Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes — and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative — such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.

The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able — and willing — to destroy all of humanity.

We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” — including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.

Maybe it’s too unpleasant to acknowledge that we’ve been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it’s even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just “out there.” It’s also internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.

Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like “make love, not war” — and, a bit later, “the personal is political” — really spoke to us. But over the decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if personal and national histories weren’t interwoven in our pasts, presents and futures.

One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the biggest military contractor in academia — and gave a speech. “Our government has become preoccupied with death,” he said, “with the business of killing and being killed.”

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war’s end, Wald pointed out: “We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled — decisions that have been made.”

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing — whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social safety-nets at home — thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of “national security” that brandishes the Pentagon’s weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.

As it happened, for reasons both “personal” and “political” — more accurately, for reasons indistinguishable between the two — my own life fell apart and began to reassemble itself during the same season of 1969 when George Wald gave his speech, which he called “A Generation in Search of a Future.”

Political and personal histories are usually kept separate — in how we’re taught, how we speak and even how we think. But I’ve become very skeptical of the categories. They may not be much more than illusions we’ve been conned into going through the motions of believing.

We actually live in concentric spheres, and “politics” suffuses households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called “The World House.” Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled “Made Love, Got War”) that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state… and, in the process, through my own life. I haven’t learned as much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged — persistent and pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

The warfare state doesn’t come and go. It can’t be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it’s at the core of the United States — and it has infiltrated our very being.

What we’ve tolerated has become part of us. What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.”

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.

– Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” will be published in early fall. The foreword is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

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The sorry thing is that anyone would believe this crap.

First, there is no shredding of social safety-net in the US. Bush & company have increased spending in this area … too much I would say. Our “poor” have cars, big screen TV’s and more … and would be considered rich compared to the rest of the world’s poor.

In addition, our poor have unlimited opportunity based on their efforts …

Our military protects us and our freedoms … peace through strength …. without our military power there would be some world governments which would move in and fill that void.

Yet our enemies know that people like you exist in this country which makes us weaker because terrorists can use time and media against us.

Make love not war, sure that sounds funa nd count me in … but only if we have the ability with a strong military to use our might to prevent attack as well as go after those who harm us.

Eisenhower’s warning us about the (Congressional) Military Industrial Complexes
consequences has been borne out by history.
When the military orders 300 F22 Fighters and Congress budgets over 600 you know our country has a big, big problem.

Dr. Weed, With all due respect, you have lost touch with reality. “First, there is no shredding of social safety-net in the US.” Um…ever hear of “welfare reform”? This means that, on a strict time limited basis, SOME poor families are able to receive time-limited sub-poverty level aid, with a healthy measure of punitive and demeaning requirements. One big problem here: When a parent becomes too ill/disabled to work, they used to turn to welfare for their family’s survival while they underwent the disability application process. This used to take about a full year; now it takes three to five years, but they can’t fall back on welfare because welfare requires work…but because they are ill/disabled, they can’t work. These people are quite sure that there is no safety net. Virtually all education and skills training has been “reformed” out of reach of the poor, ensuring that people will remain poor, no matter how hard they work. As a direct result of our welfare “reform”, America’s poor now have infant mortality rates that equal or surpass that of Third World nations, and the life expectancy of our poor has been on a free-fall. In short, welfare “reform” does kill. At its highest (mid-1970’s), welfare allotments just inched over the poverty line, and were quickly reformed back to subpoverty levels. Note that the US provided the most meager level of aid out of all modern nations.

Most of the money spent on US welfare did NOT go to the poor, but into the salaries and offices of those who worked for the welfare department. It is embarrassing to think that one of my fellow citizens would be so ignorant as to believe the old Rich Welfare Mama myth—big screen TV, etc. Apply this to any area of the US: Check any county, and see what their welfare allotments are for a family of two (note: the overwhelming majority of welfare families consisted of 2 to 3 members). Now check the rents in the area, average food and transportation costs, as well as annual utility costs. For example, the welfare allotment in this county was a “high” $425 per month, with low rents in the $350 range. This is the north, with high heating costs. If you’re lucky, you can get enough energy assistance and a budget plan enabling you to pay $50 per month year-round to cover heating costs. That leaves $25 for water, electricity, clothing, transportation, to supplement food stamps and, of course, the monthly bill on that big screen TV.

With all due respect, saying that our poor have “unlimited opportunity” betrays your ignorance. Life is very complex, and there is a long list of factors that can tear any family’s middle class life right out from under them, leaving them in poverty. “Get a job” is hardly an adequate answer for those who are too ill to work, or who lack skills needed to earn family supporting wages. We have this alternative image of the welfare mother who is supposed to be a super human —a full-time worker while being a full-time mother and, in her spare time, holding a second job to pay for college so that she can move beyond a bottom-wage job.

I’m not saying that you’re dumb, just ignorant, fortunate enough to be WAY out of touch with the realities of US poverty today. It is precisely this sort of screw-you arrogance of the few that has brought such contempt toward America from all corners of the world.

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