February 24, 2022
John W. Whitehead
& Nisha Whitehead, TRI
“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
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 U.S. 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.
War has become a huge
money-making venture, and the U.S. 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
U.S. 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 U.S. 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.”
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