Events in the rearview mirror appear clearer than they are.
It is important to remember that though we are the victims of a 20th century “conspiracy” it wasn’t really a conspiracy. More of a prospiracy. A loose group of people blundering around doing things because they seemed right, who didn’t actually foresee the disastrous and terrifying consequences of their behavior, their ideological allegiance, or their corruption of what their profession should be.
Take war for instance.
A lot of us are quietly revolted at what the Trump presidency and those who oppose it revealed. We thought Trump was nuts when he spoke of withdrawing our support from things like NATO, or at least making the other nations pay their fair share.
And then– Well, the Trump presidency happened, with its twin revelations that the war in the Middle East, and our involvement in it, including our dependency on foreign oil was optional, and that the military industrial complex would do anything — ANYTHING — rather than let the permanent state of war end.
This has hit me very hard, coming from an Academia background (look, not my fault, okay? I got pushed into it) and having heard the left natter forever about the Military-industrial-complex. I don’t want to think they were right, including the hippie paranoia that young men were sent to die so old men could keep power.
But in the light of how hard the brass fought to keep us from withdrawing from the Middle East, and how strangely they seem to be cheering for a world war, it’s hard to keep from agreeing.
This has hit me very hard. It’s hit my military veteran friends harder.
However, it helps if you realize that no, you didn’t fight for a lie. You fought for what seemed from facts available as the best thing to do, at the time, for us and for our country.
First, let’s dispose of the sappy, bizarre idea of our er… friends on the left, who think the US military is a sort of charitable organization, which should be deployed abroad, whenever someone is being mistreated or even to enforce the left’s rather weird beliefs and gospel. (Hence trying to push transgender notions on Afghanistanis that give laughter belly aches to Iowa farm boys.)
That’s not the purpose of a military. That was never the purpose of a military. No matter how much you would like the military to be sort of missionaries of wokeness, that’s not what an armed force is for. An armed force is either to protect the homeland (which our current administration is singularly determined in refusing to do) or to invade other nations (which they want to do, but only if our boys can die to prove … I don’t know what. Maybe to protect 10% for the big guy.)
At least the American right’s use of the military is seemingly saner. Seemingly, because it tries to fit into those two uses. To be fair, into the first one. It’s just that over time it too has gotten corrupted and slid away from what is needed and into pie in the sky.
And then there is the tendency for any human institution to perpetuate itself, no matter how stupid or harmful its purpose, because it is the job of the persons running it.
Suppose tomorrow there was a plague that rotted infants from the toes up, so that if you didn’t immediately cut an infants’ toes off, they would die sometime before five. An organization would be formed to cut infants’ toes off, and develop all sorts of branches and sub-organizations. Then twenty years later, someone discovered that a simple antibiotic stopped the death. Do you think the infant-toes-cutting-off bureaucracy would go away? Really? Why?
I bet you they would come up with a million reasons why cutting off day-olds’ toes was better for the baby, and stridently refuse to disband and/or change policy.
This is sort of how we got here.
No one meant to create a bureaucracy that would overshadow the elected branches, only… well, the future was self-obviously more organized and centralized. Look at how much better centralized production worked. And how more efficient it was. And educated people had a clear vision of what the future brought — dinned into their heads by statist and increasingly more Marxian professors — that they could make true, no matter what goobers were elected.
No one meant to create a self-perpetuating military that would hobble itself in order to lose wars to the world’s most liliputian militaries and be about as useful as a chocolate hammer, but less tasty.
But the US really despises foreign entanglements, as a culture. We want to live in our land and tend our garden. And we can. But WWI and WWII and the cold war were viewed as “they just won’t live us alone.”
Our intelligence services are even less useful than a chocolate hammer. Perhaps as useful as Kleenex soaked in piss. Part of this is that Americans born and bred are curiously blind to the uniqueness of America and incapable of understanding totalitarian regimes. So they took Moscow — and Beijing — at their own word. Which made them seem like a formidable enemy indeed.
So…. well, peace through superior firepower. We’ll finally get them to leave us alone. Which means we grew, and grew, and grew. And the industry and commerce associated with war grew along with the military. And all of it tended toward use. Not helped by the “threats” our intelligence agencies keep finding or manufacturing.
It wasn’t so much a fine tuned conspiracy. Back then with what we knew — and remember agencies and governments relied on the exact same corrupt prospiracy we call the Main Stream Media — we did what seemed right. We, both as a country and as individuals.
It is acceptable to sigh at how deluded we were. It’s not acceptable to think the delusion was carefully created.
It was the result of bad education, bad media, and people’s natural tendency to want their job to be important.
That it’s now revealed to be a tissue of lies is important too.
The human tendency is to lie to ourselves, to unify our fractured understanding by telling ourselves no, it’s all right, we were right all along. I think that’s why the left is chivvying us along to world war, and it will be through no fault of their own if we’re not at war in our territory by March 2024. At some level they want the dissonance to go away. They want “unity” inside and out.
But we can’t afford it. Either the war, or the false plastering over the truths we now know.
The world has changed. We see very clearly what’s been going on. After the crash everyone can feel, it’s important to remember this is above all the result of centralization and bureaucratization of government.
It’s important to go small, go local, go as specific as possible.
Because no matter how evil or temporary their purpose, bureaucracies will self-perpetuate and destroy the republic.
Let’s build the republic and prune back bureaucracy.
