Trump’s Salute: Apotheosis of the Warfare State

David Stockman / Rational Review

 (July 6, 2019) — Granted. The Donald skipped American history class—along with much else that even modestly educated people still recall.

But owing to his late life conversion to flag-hugging patriotism you would think he might have taken time to actually read the Declaration of Independence.

Obviously not. We have scoured its 1334 words, and our recollection was fully vindicated. To wit, there is not a single mention of armed might, military exploits, unfurled flags, marching bands, battle hymns or occupied airports (sic!) etc.

Well, except for its reference to King George’s brutal use of mercenary armies to quash the colonists right to individual liberty and just self-government. Among Jefferson’s long bill of particulars was this:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Self-evidently, the Declaration was a jeremiad against tyrannical rule and an evocation of the principles of liberty and the grounding of the state in the consent of the governed.

That is, the document is libertarian, not statist, through and through; and it was for those principles, not military glory, that the 56 courageous signers pledged to each other their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor.

Indeed, as the plain language of the Declaration holds, the signers understood liberty to be not a gift of the state or privilege granted by the king, but rights that were “unalienable” and pre-existing to any and all forms of government:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Accordingly, the Declaration was essentially revolutionary in proclaiming not only preexisting natural rights, but also a right of the people to abolish the existing state whenever it becomes destructive of liberty and to start anew with a fresh constitution. That’s the very opposite of blind worship of the established institutions of government and patriotic subservience to its orders, projects and pretensions:

– That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…….

Not surprisingly, therefore, the most stirring portions of the document focus on the righteousness of the signers opposition to the king’s tyrannical rule. The resulting threat of “absolute Despotism” veritably conferred on them a “duty” to overthrow such government and to thereby reclaim those “unalienable Rights” of the people which were “endowed by their Creator”.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

So we have a newsflash for the Donald. The 4th of July is not Memorial Day; it is not an occasion for tribute to those fallen in America’s wars—just or otherwise. Nor for brandishing the military capacities and lethal weaponry that may give rise to additional such sacrifices in the future.

To the contrary, it is a celebration of the birth of Liberty; it’s a time to minimize the State and remind that it is the servant of a free people and that its remit is conditioned upon a scrupulous regard for their rights, prosperity and happiness.

After all, even the traditional fireworks displays on the 4th were never understood to be a celebration of battles won or enemies defeated. It was a spontaneous expression of rejoicing by the citizenry that they and their rights are preeminent in America because 243 years ago its founding fathers had the courage to revolt against an unjust ruler.

That’s why the Donald’s military extravaganza on the mall was so tone-deaf, offensive and profoundly anti-conservative in the traditional small government, pro-liberty and free-market sense of the term.

But it goes far beyond tonalities and misplaced symbolism. As the great Randolph Bourne famously proclaimed amidst the insane carnage of the WWI: “War is the health of the state”.

Today we have a permanent $1 trillion per year Warfare State (counting debt service and $200 billion for Veterans) that would have terrified even Randolph Bourne. That’s because it represents a raw and wholly unnecessary aggrandizement of the state and the far-flung machinery of Empire—an illicit undertaking that has no basis in the security and liberty of the homeland or in the concept of a peaceful Republic that led the signers of the Declaration to expose themselves to the terminal justice of the King’s hangman.

Stated differently, the American Warfare State is now so massive and embedded in the warp and woof of national governance that its writes its own ticket; or, in the metaphor of hot 4th of July afternoons, has become a self-licking ice cream cone.

It simply declares untrue things which are then used to justify its missions, budgets and monumental lethal capacities for military action.

In recent times these untrue things include the claim that Russia annexed Crimea against the will of its people; that China is lacing Huawei cell phones and network gear with secret spy equipment; that we must risk war with Iran because they neocons have ixnayed its right to have an independent foreign policy; that North Korea must give up its entire nuclear capacity before the Korean peninsula can be demilitarized, even though it remains surrounded by a massive armada of American warships, planes and land forces in Japan and the Pacific waters; and that the Syrian regime needed to be overthrown because Assad is an evil ruler who threatened America’s security, somehow.

It also falsely claimed that Khadafy had to be bombed because he was fixing to massacre his own people; that Saddam had to be taken out because he was harboring weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda operatives; and that the benighted Taliban rulers of Afghanistan needed to be overthrown and the Afghan “graveyard of empires” occupied indefinitely because they once harbored a few hundred al-Qaeda fighters who have long since vamoosed or have been liquidated along with their leader, bin Laden.

