I strongly suspect that most people would recognize the significant differences, and have strong opinions about them, if we were shown a basic pie-chart of spending priorities from each candidate.
When I say that the United States is the mafia, I don't mean that we are all the same, or that nobody is doing good. But I do mean the society as a whole, not just the government, and certainly not some shadowy room where eight guys with cigars decide everything. Our problems would be a lot easier and a lot harder in various ways if the world worked like that. The reality is very different. We have a pseudo-representative oligarchy with various power centers and ideologies rolling recklessly toward the cliff of World War III, with certain parties licking their lips for dollars or blood, and others coming to grips with the possibility that they've gone too far.
Many of us have a fondness for whistleblowers. Even beyond our respect for people who were always right, we like the stories of people who were wrong and then saw the light and then took a courageous risk to expose wrongdoing. But how do you blow a whistle on a whole society? Whom do you expose it to? You have to expose it to itself. You have to intervene as a member of society to correct society while society tries to remain anonymous like an alcoholic, avoiding publicity about what it has done.
At World BEYOND War we're working on cultural changes, as well as structural changes like divestment from weapons, and closure of bases. These factors all interlock. If people were ashamed to profit from weapons it would be easier to divest from them. If there were less profit in weapons, it would be easier to make people ashamed of them.
Last Spring, some of us asked the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live, to divest from weapons and fossil fuels, and they did so. And one place we took the idea next was Arlington, Virginia. I spoke with one of the County Board members there. And he told me without the slightest hint of embarrassment that it would be hard for Arlington to divest from weapons because, first, Boeing had paid for a nice park, and, second, because of the National Cemetery full of war dead in Arlington.
Think about that second one. It's always been important in starting wars to get Americans killed so that more can be killed in some sort of sick honor of the earlier ones killed. But here is advocacy for getting more people killed (of course some 95% of them are likely to be non-Americans) killed in unspecified future wars in honor of the dead from all past wars.
Now, perhaps the idea is this. If we outgrow the barbarism of war, if we cease producing rows of corpses, then we will be putting on airs and suggesting some sort of superiority to the people already rotting away in row after row of war graves. I think this confuses individuals with society. A society can improve (or worsen, for that matter) without its constituent individuals changing their attitudes toward the dead. Our society claims to be superior to slavery but puts slave-owners all over its money and monuments.
Yeah, somebody shouts out, but slavery is gone because of war. You can't hate slavery if you don't love war. No? Watch me. I can do it even while disliking the lousy education that denies people the knowledge that most of the world ended slavery without wars. But what you think of the U.S. Civil War need not determine what you think of an individual person who was caught up in it. And what you think of the Civil War shouldn't alter the fact that nobody proposing any major legal changes, such as the creation of a Green New Deal, is proposing that first we find some fields, slaughter millions of young people, and then pass legislation to create a Green New Deal. We are in a society that is superior to that, whether we like it or not.
Many people, however, are still far too ready to support wars on distant foreigners and to support the weapons industry that supports the wars because of their belief that foreigners often need some killing to straighten them out. One way to increase opposition to the weapons industry that we don't take advantage of is to make people aware that it's a global monster with no flag or fight song, that U.S. weapons stocks rise on the threat of U.S. wars but not merely because the U.S. government will use their weapons. Most wars have U.S. weapons on both sides.
The U.S. government not only markets and approves the foreign sales of U.S.-made weapons, but it also gives other governments billions of dollars every year on condition that they use this money to purchase U.S.-made weapons. If you unquestioningly support U.S. militarism, then you support whatever Egypt, Israel, and numerous other nations do with their free weaponry. I suspect that few taxpayers in the United States knew they were giving weapons money to Ukraine until the topic came up during the impeachment of Donald Trump, just as few even in Congress seemed to know that the United States had troops fighting in Niger until a scandal developed around what Trump said to the widow of a soldier killed there. Perhaps it is the case not only that wars are how the U.S. public learns geography, but also that weird scandals are how the U.S. public learns about U.S. wars.
The U.S. government also provides military training to other governments' militaries around the world. Sometimes this serves to support an existing government, such as the brutal dictatorship of Bahrain, and sometimes to overthrow it, such as with Bolivia, but always to militarize it. The U.S. government also maintains military bases in numerous other countries, bases that sometimes serve to help prop up unpopular governments, such as Afghanistan, or assist them in their foreign wars, such as Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen.
So, even U.S. government militarism is not limited to the wars of the United States.
Not only does U.S. militarism extend well beyond the patria, but it extends into places that call into question one of the most common justifications for militarism. We're often told that wars and war preparations are aimed at protecting the world and human rights from dictatorships and oppressive governments. The wars are for freedom! Yet, U.S. weapons companies (with U.S. government approval and assistance) and the U.S. military are, in a variety of ways, supporting most of the worst governments and dictators on earth, and have been doing so for many years.
President Donald Trump has expressed an embarrassing fondness for various authoritarian leaders, but supporting authoritarian leaders has always been part of U.S. governmental policy, regardless of political party. In fact, while Trump has been criticized severely for talking with the leader of North Korea, the standard U.S. approach to the most dictatorial leaders on earth is to arm and train them. This fact makes the outrage over merely talking with someone seem so out of place that one has to assume the U.S. public is generally ignorant of the basic facts.
In 2017, Rich Whitney wrote an article for Truthout.org called "U.S. Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World's Dictatorships."
Whitney was using the word "dictatorships" as a rough approximation of "oppressive governments." His source for a list of the oppressive governments of the world was Freedom House. He intentionally chose this U.S.-based and U.S.-government-funded organization despite the clear U.S.-government bias in some of its decisions. A list from Freedom House is as nearly as possible the U.S. government's own view of other countries.
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