War-Making is a Socialist Government Program

[babylonsister]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28982

War-Making is a Socialist Government Program
Submitted by cactuspat on Wed, 2007-11-28 04:46. General Discussion | Media

War-making is a socialist government program, hobgoblin of the right
posted on November 19th, 2007 by Don Williams


I’m amused when far right ideologues denounce equitable health care, affordable housing and other safety net features of liberal democracies as “socialized medicine” or other derisive labels. Such offenders of language are insulted when I fire back: “There’s nothing more socialized than the U.S. military.” It’s true. Every soldier gets government housing, price-fixed salaries, government education (indoctrination into killing), health care, clothing and much more. And with an annual budget that threatens decades or centuries more of national debt to finance war in the name of “spreading democracy,” children not yet born will pay for our socialized army should civilization last long enough... These payments could come at the expense of other, more constructive programs, such as bridges, highways, fuel-efficient cars, basic research, schools, disaster relief, Social Security, the campaign to stop global warming and much else. Meanwhile the effects of this military / industrial complex–financed by your tax dollars–will be disastrous, even murderous, for millions or billions of innocents, as we spread nuclear technology, depleted uranium, ethnic cleansing (face it, we put the Shiites now busy murdering Sunnis–who respond in kind–in charge of Iraq) and worse around the globe.

As Sheldon Richmond puts it in an article for Media With Conscience…

War, then, is always a government program, sharing certain features characteristic of all government programs. Politicians are not like entrepreneurs in a marketplace, dealing exclusively through consent to earn profits by pleasing consumers. Rather, politicians operate an apparatus of force, deception, and exploitation — the state — in pursuit of their own objectives. All the perversities we have come to expect from government’s domestic programs are present in war: hubris, corruption, self-interestedness disguised as public service, insulation from accountability, the inability to calculate true costs. But war is more to be feared than other government programs, and not just for the obvious reason—mass murder. It is only in matters of war and foreign affairs that the politicians can demand secrecy. If they refused to discuss Social Security because the information was classified, they would be ridiculed. Yet they routinely get away with denying the public information in military matters. This provides all the more scope for the horrors that war entails. Read the rest of the article...

As H. L. Mencken put it:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. War and putative external threats are used to justify conscription, higher taxes, regimentation, suspension of civil liberties, lucrative contracts for cronies, and the like.

Not a big Mencken fan? Then consider what Founding Father James Madison had to say:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

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1. Good article! nt