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How Does Joe Biden’s Oligarchy Speech Compare With Eisenhower’s Military Industrial-Complex Address?
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For the uninitiated, farewell addresses from outgoing Presidents are a time-honoured tradition.
It allows the occupant(s) of the most exalted office in the world to defend their decisions, while glossing over major scandals, which took place on their watch.
No one talks about the Iran-Contra episode, in which Ronald Reagan became the financier of the cocaine trade in Latin America, which destroyed the lives of thousands of Black folks in inner cities across the United States of America.
And no one remembers that Bill Clinton bombed large areas in Sudan and Somalia, because we all found out that he was getting sucked off by a 24 year old intern.
In listening to farewell addresses, we are invited to view their time in office through the lens of sentimentality and not through the lens of the many atrocities committed across the globe and disastrous effects on generations, yet unborn.
But one speech, however, did buck the trend.
And it came from the general who won the second world war for the United States of America and its allies and also became its 34th President — Dwight Eisenhower.