Even CNN struggles to stay solemn, neither laughing nor vomiting, at news of Congress creating a new branch of the U.S. military to fight wars in space.
Of course, one purpose of militarizing space, which other nations have long supported banning by treaty, has for the United States long been to facilitate more unstoppable attacks on various corners of the little planet earth.
But another stated purpose of this legislation is to “guard the galaxy.” Here’s where a massive miscalculation has been found in the plan.
The U.S. Department of Defense has long since learned that by imposing itself on some corner of the globe it quickly generates something to “defend” against. Bomb a capital, overthrow a government, occupy cities, kick in doors, and before long, lo and behold, there’s an enemy threatening to “aggressively” attack U.S. occupying forces, which are then compelled to “defend” themselves.
But the Pentagon is apparently so self-centered that it commits a Nakba Error in its understanding of this process of defensive aggression. That is to say, it believes its actions are all reactions to the blowback it creates, and it simply overlooks the requirement for any such blowback to be produced that there be people inhabiting the territory assaulted.
The space cowboys who won the West imagined there were no Native Americans, but simultaneously could not have “won” had there not been someone there to lose.
So off traipses the new U.S. Space Corps to defend the galaxy, completely unperturbed by the fact that no known life forms inhabit any of it outside the earth. The assumption in the halls of Congress appears to be that even in outerspace if you aggressively start “defending” the hell out of planets and stars, aggressive aliens will retroactively materialize and be cited in a UN resolution.
Assuming that no enemies are generated by the Space Corpse, if only because there are no life forms to be found, this new branch of the U.S. military will have an enormous point in its favor over various other branches, which are constantly generating hostility and terrorism everywhere they go.
The question for activists on terra firma will then be: Do we try to shift funding from the Marines or Air Force to the Space Corps, as a strategic possible win, or do we stick with the principled stand of trying to move money away from all such insanity and into such down to earth programs as sustainable energy, education, and housing that comes with air and gravity?