Hell Mixed with Futility
[Photo: WWII ship launch from Kaiser Shipyards (NPS). Quote: Eisenhower, “Chance for Peace” (4/16/1953)]
By Robert C. Koehler
Source: CommonWonders
While only 55.7% of households had a TV in 1954, 90% had them by 1962 (Television Set). Before that there was radio and newspapers. What was once largely local with a plethora of information (news) sources, has narrowed down to a handful, and those share significant economic interests even if the target different “markets” (demographic and ideological portions of the population). More recently, we have added social media and all to the influencing and propaganda mechanisms are brought to bear in a highly targeted manner. Partially because of overload, and partially by shaped behavior, much of our population is trapped in a shiny bubble of roaming “now”, framed to our individual preferences and biases. We have largely become untethered from history, continuity, and reality. Highly paid message magicians distract attention, while atrocities happen and the theft of our world happens right under our noses.
In 1953, General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower conveyed the truth of war to the nation in his “Chance for Peace” speech (4/16/1953). Speaking from the midst of the cold war and the armed camp mentality that rapidly established itself, this man trained to war foretold the path of the militarism that we now blithely embrace (emphases mine):
The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.
The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
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 plane 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.
Militarism is insidious and omnipresent. A couple of days ago I posted a piece on corporations who owed no taxes, and even received subsidies and rebates. In study after study this list of tax brigands includes the top military industries and the energy sector, as well as the financial industry that funds and profits from endless conflict and war. Every year, more of our taxes goes directly and indirectly to militarism. Congress is captive as contractors have distributed production and jobs across the entire country and a threat to move would mean major financial harm to those communities.
The other side of the equation is to continuously expand military spending beyond war to domestic uses. First by transferring the machinery of war to police departments where it can be used directly against us as we pay for both police and technology and the ever-eroding investment in people and communities. Second into the private consumer market from “security” systems, to personal drones, to the morally corrupt gun industry selling arsenals meant for war to a civilian market for “entertainment” and “security”. We are being swallowed whole and while most folks sung up in their customized bubble.
[I have included some sources after Robert Koehler’s article that folks many find useful: the whole text of Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” and his final speech before leaving office in which he highlighted the M-I complex, and a list of the 10 most expensive weapons in the US arsenal.]
Robert C. Koehler
Oh, the normalcy of militarism! Our annual financial hemorrhage to this complex menagerie of institutions — from the Pentagon to Homeland Security to the Nuclear Security Administration to the CIA and its secret expenditures — must not be seriously questioned in the corridors of Congress, even though, all things considered, it comes to almost a trillion dollars annually.
Call it the Defense budget, smile and move on.
Even the current “liberal revolt” in the House of Representatives over the Dems’ proposed budget isn’t a serious questioning of the American way of war but, rather, a demand for “parity” between social and defense spending, which, if anything, further hardens the latter into an unquestioned reality. Yes, yes, America spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined, but let’s make sure we have money available for healthcare too, OK?
Norman Solomon called it the “toxic lure of guns and butter,” this creation of an America that has both the values of democratic socialism, a la Canada and Western Europe, and yet is the global cop extraordinaire, fighting (and creating) terrorism, bombing civilians, operating some 800 military bases in over 80 countries and maintaining a nuclear arsenal second to none (indeed, developing “usable” nukes). What’s wrong with that?
The headache here for the Dem establishment is the “democratic socialism” part, which is often covered with disdain by the mainstream media, e.g.:
“U.S. House of Representatives Democrats on Tuesday canceled a planned floor vote on legislation to set federal spending levels for next year after the party’s left wing demanded more money for domestic programs,” Reuters reported last week.
“It was an awkward moment for Democrats. . . .”
Groan! Those left-wingers are totally screwing up the smooth flow of the governing process! This is the same problem the Republicans have with their white supremacists. The nation’s strength is at its center. Everything on the margins is equally a threat to our freedom, equally a nuisance to our governance.
Perhaps you can spot the void at the center of this thinking. It isn’t simply the dismissal of “the left” that is problematic here. Far worse, I fear, is the lack of courage among those in control to challenge the insanity not simply of the military budget but of militarism itself.
But the budget is strange. As Matt Taibbi writes at Rolling Stone: “Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.
“Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.”
Apparently, waste and corruption and sheer incompetence, when they are sufficiently large, must not be questioned — not by liberals, not by debt-obsessed conservatives. No matter, as Taibbi wrote, that 1,200 auditors examined Department of Defense spending last year and concluded that the books were impenetrable. The Pentagon is our protector. We must give it what it needs.
But beyond the budget is something infinitely worse — war itself, or rather, endless war. Every war we’ve waged or been a part of over the last seven-plus decades has spewed human and environmental destruction almost beyond comprehension and, at the same time, has failed to accomplish anything remotely beneficial to the country, unless you happen to be a war profiteer. How is it possible that there is virtually no discussion about this at the national level — no discussion with political traction, even as the wars go on and on and on and on?
This is hell mixed with futility, and the United States of America isn’t sufficiently a democracy to acknowledge and address this except at its margins. One writer at the margins, Stephen Wertheim, in a piece for New Republic, notes:
“Trump and the establishment are one in assuming that the United States must maintain global military dominance, regardless of circumstances, forever.” However: “. . . permanent armed supremacy produces permanent armed conflict. And its burdens are mounting.”
American might, Wertheim writes, “has not prevented China from rising nor Russia from asserting itself, and may have antagonized both. Instead of cowing others into peace, primacy has plunged America into war. It has forced the United States to resist any significant retraction of its military power, lest it lose influence relative to anyone else. The endless wars are endless because the United States has appointed itself the world’s ‘indispensable nation,’ in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s formulation, responsible less for ensuring its own safety than for maintaining its material and moral privilege to police the world.”
I repeat Wertheim’s primary point: Permanent armed supremacy produces permanent armed conflict. This is my cry to every progressive — indeed, to every — member of Congress. The time to look this truth in the eye is now.
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at [email protected] or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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Appendices
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” Address (April 16, 1953)
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Final White House Speech On Military-Industrial Complex
10 Most Expensive Weapons in US Arsenal
| Equipment/Weapon | Each | Total |
| Arleigh Burk Destroyer | 1.98 bil | 114 bil |
| V-22 Osprey | 70 mil | 60 bil |
| F/A 18 E/F Super Hornets | 65 mil | 58 bil |
| Virginia Class Submarine | 2.7 bil | 87 bil |
| USS Gerald Ford Carrier | 12.6 bil | 38 bil |
| Joint Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) | $1 mil | 58 bil |
| Trident II Missile | $37.3 mil | 53 bil |
| F-22 Raptor | 412 mil | 67 bil |
| Littoral Combat Ship | 362 mil | 67 bil |
| F-35 Joint Strike Fighter | 100 mil | 1.5 tril |
| Source: MSN (March 2016) “10 Most Expensive Weapons in the Pentagon Arsenal“ |
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