Humanity is living according to an antiquated social model that’s at least 6,000 years old. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
A few people remember President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, where he warned Americans about the rise of a military-industrial complex… a warning that was stunningly accurate and almost fully ignored.
What almost no one remembers was Eisenhower’s speech in 1953, when he said that under the pressures of fear and war spending, humanity was “hanging from a cross of iron.”
Bear in mind that this was said by Dwight David Eisenhower, the five-star general who had been supreme allied commander. He was also the sitting president of the United States when he said it. So, there is absolutely no room for passing this off in the name of patriotism.
Precisely What He Said
Before I elaborate on this topic, I want you to read Eisenhower’s words for yourself. Here’s the core of Ike’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on April 16, 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Here’s one more line you should read:
God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.
I always find Rosenberg’s work to be excellent – with one caveat.
It is my belief that he, in the final analysis, would be a proponent of the moral “ideal’ of compulsory altruism (Government directed) rather than the morality of rational self-interest (Government protection of individual rights). However, perhaps I am wrong. In any event:
Eisenhower’s speech cautioned that military spending would be better directed at what we might term “social spending.” It simply suggested two alternatives that had already ruled out a third. As such, it was a powerful delivery of an important message containing a “false” alternative, False in the sense of acknowledging no other option. Less or no spending in the first place!
I always offer a reminder to my “liberal” friends who frequently cite Eisenhower’s prescient message on the rise of the MIC – i.e., the “Military Industrial Complex,” of another of Ike’s prescient passages. It follows the more infamous one and is one that almost no one knows about or is rarely ever cited or mentioned.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money, is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
I suggest this is referring to an identical potential rise in “subversive” power that an “AIC” – i.e., “Academic Industrial Complex,” would wield. Power just as potentially damaging as its more infamous counterpart
Of course, the latter – when cited, is thought of great value by the usual suspects on the left.