The Military is "Socialist?" "My Brain Hurts"...
http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2010/04/military-socialist-my-brain-hurts-2
I wonder how Thom sees the military as socialist? The military is not what I would consider socialist. I see it more as a powerful, tyrannical, publicly owned and legitimized totalitarian institution. We the people own it, we allow it to exist in its designated form, which in essence is very undemocratic.
I understand that the term "socialism" does not refer to a concrete philosophy or a fixed doctrinal program. It's a very loose term bandied about with some energetic ferver. But with the notion of collective ownership and administration of the means of production and the allocation of resources goes a correlative logical sense of participation by those involved in that ownership. Hence it would extend logically that socialism would be a form of democracy, where theoretically the people are in charge of the economic means of production as well as the governance, in a much more participatory manner than could ever occur in any form of a military. Militaries simply can't work on that basis. A military hierarchy depends on those involved following orders in a chain of command. People can't walk away when they disagree with orders telling them to slaughter other human beings. The reasons for doing so are not for those at the bottom of the chain of command to consider. Like the private tyrannies we call corporations, a military has it's own rules designed so that it can achieve its designated purpose. In our military, those rules are separate from the rules the rest of us hold to under the Constitution. The UCMJ is not the same as our Constitutional set of rules, but it is a Constitutionally endorsed set of rules. But I don't see how the military can be said to fit the form I think of as socialism. We each have to look out our own window
(CrossPosted By: Zim.)
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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