America Is Being Slowly Turned Into A Giant Military Base

From the video “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity”

We know we’re moving in a very dark direction when the Western political class reacts the way it has to this week’s U.S.-Russia peace summit. The countless hysterical statements from pundits, politicians, and intelligence officials about the “treason” of President Trump’s moderate diplomacy towards Russia tells us the mindset that our leaders have taken on: they want warfare and militarism massively expanded, and they’re not going to tolerate any opposition.

And they’re having this goal fulfilled. Despite Trump’s occasional attempts to strengthen relations with Russia, the Trump administration is racing ahead with the military aggressions that the neocons want directed towards Russia and other countries. Last week when Trump pushed NATO members to grow their military spending, orders to Lockheed Martin soared. This is built on the numerous hostile actions Trump has taken against Russia which often exceed the aggressiveness of anything Obama did: a Nuclear Posture Review that’s increased the U.S.’ potential for striking countries like Russia; bombing Russians in Syria; expanding NATO to Montenegro; arming the opposition to Russia in Ukraine; increasing the unprovoked sanctions on Russia.

But not even this has satisfied the West’s political elites, so many of them continue to use the baseless charge that Trump is “Putin’s puppet” to threaten the president into following the neocon line. Otherwise the Trump White House has upheld the agenda of the U.S.-NATO empire: unrestrained U.S. bombings and drone strikes throughout the last year-and-a-half; CIA regime change efforts in Iran; an annual U.S. military budget that’s been expanded to over $700 billion.

These are all part of the power establishment’s reaction to the rapidly declininginfluence that America holds around the globe, and to the world’s growing economic and environmental crises. The impossible goal of capitalism and imperialism is to endlessly expand, and now that the global empire is collapsing, the elites are taking extreme measures to ensure their control.

If we don’t take action, the power centers will keep clamping down until the country essentially lives under martial law. Like always happens under a failed state, military control is increasingly going to be the way the government interacts with citizens in the coming years, and we’re already seeing this shift happen.

This is why we should be very alarmed by the ways militarism has been creeping into everyday American life in recent years. The active shooter drills, the expanded police authority, the armed domestic drones, the militarized police, the increasingly militarized hurricane responses, the domestic surveillance, the building of massive detention camps for refugees, and the explosion of war propaganda are how we’re being slowly made to accept a system of extreme military control.

The state’s plans for responding to the coming unstable period were hinted at in a Pentagon video, released two years ago by The Intercept, titled Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity. The five-minute presentation warns of an “unavoidable” future where, by 2030, the social unrest and ecological disasters will require the military to heavily intervene in America’s urban areas, essentially reducing much of the country’s population to enemy combatants.

This intervention was prepared for when Obama signed in Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the U.S. military to act as a domestic police force. As the next years go by, it will get more and more likely for the government to use this power. This is what it looks like when the most powerful and well-armed government in history tries to stave off its own collapse.

But if people organize in their communities, use civil disobedience, and spread information that counters establishment propaganda, we can take society in a different direction. Fascism appeals to people by giving them a way to band together-using military control and a crackdown against all dissent-so that they can fight against society's hardships and make the country strong. We can defeat fascism by using peace and humanity to overcome the crisis instead.