chapotraphouse

Something I've thought about a lot in the last few years is kind of coming to a head now regarding Israel and Ukraine funding.

America doesn't produce basically anything. The one thing we do produce is war technology and, simply put, bombs. That is undoubtedly a huge part of our economy. The rest is all wrapped in what amounts to "bullshit" in the form of a financialized economy.

I've wondered if we could somehow force an actual end to the endless bomb making, would the US economy simply implode? Not trying to be dramatic, but seriously, assuming bombs weren't replaced with like steel production for new bridges and massive housing complexes and railroads and such. If we just ceased bomb production... I kinda feel like shit would come crashing down.

I guess the obvious way to work around that would be to send resources and funding from weapons manufacturing to stuff like steel production (probably gotta build new fucking factories... US literally doesn't have the means to produce our own commodities like that on a mass scale the way we did for WWII. What an absolute husk of a nation).

When I think about the potential ramifications from getting what I want, I feel this sort of dissonance. That's probably the best word for it. It's like I can see that destroying the US military industrial complex is objectively moral. And I can see that doing so would probably crash the US economy causing harm to people around me.

The liberal politicians, democrats, take alllllll the stuff off the table before the start button is pushed. There will not be efforts made to bring industry base back to the US. There won't be significant nationwide investments into infrastructure. Etc. for anything that would improve material conditions and offer productive labor to replace the war industry. Off the table! You get to choose: accept making weapons here and sending them around the world ie maintain the status quo ("nothing will fundamentally change"), or stop the arms production, put a stick in the spoke of the American economic engine, and crash the whole thing on top of your head. You will not have nice things! You can't! But you can make more bombs and maybe avoid that whole crashing down thing.

Kinda rambling, but that entire concept or whatever is why I, a burger, sort of instinctively understand that we cannot dismantle the US military industrial complex from the inside and definitely not through electoral means. Not to be doomer, because there are solutions and hope, but to be realistic that the US and first world will view peace and declining US empire as an existential threat... and perhaps in some ways that is correct from the viewpoint of Americans. That doesn't make it moral or the correct stance, obviously, but how many will remain principled in calling for total dismantling of the US military as conditions plummet to hell and still congress will always ignore or say no to anything at home to improve those conditions? Safe to say... not many. What a perfectly evil system that perpetuates itself.