“For war’s a banker, flesh his gold.There by the furnace of Troy’s field,Where thrust meets thrust, he sits to holdHis scale, and watch the spearpoint sway;And back to waiting homes he sendsSlag from the ore, a little dustTo drain hot tears from hearts of friends;Good measure, safely stored and sealed In a convenient jar — the just Price for the man they sent away.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon”
“The connection between armed combat and the banking system in Philip Vellacott’s version of the fifth line in this passage, (The Oresteian Trilogy, Penguin, 1956) is sometimes translated as “War, the moneychanger of bodies,” a more gruesome suggestion indeed.”
“The relationship between those who manage the money system at the cost of “the just price for the man they sent away” can seem too bloodthirsty even for the most suspicious and cynical among us.”
“When he reviewed these page-one photographs dating from the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he suspected that the Times’ editors intended to “glamorize war and the sacrifices made in the service of war.” He began to understand that the Times functioned as a quasi-governmental entity, that by never straying far from a centrist, normative position, it became complicit with the sources of American power, which it reflected as a means of getting continuing access to those sources. “The Times and the U.S. government use each other to instantiate their own authority” he argues. The Times “knows precisely what truth the power wants told and then prints this truth as the first draft of history.””
“Pound maintained that freedom of the press in America was farcical: “as everyone knows that the press is controlled, if not by its titular owners at least by the advertisers.” This is an even more sinister idea: that modern media is an expression of a capitalist system that requires military expenditure to sustain itself.”