{"id":273142,"date":"2024-09-09T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=273142"},"modified":"2024-09-06T06:10:15","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T05:10:15","slug":"from-the-arsenal-of-democracy-to-an-arsenal-of-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/from-the-arsenal-of-democracy-to-an-arsenal-of-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Arsenal of Democracy to an Arsenal of Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bombed House, Gaza by Marius Arnesen is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 \/ Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

The Pernicious Price of Global Reach, Global Power, and Global Dominance<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Sep 2024 <\/em>– During World War II, U.S. leaders proudly proclaimed this country the \u201carsenal of democracy<\/a>,\u201d supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union.\u00a0To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants.\u00a0However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion<\/a>) for 2026<\/a> and thereafter caught me off guard.\u00a0 Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there.\u00a0 So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?<\/p>\n

Israel, after all, couldn\u2019t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000<\/a> Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands<\/a> of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry.\u00a0Often, the U.S. doesn\u2019t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills.\u00a0Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas.\u00a0Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs<\/a>, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank<\/a>). That\u2019s not \u201cdefense\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Tacitus said of the rampaging Romans two millennia ago, so it can now be said of Israel: they create a desert \u2014 a black hole of death in Gaza \u2014 and call it \u201cpeace.\u201d And the U.S. government enables it or, in the case of Congress, cheers<\/a> on its ringleader, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.<\/p>\n

Of course, anyone who knows a little U.S. history should have some knowledge of genocide. In the seventeenth century, Native Americans were often \u201csatanized\u201d by early colonial settlers. (In 1994, a friend of mine, the historian David Lovejoy, wrote a superb<\/a> and all-too-aptly titled article on exactly that topic: \u201cSatanizing the American Indian.\u201d) Associating Indians with the devil made it all the easier for the white man to mistreat them, push them off their lands, and subjugate or eradicate them. When you satanize an enemy, turning them into something irredeemably evil, all crimes become defensible, rational, even justifiable. For how can you even consider negotiating or compromising with the minions of Satan?<\/p>\n

Growing up, I was a strong supporter of Israel, seeing that state as an embattled David fighting against a Goliath, most notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Forty years later, I wrote an article<\/a> suggesting that Israel was now the Goliath in the region with Palestinians in Gaza playing the role of a very much outgunned and persecuted David. A North American-Jewish friend told me I just didn\u2019t get it. The Palestinians in Gaza were all terrorists, latent or incipient ones in the case of the infants and babies there. At the time, I found this attitude uncommon and extreme, but events have proven it to be far too common (though it certainly remains extreme). Obviously, on some level, the U.S. government agrees that extremism in the pursuit of Israeli hegemony is no vice and so has provided Israel with the weaponry and military cover it needs to \u201cexterminate all the brutes.\u201d Thus, in 2024, the U.S. \u201ccradle of democracy\u201d reveals its very own heart of darkness<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking again at the World Wars That Made North America \u201cGreat\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

When considering World Wars I and II, we tend to see them as discrete events rather than intimately connected. One was fought from 1914 to 1918, the other from 1939 to 1945. North Americans are far more familiar with the Second World War than the First. From both wars this country emerged remarkably unscathed compared to places like France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Add to that the comforting myth that U.S.’ \u201cgreatest generation\u201d pretty much won World War II, thereby saving democracy (and \u201cSaving Private Ryan<\/a>\u201d as well).<\/p>\n

Perhaps, however, we should imagine those years of conflict, 1914-1945, as a European civil war (with an Asian wing thrown in the second time around), a new Thirty Years\u2019 War played out on a world stage that led to the demise of Europe\u2019s imperial powers and their Asian equivalent and the rise of the U.S. empire as their replacement. Germanic militarism and nationalism were defeated but at an enormous cost, especially to Russia in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II. Meanwhile, the U.S. empire, unlike Germany\u2019s Second and Third Reichs or Japan\u2019s imperial power, truly became for a time an untrammeled world militarist hegemon<\/a> with the inevitable corruption inherent in the urge for near-absolute power.<\/p>\n

