( – promoted by buhdydharma )
the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) is not just a “part” of America, it now IS America.
And it is America’s most successful export. We have not spread Democracy, we have spread the infestation of the Military Industrial Complex to the rest of the world.
In fact, in America’s Orwellian parlance, “Democracy” = “Military Industrial Trade”.
I read OPOL’s diary “Dispatches From the Land of Lying Bastards” when it first appeared over at Dailykos. And OMG it was like “The Masque of Red Death” (if you’ve read that story). A major buzzkill. Like “oh man, we’re having a big-ass election orgy over here, don’t bother us with the TRUTH, please! You’re harshing our mellow!”
And reading the comments to his diary over here, where I expected (and saw) more of a welcome for his brilliant work, I couldn’t help but feel there was a certain naivety about the MIC, something of a sense of hope that in no way is deserved by the facts on the ground.
The fact of the matter is that the Military Industrial Complex is a beast which is utterly out of anyone’s control.
Many people suggested we can somehow stop “buying in” to the MIC.
The MIC won’t respond to boycotts, won’t respond to economic pressure. It doesn’t care what we buy or don’t buy. We mean nothing to them, except insofar as they want to keep us in the dark about the reality of the world. They are independent of consumer culture.
They are in the position of dictating to the people that actually MAKE the money (as in manufacture the money), and they are first in line to get it.
Like the leaders of Rome, they throw us “bread and circuses” like television and elections and lots of really fun gadgets, and they even let us share some of the cooler stuff after they’re done with it (the internet, GPS).
Because it’s easier for them if everybody keeps their heads happily up their asses and lets them continue their crimes.
They are in the position of dictating to the people that actually MAKE the money (as in manufacture the money), and they are first in line to get it. They control governments around the world. America is just the command center, the manufacturing base, of their operations.
They basically control most most of what we call “western culture” and they’re now spreading, quite successfully to the “developing world”. They ratchet up tensions between enemies, sell weapons to both sides, and if things start to look peaceful and happy, well they’ll just go ahead and start something (9/11) so we have a new endless “war” to fight.
They go into developing countries, lie to them about how great it will be the country lets them “develop” the place, loan them obscene amounts of money, then when those rosy projected lies don’t come true, they extort whatever they want from those countries. (see John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”). If the countries don’t play along, they will ultiimately send in the military to “straighten them out”.
They dominate the world the way Rome dominated the Mediterreanean and Europe in its heyday. Think the citizens of Rome actually had any power to change things? No, of course not.
The only hope, if there is any at all, is to educate everybody, to inform them as to what THE TRUTH really is, and to wean people off the most potent “opiate of the masses” ever created, the “mass” media. There HAS been, due to the rise of the Internet, a growing ability with people to discover the truth for themselves — in fact, the genie is out of the bottle — and this is growing, inexorably, and the potential is there for the truth to devour the lies, the way a tiny black hole can suck an entire galaxy into its vortex — and the media has seen this and is now desperate, and responding by throwing train wreck after train wreck into our laps now — the most sensationalistic shit they can dredge up — they keep finding deeper parts of the consumer’s “lizard brain” to which to appeal, to the point now where if Britney Spears actually killed herself on live television it would probably create a certain perverse bliss through the population.
Our only hope is to shine a light on them. Educate. Reveal. Once exposed, it will take the peaceful equivalent of a revolution to get rid of them, because it will take a massive overhaul of our political system — and if that is begun by, say, us, it will be met with, literally, a war — dirty bombs in San Francisco and elsewhere, martial law, the borders closed, dissidents sent to camps — and most of the American people will believe they really are “under attack” and will gladly give up what few (mostly artificial) freedoms they still have. And not only the American people, but the people of the entire world, will at that point simply have to quit working, quit playing along, quit producing the goods for them, and starve the beast to death.
And that’s not very likely to happen.
