Ex US Army Major says fighting "forever wars" made him a progressive

[Va Lefty]

Excellent read here.

He says goodbye to "a litany of absurdity that I witnessed in the institution to which I dedicated my adult life."

"Farewell to the generals I served under who then shamelessly spun through Washington’s revolving door, trading in their multi-starred uniforms for six- and seven-figure corporate gigs on the boards of weapons manufacturers, aka “the merchants of death” (as they were known once upon a distant time), and so helped feed the unquenchable appetite of the military-industrial beast."

"Goodbye to the devotees of American exceptionalism who filled the Army’s ranks, stalwart evangelists of a civic religion that believed there was a secret American inside every Arab or Afghan, ready to burst forth with the slightest poke from Uncle Sam’s benevolent bayonet."

"Godspeed to the often-intolerant conservatism and evangelical Christianity infusing the ranks."

"See ya to the generals who lent their voices, while still in uniform, to religious organizations, one of whom even became the superintendent of West Point, and at worst got mere slaps on the wrist for that. (And while we’re at it, here’s a goodbye wave to all those chaplains, supposedly non-denominational supporters of every kind of soldier, who regularly ended their prayers with “in Jesus’s name, amen.” So much for church-state separation.)"

"Ta-ta to the paradox of hyper-capitalism and Ayn Randian fiscal conservatism among the officers of the nation’s most socialist institution, the military. Count me in as sick of the faux intellectuals reading books by economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in Iraq or their less sophisticated peers toting around Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck volumes, all the while enjoying their publicly-financed, co-pay-less government healthcare."

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-forever-wars-turned-this-soldier-into-an-unabashed-progressive/

[Major Nikon]

1. A publicly funded military is certainly a paradox to the Ayn Rand panty sniffers

The biggest reason our grossly inflated military exists is not to protect domestic interests from foreign invasion, but rather to protect international business interests who then enjoy grossly inflated tax breaks. The best part is they typically store their profits off-shore to further prevent themselves from paying even more of their grossly reduced tax rates.

[dlk]

2. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

A highly successful method of transferring taxpayer dollars into private contractors pockets. As one highly successful contractor once told me, It’s like taking candy from a baby...”

[Girard442]

3. Spiritual heir of Smedley Butler.

[notdarkyet]

4. Don't know how you stood it for so long. Good for getting out instead of being a body on the

Line for the corporatists.

[NeoGreen]

5. When I was 18 and younger...

...my father was a Reaganite, and at that age I trusted my father's wisdom.

But then I joined the Air Force and experienced the world for myself.

And due to that experience and my time since, I have become a down home, hard core, progressive-liberal atheist.

It's all a racket.

Upon edit:

I’m active now in what little there is of an antiwar movement in this country. That was part of the genius of President Richard Nixon’s cynical decision in 1973, following years of large-scale antiwar activity in this country and in the U.S. military itself during the Vietnam era, to end the draft. He replaced a citizen’s army with an all-volunteer force. By turning the military into a professional caste, a kind of homegrown foreign legion, rather than a responsibility of every citizen, by transforming its officers into an isolated, fawned-upon caste, he effectively ensured that the public would look elsewhere and that antiwar movements would largely become things of the past.

This ^ ^ ^