Three American Generals

Three American Generals, successful generals who had accomplished many tasks given them, have spoken critically in dissent of U.S.A. failings. None of these three were paragons. None were without their own failings. But it is an important example that U.S. Grant, Smedley Darlington Butler, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all spoke with critical feedback which others were less able to get published adequately at the time. We need such critical feedback, but our system of empire typically diverts it into military venture and political speculation. This is a blatant symptom not of our liberty, but of its abridgement. Rather than whooping it up about the glory of our might, we should review these kinds of statements from "patriots" of our past, and realize the needs for introspection and social and legal change they addressed, and which are still in need for betterment.

The first of these I pose is Grant. From his second Inaugural Address:

..The effects of the late civil strife have been to free the slave and make
him a citizen. Yet he is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship
should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected. To this
correction I stand committed, so far as Executive influence can avail...

This is still a problem now, and we still now are burdened by the bigotry and ignorance of a citizenry that supports, not liberty, but repression. The long historical alternative of an enslaved minority preferring a strongman loyal to them is still present in our system. The difficulties of a constitutional republic are easy to dissent from, and the virtues of such a democracy are much more abstract and require learning and cooperative exchanges to make vital, which is not to the tastes of many, or such tastes can be cultivated away with relative ease.

My second excerpt is from Butler. Many do not know of him now, but he was a decorated militarist, albeit also a Quaker, and had many successes in battle. He was approached by financial fascist elites in the early 1930s with the request he lead a fascist overthrow of FDR parallel to what Hitler and Mussolini were doing in Europe:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the
most profitable, surely the most vicious.

This simple statement is an explosive assertion in his case. He was a military professional all his life. I cannot know his mind in detail, but as a Quaker, one can imagine him, at the point of being petitioned to commit treason against the system he had long fought in the name of, with sworn loyalty to its Constitution, that this request created cognitive dissonance, and was utterly against his personal sense of ethics and honesty. But Butler was an intelligent man, and it is telling, and a good metaphor for all of us, that he did these things he effectively dissented from for years before taking this turn. We all can build a context of fictions in our minds hoping for a community backing us that is not what is in fact actually there.

My last then is Eisenhower:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes.

Most know of this from his statements leaving the Presidency after his last term. Eisenhower felt he had a hard time controlling the MIC, and that anyone with less familiarity could easily be overwhelmed, duped, and controlled by it. We now feel that control under a President that is so obviously mendacous that his very speech does not evoke critical feedback as much as that feel one gets being dominated by a sexual alpha, the biological challenge around it, and the well known limits to longevity that kind of challenge yields to most who might want to provide alternatives.

I like to think humanity can come up with projects that will lead us, worldwide, to being able to get along with each other more or less as well as my urban neighbors do when they rub elbows at the Mall. Perhaps this is not realistic. Perhaps we will always be like chimpanzees throwing our turds at each other. However, the possibility seems to be there, and a far better option than continuing the present sprint toward the obvious cliffs of nuclear war or environmental depletion that are gaping before us. Perhaps the best start would be to stop diverting our best and brightest to projects of conflict.