The American Public Has Been Demobilized

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Excerpt from the article by Tom Engelhardt

 

The desire to take the American public out of the “of the people, by the people, for the people” business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen’s army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field.  It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army. 

 

Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an experience.  (No more Vietnams!  No more antiwar movements!)  As a result, on January 27, 1973 with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, and so the citizen’s army.  With it went the sense that Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and peace).  

 

From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow.  First, they were to be removed from all imaginable aspects of war making.  Later, the same principle would be applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself.  In this context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what those citizens were doing in their own private time.  Both should be considered demobilizing trends. 

 

Read more here:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/four_score_and_seven_years_ago_at_disney_world_20151029

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I'm trying to make sense of the article, is it referring to local militias vs a standing army"?  We only suppose to have a local militia if we are not engaged in a declaration of war.

 

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/the-founding-fathers-warned-against-standing-armies.html

 

http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/52/army-clause

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I'm trying to make sense of the article, is it referring to a local militias vs a standing army"?  We only suppose to have a local militia if we are not engaged in a declaration of war.

 

Wow. You're not kidding when you say you can't make sense of the article.

 

It's about how Americans have become complacent tv watchers; how the military and government have taken complete control of everything the media is permitted to present and everything people are permitted to see and hear so that anti-war or anti-government movements cannot develop; the privatization of the military (of which the abolishment of the draft was the first step) and the corresponding rise of secrecy and surveilance; a media that no longer seeks truth (or even information unless it's handed to them for dissemination); a public that is apathetic to the point of thinking if they root for a side while watching tv, that's good enough - and it's about the peculiarity of the 2016 election circus and how people are passively accepting that peculiarity.

 

I have no idea how you were led to the subject of militias. It wasn't militias that formed the political, the labour, the anti-war, the civil rights, movements of the past - it was the citizenry at large. The citizenry doesn't form movements that massive or that influential any more - it's been systematically demobilized. The government encourages consumerism - that is all it wants from the citizen and that's all the citizens now do - and watch the bs news on tv.

 

That's what the article is about.

[hamradio]

Wow. You're not kidding when you say you can't make sense of the article.

 

It's about how Americans have become complacent tv watchers; how the military and government have taken complete control of everything the media is permitted to present and everything people are permitted to see and hear so that anti-war or anti-government movements cannot develop; the privatization of the military (of which the abolishment of the draft was the first step) and the corresponding rise of secrecy and surveilance; a media that no longer seeks truth (or even information unless it's handed to them for dissemination); a public that is apathetic to the point of thinking if they root for a side while watching tv, that's good enough - and it's about the peculiarity of the 2016 election circus and how people are passively accepting that peculiarity.

 

I have no idea how you were led to the subject of militias. It wasn't militias that formed the political, the labour, the anti-war, the civil rights, movements of the past - it was the citizenry at large. The citizenry doesn't form movements that massive or that influential any more - it's been systematically demobilized. The government encourages consumerism - that is all it wants from the citizen and that's all the citizens now do - and watch the bs news on tv.

 

That's what the article is about.

 

The word demobilized threw me off. Thanks for the clarification.    Well the answer is alternative media not controlled by the government.  Problem is, people who watches it are called conspiracy theorist.