Written by bruce k.   

I am both an admirer and critic of MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.

The admirer part of me centers around Chomsky's understanding and writing about American history. Chomsky has an amazing memory of the various important threads in American Liberal society that are de-emphasized, but that are very important in understanding where we are.

Crucial among the ideas that Chomsky talks about is that the military is the real driver of our technology and thus our economy. The one thing that the US has an almost virtual monopoly on is both the market for and the production of high-tech. That technology was claimed to have sprung from the Space Program back when we had a Space Program. It made us feel modern and peaceful to think this was true.

However, really stuff from the space program came almost exclusively from the military. The military as Chomsky lectures that supports institutions like his own MIT and many others.

We all, all of us, all Americans, have to at least consider that our country would be so drastically changed as to put its future existence into question if somehow we unilaterally decided to cut the military down. We would be undercutting and putting at risk the only thing that keeps up safe as far as security and ahead as far as technology. I go so far in most of my comments to say that we are simply not going to cut or get rid of the military any time soon, and in fact we really ought to consider trying to make the military a secular core of our society. ( which it really is anyway )

The second part of this is that our empire, or colonialism, is key to testing, maintaining and developing that military - so it too will never be allowed to be touched. Slowly but surely our colonialism, deadly, toxic, corrupt, evil ... whatever adjectives you want to use for it - it is a necessity, and it has produced progress in the world. That progress has come at a cost that most of us would say is unreasonable - in so many dimensions, lives, misery, pain, death, destruction of the environment, waste of resources ... etc, etc, etc. The magnitude of this waste and misery is practically unimaginable and unimaginably complex to consider.

To the US government and its owners, rulers, shareholders, the most important things are survival, security, a system that promotes both, and secondly a society that promotes the people who promote those values. These are the facts of life.

These dynamics make the chasm between Left and Right almost trivial because there is not a free market, except a kind of Disneyland of illusions around a totally manipulated system of technology development and military implementation. While everyone is arguing about capitalism and socialism we have what is basically economic totalitarianism that looks capitalist around the edges. Which is fine because it keeps people essentially out of politics.

Politics in America is a desert wasteland which non one inhabits and is never dealt with honestly in our media or by our journalists. We hide our economy and we hide our politics because to not do so would be to open it to the criticism of those who do not understand this big picture.

So, if we want to have political change, where can it exist. How can it be considered, what are the bounds of it and why would we need that?

First we need political change that invests in Americans because the rest of the world is catching up through sheer energy with what we have been doing in a totalitarian way that has confused and made incoherent American society. We need an actual culture that Americans, and non-American can buy into, in order to support our system and change with our system, so our system can predominate.

Right now we are doing our best to suck the rest of the world dry of talent and pay them off with American gold ... which along with war and the financial corruption has created the seeds of doom for investing in the American public.

What is important, and what really needs to be done is not to change the system per se, but to define and demand public sector rights - and do not pretend to screw with the defense department - to understand how we can start by integrating the American society into the American military, and then beginning an explicit publicly driven process of improving both based on our Western Cultural Heritage of our basic freedoms ... which is still the best thing America has to offer the world.

In conclusion: I don't think the American people or the American government think that we need to defend ourselves, but what we do need is a social system that works in all circumstances. The problem with that is that it must most importantly work in the basic circumstance of the human condition - which has been conflict and war.

There are two ways change can happen politically. One is revolution, we can tear down what we have and try to engineer something better and build it out of the ruins. This will never never happen in a billion years because it leaves the US vulnerable to destruction.

The second way is evolutionarily. This is the most possible way to change America for the better, but we have to realize that we are not just changing the Fed, or the Parties, or the Electoral College, or Corpoations ... though they all may be part of it. What we need to change though understanding and from the inside is the basic military empire system, not get rid of it. Not waste our time attacking it, but to open it up for all of us, to understand it, and to apply rules to it that benefit the public sector in order for enough Americans to be created who can run it better and more openly than it has been run before.