In the fields, the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
—Black Sabbath
Donald Trump did not say last night as a packed Glendale’s Desert Diamond Arena that Liz Cheney should be put before a firing squad or fired upon. The corporate state media is spreading one of its most bald-faced lies ever. They’re doing this in a desperate bid to alter the projected outcome of the 2024 election. Trump is on track to win, and if that happens, the power elite are facing the possibility of a populist regime that would sharply reduce taxpayer subsidies to the oligarchy, especially the military-industrial complex and the medical-industrial complex. Trillions of dollars are at stake, and the new Trump administration will be much better prepared to take on the oligarchy than it was in 2017.
Today’s CNN headline is typical of headlines that are leading today’s news cycle: “Trump says ‘war hawk’ Liz Cheney should be fired upon in escalation of violent rhetoric against his opponents.” The headline doesn’t merely warp the truth. It manufactures a perception that has no basis in what Trump actually said. Here’s what Trump actually said: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Anybody who has any familiarity with antiwar sentiment surely knows that this isn’t violent rhetoric aimed at an individual. This is a sentiment that many of us have voiced over the years when criticizing the was pigs. It calls out the hypocrisy and callousness of the elite. Recall the Black Sabbath lyric, penned by bassist Geezer Butler:
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor, yeah
We can’t have warmongers like the Cheneys (Liz’s father, the notorious Dick Cheney, authorized and celebrated the torture of captives taken in an unjust war, and his daughter is cut from the same wicked cloth) anywhere near power. These are the truly evil people. As an atheist, I am not one to use that word lightly. This is one of the most important reasons to support the populist-national movement Trump represents—to get and keep the war hawks from power.
I his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower observed the importance of the military establishment in keeping the peace. “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction,” he said. But after noting that the “immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he cautioned us that “we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”
He continued: “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. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
He didn’t stop there. As Bobby Kennedy, Jr. reminded us last night at the Arizona rally (and this is something I have taught my students in my research methods classes for more than two decades), Eisenhower also cautioned against the presence of a scientific-technological elite. “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades,” he said. “In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. … [T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract [and by extension corporate funding] becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” He warned of the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
This is what makes the corporate state media’s lie this morning so outrageous: it obscures the actual point Trump was making, which is the moral problem of elites putting working class sons and daughters in the line of fire while they remain safe in their homes for the sake of enriching the death merchants. The war pigs need forever wars to feed the death machine with blood and treasure. And the manufactured controversy, if it finds its legs, eclipses Bobby Kennedy’s brilliant critique of the medical-industrial complex and the food industry that are making the people sick for the purpose of amassing profits.
Recall Walter Benjamin’s identification of the inevitability of war under fascist condition and associated culture industry sublimations in his brilliant essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.”
My vote on November 5 will be, among many other things (freedom of conscience and speech, privacy, the right to keep and bear arms, equity in gender relations, deconstructing the administrative and regulatory apparatus, restoring the integrity of the founding federal arrangements, return to evidence-based science and medicine, strong borders, the deportation of criminal migrants), a vote for world peace and negation of the incentives that move the military-industrial complex.
For the first time in my lifetime, voters actually have a choice between the power elite that C. Wright Mills describes in his landmark 1956 book by the same title and a social movement rooted in popular concerns and interests that cut across social class and other (many manufactured) divisions. The Arizona rally last night was amazing, inspirational. That’s why, as with the Madison Square Rally, the corporate state media is working desperately to obscure the message.
I will let the brilliant words of Geezer Butler close out this essay and end on a hopeful note:
Now in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where their bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgement, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan laughing, spreads his wings
freedom and reason 