(Photo: United for Justice With Peace)
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen’s latest piece (Huffington Post, 4/12/13) decries the nonexistent debate over war and its the human costs–including how unchecked militarism blights so many other aspects of American life.
Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem–a problem that Martin Luther King, Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.
Cohen adds:
In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”–and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues — but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.
We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention–as they so often do–debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say “Phil Donahue.”
It is past time to stop pretending that war and preparations for war have no consequences.
The problem is not that anyone is pretending there isn’t consequences, the problem is, they like the consequences. It gives them a reason to not have to actually think, or produce useful items that will last, since they are being consumed in the war and it’s preparations. And as the story line goes,
“”The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.””
George Orwell
“[L]ikely to disappear faster than you can say “Phil Donahue.”
Love that line.
Eisenhower warned us the military industrial complex will be running America unless we take action … in1960. We didn’t take any action.
And they are running the country with the collaboration of their stockholders from Wall St.
The schools, the minimum wage, the unions might have kept us above water but they are all under attack … while the rich get richer
We have nobody to blame but ourselves. We buy into the fear and the myth of American exceptionalism. We condone imperialism especially when committed by the Dems. Unfortunately every time the masses get financially comfortable they start turning conservative. Why did Americans have to vote for Reagan? Were they bored?!
There are times when it is a moral act to become embroiled in war. The Civil war needed to be fought,and WW II comes to mind. Yet, even with some measure of true moral imperitive for justification to engage in extreme conflict – both sides exhibit hideous and hellish behaviors. To think George W. Bush simply decided to ‘make up a war’ that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people puts on stage the enormity of our societal failure and this nations nauseating lust for war profits. War has become a low brow scam to produce a collective Stockholm syndrome effect, of getting us to shut up and bow our heads and kiss the flag, while the ‘shock and awe campaign’ takes care of corporate affairs.
The corporate media and their apologists love to blame we the people for their slanted coverage. They say people don’t want to hear news like that. They are just giving us what the ratings say we want. It’s our fault.
Not being a polling organization myself, this was hard to counter. But I would like to commend CNN and many other news corporations that now allow us to post comments at the end of every article, comments that everybody can see. It’s very interesting to peruse those comments for political articles. If you read around the usual flame wars that pollute every such forum, you find enlightened people are not that rare. You see a very significant portion of comments by people who are well educated on things. For example when CNN put up a news story on massacres in Guatemala, I was surprised to read how many people were aware of our role in all of that. A bloody repression where we basically murdered some 180,000 civilians in cold blood for demanding basic human rights. They certainly didn’t find out about that on CNN or any other corporate media, but they found out somewhere.
I’m actually pretty surprised CNN does allow such commentary on their site. Yes they moderate and delete stuff, but they usually don’t delete posts pointing out CNN as a propaganda machine, they remove stuff like racial name calling and such. Has FAIR talked anywhere about this? I think it’s very interesting. Somebody with some time could do some good data mining of those comments and get a valuable profile of the breakdown of opinion of the true viewers. I realize it’s not a perfect random sample of viewers but it still would tell us a lot. I think we’ll find the enlightened are not as rare as we thought. We’re just disorganized and isolated.