during the cold war they told us that they wished they could spend money on schools and healthcare, but those darn Soviets would overrun us if we didn't spend it all on guns and bombs. "peace dividend" my ass
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower
Would be such a good speech over all of he didn't spend the bit right before this blaming the mistrustful Soviets for not just like taking their word that "the free nations" 🙄 are not aggressive
Japanese anti semites believe that the reason Jews controlled the world was because they invested in infrastructure and transportation. And they wanted to usurp this supposed Jewish cabal with a Japanese cabal. I don’t know if this ideology influenced their decision to go ham on trains and other tech, but lmao
Except they haven't actually demonstrated anything, there were a bunch of startups and others in the west who have done this same 'demonstration' before concluding (rightly) that it wasn't worth pursuing. Socialism doesn't change physics, it's still a stupid idea. Just because some group in China is now on the grift doesn't change that fact.