Americas Good Germans?: A Mercenary Society

[sintax]

America's Good Germans?

A Mercenary Society
By Robert Jensen

This suggests that a majority of the public can recognize that the United States has failed in the stated mission but cannot yet see that the stated mission was a lie. This was never a war about weapons of mass destruction or stopping terrorism (indeed, the war has created terrorism, on both sides), nor is it at heart about establishing democracy in Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq is -- as all U.S. interventions in Middle East have been -- about extending and deepening U.S. dominance in the region with the world's most crucial energy resources.

Part of the barrier to a clear understanding of this is the belief that the United States, by definition, always acts benevolently in the world. But also standing in the way of an honest analysis is the reality that the brutal imperialist U.S. policies, while devised by elites, are being carried out by ordinary Americans. Can we in the United States come to terms with the fact that we are the "good Germans" of our era, routinely allowing pseudo-patriotic loyalties to override moral decision-making? Can we look at ourselves honestly in the mirror when so many of us are implicated in the imperialist system?

From the people who make the weapons to the military personnel who use them -- and all the other people whose livelihoods or networks of friends and family connect them to the armed forces -- most of the U.S. public has some relationship to the military. Any talk of closing a military base sparks almost automatic resistance from neighboring communities that have become dependent on the base economically. Large segments of the corporate sector rely on military or military-related contracts, and executives and employees alike understand what that means for profits and wages.

As U.S. anthropologist Catherine Lutz put it in her book "Homefront", an insightful study of the effects of the militarization on American life: "We all inhabit an army camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state of war readiness Are we all military dependents, wearers of civilian camouflage?"


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9837.htm

[Burried News]

1. Very worth while article - somewhat misstitled.

I see it as saying that so much of the economy is built around war that to be at peace would result in a massive depression. I think this is true. The American economy is so week that the war is the only thing keeping it going. The unfortunate thing is that war is massively inefficient in the long run - we are literally feeding on the remains of the industrial economy and accelerating the collapse.

If we were a smaller country like Germany, this would be more evident. But we are so large that the problem evolves slowly and massively. It is perhaps like global warming - by the time you can prove it, it is too late to reverse it. The possitive is that history is available as a guide; if we will study it. The USSR can serve as a very recent examples. In fact there are those who say we are ourselves vulnerable to the Reagan strategy that we used on the USSR.

The good news is we won the Cold War. The bad news it bankrupted us too and created an economy only suitable for war.

[Rich Hunt]

2. "mercenary society" indeed

Though I think that some of the corporate "masters" are more ethically deprived than people in the military.

[Rich Hunt]

3. kick n/t