Friday 17 June 2011

Mainstream Conspiraloon #735 - Lord WarWar

Lord Simon Jenkins of WarWar
Proof that mainstream media journalists occasionally notice something.
Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
....
It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes"
.....
The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."

3 comments:

Stef said...

"Proof that mainstream media journalists occasionally notice something."

And something I've noticed is that not one of those fuckers spoke out against any of the post 9/11 shit that has gone down until they couldn't avoid doing so - not the thieving, not the murder, not the creeping tyranny, none of it

That makes them accessories before, during and after the fact and I would dearly love to believe in a Hell so that I could take some comfort from the fact that they are all going to rot in it

Tom said...

Maybe there was some sort of peer pressure involved.

Anonymous said...

Overly generous with the Mainstream Conspiraloon numbering system.

If there were really 735 of them...