{"id":53582,"date":"2015-02-09T13:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53582"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:07","slug":"war-and-perpetual-adolescence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/war-and-perpetual-adolescence\/","title":{"rendered":"War and Perpetual Adolescence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robert<\/a>The urgency I feel isn\u2019t any longer to stop a particular war but to interrupt endless war: to interrupt the narrowly focused geopolitical conversation, conveyed to us over and over by media stenographers, in which lethal intervention \u2014 wherever \u2014 is always the first and only choice. The uncertainty is never a matter of \u201cif.\u201d It\u2019s only a matter of \u201cwhen.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance: \u201cThe West needs to bolster deterrence in Ukraine by raising the risks and costs to Russia of any renewed major offensive. That requires providing direct military assistance \u2014 in far larger amounts than provided to date and including lethal defensive arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The quote, which appeared in the New York Times, is from a recently issued report signed by \u201ceight former senior American officials.\u201d It comes with an assumed certainty and seemingly impenetrable authority. \u201cThe report was issued jointly by the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.\u201d One of the insiders who put her name on it was Mich\u00e8le A. Flournoy, \u201ca former senior Pentagon official who is a leading candidate to serve as defense secretary if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s that. It\u2019s all so pristine and scientific-seeming. Never are the consequences of military action discussed, alluded to or acknowledged in the mainstream media, even though the wreckage of our wars is all around us. That doesn\u2019t matter because grotesque, medieval hostility \u2014 beheadings, immolation \u2014 emerge from the wreckage. Unlike America\u2019s impersonal, high-tech and regrettably necessary killing, our enemies perpetrate Evil Itself. The over-the-top drama of what they do continually supplants any motivation we have to engage in political self-examination. Fear rules, but fortunately we have the technology and the bottomless budget to defend ourselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s truly \u2018exceptional\u2019 in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like,\u201d William J. Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, wrote recently at TomDispatch.com. \u201cInstead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It\u2019s the background noise of their world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astore, in his excellent essay called \u201cWar Is the New Normal,\u201d offered a number of reasons why militarism has cleared any challenging viewpoint from the corridors of American power. The theory and practice of peace \u2014 humanity\u2019s only hope for a viable future \u2014 is alive and well. Embracing it in some way, recognizing the need to suppress a tantrum, acknowledge someone else\u2019s humanity and allay short-term desires for the sake of the long-term good, is every child\u2019s transition into adulthood. It\u2019s called growing up. But somehow we\u2019re failing to do so politically; indeed, we seem to be moving backwards.<\/p>\n

I say this because I\u2019ve seen and felt it happening in my own lifetime. While the USA has always been a warrior culture, built on a foundation of conquest and exploitation, that\u2019s only been part of the picture. Movements of liberation and the expansion of the mantle of humanity have always been a part of the social\u2014and political \u2014 picture as well, but today they seem less so than I can remember. Militarism, in increasingly juvenile intensity, has been getting, it seems, free rein. Why?<\/p>\n

Reason number one, according to Astore\u2019s analysis, is \u201cthe privatization of war\u201d: its takeover by corporate America. There was a time when \u201cwar profiteer\u201d was an epithet, a name for someone who would sully national ideals to make a profit on the mobilization for war. There was also a time when people opposed, in large, vocal numbers, the commercialization of Christmas. In both cases, the old idealism has been poisoned by money.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Barbara Ehrenreich puts it in her book Blood Rites<\/em>: \u201cMeanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commercialism, as an end in itself, has no interest in what\u2019s good for us or, even less so, what\u2019s good for the future. Like cancer, it destroys its host. What we need to survive on this planet is not a global defense budget that eclipses every other human need.<\/p>\n

Astore\u2019s second reason for our state of endless war flows from the first: \u201cthe embrace of the national security state by both major parties.\u201d This is a symptom, of course, as well as a cause. It\u2019s also an indication that our democracy, at least at the national level, has gone the way of Christmas. We have a democracy-for-profit, which means that Barack Obama, elected on an enormous \u2014 indeed, global \u2014 peace mandate, has proceeded through his presidency as Bush Lite, modifying but perpetuating our state of endless war. Understanding peace may be a prerequisite for adulthood, but politically we\u2019re caught in perpetual adolescence.<\/p>\n

The prime requirement of war is \u201can enemy.\u201d And the first thing we do when we\u2019re at war is dehumanize that enemy. And as long as we\u2019re at war, that enemy must stay dehumanized, which explains the shocking weirdness, outed last month, of the behavior of North Miami Beach\u2019s police department \u2014 acting as a brigade on our war\u2019s domestic front \u2014 which was caught using mugshots of real people (men of color, of course) as shooting range targets.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all part of the endless war. This particular incident was still publicly shocking, fortunately, and the city council was humiliated into banning the practice when clergy and others from around the country began posting pictures of themselves on Facebook with the hashtag #UseMeInstead.<\/p>\n

And it worked: conversation interrupted. I wish I knew how we could stop dehumanization practices just as effectively when we commit them beyond our own borders.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Robert 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> or visit his website.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Tribune Content Agency, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

The urgency I feel isn\u2019t any longer to stop a particular war but to interrupt endless war: to interrupt the narrowly focused geopolitical conversation, conveyed to us over and over by media stenographers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53582","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=53582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}