A Military Plot To Take Over America: Fifty Years Later, Was The Mission Accomplished? By John W. Whitehead March 25, 2014
Director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May is a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. Yet 50 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain. The film’s premise is straightforward enough: With the Cold War at its height, President Jordan Lyman signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States, General James Mattoon Scott plans a military takeover of the national government. When the military coup is uncovered, Lyman confronts Scott, declaring, “You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.” Unfortunately for the American people, the coup d’etat wresting control of our government from civilians and delivering it into the hands of the military industrial complex happened decades ago, while our backs were turned. Over the past half century, America has actually been at war more than we’ve been at peace, enriching the military industrial complex with trillions of taxpayer dollars. Now we find ourselves in the unenviable position of trying to rein in a runaway militarized government with a gargantuan and profit-driven appetite for war. Here’s the problem, though: what happens to all those hefty profits for the military industrial complex when you start to scale back on 50 years’ worth of wars abroad? If war is a business, as it has become, in order to maintain a profit margin when there are no more wars to be fought abroad, one would either have to find new enemies abroad or, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, focus on fighting a war at home, against the American people, and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with today.