Download - What Does Our Standing Arm
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S a t u r d a y , J u n e 1 1 , 2 0 1 1
S a t u r d a y , J u n e 1 1 , 2 0 1 1 S a t u r d a y , J u n e 1 1 , 2 0 1 1
S a t u r d a y , J u n e 1 1 , 2 0 1 1
What Does Our Standing Army Stand For?What Does Our Standing Army Stand For?What Does Our Standing Army Stand For?What Does Our Standing Army Stand For?
Come on people, lets use our intelligence, courage, reason and
observational capacities, all those things that we would often
rather not use, and try to answer some simple and obvious
questions. You know cognitive dissonance, right, when the
elements of a story dont comport with other elements of the
same story; like when your son arrives home in 45 minutes from60 miles away and claims to have never gone over 65 miles per
hour; and you really want to believe him.
What about needing to spend 1.2 trillion dollars a year on a
standing army and national security (sic) apparatus (wars extra
obviously a moving army would cost more, you old silly!)?
Armies are for protecting something from an enemy; so
there must be an enemy. That would be, at the moment, Muslimterrorists (with the Ruskies and the Chinese hiding in the
bushes). So, 1.2 trillion dollars US (wars extra) for unmanned
aerial surveillance vehicles (with missiles extra), urban use
weapon systems, guided missile ships, smart shoulder arms,
supersonic stealth aircraft, sub-lethal crowd control technologies
(adaptable as lethal force multipliers), no fly lists,
intelligence/spy agencies, plus a whole bunch more stuff allcontrolled by a professional army/police force and bureaucracies
[1] the worlds most highly trained professional soldiers! This
force of millions of GI soldiers and contractors, indomitable
weapons and surveillance systems are for fighting a few
thousand organized terrorists whose weapons are short range
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shoulder arms, improvised low yield bombs and stealthy
methods. Now just how fast were you going son?
Let us assume for a moment that the people driving this
military/security bus are not completely insane, that there arereal reasons for these expenditures and methods just not the
ones we are being told. Three questions: (1) Who is being
directly benefited by the present design of the security
apparatus? (2) Who is the military/security apparatus protecting?
(3) Who are the present and future targets of military action?
Who is being directly benefited: the most direct economicbenefit goes to the suppliers of military/security needs and
services, consumables and capital equipment (which in the case
of war becomes consumable). Politicians benefit by delivering
economic development based on military supplying industries to
their constituents. The officer/bureaucracy corps benefit more
diffusely by employment, status and power, while the
soldier/worker benefits much of the time by high levels of basic
material and social support, employment and a paternalenvironment I say, much of the time, since the soldiers may
be required to take considerable risk for these benefits.
Who is the military/security apparatus protecting: Major
General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), US Marines, gave his
answer in the 1930s: the economic elite. He claimed that he was
an enforcer for American business. That was, of course, at a
simpler time when there was American business; today the
situation is more complex and the US Military seems to be the
international enforcer for multinational corporations [2]. This is
not to say that the US military/security apparatus will not protect
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the people, but only to the extent useful to and desired by the
economic elite.
We are told that the military/security apparatus is protecting our
way of life, but just whose way of life would that be? Is mypersonal way of life being protected by the actions currently
being taken in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan,
Yemen, Pakistan [3]? Perhaps I am being selfish, asking that the
paltry sums of money that I pay in taxes be applied in ways that
protect my way of life; then are these actions protecting the
hundreds of millions of other inhabitants of this nation? To
answer that we would have to imagine what would happen if ourmilitary were to leave those places.
The unrest would continue without our military and security
presence, so that part would not change. People would still be
mistreated and killed until new structures of equilibrium were
formed; but such structures cant begin to be created until
outside influences either leave or become an accepted permanent
part of the place, the latter an unlikely eventuality anywhere inthe Middle East.
So leaving or not would have little effect on the general form of
the immediate situation in those countries since the conflicts are
based mostly in civil strife, much exacerbated by the presence of
an outside force except that adaptation to a new stable
structure could begin. The economic elites supported by our
military, however, would either lose power in the situation or
would have to find new military powers to support them. Oil
and associated companies, construction contractors, military
support contractors, private military and security companies: all
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of these and more could/would experience huge losses if the US
left the middle east militarily and only engaged diplomatically.
