OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #170, MARCH 27, 2024

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #170, MARCH 27,  2024 .   Compiled by Dick Bennett

Michael Swanson.  The War State.
OMNI, AFSC, FCNL Mission Statement.

Michael Swanson.   The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite, 1945-1963.  2013.
[For readers who have not studied US post-WWII/ColdWar/Imperial history, this book provides a basic introduction simply and clearly written; those who know the history will find this a good review and handy reference (despite its lack of an Index).  –Dick]

 

Author’s Overview

Today when you factor in the interest on the national debt from past wars and total defense expenditures the United States spends almost 40% of its federal budget on the military. It accounts for over 46% of total world arms spending. Before World War II it spent almost nothing on defense and hardly anyone paid any income taxes. You can't have big wars without big government. Such big expenditures are now threatening to harm the national economy. How did this situation come to be?

In this book you'll learn how in the critical twenty years after World War II the United States changed from being a continental democratic republic to a global imperial superpower. Since then nothing has ever been the same again. In this book you will discover this secret history of the United States that formed the basis of the world we live in today.

By buying this book you will discover:

- How the end of European colonialism created a power vacuum that the United States used to create a new type of world empire backed by the most powerful military force in human history.

- Why the Central Intelligence Agency was created and used to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations when the United States Constitution had no mechanism for such imperial activities.

- How national security bureaucrats [=fear and war mongers] got President Harry Truman to approve of a new wild budget busting arms race after World War II that is still going on to this day.

- Why President Eisenhower really gave his famous warning against the "military-industrial complex."

- Why during the Kennedy administration the nuclear arms race almost led to the end of the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

- How President Kennedy tried to deal with what had grown into a "permanent government" of power elite national security bureaucrats in the executive branch of the federal government that had become more powerful than the individual president himself.  [Consequently he was assassinated by national security officers, according to James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, 2008, apparently unread by Swanson.  --D]

In this book you will discover this secret history of the United States that formed the basis of the world we live in today.

Here’s a sample:
“The spirit of NSC 68 [codifying the secret move of the US from a policy of containing the Soviet Union to “one of global empire”) lives on today more than the spirit of 1776.  At the beginning of the twenty -first century, the United States simply replaced a battle against communism with a ‘war on terror’ to provide the ideological underpinning for imperial policies.”  Swanson references Ernest May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68.]    --D

 

The mission the OMNI Weeklies—War Watch Wednesdays and Climate Memo Mondays—is the same as that of the OMNI: Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology (2001), which copied the mission of the two US Quaker organizations-- AFSC and FCNL:

a world free of war and the threat of war;
a society with equity and justice for all;
a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled,
and an earth restored.

The statement serves as our optics and our measure in reading and reflecting on US history and the USA today.