{"id":150302,"date":"2019-12-23T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=150302"},"modified":"2019-12-30T11:24:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T11:24:41","slug":"militarism-the-delusion-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/militarism-the-delusion-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Militarism: The Delusion Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

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18 Dec 2019 – <\/em>The annual defense budget, passed recently<\/a> by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

War hits the motherlode every year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe money just isn\u2019t there\u201d for virtually anything that matters \u2014 you know, healthcare for all, free college tuition, clean water, eco-sustainable energy production \u2014 but we\u2019ve sold the national soul to the war god so long ago that the perfunctory, bipartisan passage of the National Defense Authorization Act comes and goes every year with, at most, a few marginal cries of outrage and a big shrug from the media.<\/p>\n

This year the NDAA came with a few extra stocking-stuffers for the warmongers and profiteers. It bequeathed the world an upgraded possibility of nuclear war and guaranteed the universe a future of bellicosity beyond the confines of Mother Earth.<\/p>\n

The temptation for me as I write about this is to hide behind a fa\u00e7ade of sarcasm as I hurl my scathing little criticisms at the politicians, the mainstream media and the corrupt bureaucratic farce known as the Pentagon. The alternative is to stand naked and vulnerable to what is being done: lobotomizing humanity\u2019s collective thought process, killing the future.<\/p>\n

Consider these words of Charles Edward Jefferson, published in the March 1909 issue of The Atlantic<\/a> \u2014 at the dawn, my God, of the 20th century, before World War I set the world on fire:<\/p>\n

\u201cMilitarism has foisted upon the world a policy which handicaps the work of the church, cripples the hand of philanthropy, blocks the wheels of constructive legislation, cuts the nerve of reform, blinds statesmen to dangers which are imminent and portentous, such as poverty and all the horde of evils which come from insufficient nutrition, and fixes the eyes upon perils which are fanciful and far away. It multiplies the seeds of discord, debilitates the mind by filling it with vain imaginations, corrodes the heart by feelings of suspicion and ill-will. It is starving and stunting the lives of millions, and subjecting the very frame of society to a strain which it cannot indefinitely endure.\u201d<\/p>\n

A hundred and ten years later, the truth in his essay, called \u201cThe Delusion of Militarism,\u201d has merely intensified. How hot do they have to get before they can no longer be ignored? Our militarized political focus remains fixed \u201cupon perils which are fanciful and far away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus the NDAA officially created a sixth branch of the American military, the Space Force<\/a>, \u201cestablishing,\u201d in the words of Donald Trump, \u201cspace as a warfighting domain<\/a>\u201d and guaranteeing that \u201cthe United States will dominate in that environment just like all others.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hill<\/a> explains it further: American corporations will eventually start building factories in outer space and mining \u201cthe moon and the asteroids for their mineral wealth.\u201d But have no fears: \u201cThe United States Space Force will ensure that no unfriendly power can impede these activities through military attack. The new service branch will have to be so strong and capable that no other country would think of trying to bring fire and destruction to American and allied space infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, apparently, expanding the human enterprise into the great beyond will not in any way unify the planet or free political minds from the nationalism and hubris that encages them \u2014 not if Trump has anything to say about it (and he does).<\/p>\n

Jefferson, discussing The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 \u2014 where \u201ceverybody conceded that it was better to settle international disputes by reason rather than by force\u201d \u2014 points out that \u201cas soon as the legal machinery was created, by means of which the sword could be dispensed with, there was a fresh fury to perfect at once all the instruments of destruction. After each new peace conference there was a fresh cry for more guns.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he sees hope on the horizon: \u201cThe old policy is wrong. The old leaders are discredited. The old programme is obsolete. Those who wish for peace must prepare for it. Our supreme business is not the scaring of rivals, but the making of friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill America become a leader? . . . Will she, by setting a daring example, arrest the growth of armaments throughout the world?\u201d<\/p>\n

Is Jefferson\u2019s irony-saturated question dead and buried, beyond any possibility of exhumation? It certainly seems that way. Militarism \u2014 American militarism in particular \u2014 keeps claiming the future and seems intent on doing so until there\u2019s no future left to claim. One of the provisions of the newly passed NDAA, for instance, allows the deployment, on U.S. Trident submarines, of the W76-2 tactical nuclear warhead, a low-yield nuclear warhead that puts it in the realm of being a \u201cusable\u201d nuke: possibly the most insane concept in the history of warfare.<\/p>\n

Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists<\/a>, writes with alarm: \u201cThis bill accelerates the growing nuclear arms race with Russia. It fully funds almost every element of the Trump administration\u2019s trillion-dollar plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with new, more deadly weapons that we do not need, and cannot afford. Most immediately, the bill will allow the Trump administration to quickly deploy the new W76-2 nuclear warhead \u2014 a lower yield weapon specifically intended to be more useable in a nuclear conflict. Weapons such as this one make nuclear war more likely and do nothing to enhance our security.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c. . . there was a fresh fury to perfect at once all the instruments of destruction.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, Mother Earth! As soon as we move incrementally toward peace, our soul snaps and all we can envision is war. Nuclear weapons once sat smugly as agents of deterrence. But the W76-2, which is slightly smaller than the bombs actually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a weapon to be used \u2014 to murder and contaminate, not simply to intimidate. It is not surprising that such a weapon would find its way into the global arsenal.<\/p>\n

Tick, tick, tick . . .<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Dec 2019 – The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion. War hits the motherlode every year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,57,65],"tags":[1126,1050,1105,769,95,70,118],"class_list":["post-150302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-military-supremacy","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}