Military/Militarism

Since American Sniper has become one of the “top grossing films of all time”, garnering a few Academy Award nominations and at least one, if trivial, award, there have been even more reviews written about this insidious and insipid strip of celluloid. Unsurprisingly all of them contain the same swill. I had to return to my own review just to see if I had perhaps omitted anything essential or if anyone might have thought in an at least similar direction.

…Evil minds that plot destruction. Sorcerers of death’s destruction. In the fields the bodies burning as the war machine keeps turning…Politicians hide themselves away. They only started the war. Why should they go out to fight?  They leave that role to the poor.
— Black Sabbath, War Pigs

In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident.

Over the past 50 years the US and European powers have engaged in countless imperial wars throughout the world. The drive for world supremacy has been clothed in the rhetoric of “world leadership”, the consequences have been devastating for the peoples targeted. The biggest, longest and most numerous wars have been carried out by the United States. Presidents from both parties direct and preside over this quest for world power. The ideology which informs imperialism varies from “anti-communism” in the past to “anti-terrorism” today.

Ben Swann investigates the origins of the militant group referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Truly, US President Barack Obama’s recent call to address the root causes of violence, including that of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) and al-Qaeda was a step in the right direction, but still miles away from taking the least responsibility for the mayhem that has afflicted the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“Defense Contractor” is no longer a valid term for US weapons makers.
References to the “military industrial complex” are agonizingly silly particularly since the man who coined the term — President Dwight Eisenhower — was as ruthless as his CIA director John Foster Dulles. According to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, defense spending never fell below 50 percent of the US budget during Eisenhower’s presidency. In fact, he increased spending on nuclear weapons. And it gets worse:

I think [Winston] Churchill is one of the most dangerous men I have ever known.
— Mackenzie King, Canadian PM to King George VI, June 1939

It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century, you just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.
— Secretary of State, John Kerry, “Meet the Press”,  March 2, 2014

Amazingly, the history of the Vietnam War is still being fought over in the United States. There seems to be an effort to reframe that horrific and shameful campaign into some honorable intervention. For example, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 authorized the U.S. Secretary of Defense to conduct a program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. In 2012, President Obama signed a proclamation stating that the commemoration would begin on Memorial Day (May 28th) 2012 and would continue until Veterans Day (November 11th) 2025.