The Disease of Permanent War
By Chris Hedges
May 18, 2009 "TruthDig.com" -- 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," Randolf Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."
In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman 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 towards 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 and 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 $le1 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.
Mellman, 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. It comes with guaranteed
profits. 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 junk yards where they 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. Mellman 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. Mellman 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, Mellman found that ninety-two were imported and only
eight were made in the United States.
The late Senator 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 its 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.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from
Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign
correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should
Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and
the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for
pre-order.
© 2009 TruthDig.com
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