Sadly, the only way this thing is LIKELY to end is that it will be crushed under the weight of itself. Like the Soviet Union, it will become too expensive to maintain, and with the end of the Oil economy, there will be no more isolated spigots of intense wealth to control. The Oil Economy now funds the MIC, and those days are numbered.
And with that, I’d like to tell you which candidate I’ve decided to support ……
That’s a JOKE. Because the candidates are a joke. Not one of them has addressed the truth. Not one of them has addressed the criminality of the very system they are offering to “change”, the system that vetted them, chose them, and is now marketing them like a new softdrink.
It is a challenge to be grateful to someone who has hurt you, but if we can be grateful to the Bush administration for something, it’s for thier “bull in the China shop” way of doing business, their brazenness, their complete tone-deafness to finessing things, their inability to make their true intensions. They are the poster-children for the MIC, and like children they have no idea how obvious their motivations are.
Millions of people, here and throughout the world have awakened to the reality of what America has become — a fraud, a once-noble and handsome body now possessed by a monster’s spirit created from fascism and war profiteering and greed and death.
I am one of those people. I am a vastly different person than I was eight years ago. The Bush administration forced me to face my own preconceptions of this country, and I realized they were all a sham.
I know there are others here who have experienced the same path.
I can’t help but be excited by the ongoing story of Sibel Edmonds and the international corruption game (the latest diary on this by the amazing Lukery is here) is that we might finally have a story that will blow the lid off the entire mess. Because this story seems to encompass the whole enchilada of the depravity – the collusion of the international banking industry, the trade in illegal drugs, the spreading of WMD technology, and the deeply entrenched corruption from members of BOTH parties and SEVERAL administrations, and more than one country. It is this kind of story that has the potential to rip the facade away.
I’m not even sure how to end this. It started as a comment to OPOL’s diary. Just wanted to get it out there. Some may call me cynical, I call myself realistic. I grew up in the MIC. My family was heavily entrenched in the MIC. Every dime I ever had until I started working was from the MIC. It put me through college, it fed me until I was an adult.
And while I think that it’s impossible to fight, in any traditional sense, I believe its days are numbered because history proves it. I grew up with the Berlin Wall, I peered over it when I was ten years old. I never thought it would come down in my lifetime, but I KNEW IT WOULD some day. And it did.
The Soviet Union was a player in the MIC. They were the Yin to America’s Yang, the acid in the battery. And one day they just collapsed. The MIC will some day be gone, maybe sooner than we think, maybe generations from now. We just don’t know. All we can do is keep uncovering the truth, and keep trying everything we can to get it out there for everyone else to see.
Turn off your TV’s. Disconnect your cable. Tell people you’ve done so — you will inspire others — the unthinkable will become thinkable. Don’t be afraid to talk. They’re not going to send you to Gitmo, and chances are, they won’t think you’re a nutjob — when I talk to others it’s AMAZING how many other people, people you’d least expect, have already realized many truths, read about them, and are simply reluctant to talk about them because they fear that everybody else will think they’re nuts.
Do not be enslaved to the media, for right now, that is what we all are. They tell us what we think. Only they’re lying. But their hold on us is more powerful than most people realize.
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Perhaps it would be best to get ready to
“Do the Wolverine thing”.
Wolverines comes from a movie “Red Dawn”. The general theme is a “Soviet” invasion of America and a small band of teenagers get together and fight. We won’t be fighting “the Red menace”, we will be fighting the MIC.
I still think education of the comatose masses to be of value even if you get back a tin foil hat comment. The thing with fascism though is that sooner or later it negatively impacts their life.
This topic has been an interest of mine for some time – I wrote my senior thesis on the conversion of military to civilian economies. Senator Thomas Eagleton submitted a detailed plan on how to do this in the 70’s; but, of course, it didn’t get very far. The premise of such a plan is to focus on these conversions at the local level. I think this has been done with some success, although I can’t cite examples off the top of my head. Basically, military bases in the U.S. and weapons manufacturing plants can be phased out and replaced with an industry that is more appealing to employees in towns all across the country – but the crux is financing the alternative civilian industry. Municipalities and local governments find military industries attractive, because they think that they bring in money and jobs.
