Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex (long version)
Some 53 years ago President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his Farewell address about the rise and progress of Military Industrial Complex in the US and around the world. Today Eisenhower's farewell address is regarded as a landmark speech. It was given during the early of the Cold War where the threat of nuclear war and military annihilation kept the whole world literally on edge or living in paranoia. The Cold War and fear also produced classic and relevant literature ie 1984, Dr. Stranglove, Twlight Zone, The Watchmen, Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Day the Earth Stood Still, Lord of Flies. The speech and literature rightly warned of a militarized society, an oppressive government and the raw fear war produced driven by politicians and defense corporations as well as the media's spin to keep ordinary people scared of the world outside the nation's borders. War fears and possibly of a dystopian future gave way to national insecurity and politicians' stubbornness to negotiate with adversaries and enemies living thousands of miles away. The enemies become the personification of evil justifying a huge beef up in security from the airport right down to the streets of small towns. The enemies of national fears are never seen to be fighting against foreign interventions or military occupations in their fight for rights and sovereignty. Instead of negotiations, US defense leaders and Masters of War have continued to hype up a fear of an unending existential threat to the homeland and the world in form of terrorism. The fear of war with competing power(s) or nuclear annihilation that produced the military industrial complex during Eisenhower's time has today personified into the militarized police and the war jargon used to describe citizens screaming for transformative change. Protesters in Ferguson and other cities across the country are equally screaming, venting the long boiling anger over institutionalized racism against African Americans and Latinos, injustice justice system, the deafening economic/financial crisis, crumbling infrastructure, rising houses prices and gentrification of neighborhoods of color. Human Rights and respect for the rule of law have been demanded by African Americans in United States for decades. For years dehumanized as lesser humans who weren't even considered to be one third of a human being until fifty years ago, African Americans have lived the same horrors as the people in Gaza and other occupied peoples across the world. Now they face the personification of the military industrial complex as they have in other cities and towns across the country.
Robocop was funny but the real life military police...
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