If you are an alien, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, looking at our nation these days, you would be scratching your head trying to figure out why our country is known as the USA and not the DPA (Disunited Peoples of America). Only thing that appears to unite us – not all but most – is the love of empire and pride in a corporate-military war machine that mercilessly sucks a great part of our economic, intellectual and moral resources; truly impoverishing our people and making Americans, friends of some but enemies of most people around the world.
Somehow things went awry for us back in 1947, when a Peter-principled president, who had succeeded FDR as a vice-presidential wonder, Harry S. Truman, succumbed to the wish of a military elite fresh from a popular war. The Department of War (War Office), so known since 1789, was renamed the Department of Defense; a true misnomer for a cabinet department that would eventually house a world police force with a budget as large as the combined budgets of the rest of the ‘military world,’ both non-communist and communist. And that was the start of our fabled warring empire behind the mask of righteous self-defense… and the protection of ‘American interests,’ which implied total whitewashing for any and every action our military might be asked to take.
A then military hero and later president, Dwight Eisenhower, did warn America of the consequences; however, a blossoming economy quickly placed a veil over any fear we might have harbored, and soon our true-blue patriotic military would supplant, and eventually expand on, Germany’s then recently defeated Wehrmacht. And prosperous America sold itself to the world as a benign powerful nation-empire promoting both freedom and democracy; and more importantly, as the virtuous warrior of capitalism intent in defeating communism; or for that matter, any form of socialism.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 18, 2016.
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