Further back in time that Warfare State emitted the big lie that the petty quarrel between Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait in 1990 required the mobilization of 500,000 American troops to rescue the bank accounts of the latter; that the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the pages of history in 1991 did not obviate the need for NATO and a massive US conventional military force—the primary purpose for which had been to contain the Red Army and its 50,000 (largely inoperative or unfueled) tanks and related land forces; and that Washington had a dog in the 1980’s fracas between Iran and Iraq that required a policy of “tilting” toward the latter and assisting Saddam’s genocidal use of chemical weapons on essentially unarmed teenage Iranian soldiers.

Reaching even deeper into history, it was also the machinery of the Warfare State and its auxiliaries, think tanks and military-industrial complex lobbies that falsely held that Vietnam was a “domino”, albeit hidden in the jungles of Southeast Asia, that dare not be allowed to fall to the international communist rulers of the day—rulers who were otherwise engaged in vicious conflict among themselves and in genocidal depredations upon their own people; and that the mere “surveyors line” at the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula, as Secretary Dean Acheson correctly put it in a moment of post-WWII lucidity, required a savage war on the north in order to save western civilization.

And on and on it has gone for more than 70 years. And, in fact, from the time that Teddy Roosevelt pulled his Rough Rider stunt on San Juan Hill and then, upon bloodying his way into the Oval Office, commenced yapping about carrying a Big Stick and building a huge blue water Navy that was absolutely unnecessary for the defense of the American Republic—given that the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats and a shoreline defense were more than enough to keep any potential Old World aggressors at bay.

Indeed, a few short year latter the carnage along the western front of Europe proved the point. There was zero reason for America’s entry into the Great War in April 1917 because by then the belligerents had all already bankrupted themselves and bleed their economies and populations to the point of collapse or revolt. American troops ended up in the decimated hellholes of northern France only because of President Woodrow Wilson’s vainglorious and messianic desire to have an important seat at the eventual postwar peace table.

But Wilson blew even that and acquiesced to a vindictive peace of victors as embodied in the destructive Treaty of Versailles. The latter soon paved the way for the revanchist nightmare of Nazi Germany and the consolidation of power by the tiny band of communist fanatics in Russia who had sized power in Petrograd in November 1917 only owing to Wilson’s intervention in a war that was otherwise over.

From that horrible mistake, of course, what amounts to a century of war followed inexorably thereupon.

So there is no other way to slice it. Contrary to the Donald’s seventh grade history lesson, America did not have a glorious military history after the revolutionary war based on the fact that men died on the battlefield in defense of liberty and democracy. They didn’t.

When it came to defense of the latter, God or mother nature, as the case may be, took care of that long ago when they placed America safely between the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats.

Moreover, once America industrialized because it had capitalism, small government and borders open to a massive inflow of liberty-seeking economic and political refugees from the old world (40 million between 1850 and 1923), there was never any risk of invasion; there was never any need for a vast military establishment, let alone today’s $1 trillion Warfare State.

The latter has always been an instrument of Empire, not a guardian and savior of domestic liberty, prosperity and happiness itself. And that’s exactly why the two Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two 60-ton Abrams tanks displayed near the memorial were so profoundly inappropriate.

There never has been and never will be a time in the life of this planet that a foreign power could deliver a massive expeditionary force to the American shores that would require a defensive counterattack by these vehicles of war. Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting vehicles are strictly instruments for invading and occupying foreign lands.

In a true policy of America First during the present day and age, we would not even waste money on these relics. Advanced missile and munitions technology and our already bought and paid for nuclear deterrent is all that is needed to keep any theoretical aggressors at bay.

And that’s the real irony of the day. The Donald was elected because he sounded like he wanted to end the crushing failure and cost of an Empire made in Washington by the very Warfare State complex that licks its own ice cream.

Yet owing to his own insatiable ego and schoolboy infatuation with military weapons like those listed below, he ended up organizing a Fourth of Me celebration of the very Warfare State that threatens the unalienable right to Liberty, Prosperity and Happiness that was born 243 years ago.

• Air Force One
• Blue Angels (F-18 (6))
• US Coast Guard Aircraft: MH-60 (1)/ MH-65 (1) / C-130 (1)
• US Air Force Aircraft: B-2 (1) / F-22 (2)
• US Marine Corps Aircraft: V-92 (1) / V-22 (2)
• US Army: Aircraft: AH-64 (4)
• US Navy: F-35 (2) / F-18 (2)
• M1A2 Abrams Tanks (2)
• M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles (2)
• M88 Recovery Vehicle (1)
• Contact Truck with crew (1)

For want of doubt, here is the Declaration that gave rise to it all:

In Congress, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here.

We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

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