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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 c
by djsumdog 8y ago
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 fifty 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.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
- walrus01 8y agoEisenhower farewell address: https://youtu.be/OyBNmecVtdU https://youtu.be/OyBNmecVtdU
- oh_sigh 8y agoArms are a complete waste of money, until you need them.
- mysterydip 8y agoAs are data backups :)
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoGiven that the main function of US military capabilities since the second world war has been deterrence, that seems exactly wrong.
- oh_sigh 8y agoI suppose I should take this comment with a grain of salt considering it came from Emma Goldman, but in the case of deterrence, then the weapons are indeed needed all throughout.
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI agree but then the original statement makes no sense. Arms always have a deterrent effect, that's the point. There is no climactic moment in which they suddenly prove their worth, no 'until'.
- tomohawk 8y agoExactly. But when you are facing Communists who have taken over a very large chunk of the world, and who have starved tens of millions of people to death and shown very little regard for basic human rights, it kinda seems worth the cost. Because, you aren't going to have any of those fine things if the Communists succeed with their plans.
- programmer_dude 8y agoLol!
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI don't think anyone argues that the United States should have cut its military budget to zero. It is a question of degree. Did the US chronically overstate the Soviet threat, inflating the defence budget well beyond what was necessary? One could make a good case that it did. From the start the Soviet Union was on the defensive. Stalin reigned in the Red Army in the final months of the Second World War from taking West Germany, for fear of inflaming the US and UK. He refused to support the communists (mostly ex-resistance fighters) in the Greek Civil War for the same reason. Nor did he lend support to the Chinese Revolution. The US was the far greater power from the beginning of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had only industrialised in the last generation and was wrecked by the Nazi invasion. While it showed impressive growth into the 1960s, under Brezhnev it began to stagnate. Various US operations (e.g. Vietnam) and defence programmes (e.g. the Strategic Defence Initiative) were not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the US. Both of these examples were based on exaggerations of the Soviet threat: Vietnam on domino theory; SDI on the phantom 'missile gap'.
- Sommer_Son 8y agoSoviet Union never was on defensive side. From the very beginning they've tried to conquer most of their neighbors, they've attacked Poland together with Hitler and Finland in 1940. Even in 1945 they've tried to annex part of Persia and wrestle Bosfor Straight control from Turkey.
- 8y ago
- sumnole 8y agoFull speech: http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/ike_chance_for_peace.html http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/ike_chance_fo...
- jessaustin 8y agoGosh, if only there had been a respected military man who was also a popular and successful politician who had also been well-placed at the right time to prevent the nascent military-industrial complex from permanently instituting the political and industrial arrangements it had cynically used the Korean War to establish... what could have been?