As Russia put its military hardware on display in Red Square to commemorate the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, the US — also a major player in World War II — kept its hyper-firepower under wraps and its people in the dark.
Ever since May 9, 2008, when Moscow brought back rumbling tanks
and screeching jets to Red Square for the annual Victory Day
celebrations, it has aroused accusations in Western capitals of
“flaunting its military might.”
The charges are loaded with irony for a glaringly obvious reason:
The Russian military, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union —
and aside from a five-day war with neighboring Georgia, who, it
must be noted, attacked Russia first — has been parked at home.
In the same period of time, however, the Western military junta,
known affectionately as NATO, has been circling the planet like a
pack of fat vultures looking for its next easy takeout.
It seems to require little explanation as to why the Russians take
their tanks for a spin around town every May 9th: Russia lost an
estimated 26.6 million soldiers and civilians from mid-1941 to
1945, according to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Given the
depths of this human tragedy, made more surreal by a simultaneous
sense of triumph, Russia has certainly earned the right to hold a
military parade once a year without arousing suspicions of gearing
up for another shot at empire.
Witnessing the Victory Day celebrations in central Moscow for many
years, I began to ask myself a question: Why doesn’t America drive
its tanks down Main Street each year, say, for Veterans Day? I
posed this question to an American friend of mine, and I got the
haughty response: “Because America is a democracy.”
So according to this fuzzy, feel-good logic, good democracies
don’t march their soldiers and showcase their latest missile
systems around self-satisfied places like Washington, DC, or
Brussels, Belgium, because that would smack of something faintly
fascist. Instead, we drive our battle tanks down the main streets
of Baghdad, Iraq, and Kabul, Afghanistan, and call this beneficent
behavior “democracy building.” Do the denizens of Washington
begrudge the residents of Baghdad the lack of an annual military
parade? Somehow I doubt it, but Baghdad should begrudge Washington
the stench of hypocrisy.
Would shutting down Washington for a joyous day of military pomp
and parades risk exposing some uncomfortable truths about the
present state of our democracy? Would watching tanks and drones
buzz through town be a bit like the vampire confronting its
horrible reflection in the mirror at midnight? Would such a
momentous event as a military parade, coming
This article originally appeared on : RT