always be piously thanked for their “service.”
Whom exactly did they serve?
It isn’t difficult to find numbers that tell you the profit and loss generated by war and the preparation for war. The top five arms manufacturers are all from the USA, Britain is next, then Russia, and numbers 8, 9, and 10 are companies based in China. Germany has its first winner at number 26. But now that Europe has promised to ramp up its preparations for the coming war with Russia, I’m certain that German companies will climb the ladder of armament prosperity in the next few years.
“… hating violence, [we] do not wish to recognize that it is integral to modern society … fine feelings and noble attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force. [We] do not want to learn where [our] incomes come from. Underneath this lies the hard fact … that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.”
Excerpt From
All Art Is Propaganda
George Orwell
That’s why the war-makers are always in the black. We need war and exploitation to maintain our comfortable (civilized?) standard of life. You and I might rail at the absurdity of what the Orange Monster is doing, and what the Czar is doing, and what the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom does. But you will buy the electric vehicles produced over there, you will heat your home with the oil bought from “the Axis of Evil” and you will willingly let multinational corporations from the land of the free buy property in your country and twist your government into giving them subsidies and lower tax rates so that they can provide employment for your (our) people.
Yes, it’s true, we live well on top of the hill. A hill of bones. The bones of the people we exploit by raping their land of its minerals and crops, and reducing the millions—billions by now—to what can objectively be called slavery. Most of the world’s people are our slaves. They serve us our tea, coffee and papayas. And we allow the criminal class (expanding daily) to provide us with flesh and blood slaves who will pleasure us in other ways.
“In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. ”
Excerpt From
All Art Is Propaganda
George Orwell
The worship of the successful criminal has gone so far that the most successful con man in history is now occupying the highest office in the land of the free. As clever as he is in conning the public, so is he also clever in allowing lesser criminals than he to come and feed at the public and private trough and steal as much as they can for themselves for as long as he reigns. And so they support his thieving in order to continue their own. However, they must not assume they can outdo his criminality without being castigated for it.
It’s not much different in the Czarist realm or in the Middle Kingdom. As long as the local criminals don’t nibble at the cheese on the master’s table, they will be tolerated. Intolerance gets you defenestrated (by the Czar) or gets you a bullet (that you paid for) in the medulla, where the brain meets the spinal cord, from the Emperor. At this writing, the Orange Monster has not yet initiated a reign of terror for the errant white criminal or the white opposition. Mechanisms have always existed in the USA to deprive opponents of work, money or social status. Up to now, that has been enough. It’s early days yet, so that could change quickly if the burrs under the Orange Monster’s diaper dig deeper into his thin skin.
We live in a world where power is the key to survival. Orwell knew this. We should know it too.
“… it is impossible to have a positive foreign policy without having powerful armed forces.”
Excerpt From
All Art Is Propaganda
George Orwell
That is why the war machine makes money for us—yes, us—and why war is a drug that we keep going back to time and time again. It’s addictive. We know it is evil and self-destructive. The problem is that without the ability to use violence against opponents who use violence, we are faced with the possibility of losing not only our comfortable lifestyle, but we face the absolute certainty of being reduced to slavery. Those who resisted the Roman conquerors knew this, and we know that if we allow the Czar or the Emperor and now, the Orange Monster and his minions to dominate us, we are bound for slavery and a rather uncomfortable life producing wealth for masters who are not nearly as tolerant or fair as the masters we work (slave) under now.
This is all to say that the CoDB that we don’t like to acknowledge, but that is an integral part of our comfortable life, is measured by the number of dead that we stand on in order to get our pleasurable goods, or that we kill because of our need to secure territory. Your (our) hands will never be clean as long as we don’t figure out how to stop the criminal class from using their power, which is based on violence. The biggest irony in the war against the criminal class is that we are little criminals too, feasting on the leftover crumbs of cheese that fall from the master’s table.
I recommend that you read the essays in All Art is Propaganda by George Orwell. This piece has been inspired by those essays.