New American Militarism Breeds Fascism

Comment by Larry Ross, May 24, 2006

 

Professor Andrew Bacevich, graduate of West Point and the Vietnam war is Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. He shows how America has spread it's control around the world with "hundred and hundreds of military bases, large and small" and that today "...planning, preparing, and waging war has become the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States" 

America needs enemies to feed its "military/industrial complex" which has become a threat to the continuation of the United States as Americans know and love it. President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about this as he left  office in 1960. Eisenhower took no steps to curb its power before he retired and It has gone from strength to strength ever since. Acting to make new enemies to feed this complex are the neo-conservative Bush Administration. All kinds of tricks, word games and psywar techniques are being used to deceive Americans into supporting the need and righteousness of the latest war, and to hate the latest enemy. A few years ago it was the communist threat. Today it is the "catch-all terrorist threat", plus any country that is opposing U.S. conquests, or what the U.S. decides are its interests. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria etc have been verbally attacked by the U.S.and it is expected that U.S. planes will start bombing Iran soon. Usually countries are accused of aiding and abetting international terrorism, or preparing WMD to attack the U.S. That helps condition the U.S. public and tell them who is the selected 'enemy-of-the-day', get their support and prepare them for the onslaught to follow. Also the public needs to be kept on side because it is the American public that supply their sons and daughters to implement the policies of the Masters of War in Washington.

Andrew Bacevich is very scholarly and thorough, but could be accused of sometimes skating on the surface, and not probing deeply enough into reasons why; and the real covert reasons for U.S. policies, or their dire potential consequences. However I really do recommend that people read this very informed and perceptive observer of America today.

 

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Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

by Tom Engelhardt , April 20, 2005

 

We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands at the point of a missile. As Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts it: "Increasingly, the president uses speeches to troops to praise American ideals and send a signal to other nations the administration is targeting for democratic change."

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized ways of signaling "change" that are even blunter. We already have, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small, spread around the world, but never enough, never deeply enough embedded in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy heartlands of our planet. The military budget soars; planning for high-tech weaponry for the near (and distant) future -- like the Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule capable of delivering "conventional" munitions anywhere on the planet within 2 hours and due to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business in Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.

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