And, just like the military recruits kids in high school, the R&D military sector recruits college graduates with attractive offers they can’t turn town. That’s how my brother started working for Boeing. I hope we can find a way to challenge this situation with jobs that can compete in the civilian sector.
As you point out, however, this isn’t just a problem here. U.S. expansionism has fed the MIC beast on an international level, through weapons sales, international bases, weapons production all over the world. The end of the artificially created “cold war” forced the creation of the new “war on terror”, that by its nature has the ability to influence the paradigms of people internationally. Bringing down the beast is going to have to be an international effort; as citizens of this country, it’s our responsibility to educate ourselves on the realities of the situation to prepare ourselves on how to cooperate with citizens of other countries to convert our economies in ways that will put an end to the MIC everywhere.
I think we can fight the Military Industrial Complex. It will just probably be a very long fight.
I know maybe 3 persons who support Bush.
The rest, including LOTS of Repubs, wish he’d just go away, or worse.
But do EXXON or G.E. want him to go away?
Hell no! He’s serving their interests. As would some of the Dem candidates.
My dad worked for it, along with aerospace technology. He believed in the necessity for military supremacy a left over from the Big One. As time wore on he took to justifying his dirty deeds by saying if I didn’t design these things someone else would. He also was a huge believer in capitalism. Commies were going to get us all just like the terrorists now! When the Soviet Union collapsed they just shifted top a new permanent threat.
I don’t consider the fall of the MICMC a foregone conclusion. Just as the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall were not foregone conclusions. People made them happen. Real people. People like you and me tore down the Berlin Wall. People like you and me ended the Soviet Union. It was a foregone conclusion that people would make the attempt, and it was a foregone conclusion that given enough attempts they would eventually succeed, but it was always about people. Humans. (I guess it’s more a semantic difference, but I feel it’s important.)
We make our own future.
So we can fight, but you are right that it cannot be a traditional fight. We haven’t the skills nor tools to take on the MICMC in a straight fight. But we do have skills and tools we can use. And we have far more power than, I believe, most of us give ourselves credit for. That’s what the MICMC is afraid of. That’s what they don’t want us to harness. That’s why they will do anything to stop us. That’s why the media keeps us pacified. Because it’s easier to control the pacified masses than it is to kill the angry citizenry.
We can fight them, but it will not be easy. It will not be clean, no matter how peaceful we wish it to be. They will kill as many of us as they can to prevent us from taking away their power and money. We haven’t the resources for a protracted confrontation, so either it is quick or the resistance will grow slowly over decades while the MICMC rots from within until finally they are weak enough to be easily broken.
But there’s no point in resisting unless we have an alternative ready to take control. Because let’s not kid ourselves. This is a fight for control of the nation, and potentially control of the entire world. If we don’t have anything ready to fill the vacuum we create, there will be chaos at the very least. Were we to allow that to happen, how would that make us any better than the people we wish to supplant?
from yours is this:
The part I don’t agree with is the romantic view of America’s (rather dark) past.
We’ve flirted with fascism before, certainly in our choice of allies. Suharto died this morning, the murderer of perhaps a million people got to live out his retirement in a luxurious villa, having looted billions for himself and his cronies. A “cold war ally”, with no further comment needed on his reign of theft and terror. Evildoers like Saddam and Noriega were good American allies.
We’ve tortured before. Ask anyone who was a victim of the graduates of The School of the Americas, long a center for teaching torture, assassination, rape, beheadings, etc. Vietnam’s Operation Phoenix, another long and sad record.
We’ve slaughtered millions in optional wars before. From the point of view of the Vietnamese, Eduardo Galeano pointed out, there are sixty (six zero) Vietnam War Memorials missing.
America never was America, as the poem goes.
