This means eliminating the Department of Homeland Security, closing down our 800 military bases on foreign soil, and slashing armaments spending by the War Department, the one euphemistically called the Department of Defense but which is, in fact, the spearhead of today’s naked American aggression in six countries.
Real security begins with creating a policy of peace, meaning non-intervention, in the affairs of other states. It means when the U.S. sends its sons and daughters abroad on official business, it sends the Peace Corps to help and not the Pentagon to obliterate. It means returning to the lost arts of diplomacy, restoring the State Department to its original relevance; it means scrapping the posture of arrogance that is known as American exceptionalism and not acting as the self-appointed policeman of the world; and it means settling disputes with other nations in the World Court, not on the battlefield; and lastly, and not the least, it means having the courage to put some trust in the organization to keep the peace in whose creation America played so large a role in founding, the United Nations.
In today’s America, the search for absolute security has assumed hysterical proportions, with DHS officials everywhere checking up on everybody, “probable cause” be damned, at airports and bus terminals and train stations. It has made every citizen the object of Federal suspicion and denied to 100,000 the right to board an airplane. Communist Russia’s Nikolai Lenin would have cheered this invasion of individual privacy, as he once said, “It is true that liberty is precious---so precious that it must be rationed.” Under Communism, the rights of the individual were ever subordinated to the State, and that is increasingly true of America today.
In today’s America, the Pentagon, which consumes 54 cents of every tax dollar, reigns supreme, making a mockery of President Truman’s words, “If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military.” Truman’s staff feared that concentrating all military offices under one roof might create an ogre and that nightmare has become reality. As James Carroll remarks in his “House of War”(Houghton Mifflin): “Secretary of War Henry Stimson, saw the new danger at once and warned of it, to no avail. After Stimson, dozens of others would sound alarms as the Pentagon usurped controls over the levers of the American economy and culture, over science, academia, and politics.” Or as the poet Robert Browning wrote, “A man in armor is his armor’s slave.”
