Let's Face It: The Warfare State
Is Part of Us
by Norman Solomon
http://www.mediachannel.org/
The USA's military spending is now close
to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh
year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is
the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few
in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of
the warfare state.
While the Bush-Cheney administration is
the most dangerous of our lifetimes - and ousting Republicans
from the White House is imperative - such truths are apt to smooth
the way for progressive evasions. We hear that "the people
must take back the government," but how can "the people"
take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls
for "returning to a foreign policy based on human rights
and democracy," we're encouraged to be nostalgic for good
old days that never existed.
The warfare state didn't suddenly arrive
in 2001, and it won't disappear when the current lunatic in the
Oval Office moves on.
Born 50 years before George W. Bush became
president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in
the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed
to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed
protectors have been able - and willing - to destroy all of humanity.
We've accommodated ourselves to this insanity.
And I do mean "we" - including those of us who fret
aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed
because our voices don't carry much farther than the choir. We
may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a
system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.
Maybe it's too unpleasant to acknowledge
that we've been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe
it's even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state
is not just "out there." It's also internalized; at
least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to
resist it.
Like millions of other young Americans,
I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like
"make love, not war" - and, a bit later, "the personal
is political" - really spoke to us. But over the decades
we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if
personal and national histories weren't interwoven in our pasts,
presents and futures.
One day in 1969, a biologist named George
Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology - the biggest military contractor in academia -
and gave a speech. "Our government has become preoccupied
with death," he said, "with the business of killing
and being killed."
That preoccupation has fluctuated, but
in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and
a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war's end,
Wald pointed out: "We are under repeated pressure to accept
things that are presented to us as settled - decisions that have
been made."
Today, in similar ways, our government
is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of
killing - whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through
the deadly shredding of social safety-nets at home - thrives on
aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of "national
security" that brandishes the Pentagon's weaponry against
the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens
to destroy anything and everything.
As it happened, for reasons both "personal"
and "political" - more accurately, for reasons indistinguishable
between the two - my own life fell apart and began to reassemble
itself during the same season of 1969 when George Wald gave his
speech, which he called "A Generation in Search of a Future."
Political and personal histories are usually
kept separate - in how we're taught, how we speak and even how
we think. But I've become very skeptical of the categories. They
may not be much more than illusions we've been conned into going
through the motions of believing.
We actually live in concentric spheres,
and "politics" suffuses households as well as what Martin
Luther King Jr. called "The World House." Under that
heading, he wrote in 1967: "When scientific power outruns
moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.
When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize
the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our
hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited
lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives
in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual
and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse
of our own instruments."
While trying to understand the essence
of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century,
I worked on a book (titled "Made Love, Got War") that
sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state and, in the
process, through my own life. I haven't learned as much as I would
have liked, but some patterns emerged - persistent and pervasive
since the middle of the 20th century.
The warfare state doesn't come and go.
It can't be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it's at
the core of the United States - and it has infiltrated our very
being.
What we've tolerated has become part of
us. What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the
long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn.
And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, "It is the
sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without
nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate
the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have
prepared."
The triumph of the warfare state degrades
and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.
Norman Solomon's book "Made Love,
Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State" will
be published in early fall. The foreword is by Daniel Ellsberg.
For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com
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