by John W. Whitehead
“Of all the enemies to public liberty
war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded
because it comprises and develops the
germ of every other. War is the parent
of armies; from these proceed debts and
taxes… known instruments for bringing
the many under the domination of the
few.… No nation could preserve its
freedom in the midst of continual
warfare.” ~ James Madison
March 07, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- War is the enemy of
freedom.
As long as America’s politicians continue to
involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation,
jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase
the chances of terrorism and blowback
domestically, and push the nation that much
closer to eventual collapse, “we the people”
will find ourselves in a perpetual state of
tyranny.
It’s time for the U.S. government to stop
policing the globe.
This latest crisis –
America’s part in the showdown between Russia
and the Ukraine – has conveniently followed
on the heels of a long line of other
crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have
occurred like clockwork in order to keep
Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and
insulated from the government’s steady
encroachments on our freedoms.
And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.
Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world
into a state of global authoritarianism, just as
the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates
seems to have finally worn thin, we are being
prepped for the next distraction and the next
drain on our economy.
Yet policing the globe and waging endless
wars abroad isn’t making America – or the rest
of the world – any safer, it’s certainly not
making America great again, and it’s undeniably
digging the US deeper into debt.
Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all
of the government’s military meddling and bring
all of the troops home today, it would take
decades to pay down the price of these wars and
get the government’s creditors off our backs.
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War has become a huge money-making venture,
and the US government, with its vast military
empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.
What most Americans – brainwashed into
believing that patriotism means supporting the
war machine – fail to recognize is that these
ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the
country safe and everything to do with propping
up a military industrial complex that continues
to dominate, dictate and shape almost every
aspect of our lives.
Consider: We are a military culture engaged
in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at
war for most of our existence. We are a nation
that makes a living from killing through defense
contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless
wars.
We are also being fed a steady diet of
violence through our entertainment, news and
politics.
All of the military equipment featured in
blockbuster movies is provided – at taxpayer
expense – in exchange for carefully placed
promotional spots.
Back when I was a boy growing up in the
1950s,
almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the
heroic American military saving the day,
whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from
Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was
the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to
be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own
kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s
blockbuster film Top Gun –
created with Pentagon assistance and equipment
– that boosted civic pride in the military.
Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and
overwhelmed by
child-focused military propaganda. Don’t
even get me started on the
war propaganda churned out by the toymakers.
Even
reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig,
with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping
to sell war to the American public.
It’s estimated that
US military intelligence agencies (including the
NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV
shows.
And then there are the growing number of
video games, a number of which are engineered by
or created for the military, which have
accustomed players to interactive war play
through military simulations and first-person
shooter scenarios.
This is how you acclimate a population to
war.
This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war
machine.
This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to
the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you
teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the
bomb.”
As journalist David Sirota writes for
Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military
and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon
officials to line edit scripts – is once again
on the rise, with new television programs and
movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major
Hollywood directors remain more than happy to
ideologically slant their films in precisely the
pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the
Pentagon demands in exchange for
taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”
Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the
government at large) so focused on using
Hollywood as a propaganda machine?
To those who profit from war, it is –
as Sirota recognizes – “a ‘product’ to be
sold via pop culture products that sanitize war
and, in the process, boost recruitment
numbers….At a time when more and more Americans
are questioning the fundamental tenets of
militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense
expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations,
etc.), military officials are desperate to turn
the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist
direction – and they know pop culture is the
most effective tool to achieve that goal.”
The media, eager to score higher ratings, has
been equally complicit in making (real) war more
palatable to the public by packaging it as TV
friendly.
This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to
as the representation of a “clean
war”: a war “without victims, without
bodies, and without suffering”:
‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all
human imagery from target areas … The language
used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic
as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A
future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’
Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are
‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always
‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped
the humanity of civilians from the screen …
Create conditions by which war appears short,
abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically
beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of
soldiers or civilians.
This is
how you sell war to a populace that may have
grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the
war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting
(present a clean war), gloss over the actual
numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human
cost), cast the business of killing humans in a
more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a
hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the
weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.
