georgephillip
Senator
Chris Hedges gave the following speech in Orange County, California yesterday (Sunday, 20 September).
"We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace has failed..."
"We will, as Friedrich Engels wrote, make a transition to either socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend into the Hobbesian chaos of failed states, mass migrations—which we are already witnessing—and endless war..."
Hedges then explains how all socialists oppose "the psychosis of permanent war":
"First and foremost, all socialists are unequivocal anti-militarists and anti-imperialists.
"They understand that there is no genuine social, political, economic or cultural reform as long as the militarists and their corporatist allies in the war industry continue to loot and pillage the state budget, leaving the poor to go hungry, workingmen and -women in distress, the infrastructure to collapse and social services to be slashed in the name of austerity.
"The psychosis of permanent war, which infected the body politic after World War I with the internal and external war on communism, and which today has mutated into the war on terror, is used by the state to strip us of civil liberties, redirect our resources to the war machine and criminalize democratic dissent.
"We have squandered trillions of dollars and resources in endless and futile wars, from Vietnam to the Middle East, at a time of ecological and fiscal crisis. The folly of endless war is one of the signs of a dying civilization.
"One F-22 Raptor fighter plane costs $350 million. We have 187 of them.
"One Tomahawk cruise missile costs $1.41 million. We fired 161 of them when we attacked Libya.
"This missile attack on Libya alone cost us a quarter of a billion dollars.
"We spend an estimated $1.7 trillion a year on war, far more than the official 54 percent of discretionary spending, or roughly $600 billion.
"If we don’t break the back of the war machine, profound change will be impossible."
And the US homeland will reap the whirlwind it's sown across the Middle East.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920
"We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace has failed..."
"We will, as Friedrich Engels wrote, make a transition to either socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend into the Hobbesian chaos of failed states, mass migrations—which we are already witnessing—and endless war..."
Hedges then explains how all socialists oppose "the psychosis of permanent war":
"First and foremost, all socialists are unequivocal anti-militarists and anti-imperialists.
"They understand that there is no genuine social, political, economic or cultural reform as long as the militarists and their corporatist allies in the war industry continue to loot and pillage the state budget, leaving the poor to go hungry, workingmen and -women in distress, the infrastructure to collapse and social services to be slashed in the name of austerity.
"The psychosis of permanent war, which infected the body politic after World War I with the internal and external war on communism, and which today has mutated into the war on terror, is used by the state to strip us of civil liberties, redirect our resources to the war machine and criminalize democratic dissent.
"We have squandered trillions of dollars and resources in endless and futile wars, from Vietnam to the Middle East, at a time of ecological and fiscal crisis. The folly of endless war is one of the signs of a dying civilization.
"One F-22 Raptor fighter plane costs $350 million. We have 187 of them.
"One Tomahawk cruise missile costs $1.41 million. We fired 161 of them when we attacked Libya.
"This missile attack on Libya alone cost us a quarter of a billion dollars.
"We spend an estimated $1.7 trillion a year on war, far more than the official 54 percent of discretionary spending, or roughly $600 billion.
"If we don’t break the back of the war machine, profound change will be impossible."
And the US homeland will reap the whirlwind it's sown across the Middle East.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920
