These days the liberal press is up in arms, so to speak, about Trump’s choice to lead the military (among his picks for other posts). Mainstream media glorifies the Defense Department as necessary for the protection of our country. I have a somewhat different take.

My Military Service

My childhood dream was to become a space pilot, which is now called an astronaut. I was a bright, nerdy child, the kind who spent hours in the Hayden Planetarium and devoured science writing and science fiction. While in the last year of middle school I took the test for admission to the Bronx High School of Science, because it was the only science-oriented public school in New York City that allowed girls. The other two, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant, were boys-only until 1970.

I was accepted at Bronx Science.

In 1957, which was my junior year there, an Air Force recruiter set up a desk in the hall. I was eager to apply, thinking this would be my chance to go into space. As I wrote in a previous post, the recruiter told me that they trained girls to be secretaries or weather girls, not astronauts. I walked away.

I was disappointed then, but realize now that I’d dodged a bullet. Maybe more than one. If they had accepted girls into the military, I could have been sent to Vietnam to kill people who had never attacked the United States, or poisoned by Agent Orange, or outed as a queer and dishonorably discharged, or raped by another soldier. All of these things happened in the military to people I knew.

In 1963, after leaving my parents’ home, I joined a group of friends on a bus to Washington DC to march against the Vietnam War. I marched against that war year after year, and then later ones, though these days I no longer march in the street. The last antiwar demonstration I participated in was in 2003, a march to protest the United States invasion of Iraq.

The supermarket where I usually shop offers a 10% discount on Tuesdays for military personnel and the same on Wednesdays for us seniors. Once when I was leaving town I had to pick up some items on a Tuesday, so I told the young checkout clerk that my military service consisted of nine years of anti-Vietnam War protests. She grinned and gave me the discount.

Thank You for Your Service

Since the founding of this country Blacks, women, and gays have struggled to prove their worth as citizens via military service. Members of all of these groups fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, including women who disguised themselves as men. Black people fought and died in segregated units during the two World Wars, only to come home to segregation. Some were even lynched while in uniform. Women were recruited to the armed forces starting in 1917, though they were not permitted in combat roles until the 1990s.

Gays have always served in the United States military, as far back as Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a gay Prussian military man hired by George Washington. By the 1940s, however, we were considered mentally ill or criminals, and if discovered we were dishonorably discharged. It was not until 2011 that we were allowed to be open about our orientation in the military.

War Is a Racket

Yet what kind of military have we killed and died for? The United States pretends to be the “leader of the free world,” to stand for democracy, and to spread democracy everywhere. Day after day, our media pumps up this egotistical delusion.

What the United States actually spread was, and is, neofascism.

Major General Smedley Butler’s book, War is a Racket, should be taught in every history class instead of the jingoistic propaganda I, for one, was fed in junior high and secondary school. Smedley writes, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives…

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Butler wrote that book in 1935. With the possible exception of the Second World War, nothing has changed.

During my lifetime, the United States military has invaded numerous countries that did us no harm, including but not limited to Vietnam (with associated bombings of Laos and Cambodia), Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, and Iraq. In addition, we’ve arranged coups all around the world, supplying arms and intelligence to overthrow elected governments and install dictatorial regimes favorable to United States business interests. I’m thinking of Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, but there were many, many more. Our military has killed millions of people in those countries—1-2 million in Indochina alone.

We must add the bodies of tens of thousands of American soldiers to that vast human sacrifice on the altar of corporate profit. Countless others were permanently disabled, physically or psychically or both.

Now, with the supremely unqualified Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in charge of the military, all the supposed gains, all the blood sacrifices of Blacks, women, and gays for recognition as equal citizens, are being erased from historical memory. The Air Force will no longer show its recruits training videos documenting the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed Black aviators (among them 450 pilots) who fought overseas in segregated units during the Second World War, or another video about the WASPS, Women Airforce Service Pilots, who also served during that war.

Trump’s Storm Troopers?

What scares the liberal press about Trump’s control of the military is that he intends to use it within our borders—first against migrants, and then? He’s made it clear that he’ll go after political opponents, gays, feminists, ethnic minorities—and of course anyone in the media who writes a criticism of his policies. In addition to regular troops, he will have an irregular militia at his disposal, the thugs he recently released from prison, plus other MAGA types who will happily join them.

Americans who were comfortable economically clung to the delusion that our country was “exceptional” and that we were exempt from the neofascism we inflicted on poorer nations. Yet we were warned. After JFK’s assassination, Malcolm X said that the chickens had come home to roost. It’s been happening steadily over the last few decades, but now those birds have broken down the door and taken over the house.

The Laws of War

Finally, I would add my 2¢ to General Butler’s. Throughout history nations have attempted to regulate these orgies of mass murder that we call war. Hammurabi wrote one of the earliest in 1750 BCE, prescribing codes of conduct “so that the strong do not oppress the weak.” In modern times treaties such as the Geneva Convention tried to lay down what we call “laws of war.”

Mass slaughter, torture, rape, and destruction continue unabated. Occasionally an individual—usually from the losing side—is prosecuted for “war crimes.” When a soldier from the victor’s side is convicted of such crimes, he generally gets a slap on the wrist at worst, or even receives a complete pardon, as Trump did with three men who murdered unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.

I say the concept of an honorably conducted war is so ludicrous as to be obscene. Laws of war? War crimes?

War itself is the crime.