What's the price of war
This piece marks the end of a cycle begun with What's the Price of Freedom and Cycles & Civilisations. It is the culmination of a reflection on freedom, ideological manipulation, consumption, and systemic violence.
Symbolisme
- La palette : Transportation. Logistics. Commerce. The industrial and productivist dimension.
- AK-47 : The symbol of all conflicts.
- Or : The economic dimension of war: from arms sales to looting to conditional peace/surrender agreements (which cause many subsequent wars due to unbalanced terms).
- Noir : Embodiment of oil that fuels all conflicts as both reason and resource.
The meaning of the work
War is organized. It serves economic, financial, and industrial interests. The military-industrial complex produces, sells, supplies, invoices. But before the first bullet is fired, war must be sold. This is the function of what Pierre Conesa calls the military-intellectual complex: columnists, analysts, appointed experts who manufacture consent from behind their desks. They designate the enemy, construct the threat, invoke urgency. They will never fight. They are paid to send others to die.
None of this is new. The mechanisms are documented, the precedents countless, the archives accessible. This observation is merely an update. Propaganda changes its channel, not its nature. It now travels through social media, twenty-four-hour news networks, opinion pieces disguised as analysis. On all sides, lies present themselves as self-evident truths. And as long as populations agree to believe without verifying, to feel outrage on command, to mistake emotion for understanding, the cycle perpetuates itself. War does not persist despite collective ignorance. It persists because of it.