How Long Has This Been Going On? (“What They Want is the World”…The Roots of Our Current Coup d’Etat)

~~By Grail Guardian

“What is past is prologue.”

Those sobering words become even more chilling in the context in which I just viewed them; at the end of the movie JFK. If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s director Oliver Stone’s 1991 indictment of the Kennedy assassination conclusions. In it Stone questions the lone gunman theory, which states that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in an isolated act of a deranged man. While Stone made the movie an amalgamation of numerous conspiracy theories, it certainly does make one stop and think. I’d seen the movie when it first came out, but watching it today I had a different set of eyes–eyes that have been opened to the hypocrisy and lies of our government and political parties. And I saw things I had never noticed before,  names I’d never noticed before.

The movie begins with an excerpt from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address:

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

I’ve heard this quote many, many times in my life, but this time it had a different resonance. Military-industrial complex – the phrase just makes the blood run cold. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

…a concept commonly used to refer to policy relationships between governments, national armed forces, and industrial support they obtain from the commercial sector in political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of iron triangle.

(SNIP)

It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and Executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity. A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, “an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs.”