Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 51, 20 December 1948. p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
“The policies declared by Defense Secretary Forrestal, if followed, would place the nation in the fascist orbit with control in the hands of the military,” warns Ray Martin, informed columnist of Labor Herald, oldest independent weekly in Maryland and the District of Columbia.
In two recent articles, Martin charged that James Forrestal, “former president of the international banking house known as Dillon, Read and Company,” is “promoting schemes to control everything in the nation under the guise of security. Complete control would be lodged with the military; this is the very essence of a military fascist dictatorship.”
Among the proposals which Forrestal, just renamed Secretary of Defense by Truman, has put forward in the past three months are:
“Universal Military Training: A national service law compelling workers to work in specified plants; a secret police force operated by the Army, in lieu of the FBI; to have local police supplanted by the Military Police in time of emergency; news censorship by the Army; an official government newspaper controlled by the Army; and the complete control of commerce and industry by the Army.
“To add to these aims the Defense Department has made public a civil defense program against enemy attack — ‘a program that will bridge the gap by providing the link that is missing in our defense structure.’”
This “missing link,” reports Martin, “calls for the establishment of a civil defense agency with some 15,000,000 persons” under the complete control of the Defense Department, that is, the military machine. “Provision for ‘loyalty oaths’ of the civilian defense workers is included- in the proposal.”
In assailing the plans for military dictatorship being prepared by Forrestal, representing the Wall Street-Big Brass interests, Martin pointedly quotes from the Declaration of Independence signed 172 years ago:
“‘He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.’ The statement referred to the King of England. It was but one of many tyrannical subjugations that we sought to free ourselves of.”
Main Militant Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 28 March 2023