Me on War -- Appendix A

From the e-mail file, some comments, dated April 13 and 14, on a news item dealing with Phil Donahue's new film, "Body of War":

As for Donahue -- all well and good, but someone needs to investigate why the American public is so psychologically invested in war -- not just this one, but war in general. Why is it, for instance, that at long last we seem to be the most warlike society on the planet? Now, this is not the same as individual _Americans_ being "warlike" or belligerent or temperamental -- we are still fairly phlegmatic most of the time as individuals -- probably about average for white people at least -- but as a society (read: government, if you like) we are perpetually ready to send troops in anywhere, any time, for any reason, and we usually do. This ought to be the main focus -- that, and why there is so little resistance -- relatively speaking -- on the part of the public, including those who get hurt the most -- to the government's policies. If Americans were serious about stopping gratuitous war we would expect any anti-war candidate to win over any pro-war candidate. But that's clearly not the way it works -- in fact, it's usually the other way around. Anti-war people are still regarded as limp-wristed "wusses" and cowards by most people -- and war is still widely regarded as the preferred way for young men to "prove" their masculinity, and for the society as a whole to prove _its_ masculinity. And all the anti-male chauvinist and pacifist appeals on earth are not going to change that.

Another society that was very militaristic was Japan, up to and through WWII. But they had a change of heart after most of their country had been destroyed, all of their military materiel lost, huge numbers of troop casualties, and two A-bombs lobbed on them. I suspect that this country would need a lesson of comparable magnitude in order to change its ways. So how is this supposed to come about?

[My correspondent's reply was: " Very interesting questions. It’s my impression, not terribly well supported, that the strong pro-war sentiment is actually something fairly new in American history. 80% of Americans were opposed to entry into WWII in 1941, until Roosevelt engineered an attack. There was also little sentiment, I believe, for entry into WWI, until the attack on the Lusitania was similarly provoked. But that merely leaves the question of what has changed in more recent decades. One possible factor is Truman’s creation of the military-industrial complex, which gives large numbers of people a financial stake in war. But there’s clearly something ideological going on, and not just financial."] My response:

I think the ideological and the financial exist in a state of symbiosis. Granted, the financial interest is more stable and long-term. It is also more "calculating". The ideological is less stable and more amenable to propaganda, e.g. the abolitionists before the Civil War and the "yellow press" prior to the Spanish-American War. People who are subject to the winds of propaganda and persuasion are the rightful victims of those who have made more sober assessments as to their own gains and losses. But there is something _behind_ the vulnerability to propaganda -- perhaps a sense of insecurity re: the "American experiment" and all the delusions that go with it. Which is to say, there is a kind of feeling that America keeps "failing" to provide the utopia that was promised or implied by the Revolution, and which goes back, ideologically, to the Reformation. America was supposed to be the place where all these ideals would finally be put into practice, unfettered by the inertia of the European regimes. The New World was a clean slate, upon which anything could be writ with equal conviction. So, what better place to try out the Reformation/Protestant/humanistic ideals that had been developed in England (mostly) than over here? And the Revolution did, in fact, succeed -- and many of the promises were kept -- up to a point. We had the "Era of Good Feeling" and Jacksonian Democracy, etc. but there was a heart of darkness, i.e. Masonic utopianism and secularism (actually brought to a much more dramatic head in the French Revolution), and also a major flaw in practice, namely slavery. So these were handicaps that were with us from the beginning, and which bore -- and continue to bear, to this day -- fruit of various poisonous kinds. So the answer to failure is not to re-examine our premises, but to try again, and "harder".

Whether the democratic (or at least federalist) ideals of the Founding Fathers would have stood quite so solidly _absent_ these "occult" influences -- i.e., Masonic utopianism and Reformation secularism -- is a good question. One wishes they could have stood alone, but maybe not. And if the latter, it calls into question the entire American experiment -- democracy -- representative government -- etc. Maybe it really is all an idea founded on a delusion. But that, if it is indeed the case, provides an even stronger argument for libertarianism and limited government. I.e., if we can't even trust "pure" democracy to provide the (philosophically) desired result, then what can we trust, and the answer is no "form" of government per se, but an _absence_ -- in as much as possible -- of government. Just enough government to guarantee certain rights, but not more -- because "more" will start to erode those rights, and the point at which this occurs is -- or ought to be -- a main topic of debate among libertarians. Taking the historical model, it probably happened sometime in the early 1800s, certainly well before the Civil War. (And yet we see de Tocqueville, writing at that very time, warning about the hidden flaws in American democracy, which would eventually rise to the surface with a vengeance.) Everything we've had since is on the "too much government" side, and what we've had since the New Deal is _way_ too much government.

But to return to the war question, if we limit the _ability_ of government to wage war, then it will not be so critical what the people "think". People see government as a way of protecting people from their own folly and delusions -- but a better argument can be made for _strictly limited_ government not protecting people from folly and delusions, but protecting them from the _consequences_ of those follies and delusions, by making it virtually impossible to actually carry them out. But, of course, for that you need a government whose primary mission is to be self-limiting -- and as we know it's very hard to find any system -- material, organic, or a hybrid of the two -- capable of doing that. It almost seems as if we need two elements in the mix, one to provide structure to protect individual rights and another to limit the growth of that same structure. Sort of a thesis-antithesis form. Now, the Founding Fathers had something like this in mind with the three branches -- but the way they organized the balance of powers was clearly (in the long run) flawed. That doesn't mean it can't be done right, but who do we turn to for an example?