Patriotic Liberals (is there any other kind this time of year?) have rightly been both mocking and fearful of this KKKlown’s upcoming military parade, yet criticizing it in frankly harmful ways that lack self-awareness of the very terroristic nation they claim should be protected from such exhibitions. They argue that military parades are the realm of the totalitarian (read: communist) dictator and not that of a free democracy like the United States of America. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s just dive in and take these arguments to task.
The US is already a totalitarian state. Ask our global victims, who have no say in how we decide to run their businesses. It is a dictatorship.
The parades here celebrate a dictatorship, even if not one run by a single person. They honor the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. You can see it in every float, every uniform, every parade’s name. It’s the name of the most famous holiday parade: Macy’s. Even Pride, which began as a revolutionary act of defiance against the carceral state and capitalist patriarchy is sponsored by Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Banks, not to mention the police and Armed Services.
We already have military parades. Wtf is the Air & Water Show if not a parade that merely takes place in the sky instead of down Main Ave? Major sporting events are sponsored by the Military Industrial Complex and have Air Force jets scream overhead. Every ballgame has two iterations of the national anthem that each player and spectator is socially pressured to participate in “for the troops.” Or did we forget the whole controversy about kneeling for something interjected and paid for by the military propaganda department just a generation ago? Even when the entire procession isn’t overtly militaristic, there is no way to not notice that in every small town and hub, in every last parade, several local armed forces units march to raucous applause. How many liberals join in these cheering sections?
The police, who also are loudly applauded and thanked during these Totally Non-Military (TM) parades, tend to take this opportunity to show off their military-industrial hardware. Who are they planning on using that against? Who have they used this type of hardware against? Those may be rhetorical questions, but you should already know.
Speaking of using military equipment against civilians, are these same liberals also criticizing the occupation of other nations? Or is this another case of “Our weapons of mass destruction and murder should only be terrorizing Black and Brown children elsewhere; just not where my daughter sleeps”? Where was this opposition when the Democratic Party en masse actually raised the military budget beyond what Trump was even asking, by 10% in one year?
Let’s move on to international relations, as it’s euphemistically called.
Several liberals have compared the idea of a military parade here to that famous image of that protester in Tiananmen Square positioning himself in front of tanks some thirty years ago. Which is kinda sick when you consider that these same tanks went out of their way to avoid running over this protester who, for all they knew, may have been carrying a bomb. That may sound like some wild reach until you consider that the tanks were sent into the square because unarmed military who previously went into the protest area were immediately jumped on and killed by these same Western-backed protesters.
The image being shared, if seen in context, is actually one of restraint on the part of the People’s Republic of China. But since rampant Xinophobia (aka, Yellow Peril) is once again making headway in this nation, most liberals wholesale eschew context for a scary picture that gives them a pleasant view of capitalism and an evil one of socialism.
Another really important aspect here is that while one can argue the military parades of the USSR and the DPRK (North Korea) are substantially different than those in the US, we must ask why? Communist countries are in place for one reason and by one reason: the people. They have to protect the people of their nation from existential threats of imperialism.* The Imperialist West (of which the United States is the biggest player, easily) has tried and in many ways succeeded in sniffing out socialism throughout the world. The USSR kept up pace with the USA in nuclear proliferation not because they wanted to end the world, but because the US was constantly bragging about ending its existence, plunging its people into massive starvation through military and economic might. In fact, it did so. The USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK and many other socialist nations played tremendous underdogs against the aggressive and rich Western Europe and the Anglophonic settler nations. They put on these shows to encourage their citizens with the size, strength and discipline of their fighting forces, and to show the world that they were serious about defending their homes from imperialism.
Consider also that the entire military operatives in a socialist country like the DPRK are at home so they’re able to assemble with relative ease. Unlike the US Command Forces, they are not deployed elsewhere. This is because they are in a defensive position, and they have every right to be. You would think that people who understand Abusive Dynamics would at least be sympathetic here…
The narratives that liberals and the corporate media use against defensive socialist military — comparing them to aggressive fascists like the Nazis while disregarding all the above facts of the MIC in this nation — is reminiscent of cop shows when they trot out the public defense attorneys. In this framing, the underpaid, overworked, understaffed, and rushed defense teams look like proud and ruthless jackals who tirelessly work to release criminals on the streets in concert with (rather than completely against) the wishes of circuit judges. It’s pure fantasy out of a Ronald Reagan speech.
In this scenario, the US is the aggressor. Is the violent one. Is the harmer. We must learn and teach the difference.
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*One definition of imperialism is an ongoing process of extracting resources and production from other nations and the militaristic and economic devastation and occupations necessary to continue these colonial practices unabated.