“This obsession with weapons of war has a
name:
technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons
appear to take on a magical aura. They become
centerpieces in a cult of worship.”
“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these
bombs, we were also invited to step inside these
high-tech machines and take them for a spin,”
said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can
purchase one of the military vehicles on the
consumer market. Not only are we invited to
fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we
are routinely invited to peer through the
crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging
war cultivate new modes of perception, new
relationships to the tools of state violence. In
other words,
we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the
machines of war.”
In order to sell war, you have to feed the
public’s appetite for entertainment.
Not satisfied with peddling its war
propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows
and embedded journalists whose reports came
across as glorified promotional ads for the
military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports
to further advance its agenda, “tying
the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”
The military has been firmly entrenched in
the nation’s sports spectacles ever since,
having
co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.
This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite
for war.
No wonder entertainment violence is the
hottest selling ticket at the box office. As
professor Henry
Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only
trades in violence as entertainment, but also it
delivers violence to a society addicted to a
pleasure principle steeped in graphic and
extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and
torture.”
No wonder the government continues to whet
the nation’s appetite for violence and war
through paid propaganda programs (seeded
throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood
blockbusters and video games) – what Stahl
refers to as “militainment“
– that glorify the military and serve as
recruiting tools for America’s expanding
military empire.
No wonder Americans from a very young age are
being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers – even
virtual ones – in America’s Army
(coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first
person shooter video game produced by the
military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one
of the
most popular recruiting tools for the military
and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement,
Border Patrol, and the FBI).
No wonder the United States is the
number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of
violence and violent weapons in the world.
Seriously, America
spends more money on war than the combined
military budgets of China, Russia, the United
Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India,
Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the
globe, with
800 military bases and troops stationed in 160
countries. Moreover, the war hawks have
turned the American homeland into a
quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons
and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces
have become roving extensions of the military –
a standing army.
We are dealing with a sophisticated,
far-reaching war machine that has woven itself
into the very fabric of this nation.
Clearly, our national priorities are in
desperate need of an overhaul.
Eventually, all military empires fall and
fail by spreading themselves too thin and
spending themselves to death.
It happened in Rome: at the height of its
power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not
stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning
military. Prolonged periods of war and false
economic prosperity largely led to its demise.
It’s happening again.
The American Empire – with its endless wars
waged by US military servicepeople who have been
reduced to little more than guns for hire:
outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to
far-flung places to police the globe – is
approaching a breaking point.
The government is destabilizing the economy,
destroying the national infrastructure through
neglect and a lack of resources, and turning
taxpayer dollars into blood money with its
endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death
tolls.
This is exactly the scenario President Dwight
D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned
the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war
machine endanger our liberties or democratic
processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme
Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during
World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the
profit-driven war machine that, in order to
perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging
war.
Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the
consequences of allowing the military-industrial
complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and
dictate our national priorities are beyond
grave:
Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and
are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed. This world in arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children. The cost of one modern
heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in
more than 30 cities. It is two electric power
plants, each serving a town of 60,000
population. It is two fine, fully equipped
hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete
highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half
million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single
destroyer with new homes that could have housed
more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the
best way of life to be found on the road the
world has been taking. This is not a way of life
at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of
threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a
cross of iron.
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry
and the government that Eisenhower warned
against has come to represent perhaps the
greatest threat to the nation today.
What we have is a confluence of factors and
influences that go beyond mere comparisons to
Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its
shadowy, totalitarian government – i.e.,
fascism, the union of government and corporate
powers – and a total surveillance state with a
military empire extended throughout the world.
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People and in its fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how
tyranny rises and freedom falls.
The growth of and reliance on militarism as
the solution for our problems both domestically
and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional
principles which form the basis of the American
experiment in freedom.
As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty
cannot flourish in a country that is permanently
on a war footing, or even a near-war footing.
Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of
everybody and everything by the agencies of the
central government.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of
The
Rutherford Institute. His new book is
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People (SelectBooks, 2015). Whitehead can
be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org.
The views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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