Saturday, April 15, 2017

Looking at US

William Astore, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and history professor, asks:
If you were Chinese or Russian or Shia Muslim, how might U.S. military activities appear to you? 
He has a few answers:
* Expansionist? Check.
* Dedicated to dominance via colossal military spending and global interventionism? Check.
* Committed to economic and ideological hegemony via powerful banking and financial interests that seek to control world markets in the name of keeping them “free”? Check.
He's also worried at how much our armed forces have become separated from the rest of the country. Even our Congressmen are separated as it has given its war-making powers to the president and the military. 

Astore likens us to Germany at the start of the 20th century. "The German military, praised as the “world’s best” by its leaders and sold to its people as a deterrent force, morphed during those two world wars into a doomsday machine that bled the country white, while ensuring the destruction of significant swaths of the planet."

He asks one final question:
Is North Korea’s Kim Jong-un the only unstable leader with unhinged nuclear ambitions currently at work on the world stage?

1 comment:

R J Adams said...

Why is it we never see things from the "other side's" perspective? Answer: constant media/political propaganda. We believe what we're told, blindly. They say Russia hacked the US election, but they never reveal any evidence; Tillerson accused Iran of being the "worst perpetrator of terrorism on the planet." Where's the evidence? No Shia terrorist has ever planted a bomb/crashed trucks into people/shot up innocent folks going about their business - all are carried out by Sunni extremists. How can Shia Iran be what Tillerson says? Yet because he says it, people blindly believe it. Politicians have learned they don't have to show proof anymore. They can say anything, knowing it'll be believed by sufficient people to have an impact. Then, of course, social media carries that belief around the globe.