During his speech on Thursday, General Milley, after expressing his disgust over the video of the killing of Mr. Floyd, spoke at length about the issue of race, both in the military and in civilian society. “The protests that have ensued not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice toward African-Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of our original sin in Jamestown 401 years ago, liberated by the Civil War, but not equal in the eyes of the law until 100 years later in 1965.”
Such a statement from the head of the greatest imperialist military force in history needs to be seen in context. It shows that Trump's incompetence and idiocy has alienated the armed forces and exposed, to even the most thick headed of his supporters, his absolute unfitness to be president. It also shows the anti-racist and progressive demands of the the current people's movement for fundamental changes to abolish institutional racism has registered in the consciousness of the highest levels of the ruling class.
This ruling class controls a vast imperialist economic empire that bestrides the globe and extracts the wealth of the planet from sucking out the financial and natural resources of lesser developed countries in the global south and in dominating the economies of the most economically advanced capitalist regimes with whom it is allied.
It faces three challenges to its world domination: 1) growing resistance of Third World peoples who still pose a threat of revolutionary resistance; 2) the rising power of socialist China posing an alternative model to the capitalist domination of the world's economy; 3) the mishandling of its relations with semi-democratic capitalist Russia which has pushed that country to ally with China and give support to progressive Third World opposition to the US - thus unintentionally reviving progressive aspects of the former foreign policies of the Soviet Union.
US foreign policy is basically founded on the threat of military intervention in the last analysis if other methods to impose its will fail, and maintaining the expenses of the military industrial complex, which drains the wealth of the country away from social programs benefiting the American people, can only be sustained as long as the American people are unaware of the US role in the world and basically accept through their passivity, in one way or another, the status quo imposed by the ruling class. Trump is upsetting this status quo and the military's future is dependent on its being seen by the people as being able to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, and provide for the common defence. It's real use is to be a tool of imperialism for the conquest and domination of foreign peoples and to hide this is the real objective meaning of General Milley's speech, whatever sincere subjective feelings he may or may not entertain. No justice, no peace, no status quo, no imperialist interventions or wars.
