The Price of Deception

Clyde Wilson

1994

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat Newsletter, March 1994, No. 122

The use of deception is not a recent phenomenon. It has been around for a long time. It is a technique that politicians, diplomats, cold warriors, spin doctors, salesmen and other snake-oil promoters use to deceive the unsuspecting and gullible public. Even the experts in the art of deception are not immune to fooling themselves and overplaying their hand.

Case in point: The revelation that the Pentagon attempted to fool the Soviet Union into thinking that the United States had an advanced missile defense system. While with some reservations, the Pentagon has now admitted that the high-sounding and costly Strategic Defense System (SDI) was merely a ruse, it claims that through its deception, Star Wars was the straw that broke the back of Soviet communism.

While the explanations (deception?) coming from the Pentagon have been ambiguous when it comes to SDI, there are reports that the Pentagon (and cohorts) rigged the test to make it appear that SDI was feasible and had a practical potential for development and application. Billions of dollars have been and continue to be spent on this dud.

According to Senator Jim Sasser (D-Tennessee), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, $30 billion has been spent on Star Wars in the last eight years. This has been the result of the traditional log rolling and pork-barrel deals that go on in the halls of Congress and behind the scenes. With all of this talk about balancing the national budget, one would think that this white elephant (SDI) would have joined its mammoth ancestors long ago. Yet, the White House plea of $3.4 billion for the continuation of SDI was only reduced to $3 billion by Congress. And to add insult to injury, the money for SDI will double next year and stay at a $6 billion level until the end of the century!

The purpose behind SDI has been to provide lucrative contracts for the aerospace industry. The defense system of the United States has never been for deterrents and containment of communism but for profits and maintaining huge military expenditures as a means to prevent the present economic system from collapsing.

Since World War II, ``national security'' has become the instrument of deception to divert the attention of the country and the American people away from the magnitude and severity of the nation's domestic problems. As a result, America has been prevented from implementing a transition or conversion plan toward a viable, balanced-sustainable economy--from war and destruction to peaceful and meaningful pursuits.