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The embrace by any society of
permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a
nation.
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that
devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes
liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist
cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks
the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining
an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism,
whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar
Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism
comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of
slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist
salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its
core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of
mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation
of permanent war.
It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the
liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held
great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries
such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent
war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the
United States. The moral and intellectual trolls--the Dick Cheneys,
the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads--personify the
moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia.
They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They
crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke
racism.
"War," Randolph Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the
state."
In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Melman described the defense
industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war,
he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They
redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects
and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We
produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish
its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes
bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons
systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global
warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and
grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This
is the disease of permanent war.
Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1
trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending,
has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools
decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten
the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the
mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human
suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.
Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the
insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask
an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the
doctrine of permanent war--who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's
doctrine of permanent revolution--must keep us afraid. Fear stops us
from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear
means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear
means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties
for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.
Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to
characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the
Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half
its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It
is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The
military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It
is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they
are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the
federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are
always guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives
some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American
weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the
research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy
them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular
system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These
weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They
are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust.
It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the
permanent war economy.
Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the
economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then
using the profit for further investment and production. They
operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line
between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability
of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable
jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority
and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new
subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies
responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no
longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to
build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually
contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway
cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated,
directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In
another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean
catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were
made in the United States.
The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the
military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon
Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced
and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public
relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with
Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority
of the military analysts on television are former military
officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a
fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a
retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News,
was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of
Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article
noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.
Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and
the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it
funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them
on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because
it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker
than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.
The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats,
empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the
inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil
while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a
state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote "Notes From the Underground" to illustrate
what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes
sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in "Notes From the
Underground" carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their
logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews
passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over
sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of
accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia
and as it will doom us.
"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor
good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an
insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life
in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile
consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man
seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."
We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these
fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear
apart all systems--economic, social, environmental and
political--that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He
was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to
confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice.
What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the
face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the
facade. Source
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