Cold War Communism
Considering the fall of Cold War communism and other notable events of the second half of the 20th century, C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite still seems to holds up on several points as read in the year 2002. Charles Mills died in 1962 at the age of 46 as a distinguished professor of sociology. He was a pragmatist and he was always concerned with real world problems. His writing style and attitude seems somewhat bitter today but I suppose the truth as he saw it was pretty dismal. In the excerpt from the book, he comes to a seemingly abrupt logical conclusion that there is no large-scale conspiracy by the power elite of America. In the unabridged version of The Power Elite he probably develops the reasoning more methodically. I believe his conclusion is correct, however I think it would have been interesting to get his take on events such as the Kennedy assassination - if he had only lived to see it and the contradictory ballistic evidence such as the Zapruder documentary film. I think he may have viewed the Kennedy assasination as an attempt by the military industrial complex to quell a politically popular leader who overstepped his bounds on various social issues of the day. In the very first paragraph Mills makes his opini
Mills writes, "people are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split . . . They are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes. And it is true that our society has not had a feudal age as Europe did, but did "the revolutionary War put an end to colonial pretensions to nobility" as Mills claims? It seems to me that we have always had unofficial nobility whether through asset ownership, equity holdings, or high government office. We don't call them noble families but they are; whether they represent the military industrial complex, entertainment celebrities, or the corporate elite. It also appears that in rural America we have upheld a sort of informal feudal relationship between landowner and laborers whether it is slavery, indentured servitude, or low cost illegal immigrant labor. It is well known that when the elite exhibit less than "finer moral character" they can avoid punishment through the purchase of a favorable trial and a civil settlement. Then Mills reminds us that Americans and Congress had no say in dropping the bombs on Japan at the end of World War 2. This is very germane today as both Bush 1 and 2 love to drop bombs without technically or legally waging war. In fact I would venture to say that everything Mills writes about the military power elite holds true for the Bush/Cheney/Powell White House. There could be no better description of our trio than the term "warlords" and Mills used this term before Vietnam. I would suggest that the American public's current jingoism and green light
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Approximate Word count = 1121
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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