Monday, March 16, 2009

Tripping down the road toward fascism

Dwight Eisenhower warned of something called the great Military-Industrial complex. I guess the concept of “the military” and industrial tyrants conspiring to rule the world or at least keep enough low-grade wars going to advance the interests of each is a spooky enough thing to lay awake worrying about. It’s the thing movies are made of. Think, Ironman, Spiderman and other movies like them, where the military gets sucked into producing some “ultimate weapon” only to have a slimy captain of industry or maniacal general use it for his own gain.

The trouble with the whole Military-Industrial complex conspiracy theory is that it falls apart under the weight of a true democratic and capitalistic society with competing political and business ideas. The Republicans could not hold the Military-Industrial complex together during what started out to be a wildly popular war. Demo-rats undermined the president, the troops and their generals at every step. The equipment that we went to war with, that made certain industries rich, is not the same equipment we are using 6 years later. The industrial complex has been infiltrated by new guys with better ideas for everything from body armor to armored cars.

On the military end, Rumsfeld and Franks, the architects of the greatest military advance of all time, gave way to Gates and Petraeus who produced a winning strategy for post invasion operational victory, in spite of cretin Demo-rats like Reid, Murtha, Durbin et al. So the Military-Industrial complex conspiracy theory fell apart on all fronts.

What’s really dangerous is a one party government; led by a figure that the media is afraid to question (not because they’ll be criticized for disagreeing with his policy but will simply be rejected as racists) and that government buying majority holdings in banks, manufactures, education and unions. That begins to look an awful lot like where we are headed. And that is fascism, my friends.

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