Grievance 8 - Militarism

The U.S. Constitution failed to prohibit the government from extending
its armed forces worldwide with no threat of war on the nation. As the
20th century came to a close, there were 1,150 U.S. military
installations around the world, and a fleet of warships and floating
warehouses on the seas.

Military academies, colleges, and bases trained not only Americans, but
foreigners in physical force and violence. The idea of "peace
academies" for training people in proven methods of conflict resolution
was diminished by the government's militaristic policy.

Each year since 1946, some 2,000 foreign military personnel were brought
to the government's "School of the America's" at Fort Benning, Georgia,
to train in "low-intensity" combat, which was said to be a code word for
brutalization and terror. The Army admitted that some of its graduates
abused their power. Critics said it was a training ground for
assassins, dictators, and their henchmen. Some of its graduates were
linked to the murder of six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador.
A congressional study found that 10 graduates had taken over Latin
American countries through military coups or other undemocratic means
over a 30-year period.

The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia said at the height of that country's
economic and political destabilization in 1998, in which 1,200
Indonesians were killed, a U.S.-trained secret military force was
involved in abducting and torturing political dissidents.

The government required 18-year olds to register for possible
involuntary induction into military service, and advertised enlistment
with the slogan "Be all that you can be". Training 6,000 individuals to
operate a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, as an example, raised a
question whether this was all they could be.

The U.S. "federalized" state National Guard troops in the early 1990's,
bringing them more directly under control of centralized power.
Congress militarized many law-enforcement agencies in giving the
military an increased role in fighting civilian crime.

Research and development of new weapons was ongoing with no lid on
spending. Besides nuclear, chemical and biological means of death and
destruction, the arsenal contained weapons for sound, color, symbolism,
psychological, and other methods of control and manipulation of people.
The military researched high-tech weapons to use on large populations,
including powerful transmitters, microwaves and infra-red radar.

The U.S. was a one-stop supermarket for other nations to purchase
miliary hardware, profiting arms makers and their favored politicians
each in their own way. The Defense Security Assistance Agency sold $33
billion worth in 1993 alone. In 1998, 80 new fighter planes were sold
to the tiny United Arab Emirates for $7 billion, and other major arms
sales were made to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the Middle East "tinder
box". The government sent $3.2 billion in "subsidized arms sales" to
Egypt in 1999. Technology to produce weapons was sold along with the
weapons themselves, resulting in many smaller nations producing a
variety of modern weapons and becoming new arms sellers.

The government encouraged South Africa to develop a chemical and
biological warfare program in the early 1980's when that country's
apartheid policy was being seriously challenged.

Americans were surprised in the 1990's to see former "enemy" troops in
some parts of the country. Russian and East European forces wearing
United Nations emblems appeared for exercises with their own helicopters
and vehicles, raising questions regarding national sovereignty.

The U.S. was itself an armed camp with satellite armed camps throughout
the world, under an unannounced and subtle program of world militarism
at a high cost to American taxpayers.

With an AUTHENTIC CONSTITUTION in harmony with the natural
Cosmic Laws of the universe, and producing High Moral Values and
Democratic Ideals, an adequate defense is seen as far less expensive and
imposing on the world than militarism.

Back