I've never been a good sleeper. When I was still working, I wouldn't just take my work home with me but even to bed as I always kept a notepad on my bedside table to jot down any work problems my restless mind might conjured up as I drifted in and out of sleep.
Retirement added to my restless mind the absence of physical exhaustion due to a lack of physical activity and increased bladder function due to old age - despite drinking only PINO MORE. And so, instead of a notepad, I now keep a radio on my bedside table which is constantly tuned in to ABC Radio National, and listening to Phillip Adams' LATE NIGHT LIVE broadcasts is usually enough to let me drift off to sleep until my first bladder call around one o'clock in the morning.
And so it was again last night, except that I then began to listen to a broadcast by the Canadian Broadcoasting Corporation of a speech given by a Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a lifelong Republican and career army officer, who believes that American military spending has become an ideological article of faith which is both bankrupting America and making the world a dangerous place. To listen to the same broadcast and to know what kept me wide awake for an hour or so, click here.
As the now retired colonel put it, "America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret nineteen straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it. And that's the agony of it." He calls America the "Warfare State" which, if it weren't so terrifyingly true, would be a nice play on words.
Next morning - and two bladder calls later - I googled for "The Warfare State" and came up with the above YouTube clip (and several more), and this prescient book, written as early as 1962, by a Fred J. Cook.
(to read the book, JOIN UP - it's free! - then LOG IN and BORROW)
The most startling and alarming aspect of this book is not the accuracy of its predictions regarding the growth and influence of this military and industrial alignment, but rather the area of the book that deals with the cold war. It details with disturbing clarity a loosely guided program of propaganda that effectively negates the wisdom of elected officials, counters the knowledge of our scientific community, and distorts public and popular opinion to such a degree that it allowed the U.S. government to conduct a policy that, stripped of its false façade, is a recipe for world-wide nuclear annihilation. This has been going on for decades and it represents the backbone of American foreign policy.
Reading this book more than half a century after its publication almost makes one believe in precognition. The evidence is clear. Annual budgets earmark three-fourths of a trillion dollars toward the military (not including wars), while the country’s infrastructure falls into disrepair, its citizens are denied a proper health-care system, the middle class have no economic security, and an elite ruling class is so entrenched that they no longer have to resort to subterfuge to impoverish the people they once represented. We are living in the world that this book predicted, fifty-eight years ago. And what’s really frightening is how easily it was all done.
Come on, I dare you! Listen to the broadcast, read the book, and join me in my sleepless nights!