And with the current state of the two parties led mostly by pro-war, pro-imperialism politicians — and a citizenry that frankly doesn’t give a damn (present company excepted) — American never will be. My main hope for the future lies in the coming bankruptcy of the empire. Indeed, maybe it won’t end with a bang, or a citizens movement, but with the whimper of a bounced check.
As Alexander Cockburn put it
Nordic, you have done a great job of wrapping it all up in one diary. The most important thing that you talked about is how it truly is international in scope. Getting that out is super critical. I call them “The Elites”, the ones that are the true owners of all those companies, and much more importantly, the Banks. That is what is so important about Sibel Edmonds getting her story out, it points to those Elites, and shows that it is not a right or left thing.
The bull in the china shop comment is right on, and it is not over. I have thought for a long time now that only good to come out of cheney/bush is that it is going to wake people up out of their entertainment induced comas and take back their lives. Sadly, now I don’t think that is going to happen, it’s going to take more. And when bush signed his executive order last spring giving him control over the Legislative, and Judicial branches of government in case of national emergency, I realized we aren’t even going to have elections next fall. There will be something happen, probably in August with Congress on recess, which will cause bush to declare his martial law. But it will be benign to the people, and cause no big problems. But then just before the elections, the shit will hit the fan and there goes the elections. I really do believe the neocons are going for that permanent majority Rove talked about (And by the way what IS Rove doing now?), but in a slightly different manner than elections. And as you say, that’s when the detention camps and all the rest come into play.
And at that point I would like to say they have finally overplayed their hands. But it is international, as the Edmonds story shows, so is it going to make any difference if they overplay their hands? The neocon sockpuppets are expendable to the Elites, and the Elites do have another sandbox to play in, the Far East, so what do they care about us and our little problems. Any answer has to be with dealing with the Elites on an international level. They have the preferred stocks in all those big munitions companies, and the media companies that are part of the complex, and they own the Congress Critters that are part of that same complex. And oh they own the banks too, and not just the little ones like Bank of America and the rest, They own the Federal Reserve Banks, Bank of England, and other “oversight banks” also. They are the true enemy, the Rothchildes, Rockefellers, DuPonts and others.
They OWN US, and it is going to be hell to break their death-lock, but if we don’t, I fear the planet is doomed to the same fate that happened 261 million years ago, which was the date of the largest mass extinction in the planet’s history. This was due to ocean acidification, caused by excess CO2 being absorbed by the ocean and carbolic acid being formed. Over 90% of sea life and 75% of land based life was killed from lack of oxygen, because the shells of plankton were dissolved by the carbolic acid. Plankton produce 80% of our oxygen. That scenario could happen in the next 100 years. 100 years and no humans, no cute lemurs, no ferocious big cats, no salmon, no killer whales, no big white sharks, no beautiful morning songs from the finches, the thrushes, the starlings, no eagles soaring, no parrots talking no nothing left except slime and lichen. And the fucking elites are so self absorbed in their games of one-up-mans-ship they don’t see it coming. Or maybe they really are so jaded they don’t care. Or maybe they have inbred so much they are insane. But they HAVE to be stopped somehow.
… they build nests to survive what kills the dinosaurs.
I personally think balanced trade offers possibilities for nest building. But in any event, some serious nest building must be done.
I will never understand why anyone cares about elections, these days. Like…. what??? It’s over, people.
I would be sooo ashamed and embarrassed to vote. (I use voting as a marker that senility has set in.)
Remember the purple fingers? LOLOLOL
That’s what cocaine and drugs are for… or, Iran/Contra never stopped.
A Mexican laughed in my face: you think people pay cash for weapons?
No, they pay uncut drugs.
And then…
taking orders. What preceeded that was a massive multi-year effort to educate people about the war.
Education can defeat the beast. When we have educated enough people that a majority of soldiers refuse to take orders we will have won. To say the beast can’t be defeated is, well…defeatist.