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February 24, 2010 02:56 AM UTC
6 Comments
I see our time period very much like the 1930’s in Europe. In economic hard times both the radical right (fascists in Europe) and Radical left (communists in Europe) rose in power and fought each other for supremacy. To a lesser degree, the same is happening right now in the USA.
The Teabaggers are being courted by the GOP as mainstream, and elements of the Democratic party are very left and attack the middle (the President and candidates like Sen Bennet) as hard as the right does.
I wouldn’t say that either rise to level of fascists and communists at this point, but I would warn the left that the USA has shown clearly during the Cold War that the left has very little chance of victory when it marginalizes. My generation grew up doing duck and cover drills in elementary school, and the USA fought Communism all throughout the 3rd world. The prospects for the radical left to be victorious against a radicalized right are slim to none.
If the center cannot hold, then the new neocons will make GWB look liberal.
That’s just my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.
Care to expound?
I don’t see this changing. It’s a disturbing trend that escalated under the previous administration.
War makes many companies money. The most famoous of which lately i.e. Halliburton (heavily involved with US armed forces logistics) and Blackwater, need no mention. The Supreme Court’s decision last month opens the floodgates for corporations to spend against candidates that challenge federal contracts.
Individuals on the left that advocate not spending in elections against this trend remind me of the isolationsist movement that strove to keep the USA from participating in WWII. They invite disaster.
A catch 22 obviously exists in that the military industrial complex arose from the aftermath of that war.
Nevertheless, the trend for further dimisnihing of civil rights in the name of security that is provided by private armies reinforces my point. The center of American politics must hold, or this country will move drastically further right rather than left.
What does this comment have to do with the post? Use of mercenaries and contractors is a problem for this country, no doubt. It has nothing to do with extremism unless you are trying to say that the contractors may be extemists (possibly true in the case of Blackwater/Xe). However, to have adequate numbers of military personnel to actually do all the tasks needed would require a draft. Ain’t going to happen.
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Our military isn’t big enough to occupy both Iraq and Afghanistan concurrently, but neither of those tasks is really necessary for our national defense.
Even without a draft, we have plenty of people to defend the nation. It’s when we try to govern other nations, against their will, that our troop numbers drop.
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always lose control of their military, and I think that’s more the issue than Ray’s Freikorps fantasies.
Reds and Rights took to the streets in Poland and Germany after World War I because there was a power vacuum produced by the removal of the previously legitimate political authorities. Those old authorities, however, were quite happy to “permit” the Freikorps to hunt Reds in the streets, and so the situation was allowed to fester to the point where the street thugs re-defined the political norm, and elected one of their own.
I’d say it’s hard to identify an “old guard” in the US that has a similar set of interests: there’s no power vacuum, and the Tea Partiers are all talk, and very little “steel” (thank goodness).
The problem the US, faces, by contrast, is that Machiavelli pointed out with regard to Rome and other aging empires: a nation that pays for military services (soldier is from soldi, or coins) eventually ends up being bought by those it pays exorbitantly when its security is on the line. Florence found itself in exactly this position in the late 1400s, as did the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish in the 1600s, and the French in the 1700s.
The answer to that problem is, and always has been, universal military service as a condition of citizenship, something more typical of Republics than Empires. It trains the necessary ‘man’power (sorry, no gender neutral term), and it tends to make the military a tool of last resort, rather than a play thing of the sovereign.
Good luck with selling that to the hedonistic masses (left or right) that style themselves “citizens” of this American empire today. We’re a consumer society, and we’ll pay to consume “spectator sport militarism” until someday the franchises buy US, outright.