Updated. Most truly moral people are shocked at the thought that leaders of a nation could engage unnecessary wars, kill many hundreds of thousands of people, very likely millions (1) in the process, and still sleep at night and smile on the golf course for the cameras.

Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations, CIA, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. (*) And he sheds chilling light on how and why this is possible. He says that despite their posing as good Christian church-going men and women, politicians and high officials are, when possible, actually carefully vetted before being allowed to “pass and go” on to seriously higher office. They are vetted to ensure that they subscribe in principle to “a quartet of the greatest propaganda schemes ever put forth by man”. Catholics like JFK were once a different and unwelcome breed; and we’ve seen that sometimes populists slipped through the nets.

Wars almost always have many strategic purposes; some are truly just as in a defensive war when a nation has been violently aggressed upon; and some are unjust as when a nation seeks to attack others without serious and morally justified cause, even when asserting pretexts to justify these aggressions or engagements.

Fletcher Prouty said some war advocates constantly seek to rationalize morally repugnant excess as cover for the aforementioned philosophical / ideological “quartet” of assumptions.

What follows are “the quartet of philosophical points” as stated by him:

“1. The concept of “real property,” a function of colonialism that began with the circumnavigation of the Earth by Magellan’s ships in 1520 and “a doctrine of discovery and rights of conquest” put forth by John Locke (which enabled those sent to conquer, enslave, confiscate land, etc).

2. The population theory of Thomas Malthus which says there are too many people on earth for sustainable living. Thus wars and similar ways of eliminating peoples are, to their ideological thinking, doing Mother Earth a  favor. (Prouty the author, btw, does not appear to have been a religious man. He was simply stating facts as he saw them.)

3. Darwin’s theory of evolution, as enhanced by “the survival of the fittest”; the owners of real property and capital are seen as the “fittest,” from the time of Darwin.

4. Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy. (God—whatever That is— threw the dice, and the elites naturally took over from there.)”

Thus, following these nihilist principles, modern wars kill far more noncombatant innocent civilians than uniformed soldiers. And that’s conceived as doing Mother Earth a genocidal favor. And so new wars with ever new enemies and imperialist designs are constantly concocted, then presented to the American people as a righteous cause.

Prouty asserts too that AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome ) was developed as a military biological weapon. The poor victims and others were cynically encouraged to participate in dangerous promiscuous sex and then were experimented on, making huge profits for pharmaceutical and insurance corporations and, of course, governments which benefit from biological warfare experiments for the future.

Prouty says the elites (whom many politicians serve) fear no enemy as much as their own people —which is the main reason all are constantly surveiled and that new weapons are in constant development to use against them if necessary. Abraham Lincoln showed how serious a threat this is. He says politics as presented in the media is often enough (not always) a dog and pony show to distract populations and disguise the real agendas.

–Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. A former colonel in the United States Air Force, he retired from military service to become a bank executive. He subsequently became a critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about which he had considerable inside knowledge.

— L. Fletcher Prouty: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy

See also:

— Ron Paul Institute: Memorializing the Horrors of War

(1) Memory Loss in the Garden of Violence

 — A Pentagon Cover-Up: Azmat Khan on How U.S. Hid Thousands of Civilian Deaths in Middle East Air War

(*) Prouty was the inspiration for the Mr ‘X’ character in Oliver Stone’s film, JFK.

— America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. What a bloody end to Obama’s reign — The Guardian

This post has been updated. Dec. 2021