I - Prova de Proficiência de Inglês

Texto A WHY AMERICA NEEDS WAR

Jacques R. Pauwels ( www.irak.be/ned/Pawelsjacques.htm)

01 Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in

02 principle opposed to wars.

03 This system - America’s brand of capitalism - functions first and foremost to make extremely

04 rich Americans even richer. Without warm or cold wars, however, this system can no longer

05 produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed and powerful

06 of America consider as their birthright.

07 The great strength of American capitalism is also its great weakness, namely, its extremely

08 high productivity. In the historical development of the international economic system that

09 we call capitalism, a number of factors have produced enormous increases in productivity,

10 for example, the mechanization of the production process introduced by Henry Ford.

11 The productivity of the great American enterprises rose spectacularly; for example,

12 already in the twenties countless vehicles rolled off the assembly lines of the automobile

13 factories of Michigan every single day. But who was supposed to buy all those cars?

14 Most Americans at the time did not have sufficiently robust pocket books for such

15 a purchase. Other industrial products similarly flooded the market, and the result

16 was the emergence of a chronic disharmony between the ever-increasing economic

17 supply and the lagging demand. Thus arose the economic crisis generally known as

18 the Great Depression. It was essentially a crisis of overproduction. Unemployment

19 exploded, and so the purchasing power of the American people shrunk even more, making

20 the crisis even worse.

21 It cannot be denied that in America the Great Depression only ended during, and because

22 of, the Second World War. Economic demand rose spectacularly when the war which had

23 started in Europe, and in which the USA itself was not an active participant before 1942,

24 allowed American industry to produce unlimited amounts of war equipment. Between 1940

25 and 1945, the American state would spend no less than 185 billion dollar on such equipment,

26 and the military expenditures’ share of the GNP (gross national product) thus rose between

27 1939 and 1945 from an insignificant 1,5 per cent to approximately 40 per cent. The key problem

28 of the Great Depression -- the disequilibrium between supply and demand -- was thus resolved.

29 However, America -- corporate America, the America of the super-rich -- urgently needed

30 a new enemy in order to justify the titanic expenditures for “defense” which were needed

31 to keep the wheels of the nation’s economy spinning at full speed. It is for this reason that

32 the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the American “military-

33 -industrial” complex, as was called that elite of wealthy individuals and corporations that

34 knew how to profit from the “warfare economy.”

35 In this respect, the Cold War exceeded their fondest expectations. More and more martial

36 equipment had to be cranked out, because the allies within the so-called “free world”,

37 which actually included plenty of nasty dictatorships, had to be armed to the teeth with

38 US equipment.

39 Later, America, or rather, corporate America, was orphaned of its useful Soviet enemy,

40 and urgently needed to conjure up new enemies and new threats in order to justify a high level

41 of military spending. It is in this context that in 1990 Saddam Hussein appeared on the scene like

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