In 1944, one of America’s finest journalists, named John T. Flynn, published a book entitled “As We Go Marching.” (You can download a free e-book here.)
Keep in mind that the book was published during World War II. Flynn could see the writing on the wall. A massive ‘Pentagon’ was recently built, and he could tell that a new America would emerge from this war, and it wouldn’t be an America devoted to the ideas of peace and non-interventionism. It would be a war machine.
Flynn wrote:
“The great and glamorous industry is here—the industry of militarism.”
The American Empire per se began in 1898, when the U.S. conquered the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, basically in one shot.
Then one of the worst decisions imaginable was made in 1917, when Woodrow Wilson thrust America into the European conflict, known as World War I.
The war complex in America got its first real taste of how government can expand in all directions, and increase its powers exponentially during a major war.
But it would be at the end of World War II that the military-industrial-complex and American surveillance state to monitor all Americans would get shackled onto the former land of the free.
Flynn wrote:
We have managed to acquire bases all over the world…There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort…
Remember, this is 1944.
And then Flynn made the most prescient statement:
…there must remain when the war is over a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies.
Flynn hit the bulls-eye.
We must have enemies.
After World War II, the U.S. went on a tirade of almost constant war … Vietnam … North Korea … Latin America … Iraq …. Afghanistan ……. and numerous countries in between and after.
All of it leading to (and including) the present day.
Some very bad decisions were made at the turn of the 1900’s.
Some good decisions will have to be made in the future.
