When we initiate massive undertakings, especially wars which are so emotionally charged, we will weigh many consequences such as world opinion, effect on other counties, even regional balances of power that may result. One we seldom, if ever, consider is the mindset of the American people that may result.
A mindset is a cultural phenomenon. Societies have them as a result of unusual experiences or as a means of accounting for what they do or have done. In this context slavery was a mindset in addition to a practice. When the practice of slavery was abolished the mindset remained, even to this day. Mindsets, being held for reasons usually immune to rational criticism, can be very dangerous to a society. They are vulnerable to political and other manipulation and, more importantly, they prevent a society from productively engaging in solutions to societal problems.
By way of example, let us consider what I believe to be one of, if not the most, significant changes in the American mindset to occur in the 20th century, the militaristic mindset of the American people. After every major war until World War II America always disarmed and returned its focus to domestic issues. After World War II it did not.
By way of personal experience let me illustrate the depth of disarmament to help in understanding what disarmament meant and hence the magnitude of the change in the American mindset over the period discussed herein. As a child in the 1930s I lived within a few blocks of Fort MacArthur whose mission was to protect the port of Los Angeles from any enemy. The fort had an upper and lower reservation. The lower reservation had the barracks and officer housing. It was open to the public and I, a civilian, got my haircuts there for 25 cents. The upper reservation had the 14 inch disappearing gun battery that could hurl a 1, 560 pound projectile 14 miles in defense of the port. I ran around the tunnels of the gun emplacements and dug bullets from the small arms firing range to melt and make lead soldiers. Additionally, San Pedro was then home port for the Pacific Fleet. When the fleet was in anyone could ride the gigs that transported naval personnel to and from the ships. As youngsters we tried to get a gig going to a battleship, but sometimes wound up disappointed by being delivered to a tender. This was the state of disarmament about 15 years after World War I. There was no effort to keep the public mindset on war.
By the end of World War II the powers that be had already decided that the Soviet Union would probably be our next enemy. Even before the end of the war Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech on March 5, 1945 at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. About the same time Henry Stimson, Secretary of War (it was then called the War Department, not the current euphemistic and deceptive Defense Department) under Truman wrote in his diary that it might be necessary to take on the Russians over their invasion of Manchuria. He said this in connection with the importance of dropping the atom bomb to demonstrate our power to the Russians. In brief, there was no intention to disarm after World War II.
This so-called Cold War produced two hot wars as well as many proxy wars around the globe. For our purposes the most significant of these was the Vietnam War.
The first of these hot wars, Korea, came barely five years after the end of World War II. Fearing the displeasure of an American public that had so recently been through a long war, the Korean War was officially called a police action.
The second, and most important for the purpose of this article, was the Vietnam War. The American defeat in this war was attributed by the military to U.S. civilian opposition to the war, especially to the draft. In consequence the U.S. military sought and won approval to convert itself from a citizen conscript organization to an all volunteer one. This created a military that was considerably less a concern for ordinary Americans who would no longer have to weigh going to war in terms of possibly sacrificing their sons. With this burden off their shoulders the Americans could more easily view war as a kind of video game played with other people's children. This new volunteer military is paid in advanced educational opportunities, medical care for themselves and their families plus a modest salary. We had in effect a paid standing army, which brought us, at least psychologically, one step closer to accepting a full mercenary army whose precursor we now employ for the State Department in Iraq. This has been a major enhancement of the change in the American mindset regarding engagement in war.
During the 1980s we also invaded two small nations. The navy was sent by Reagan to attack the island nation of Granada because it had a socialist government and H. W. Bush sent the army to attack Panama because its leader was said to be trafficking in drugs. These two events were so bizarre they suggest a desire to keep war and "the enemy" in public focus and to discourage any thoughts of challenging the American hegemony in South and Central America.
The next major event in hardening the American appetite for world dominion and the militarism that goes with it was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This left the United States as the oft declared "sole remaining super power." As such, the neocons Cheney et al began planning, during the presidency of H. W. Bush, with their document Project for a New American Century for an American empire to rival Rome in the scope of its dominion. For this a well-funded military would be essential, which I suggest is the real reason we never saw the peace dividend many thought would follow the end of the Cold War.
September the 11th of 2001 came as a godsend for the neocons who had, during H. W. Bush's presidency, laid out their plan for a new American empire analogous to that of Rome in its dominion. An analysis of what was done in rapid sequence after the attack of 9/11 evidences a pre-made plan. It was immediately called a war rather than a police action so the full involvement of the military could be justified. The Patriot Act curtailed civilian freedoms. The federal government was reorganized to facilitate a continuing integration of military and police, and citizens who protest what is going on are now increasingly treated as the enemy.
We are now an empire with over 700 military facilities world wide. Empires generate enemies more readily than almost any other form of political organization. As such, we are continuously on the alert for potential enemies. We are easily led to treat those who may not accept American hegemony as enemies to be dealt with by the military. The latest episode in this world-wide game of containment is our response to China's increasing power. We have moved troops to northern Australia and we are trying to induce Burma to side with us against China.
This whole process from initial reluctance to get involved in one more European war to the creation of an American empire out of the ashes of World War II has had as its backdrop the American mindset nurtured by a media that kept public attention focused on "the enemy." That media and the American people paid far less attention to the efforts of the United Nations to spread some of the global wealth to the world's neediest. We often treated the U.N. as the enemy and any adherence to its rules as anti-American.
One day the full extent of what the Americans and the mindset they developed after World War II have done to this world may be thoroughly articulated. This is now being done with respect to our unnecessary use of the atom bomb. This articulation will not be pretty. It will be filled with large-scale avarice, pursuit of power and dominance, which became global after World War II. It will have events of unconscionable brutality. We Americans may have to face the kind of collective guilt that Germany has had to deal with. Despite the rhetoric we use to describe ourselves and our motives we have managed to betray our heritage despite many opportunities as our performance on the world stage unfurled. Franklin Roosevelt understood this. During World War II he pushed the creation of the United Nations in which the smallest of nations would finally have a voice. He rejected Churchill's efforts to reestablish the British Empire. He articulated his Four Freedoms, which included a freedom from want and in which the Marshall Plan was rooted. With his death we lost the kind of leadership a nation conceived as was ours requires. We took the first step toward world domination with the dropping of the atom bomb, which to my mind, Roosevelt, with his profound concern for humanity, would never have authorized. Perhaps one of the larger tragedies of the last 300 years is an America, which was conceived with so much promise for humanity, played out as simply one more empire.
Bob Newhard
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