Vast levels of destruction visited upon this planet by two world wars left an opening for Washington to attempt to dominate everywhere. Hence, the roughly 750 overseas bases<\/a> its military set up to ensure its ultimate global reach, not to speak of the powerful navy it created, centered on aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for possible global Armageddon, and an air force that saw open skies as an excuse for its own exercises in naked power projection. To this you could add, for a time, U.S. global economic and financial power, enhanced by a cultural dominance achieved through Hollywood, sports, music, and the like.<\/p>\n

Not, of course, that the United States emerged utterly unchallenged from World War II. Communism was the specter that haunted its leaders, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or Southeast Asia (where, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it would fight a disastrous losing war, the first of many to come, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Here, there, and everywhere, even under the very beds of North Americans, there was a fear of the \u201ccommie rat<\/a>.\u201d And for a while, communism, in its Soviet form, did indeed threaten capitalism\u2019s unbridled pursuit of profits, helping U.S. officials to create a permanent domestic war state in the name of containing and rolling back that threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 erased that fear, but not the permanent war state that went with it, as Washington sought new enemies to justify a Pentagon budget that today is still rising<\/a> toward the trillion-dollar mark. Naturally (and remarkably disastrously), it found them, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or so many other places in the case of the costly and ultimately futile Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n

And eternally losing (or at least not winning) its wars raised the question: What will replace it? What will happen as imperial U.S. continues to decline, burdened by colossal debt and strategic overreach, and crippled from within by a rapacious class of oligarchs who fancy themselves as a new all-U.S. aristocracy. Will that decline lead to collapse or can its officials orchestrate a soft landing? In World Wars I and II, Europeans fought bitterly for world dominance, powered by militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed. They suffered accordingly and yet did recover even if as far less powerful nations. Can the U.S. manage to curb its own militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed in time and so recover similarly? And by \u201cracism,\u201d I mean, for example, reviving the idea (however put) of China as a \u201cyellow peril,\u201d or the tendency to see the darker-skinned peoples of the Middle East as violent \u201cterrorists\u201d and the latest minions of Satan.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there\u2019s always the fear that, in the future, a world war could once again break out, raising the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons from global arsenals that are always being \u201cmodernized\u201d and the possible end of most life on Earth. It\u2019s an issue worth highlighting, since the U.S. continues to \u201cinvest\u201d<\/a> significant sums in producing yet more nuclear weapons, even as it ratchets up tensions with nuclear powers like Russia and China<\/a>. Though a winnable nuclear war among the great powers on this planet is inconceivable, that hasn\u2019t stopped my country from pushing for a version of nuclear superiority (disguised, of course, as \u201cdeterrence\u201d).<\/p>\n

Making America Sane Again<\/strong><\/p>\n

The world wars of the previous century facilitated U.S. global dominance in virtually all its dimensions. That, in fact, was their legacy. No other nation in history had, without irony or humility, divided the globe into military combatant commands<\/a> like AFRICOM for Africa, CENTCOM for the Middle East, and NORTHCOM here at home. There are also \u201cglobal\u201d commands for strategic nuclear weapons, cyber dominance, and even the dominance of space. It seemed that the only way the U.S. could be \u201csafe\u201d was by dominating everything everywhere all at once. That insane ambition, that vainglory, was truly what made the U.S. the \u201cexceptional\u201d nation on the world stage.<\/p>\n

Such a boundless pursuit of dominance, absurdly disguised as benefiting democracy, is now visibly fraying at the seams and may soon come apart entirely. In 2024, it\u2019s beyond obvious that the United States no longer dominates the world, even if its military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) does indeed dominate its national (in)security state<\/a> and so increasingly the country. What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of U.S. militarism and nationalism, making the world\u2019s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.<\/p>\n