Of course, many companies could continue to engage
economically, but without the billions being put into thecountries as a result of the military action and without the
protection and persuasive power of the military, economic
opportunity would not be as available or appealing.
To put it as simply as possible: claims of direct benefits of safety
for the American people from these military actions are lies,
damned lies; flagrant, horrific, disgusting, obscene lies. Theseactions steal our present, steal our future, enrage the world
against us with the same kind of bigotry that we are expected to
show towards our enemies. That takes care of that question.
Who are the present and future targets of military action: The
US has a huge military/security apparatus requiring more than a
thousand billion dollars a year to support it. Millions of people
are a part of it. Even if it tried, it couldnt be a benign presencewaiting for the bad behavior of some foreign leader or the
organized rejection of some value that the US thinks vitally
important. It has become its own animal; nominally, as in
General Butlers day, the tool of the economic elite, but only so
long as it is fed and exercised well. It has only one clear and
constant enemy, those who would diminish its size, power and
influence, and that enemy is an educated, politically powerful
electorate supporting the Constitution of the USA and the needs
of the people.
Since the US spends, on its military/security apparatus, as much
as or more than the rest of the 190 or so nations staking out
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territory on this little globe combined, there is at least the
possibility that we could, say, cut that amount in half, using the
money for the direct benefit of the citizens of the country. That
would be 600 billion dollars worth of the peoples labor returnedto their needs rather than collected into great big piles by
defense contractors, friendly dictators, security specialists and
mercenary armies. And remember wars are extra; that would be
another couple of hundred billion plus change if we just stopped
the demonstrably illegal wars we could leave in place legal
occupations and actions at least for a time.
Of course, the military/security apparatus would not take thislying down; they are a standing army! What would you do to
your fellowman for 800 billion dollars and all the power in the
world? Well, so would they! And since the militarys work has
been and is the protection of elite interest, just what do you think
the response would be to serious challenges to those elite
interests; like environmentalists acting against extractive
industries or union organizing. We know the answers. Men and
women devoted to the preservation of natural ecologies are now
called terrorists. Women and men devoted to honesty and
equity in work are called terrorists.
The answer to the question is: should the people demand the
kinds of changes that would allow the vast numbers of the
human species to live with personal dignity, that would allow
the recovery of the earths vast, varied and essential ecologies,then the people would become the expressed enemy of the
military/security apparatus, the apparatus that we have built and
presently pay for with our labor (converted into taxes) and our
blood. There is nothing else on the earth, other than the Great
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Many, of sufficient number and power that would require the
size, power and lethal capacity of that apparatus to control.
Social unrest will be the enemy of the future, the consequence
of the increasing disclosure and affect of both wealth inequityand the processes in place that will result in a new fascist
feudalism. The language is in place: we now fear and fight
terrorists; and all who reject the elite social and economic model
can be, and are more and more often, called terrorists. And the
force structures are increasingly in place: professional armies,
security systems and militarized police forces are devoting
equipment and training to crowd control and the depersonalizingof lethality so that collateral damage can seamlessly become
the real goal.
The fear of a standing army expressed by the framers of the
USAs founding documents was fully warranted; history told of
standing armies always becoming a danger to the people as they
became the tools of a political, religious or economic elite.
First comes understanding, then planning, then opportunity and
then action. It is essential that a critical mass of people come to
this understanding and lose the Santa Claus myth of military
benignancy. Returning the military to a size and power
appropriate to our real security needs and to civilian control,
meaning democratic control by the people, is our greatest
immediate need and most dangerous enterprise.
[1] Police forces are becoming militarized; the military is performing mixed military andpolicing functions in international situations. The distinctions between criminal behavior and
misuses of national and international power are blurring; and therefore so are the distinctions
between the forces intended to meet those threats to social stability. Lost in these changes is thestructure of incentives that have placed and continue placing all of these forces in the common
control of the economic elite.
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[2] There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "fingermen" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war
preparations, and a "Big Boss": Super-Nationalistic Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a
military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years
and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile militaryforce, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-
General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for BigBusiness, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for
capitalism. (Smedley Butler, 1933)
[3] If you believe the propaganda that the Muslim hordes are chomping at the bit to kill
Americans and destroy our way of life, then you have not been paying attention to either the
history or the present situation.
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