Where are the Victory Gardens, Soldiers & Sailors? What about War Bonds, subsidized childcare and rationing? Those and much else were part of our last World War and several concerned the Home Front.
Today we fight a new and enhanced Global War with a new and enhanced Homeland Security State replacing the Homefront, so what about all those other things. Follow me below the fog of war to find out.
Victory gardens were formally recommended but voluntary. Today the recommendation is missing but economic necessity and the need for real food still drives some to have them. Today, however, they are survival gardens and the war is against the peons growing them..
War Bonds have become quantitative easing, because, in keeping with the Global Nature of our new Global War, they bring the war home, supplying the Banksters and the rest of Wall Street with the necessities to further exploit Main Street. Imperialism here at home, so to speak.
Subsidized childcare has disappeared and rationing is now informal, imposed by austerity programs, as part of the war for control of the Homeland's people, wealth and resources. The link between the endless war and the endless austerity is not open, but hidden, lest some begin to question the need for these wars of choice and our outrageoulsy enormous Military Industrial Complex.
And what of our long gone Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen? They are now "warfighters". They became "warfighters" when we started using "contractors", better known as mercenaries. They are known as "Warfighters" because "Mercenaries" and "Soldiers of Fortune" are so skeevy, less than a half-step removed from "Brigands"; homo sacer - outlaws agsinst whom the hand of every man is raised.
And what about our "Veterans"? Though still around, they are more and more often called "Warriors", perhaps in an attempt to endow them with the aura of "Heroes of the Realm". Rather than enhanced benefits (or even adequate benefits) we grant them rhetorical glorification. A no doubt intentional side benefit is that such medieval language fosters increased tribalism here in the Fatherland Homeland.
Censorship and propaganda, however, remain. Your postal envelopes will be scanned, your e-mail will be collected and at least skimmed and heaven help the whistleblowers. Each new theater in the Global War on Terror, each new target, be it a set of initials or some lone curmudgeon and his family falsely ratted out to the Centralized Idiocy Agency by a personal enemy, is the greatest threat to come down the pike in decades, an immanent threat to unfriend us on facebook or support the wrong petty despot.
US persons are being killed and maimed abroad and suffering want and deprivation at home, but the reason is not Pearl Harbor nor 9-11. The real reason is a culture of war, greed and imperialism, a craving for hegemony and global control that we cannot somehow quash. The one constant in this as in all wars is that the first victim is truth. It is said that the truth will make you free. It is incumbent upon us to work together to learn, document and spread the news that the war is here, and that is being waged against the US working and middle classes by the same old oligarchs and elites. Only then can we begin down the road to peace and plenty for all.
End War
Power to the People
Happy New Year from the Group W Bench