Creating Perpetual War

You may be aware of the current outrage over NBC's new “reality” show Stars Earn Stripes in which so-called celebrities are paired with combat veterans, mostly from special forces like the Army's Green Berets and the Navy's SEALS, to undertake simulated military attacks. General Wesley Clark has been hired to host the series, presumably to give it additional credibility. On its web site devoted to promoting this series, NBC would have you believe that this series is devoted to honoring all those who have served in the military. They are called heroes. No mention is made of that emotional kickback from combat called PTSD and the high rate of suicides resulting from it. No mention is made of the thousands of civilian casualties in these operations dehumanized to the level of “collateral damage.”

Nine Nobel Peace Laureates have sent an open letter to NBC and Clark condemning the series as glorifying war, creating entertainment out of war, and sanitizing the profound horrors of war and the aftermath of suffering it leaves.

To the charge of glorifying war leveled by the Nobel Peace Laureates NBC responded “This show is not a glorification of war, but a glorification of service.” This is an old ploy used by war mongers to emotionally trap people into war, namely, the self-sacrifice of the soldiers is among the honorable acts a human can perform, therefore the war that produces these acts of self sacrifice must be good. Emotionally, you cannot honor the soldier without honoring the war. Among the services progressives can provide to a people in the process of losing their democracy to militarism is to carefully and thoroughly lay bare the deviousness of this deception. If, for example, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken to control Middle East oil, as is patently evident, especially in Iraq, then those prosecuting these wars cannot be doing a good and honorable thing. The soldiers fighting this war are all volunteers and whatever their motives they are willing to kill others in the prosecution of such wars. They are responsible for their actions just as a Mafia hit man, loyal to his “family,” is nonetheless regarded as a criminal because the Mafia is engaged in a vicious, self-serving enterprise. Personally, I believe this confusion of means and ends contributes to the high rate of suicides among veterans of these wars as they realize the horror of the acts they have committed in a callous war of conquest. I believe progressives can provide a real service, especially to the young who are lured into these wars by the most reprehensible of deceptions that bad wars can produce honorable soldiers that we all too easily call heroes.

Beneath the calloused inhumanity and perpetual-war mongering of this TV series, provided by a subsidiary of a major arms manufacturer (General Electric is a 49% owner of NBC) lies the continuing and largely successful effort to militarize the American nation. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex pales in comparison to what has actually happened and continues to happen.

I think this latest effort to make militarism palatable to the American people by presenting it as normal entertainment, promoted during the Olympics by NBC ads, is ample evidence of what is behind this continuing effort to miltarize the American mind and the American society.

Consider the following:

• Americans have been subject to a war mentality since the beginning of World War 2. Over 70 years of relentless concern with enemies. This makes them prime candidates for war propaganda.

• Projections are that America will no longer dominate the world economy and thus secure what it wants through economic means. It will increasingly have to share economic power with China and other rising economic powers.

• Lacking the economic dominance it has enjoyed for so long it must rely on military dominance to maintain as much of its power as possible. This, I believe, is the corporate agenda for America in a global economy. I believe the major decisions have been made and we are seeing in such morally and intellectually repulsive propaganda as the Stars Earn Stripes “reality” program the unfolding of this agenda.

The final result of this agenda will be a garrison state now being prepared for by the Homeland Security Department as it deploys its drones and increasingly incorporates combat-equipped local police into its operations. Notice protesters at political and corporate events are now put behind fences. The police are trained to treat the citizen as the enemy. Their mission is no longer to serve and protect, but to dominate and subdue.

This garrison state—think ancient Sparta—is the vehicle for insuring continued American global dominance as it loses its economic clout. It is totally antithetical to democracy, but Americans seem to be having little trouble giving that up. Do we progressives thoroughly understand what we are losing? I don't think so, otherwise there would be mass protests in the streets. “Freedom” is a mantra of the far right as they pursue an agenda that is destroying it. We must make it very clear that war is so dangerous to freedom that until Would War 2 this country had rapidly demobilized after every war.

We live in a time of cruel, highly destructive deceptions of which Stars Earn Stripes is but the latest, and more than usually blatant, instance.

We must vigorously unmask these deceptions and castigate those who practice them for the moral degenerates they are.

Bob Newhard

The Public Intellectual

Gore Vidal died Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at age 86. The passing of this great novelist, playwright, essayist and cultural and political commentator reminded me of the importance of the public intellectual to society, especially a democratic society.

The public intellectual is not a formal career. Universities do not offer curricula for it nor can it be found on any job listing. It is a function taken on by thinkers voluntarily out of a concern for society and a deep passion to understand. The breadth of Vidal's interests is astounding, running from issues like the America First movement to the Byzantine emperor Julian who attempted to restore the Roman gods that had been replaced by Christianity.

Other public intellectuals such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have been key figures in helping people understand their cultures, both the good and the bad. This species of humanity is as ancient as Socrates walking the Agora debating the nature of goodness. That the public intellectual as a recognized undertaking is still suspect is evidenced by Wikipedia's expressed reservations on the legitimacy of the “topic” even though it is merely reporting the 100 most significant contemporary public intellectuals as determined by polls conducted by two reputable magazines, the Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US).

A significant number of these people have been novelists, which indicates the role the novel can play in understanding and evaluating a culture. My own sense is that the complexity and immediacy of human life hides the more general characteristics, trends and forces of a culture and it is these that the public intellectual brings to the surface in a way consonant with the lives of those who read them. Public intellectuals are not social scientists concerned with demographic percentiles or specific tendencies quantified for use by others in decision making. Nor are they journalists, as important as these can be, who report immediate conditions and events.

This country began with a plethora of public intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and it shows in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. With this range of intelligence and concern it has seemed a tragedy to me that this country has so firmly rejected the role of the intellectual in influencing the decisions it makes and the courses it takes. Evidence that intellectualism has become a political liability was blatantly displayed when Adlai Stevenson ran for President and was attacked for being an “egghead.” Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in America details the depth of this sentiment in the American psyche. My own judgment is that intellectualism got lost in the immediacy of survival needs as the population in increasing numbers continuously dealt with the demands of the western frontier. The longer view or the search for underlying influences seemed to have little value in this environment, indeed intellectualism came to be seen as a kind of pretension. A very interesting and challenging question to ask oneself is “What would Jefferson or Madison say or do once they saw that their cherished individualism had spawned a corporation-dominated society deaf to the needs of all except the wealthy?” Would they, for example, be found on Wall Street with the rest of their rich brethren? Would they feather their economic bed like Bill Clinton has done or would they make the transition to the concerns of ordinary people in a mass society? Would they be Libertarians with their freedom uber alles view and the law of the jungle it entails or would they see freedom as dependent upon human well-being as did Franklin Roosevelt?

As Peter Scheer wrote in TruthDig's Vidal obituary “A student of history, he struggled to tolerate America’s strange regression in the new millennium.” Vidal was caught between America's promise and America's rejection of that promise.

Bob Newhard