https://theconversation.com/fortress-usa-how-9-11-produced-a-military-industrial-juggernaut-166102
"Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from
the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is
suffused with policing and surveillance. This ranges from the
inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian,
such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too
big to use on regular roads.
This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American
state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of
its victims.
The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as
settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such
as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on
racist justifications.
The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the second
world war. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people
were killed in US-led or -sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a
conservative estimate.
When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left
the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing
“military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and
the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
