A Culture of Unreality, Militarism, Outlawry, and Arrogance

Time for change

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Mon Oct-18-10 11:03 PM
Original message

A Culture of Unreality, Militarism, Outlawry, and Arrogance

That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. – an unnamed aid to George W. Bush, in an interview with Ron Suskind, later identified as Karl Rove.

The above quote has been frequently used to call attention to the fact that the presidential administration of George W. Bush had no respect for truth or reality, but rather made up its own reality as it went along, to suit its own purposes. It’s a telling and chilling quote, reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel, “1984”, which depicted the horrendous evils of a totalitarian state, as well as the ability of a totalitarian state to make up its own realities, as manifested by such slogans as “War is peace”, “Ignorance is strength”, and “Freedom is slavery”.

War can be depicted as peace by naming the government agency of war the “Defense Department”. Since its main purpose is “defense”, a nation that accounts for a mere 5% of the world’s population can expend as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, accumulating massive national debts, while the architects of that military expenditure complain with a straight face that the national debt can be resolved only through massive cuts in social programs – and few call them on their absurd reasoning. Such a nation can invade other nations and bomb the hell out of them, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and justify it as “defense” or “national security”. And then its leaders can refer to those from the invaded nation who resist their invasion as “terrorists”. And when the excuse for the invasion is proven to be a lie, they can simply change the reason for the invasion to something like, “We’re trying to bring democracy to them. They should be grateful to us. Why do they try to kill our brave soldiers who are trying to liberate their country?”

Ignorance is strength in that as long as we remain ignorant of reality we can create our own reality, which is much more pleasing and self-satisfying. We can believe that we are so superior to others that we can do whatever we want – or whatever our leaders tell us we need to do – without having to worry about whether it is right or wrong. Everything we do is morally right by definition. And slavery is freedom in that as long as we do everything that our leaders tell us to do and think what they tell us to think, we will be “free” – and it requires almost no work to do that.

Don’t think for a minute that this started or ended with the Bush II administration. All nations indoctrinate their citizens in their national myths, in their attempt to create loyalty. But in the United States, aided by a press corps that is largely subservient to corporate interests, it has reached ridiculous proportions in recent years.

Refusing to see reality as it is rather than as one would like it to be has its price. When individuals fail to perceive reality to an extreme extent psychologists refer to them as “psychotic”, and they can be institutionalized for that. But when whole cultures manifest that problem we don’t have a well accepted term for it. Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman deal with this issue in their book, “Toward Psychologies of Liberation”:

When one recognizes the possibility that historical amnesia, manic defense, and normative deafness may be central to the way one knows the world (i.e. perceives reality), one can begin to think about their deadening effects. Interruptions may then be revelatory by producing moments of undeadness that wake us up…

U.S. militarism

Perhaps the most fundamental misconception that Americans have about their country is that it is a shining example to people throughout the world of a “nation of laws and peace”. Yes, it has lots of laws, and most of them are enforced to one degree or another. But as a member of the international community it sticks out like a sore thumb as the prime example of an outlaw nation with a long history of military aggression of dubious morality.

The continental expansion of our nation involved more than a century of wars against the then current inhabitants of our continent, leading to their near extermination and a war of aggression against Mexico (1846-8). To bolster our economy, hundreds of thousands of former Africans were born or sold into slavery, stripped of all rights whatsoever, and often had to endure a lifetime of brutality at the hands of their white masters. Those facts are fairly well known. But too many Americans think of all that simply as “past history”.

In this post I noted numerous illegal, immoral, or genocidal overseas military and other aggressive interventions in sovereign nations, including: Hawaii (1893); Puerto Rico (1898); Cuba (1898-1903); the Philippines (1899-1902); Nicaragua (1909); Honduras (1912); Russia (1918-); Iran (1953); Vietnam (1954-73); South and Central America (1954-); Cuba (1961); Indonesia (1965); the Dominican Republic (1965); Cambodia (1970-75); Laos (1969-74); and East Timor (1975).

Most or all of the military or CIA interventions noted above were illegal as well as immoral. And there have been lots more. The mere fact of forceful intervention against a sovereign nation was what made them illegal and immoral. Beyond that, many or most of them were associated with additional crimes and/or atrocities:

The Vietnam War
U.S. atrocities in the Vietnam War, for example, were a regular occurrence. Much of the evidence for that comes from the testimony of veterans, such as one who testified at the 1971 Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit, explaining the attitude towards the Vietnamese people that was instilled in U.S. soldiers.

It wasn’t as if they were humans. We were conditioned to believe this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and that anything we did was o.k. And like when you shot someone you didn’t think you were shooting at a human. They were a gook or a Commie and that was o.k. … and they were inferior to us. We were Americans, we were the civilized people.

