On Memorial Day, we need to remember the coverup lies told by the military under the direction of Cheney/Bush -- not only to get us into an unnecessary war, but to use the deaths and injuries of our own soldiers to propagate false heroic stories in order to justify war and to encourage more "patriotism" in America. We will never know the full truth about Pat Tillman's death, but we know for sure the military's story about his death were lies from beginning to end. That military reported to and received orders from Cheney and his puppet president Bush, who were hell bent on creating more and more war--and flag-waving enthusiasm for it in our country in order to control oil in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read the article on how the coverup of Tillman's death and lies about Jessica Lynch's "heroic actions and rescue" were engineered to pump up at-home support for the wars that have ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan and horribly maimed and killed so many of our body-and-mind-damaged troops. If you saw the 60 Minutes segment last night on returning veterans' lives who have been destroyed by their service in the needless war in Iraq, you must have felt, as I did, compassion and support for them in their extreme need for help. More than 40 suicides a day are committed by veterans who cannot get the support they need from our government for their mental and emotional disabilities.
Our troops need to be REALLY, TRULY supported -- not used for propaganda and recruitment with disgusting lies to support ever more wars. Wars are created by the power-mad, greed-driven one percent elite who are making our country into a plutocracy where the numbers of poor are increasing and the middle class is disappearing. Political power tends to rise to where the money is. The combination of great wealth with political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and concentrations of both — tilting the playing field in favor of the Cheneys, the Bushes, the Kochs and their ilk, and against the rest of us. Our military troops are drawn almost totally from the poor and middle class where, like chess pieces on a board, they (and we) are manipulated by the power-and-greed-hungry elite for their own purposes.
Please read the following on this day of remembrance for our brave troops, past and present. We the people must realize the truth in Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler's plea, made way back in 1933 (read his words in the first sentence of 2007 article below. For full article, go to: http://www.alternet.org/story/62945/top_military_recruitment_lies):
War and Empire
As U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler put it in 1933, "There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Racket is one term, empire is another to describe why the U.S. government spends $441 billion a year on a military of over two and a half million soldiers (2,685,713 with reserves), and why it has more than 700 military bases spread across 130 countries with another 6,000 bases in the United States and its "territories."
Understanding what military recruits are used for in the world, understanding war, and creating viable alternatives to both are essential if we want to break out of the deadlock of militarism. Since the collapse of the "other superpower," the Soviet Union, "empire" has become a common term among both critics and advocates referring to the unparalleled U.S. system of economic, political, cultural, and military domination of the world. The New York Times Magazine ran a 2003 cover story titled "The American Empire (Get Used to It.)" describing the United States as a reluctant but benevolent global empire. While Bush claimed in his 2004 State of the Union speech, "We have no ambitions of empire," months later Karl Rove snapped at a New York Times reporter: "'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
Some see the start of American empire in the wake of Second World War or after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Others trace it back to the invasion and conquest of numerous indigenous nations in North America from the 17th century onward, the development of a slave economy with tentacles reaching into Africa, and the 1848 seizure of Mexico's northern half, which is now the Southwest. Another wave of aggression abroad began in the 20th century.
Smedley Butler describes the U.S. military's role in this emerging empire: "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 muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
The modern-day version of "war as a racket" and gangsterism for capitalism can be seen in the occupation of Iraq. Critics call the U.S. war in Iraq a failure, but behind the scenes, it has established several permanent U.S. military bases, allowed corporations like Halliburton to make billions from unfulfilled contracts to reconstruct war-destroyed schools, hospitals, power systems and infrastructure, and is in the final process of turning control of Iraq's vast oil resources over to war profiteers such as Chevron.
The U.S. occupation's "Provisional Authority" under Paul Bremer also laid the legal groundwork for much of the Iraqi economy to be privatized and then taken over by U.S.-based corporations. Thus Butler's racket and its toll abroad. What does it cost us at home?
The price of two and a half million soldiers, aircraft carriers and military bases across the planet, and a massive array of weapons of mass destruction is high. It saps resources for healthcare, education and housing. It also requires keeping the domestic population in check through propaganda and the corrosion of civil liberties and human rights. Stifling domestic dissent, criminalizing immigrants, and torturing and illegally imprisoning citizens of other nations have all been stepped up under the guise of the so-called War on Terror.
In his book The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed , Ivan Eland writes, "Intervention overseas is not needed for security against other nation-states and only leads to blowback from the one threat that is difficult to deter -- terrorism.
In short, the U.S. empire lessens American prosperity, power, security and moral standing. It also erodes the founding principles of the American Constitution." As we write this book (late 2006) nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers and over 200 soldiers from other occupying countries have been killed in Iraq, at least 20,895 U.S. troops have been wounded, and a new Johns Hopkins report puts the number of violent Iraqi civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion at more than 600,000.
War's side effects are bleak for the environment and human society; its direct and intended effect is mass death. Down the current road of imperial dominance and warfare at will, the use of weapons of mass destruction is nearly inevitable, with apocalyptic consequences.
But there are alternatives to the expense of maintaining a military and the atrocity that is war. One that has been developed over the last 50 years is called social defense. Brian Martin, Australian scholar and author of Social Defense: Social Change , describes social defense as unarmed "community resistance to aggression as an alternative to military defense. It is based on widespread protest, persuasion, noncooperation and intervention in order to oppose military aggression or political repression. There have been numerous nonviolent actions, to be sure, some of them quite spectacular, such as the Czechoslovak resistance to the 1968 Soviet invasion, the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986, the Palestinian Intifada from 1987 to 1993 and the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989."
Imagine if even a fraction of the resources put into military defense were available for the general population to organize social defense.
Replacing global empire with domestic democracy and well-being requires redefining democracy -- pursuing ways to shift decision making and power from corporations and government to "we the people." It's not enough just to oppose something.
We need to envision, educate about, and then actually organize alternatives to the system of empire and war, to corporations, and to the lack of democratic participation in decisions that shape our lives and communities. What begin as pragmatic actions, like keeping youth from joining the military, are most effective when they have as their end the transformation of the root causes of war, undemocratic governance, and injustice. Every immediate action, when understood and explained as part of a bigger picture, can be another step toward this longer-term goal of getting to the roots of our problems and building a better world.
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