Think, in fact, of the U.S. emerging from World War II with what might be thought of as victory disease. The last nearly 80 years of its foreign policy witnessed the remarkable progression of that \u201cdisease,\u201d despite a lack of actual victories (unless you count minor escapades like the invasion of Grenada<\/a>). Put differently, the U.S. emerged from World War II so singularly an economic, financial, and cultural juggernaut that subsequent military defeats almost didn\u2019t seem to matter.<\/p>\n

Even as the U.S. economic, financial, and cultural power has waned in this century, along with its moral position (consider President Obama\u2019s curt \u201cWe tortured some folks<\/a>\u201d admission, along with support for Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide), the government does continue to double-down on military spending. Pentagon budgets and related \u201cnational security\u201d costs now significantly exceed $1 trillion<\/a> annually even as arms shipments and sales continue to surge. War, in other words, has become big business in the U.S. or, as General Smedley Butler so memorably put it 90 years ago, a first-class \u201cracket<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worse yet, war, however prolonged and even celebrated, may be the very definition of insanity, a deadly poison to democracy. Don\u2019t tell that to the MICC and all its straphangers and camp followers, though.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the two countries, Germany and Japan, that the U.S. took credit for utterly defeating in World War II, forcing their unconditional surrender, have over time emerged in far better shape. Neither of them is perfect, mind you, but they largely have been able to avoid the militarism, nationalism, and constant warmongering that so infects and weakens U.S.-style democracy today. Whatever else you can say about Germany and Japan in 2024, neither of them is bent in any fashion on either regional or global domination, nor are their leaders bragging of having the finest military in all human history. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have indeed bragged about having a matchless, peerless, \u201cfinest<\/a>\u201d military. The Germans and Japanese, having known the bitter price of such boasts, have kept their mouths shut.<\/p>\n

My brother has a saying: no brag, just facts. And when we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the U.S. empire toward an early grave. The \u201cfinest\u201d military lost disastrously, of course, in Vietnam in the last century, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in this one. It functionally lost its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and it keeps losing in its febrile quest for superiority everywhere.<\/p>\n

If we met a person dressed in a military uniform who insisted he was Napoleon, boasted that his Imperial Guard was the world\u2019s best, and that he could rule the world, we would, of course, question his sanity. Why are we not questioning the collective sanity of U.S. military and foreign-policy elites?<\/p>\n

This country doesn\u2019t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them. For if we continue to follow our present pathway, MADness could truly lie in wait for us, as in the classic nuclear weapons phrase, mutually assured destruction (MAD).<\/p>\n

Another form of madness is having a president routinely implore God<\/a> \u2014 yes, no one else! \u2014 to protect our troops. This is not a knock on Joe Biden alone. He\u2019s just professing a nationalist piety that\u2019s designed to win applause and votes. Assuming Biden has the Christian God in mind, consider the irony, not to say heresy, of functionally begging Christ, the Prince of Peace, to protect those who are already armed to the teeth. It\u2019s also an abdication of the commander-in-chief\u2019s responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution while protecting those troops himself. Who has the biggest impact, God or the president, when it comes to ensuring that troops aren\u2019t sent into harm\u2019s way without a justifiable cause supported by the U.S. people through a Congressional declaration of war?<\/p>\n

Consider the repeated act of looking skyward to God to support military actions as a major league cop-out. But that\u2019s what U.S. presidents routinely do now. Such is the pernicious price of pursuing a vision that insists on global reach, global power, and global dominance. U.S. leaders have, in essence, elevated themselves to a god-like position, a distinctly angry, jealous, and capricious one, far more like Zeus or Ares than Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, he is alleged to have said, \u201cSuffer the children<\/a> to come unto me.\u201d The militarized U.S. god, however, says: suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).<\/p>\n

To echo a popular ad campaign, Jesus may \u201cget\u201d us<\/a>, but our leaders (self-avowed Christians, all<\/a>) sure as hell don\u2019t get him. I may be a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing one like Joe Biden, but even I remember my catechism and a certain commandment that Thou shalt not kill<\/em>.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is <\/em>Bracing Views<\/a>. His video testimony for the Merchants of Death Tribunal is availableat this link<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 William Astore<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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