WHY I DISTRUST THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

The People's Army, China: What a government supported by militarism looks like. 

I was born five years after my father returned from Germany at the end of WWII. He had landed at Normandy on D-Day. He rode across Europe as part of a 90-mm anti-aircraft/anti-tank gun crew. That gun was the major U.S. artillery weapon of the WWII campaigns. It was an effective destroyer and killer. 

My father was psychologically scarred by the war, as many of his friends were. My uncle, married to my mother's sister, spoke of hand-to-hand jungle combat in the Pacific Island campaigns against the Japanese. Both of these men went dark if they indulged in any memories of combat. They seldom did.

The lengthiest discussion I had with my father about WWII occurred in the basement of our house, which my father had built with his own hands after the war. I had come across some Nazi long knives and a finely crafted accordion which had been tucked away in a box deep in a closet. With these exotic items were the ID cards, with photos, of some German soldiers.

"I took those off their dead bodies in Belgium," my father said grimly. "I don't want you to ever join the army." His eyes watered as he fingered the ID cars. "They were just kids, like me. They could have been my brothers." 

I was small, perhaps eight years old, but the sound of my father's voice in those moments never left me. He was normally a cheerful, brave and optimistic man. A policeman and a very responsible provider for our family. The darkness which descended over him was a shadow of some deep evil, which I have come to understand after working with violently insane patients. 

By contrast, my mother's brother was an engineer at Los Alamos. He never saw combat. He simply helped design the most lethal weapons known to mankind. He couldn't speak about his classified work. But, it seemed as though the war had no effect on him whatsoever. He spoke of that time in his life as a period of pleasant bachelorhood.

That contrast between my father's experience in Europe and my uncle's in Nevada planted a seed of deep distrust of all things military in my young mind. It was a healthy distrust.

I was commuting from home to college during the Vietnam War. My hometown was deeply working class. Many boys like me were being drafted. My father was furious throughout that war. He sat in front of the nightly news reports and yelled at the government officials who were making excuses for the carnage. He reminded me regularly that I should not under any circumstances allow myself to be sent to battle in Vietnam.

My luck at gambling is poor, but I won the most important lottery of my life when my birthday was ranked close to 300 in the 366 rankings of the draft. I had seldom seen my father so relieved. 

The Vietnam War has been sanitized by propagandist historians. At its core, it was not just about Communism. The predominantly Buddhist Vietnamese had suffered under the corrupt post-colonial Roman Catholic elite, left in charge of the country by France to ensure continued access to its colonial plantations. John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic American U.S. President, leapt to the aid of the corrupt Vietnamese elite. 

I attended a Jesuit university where our professors were radically opposed to the war. Unlike much of The Church, our Jesuit professors saw through the anti-Communist propaganda. Euro-American colonialism was at the heart of the U.S. military involvement. 

I had absolutely no qualms about participating in the Peace Movement against the Vietnam War.  I still think that it was the only ethical position I could have taken. I also think it is a matter of individual conscience for those who went and killed Vietnamese on their own soil. I believe most went into that war because they were afraid of being prosecuted in the U.S. for not going. Yes. That was the offered alternative to those who were draft-eligible. 

Things are different today. The volunteer military has allowed militarist historians to rewrite history. And they have done a tremendous job of it. Despite the killing and disabling of thousands of those volunteer service members who serve a corporate-globalist mission abroad, the masses have swallowed militarist propaganda, distributed everywhere. Despite the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan combined, Americans mindlessly cheer and whoop in response to constant military public relations on TV, in films, in stadiums and along parade routes. 

It is considered bad manners to not recite the robotic "Thank you for your service." when introduced to a military member or veteran. Pacifism is all but dead in America. What those who would not volunteer, or needn't because of their economic circumstances, are actually saying is, "Thank you for preventing the government from coming after me to get killed in a foreign country." 

While our military is lauded endlessly for the destruction and mayhem it executes abroad as "fighting for freedom", our own integrity as a nation is being corroded from within. I do not see these two processes as unrelated. 

Our political class have become cannibals. Daily assassination of careers and reputations occur in our media. Absolutely nothing proactive is getting done by our federal government. Our civil protection by state and local police is being eroded by senseless political activism in favor of the unlawful.

What happens in nations whose civilian governments fall into bickering feuds over power? What could happen in a nation where a military-industrial establishment is endlessly lauded and exorbitantly funded despite the fray of those elected to govern? Where all politicians dare not challenge militarism? Reading non-militarist history may provide you with some examples.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led our military in WWII, cautioned against the power of U.S. militarists, who were stoking the flames of The Cold War, as he left the Presidency in 1961: "....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex." I think the current successful indoctrination by the military-industrial complex is exactly what Eisenhower feared.