{"id":58307,"date":"2015-05-18T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58307"},"modified":"2015-05-17T16:45:14","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T15:45:14","slug":"a-new-dark-age-of-militarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/a-new-dark-age-of-militarism\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Dark Age of Militarism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robert<\/a>13 May 2015 – <\/em>\u201cWhat struck me,\u201d journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, \u201cwas the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and militarized gear.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter 30 years of the War on Drugs and a neoliberal restructuring of the state at the local level, which is not a reduction of the public sector but a transformation of the public sector, the only thing local governments had were weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parenti\u2019s observation summed up a deep sense of puzzled frustration I\u2019ve been feeling for a long time, which has been growing in intensity since the Reagan era and even more so since 9\/11 and the unleashed Bush agenda. Fear, exploited and unchecked, triggers a deep, \u201crational\u201d insanity. We\u2019re driving ourselves into a new Dark Age.<\/p>\n

The driving force is institutional: government, the mainstream media, the military-industrial economy. These entities are converging in a lockstep, armed obsession over various enemies of the status quo in which they hold enormous power; and this obsession is devolving public consciousness into a permanent fight-or-flight mentality. Instead of dealing with real, complex social issues with compassion and intelligence, our major institutions seem to be fortifying themselves \u2013 with ever-increasing futility \u2013 against their imagined demons.<\/p>\n

Parenti went on, in his interview with Vincent Emanuele: \u201cSo, less money for public housing, more money for private prisons. It\u2019s a literal transfer of resources to different institutions, from a flawed social democratic institution like public housing, to an inherently evil, but still very expensive and publicly funded institution, like prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

As American society militarizes, it dumbs itself down.<\/p>\n

The only surprising aspect to a recent story in the U.S. edition of The Guardian, for instance \u2013 about how the Houston office of the FBI broke its own rules in beginning an investigation of opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline \u2013 was how unsurprising it was.<\/p>\n

In essence, the FBI office violated the department\u2019s internal rules \u2013 \u201cdesigned,\u201d according to The Guardian, \u201cto prevent the agency from becoming unduly involved in sensitive political issues\u201d \u2013 by beginning a surveillance operation against anti-pipeline activists without receiving high-level approval to do so. Furthermore, \u201cthe investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline,\u201d The Guardian reported.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 At one point, the FBI\u2019s Houston office said it would share with TransCanada \u2018any pertinent intelligence regarding any threats\u2019 to the company in advance of a forthcoming protest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the only surprising thing about this revelation is that the agency has internal rules designed to keep its nose out of sensitive political issues. Obviously, they\u2019re easily circumvented. What\u2019s not surprising is the corporate-FBI alliance to stand tough against \u201cenvironmental extremists\u201d or the agency\u2019s lumping of environmental protests with other \u201cdomestic terrorism issues\u201d \u2013 its pathological fear, in other words, of peaceful protest and civil disobedience and its inability to see the least bit of patriotic value in their cause.<\/p>\n

This is the case despite the long, honored tradition of protest and civil disobedience in the United States and the widespread public awareness of the need to protect our environment. Doesn\u2019t matter. In the realm of law enforcement, a simple moralism too often prevails: Get the enemy.<\/p>\n

Imagine, just for a moment, an American law enforcement institution that operated out of an emotional state other than armed self-righteousness; that regarded the security it was established to protect as a complex matter that required cooperation and fairness and was ill-served by intimidation. Imagine a law enforcement institution capable of learning from past wrongs and not automatically donning riot gear in the face of every challenge to social conditions \u2013 and not automatically manning the firehoses.<\/p>\n

What I see our powerful, status-quo institutions doing is arming themselves against the future. Consider the enemies: poor people, immigrants, protesters of all sorts, whistleblowers . . .<\/p>\n

\u201cA federal court in Alexandria, Virginia sentenced former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling to three and a half years in prison on Monday in a case that has received widespread condemnation for revealing the \u2018rank hypocrisy\u2019 of the U.S. government\u2019s war on whistleblowers,\u201d Common Dreams reported.<\/p>\n

Sterling was convicted, on circumstantial evidence, of leaking classified info to New York Times journalist James Risen about a bizarre CIA operation called Operation Merlin. If true, Sterling committed the crime of embarrassing the U.S. government by outing an ill-conceived CIA plan to pass flawed information about nuclear-weapon design to Iran. The government has no right to hide its operations \u2013 and certainly not its mistakes \u2013 from the public. By pretending that it\u2019s defending \u201cour\u201d security by doing so, even as it ignores and fails to invest in true measures of security, such as a rebuilt social safety net, it squanders its legitimacy.<\/p>\n

And the more legitimacy it squanders, the more it militarizes.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Common Wonders<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 May 2015 – \u201cWhat struck me,\u201d journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, \u201cwas the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and militarized gear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}