Kennard: New book places America at the centre of global wars and fascism

In an interview with the Canary, author Matt Kennard has said that to understand geopolitics the US must be understood as the global centre of war and fascism. And he dates the current wildness of the world’s biggest terror state to the so-called ‘war on terror‘.

The Bush administration removed barriers that had prevented right-wing extremists entering the US military. Now they are running it – and at the top of both sides of US two-party politics:

 

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Kennard: “Extremists are at the wheel”

Kennard’s newly-updated book, Irregular Army, “shows how the ‘War on Terror’ pushed the US further into authoritarian extremism” because the US military relaxed its standards to meet elevated recruitment targets:

The War on Terror militarised American political life. It taught the public to accept permanent emergency, surveillance, secrecy, executive violence, and the idea that whole populations could be treated as enemies. That logic did not stay in Fallujah or Kandahar; it came home.

The book argues that the same wars that brutalised Iraqis and Afghans also degraded the institutions of the United States, especially the military, by turning it into an overstretched force willing to lower its standards in order to keep the imperial project going. In the new preface, this is linked directly to January 6, Trumpism, domestic extremism, and a political culture in which enemies are internal as well as external…

…The military needed bodies for Iraq and Afghanistan. Recruitment targets were missed. Standards were loosened. Waivers expanded. Recruiters looked away. Investigators warned about gangs and white supremacists. Graffiti, tattoos, symbols, and affiliations were visible.

Yet the wars continued, and manpower came first. When an institution repeatedly absorbs extremists because its mission requires them, that is not a series of isolated anomalies. That is a system revealing its priorities…

The evidence points to a hierarchy that understood the immediate manpower crisis and chose to prioritise troop numbers over the long-term consequences… the institutional posture became: ignore it unless it becomes impossible to ignore… That is not an accident; that is policy by neglect.

And the author concludes that, against a system built on deceit and secrecy, the best weapons against it are truth and awareness:

The truth still matters. That may sound simple, but the whole structure depends on concealment: hiding what is done abroad, hiding who is recruited, hiding the damage done to soldiers, civilians, and democracy itself.

I wrote that I hoped the book would rouse anger, because anger grounded in truth can become a reckoning. The United States is sick from these wars, but I do not think it is terminal. The hope lies in whistleblowers, anti-war veterans, investigators, journalists, organisers, and ordinary people refusing to let empire speak in their name.

That is why the Canary and Skwawkbox exist, and why authors like Kennard matter. Read the Canary’s review of Irregular Army and interview with Matt Kennard here.

Featured image via the Canary