Rosa Brooks: The Civilians Are the Fascists

[carincross]

http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-brooks21apr21,1,5190223.column?coll=la-news-columns

"WHEN SIX recently retired generals criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war and urged his resignation, the Bush administration reacted as if the generals had announced an impending military coup...

On the right, the key talking point in the War Against the Generals quickly emerged: "Civilian control of the military." It was an effective line of attack, and so clever that even many who ought to have known better were suckered...

They even had me nodding along there for a few minutes. After all, every student of recent history knows that if you dilute civilian control of the military, you end up with fascism or a Latin American-style military junta. Because constant security threats are necessary to maintain the power and credibility of a military regime, a nation that lacks civilian control of the military gets ensnared in unending, pointless wars, often against an increasingly vaguely defined threat. Gradually, the broader society becomes militarized. Dissenters are denounced as cowards or traitors, and domestic surveillance becomes common. Secret military courts and detention systems begin to supplant the civilian judicial system. Detainees get tortured, and some end up mysteriously dead after interrogation.

In the looking-glass world the Bush administration has brought us, it's the civilians in the White House and the Pentagon who have been eager to embrace the values normally exemplified by military juntas, while many uniformed military personnel have struggled to insist on values that are supposed to characterize democratic civil society."


Ms. Brooks makes an excellent point. We are living in a "looking-glass world," and this is not the first time the military has tried to rescue American values. Look at the JAG corps and torture.

[Agony]

1. I do swear (or affirm)

I would hope this is because the Generals are remembering the oath they took swearing to uphold the Constitution, not the Commander in Crime.

[Taxloss]

2. Actually, it's an oddity of the US constitution that

the civilian and the military are basically interchangeable - the distinction that exists in other countries is heavily blurred, so that the president is a military commander in a technical rather than rhetorical sense, and the population is militarised - the good ole second amendment. It's down to the USA's origins in asymmetric guerilla warfare, I think - the precarious early republic needed a policy of Total Defence, but it's utterly out of place in a dominant world power.

[xchrom]

3. i might note that in few post modern nations do you find the grass roots

irrational nationalism that you find here in the states.

we haven't JUST NOW gone through the looking glass with bushco.

we are to a certain extent reaching a kind of weird cultural apex that is being skillfully manipulated by the neocons -- since reagan.

reagan was perhaps the master -- or the chief puppet in the hands of neocons.


nationalism here in the states has always been the unwholesome hobby of many ''mainstream'' americans -- and they have been easily duped, manipulated, directed.