Establishment war machine

The phrase 'Establishment war machine' refers to the national security state:
Scientists were urged to take political responsibility and pursue socially 'relevant' research rather than, through apolitical science for its own sake, passively support the national security state (or 'Establishment war machine,' as campus radicals put it).
In news media
Tulsi Gabbard, in a campaign email released the week after her February 2, 2019 presidential campaign launch, spoke of the threat posed to freedom and democracy by “media giants ruled by corporate interests … in the pocket of the ‘establishment war machine<nowiki/>' when journalism is deployed to "silence debate and dissent” and stoke rhetoric “that could lead to nuclear war.” (This was reported only in the Washington Free Beacon.) On her Facebook page, she characterized her correction of Tim Ryan during the first primary debate: "A soldier's truth about the establishment war machine driving US foreign policy."
In a February 3, 2019 Tweet, Gabbard used similar phrasing: "As commander-in-chief, I will work to end the new cold war, nuclear arms race and slide into nuclear war. That is why the neocon/neolib warmongers will do anything to stop me."
In other publications
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, professor of American history and author of The CIA and American Democracy, wrote in his 2001 Peace Now!: American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War:
Students … appeared on picket lines in the course of industrial disputes … to raise consciousness … of the Vietnam Wr. A San Diego Free Press’ contributor, Curly Marx, informed labor in the open-shop military-production-geared city that “our common enemy is the establishment war machine the is endorsed by the Democratic union leaders.” Ronald W. Evans, in a book on American school reform wrote: "To new-wave critics, mathematics, science, foreign languages, and the social sciences were seen as complicit by affiliation in the establishment’s war machine."
E. Michael Jones, in his book on urban renewal, has also referred to the Establishment's war machine:
… was now a bona fide member of the Establishment. Taken together with his other other accomplishments, especially his newly garnered expertise in intercept intelligence, it also meant that McCloy was about to be drafted into the inner circles of the Establishment’s war machine. By the time the Black Tom case got handed down, Europe was at war once again, and the people who had invited McCloy to join the and wanted to get the United States into the war on the side of England needed to make plans.
Similar phrasings
Tom Wicker, in a 1973 syndicated column, wrote: "The bombing, and its concealment from the American people is what really matters, yet the forgery of documents, authorization for which no one now will admit, is apt enough comment on the ethical attitudes that permeate the ‘American national security establishment’ or war machine from the top down." In 2013, it was revealed that the National Security Administration had been monitoring Wicker's communications along with those of other U.S. journalists, Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, and prominent U.S. athletes who criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam.
In popular culture
As documented in a PhD thesis regarding the Kent State shootings: "ROTC symbolized the 'Establishment war machine<nowiki/>' to many demonstrators, and the calls of the previous years to end the program at Kent fell on deaf ears."

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu