Watch Out for Those Pinko-Commies in Camo<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Real Socialist Threat is the Military<\/h2>\n
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM<\/p>\n
I got into an e-mail conversation recently with a former CIA officer and ex-Marine, who, in horror at the Obama administration, went into a Tea Partyist fit denouncing the \u201ccommunists, socialists, wealth redistribution folks, Democrats in Congress.\u201d This was not his usual lucid style (he has helped me as a source on several stories), and he seemed to have momentarily lost his mind in considering the matter, or, at least, that part of the mind wherein a cold assessment of facts might operate. I wrote him back: \u201cWhere are these communist\/socialist\/wealth-redistribution folks? I see none of their ilk anywhere in Congress.\u201d He never replied.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that\u2019s because the \u201cright-wing\u201d types such as my good pal refuse to recognize \u2013 or perhaps recognize all too well – and therefore don\u2019t want to talk about it \u2013 that whenever wealth needs to be redistributed for the benefit of corporate personhood, our Congress goose-steps to the line. It\u2019s \u201csocialism\u201d for the rich, the powerful, the influential, those able to marshal cash incentives to get their cats\u2019 paws to pass laws that favor their interests, for the doling out of public funds for private benefit. It\u2019s socialism for banks and automakers and big pharma and big agribusiness and the behemoths in energy and defense, and on and on. So much for the glorious independence and striving of the perceived paragons of the free market. The derangement of so many rightists in this country \u2013 viz. the dingbat Tea Partiers \u2013 is clear: They fail to understand that when large corporations hold sway over government there is no \u201ccapitalism\u201d and no \u201cfree market,\u201d certainly not as Adam Smith imagined it in The Wealth of Nations. And as businesses grow bigger to capture government, so does government grow when captured \u2013 how else could it service big business?<\/p>\n
Then again, my ex-CIA\/ex-Marine source may be on to something about the socialist menace \u2013 as he would know all about it, having been trained, directed, housed and pensioned by a grossly expanding branch of government for most of his working life. Consider the path to happiness paved by the bomb-makers and the aircraft and tank and battleship manufacturers and the makers of grenades and rifles and teargas and bullets, and all the ancillaries of the military industrial complex, the \u201ccounterterror\u201d thinktanks and mercenary contractors and intelligence-surveillance-security firms. These would not, could not, survive without government contracts, government intervention, government swaddling and succoring and snuggling, and, of course, the perpetual preparation for and making of government-run wars that feed their industries. The imperial war-machine is the great socialist enterprise of our time.<\/p>\n
Indeed, if we want real socialism for actual persons, we should all join the US military: Everything is socialized in the military, the personnel getting socialized medicine and socialized housing and socialized transport and much else (socialized bullets and bombs), the ideal and modus operandi being one of purest collectivism, the training the kind that teaches recognition of hierarchies and obedience in that long chain of command \u2013 chain is the operative word \u2013 wherein you do what you\u2019re told, you listen to the boss, you don\u2019t question, you don\u2019t fend for yourself, you don\u2019t step out of line. How totally un-American. Thus does the military man, having given up the struggle for self-command and self-reliance, receive diapering and feeding and care, ideally from cradle to grave, never opting to grow up and survive in the rigors of the marketplace. Those filthy pinko-commies in the US Army! Who woulda thunk it!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s astonishing, though, that these same government-trained and -paid personnel so often are to be found griping about the shape and size of the tit that keeps them alive. I have a close relative, for example, who talks the hard-core right-winger line, complaining endlessly about big government and \u201csocialism\u201d \u2013 yet he works for the ever-metastasizing State Department. When he calls me a \u201cleftist,\u201d I like to tell him I have never worked for government, never gotten a government paycheck, nor any grant or subsidy from government, nor any loans, never profited from government personally (as opposed, say, to profiting from government roads), never gotten food stamps or welfare or Medicaid or workman\u2019s compensation or unemployment insurance, nor cashed in my Social Security benefits (forced to pay for them in the first place), nor received any other scrap of so-called \u201cwealth redistribution.\u201d What a leftist I must be.<\/p>\n
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is working on a book about U.S. secession movements. Find more of his work at www.christopherketcham.com or contact him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A navy veteran turned peace activist once told me that the biggest socialist economy in the world is the U.S. military.\u00a0 It took me aback at first, but when you think about it.\u00a0\u00a0 The military is a socialized system.\u00a0 It’s ironic that the prevailing current of U.S. militarism is anti-communist. >><< http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/ketcham04222010.html April 22, 2010 … <\/p>\n
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