November 7, 2012
Word: What the military really costs
Dwight Eisenhower, 1953 - 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. 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 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single
fighter plane 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.
4 comments:
That's a great quote, but did you read the entire speech?
It throws down the gauntlet to the USSR and claims the USA is a law abiding nation which would never interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. Later that same year the Dulles brothers sent Kermit Roosevelt to Iran to successfully organize the overthrow of the government.
Taken in its entirety, it's an extremely militaristic and hypocritical speech.
The way people only quote this part of the speech reminds me of the way people only quote the ending of Lincoln's Second Inaugural (the 'with malice toward none' part) and leave out Lincoln's great moral lecture that precedes it (the 'woe to that man by whom the offense cometh' part).
Ike's comment is entirely accurate. What he didn't mention was why we have the heavy bomber instead of all those other things. Given the chronic tendency of capitalism to overaccumulation and underconsumption, those are all wheat, homes, hospitals, and power plants that nobody would be able to buy. That's WHY the permanent war economy exists -- to soak up excess productive capacity by (in the words of Emmanuel Goldstein) blasting it into the stratosphere or sinking it to the bottom of the ocean.
Dear old Ike.
This out-of context paragraph and its littermates sounded good to me for years, and then I read Richard Nixon's memoirs.
One of the things we need to remember, I believe, is that even an out-of-context paragraph can contain truth. And it wouldn't have survived the editing process if the speaker, in this case Ike, didn't want it there.
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