Iraq War
An article by Laila Al-Arian described shocking testimony from a veteran of the Iraq War:

Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a "free-fire zone," Hicks was told, and no "friendlies" or civilians remained in the area. "Game on. All weapons free," his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks's unit opened a furious fusillade, firing wildly into cars, at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human and animal corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 "enemy combatants." But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. "I will agree to swear to that till the day I die," he said. "I didn't see one enemy on that operation."

Soldiers and marines at Winter Soldier described the frustration of routinely raiding the wrong homes and arresting the wrong people… "This is not an isolated incident," the testifiers uttered over and over… insisting that the atrocities they committed or witnessed were common….

While the Winter Soldiers offered a searing critique of the military's treatment of civilians, which they described as alternately inhumane and sadistic, they also empathized with fellow soldiers thrust into a chaotic urban theater where the lines between combatants and civilians are blurred. "It's criminal to put such patriotic Americans...in a situation where their morals are at odds with their survival instincts"…

Proxy war in Central America
We’ve also committed numerous crimes by proxy. Carl Boggs describes U.S. sponsored aggression in Central America during the 1980s in his book, “The Crimes of Empire – Rogue Superpower and World Domination”. Referencing the U.N. Commission on Salvadoran Death Squads, Boggs says:

Their agenda was to wipe out all domestic opposition to the Washington-backed power structure. In the period 1980 to 1992 the U.S. spent six billion dollars to sustain one of the most ruthless proxy military campaigns ever waged in the Western hemisphere. That campaign produced a death toll estimated as high as 75,000, along with displacement of one fourth of the population (mostly poor peasants)…

U.S. outlawry in general

I’ve discussed the frequent U.S. use of torture during the Bush administration in several previous posts, including this one. In another post I discussed the flagrant abuse of international law during the Bush II administration. Carl Boggs talks about the U.S. use of torture and other crimes against humanity quite a bit in his book. Here is a summary paragraph:

A nation that has so often carried out military aggression, wantonly attacked civilian populations and targets, destroyed entire societies, used weapons of mass destruction, and deployed its armed might to crush oppositional movements around the world – killing millions and displacing tens of millions more in the process – cannot be expected to shy away from torture and similar atrocities… Illegal detentions, denial of due process, kidnappings, assassinations, death squad murders, and cruel interrogation methods are simply another expression of imperial power.

Boggs makes the point that, following the U.S. efforts to establish a solid basis for international law following World War II – in the creation of the United Nations and in the Nuremberg Tribunal – its adherence to international law has been abysmal:

The sad reality is that, following Nuremberg, Washington has never supported an independent tribunal with jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and human rights abuses… The U.S. steadfastly ignored the International Criminal Court, justifiably fearful that such an impartial tribunal might be empowered to try American government and military personnel for war crimes… None of this bodes well for the future of international legality and peaceful relations among nations that just six decades ago was upheld as the great promise of Nuremberg, the U.N. Charter, and the Geneva Conventions.

Of all the international laws objected to by the Bush administration, the International Criminal Court (ICC) topped the list. Though the Bush administration provided many excuses for its hostility to the ICC, the underlying issue appeared to be that it could not tolerate the possibility that an American could ever be tried before the Court. For example, Bush claimed that the Court’s jurisdiction cannot extend to Americans because that will undermine “the independence and flexibility that America needs to defend our national interests around the world”. Phillip Sands, in his book “Lawless World – The Whistle-Blowing Account of How Bush and Blair Are Taking the Law into Their Own Hands”, posed the following pertinent rhetorical question to that excuse:

The flexibility to do what? The flexibility to commit war crimes? The flexibility to provide assistance to others in perpetrating crimes against humanity? The flexibility to turn a blind eye when your allies commit genocide?

Of course the Bush administration was not alone in that attitude. No other U.S. presidential administration has seen fit to join the ICC either.

U.S. arrogance

Of course the refusal to be bound by international law is one flagrant indication of arrogance. Boggs provides numerous examples in his book. Perhaps the best example is the rationalization the U.S. uses in its refusal to be bound by international law – which basically is that it is inconceivable that U.S. government officials or soldiers could commit an international crime. Boggs explains:

No U.S. political leader has ever believed that any facet of American global behavior could possibly be regarded as illegal or criminal; whatever occurs under the aegis of Washington decision-making is, by definition, noble, beyond the reach of ethical or legal condemnation… Those standing in the way of U.S. power often find themselves depicted as impediments to human progress, as enemies of democracy…

Most egregiously, the refusal to be bound by international law even extends to the most fundamental of war crimes – the undertaking of aggressive war:

The erosion of American political culture is so advanced that legal and moral concerns about U.S. global behavior never get raised, much less debated. In late 2002 the U.S. Congress gave President Bush “authority” to use military force against Iraq, as if such a resolution affirming superpower interests might trump established principles of international law. The American political consensus was, and still remains, that such rules cannot set limits to the pursuit of national interests, as reflected in Bush’s statement on the eve of war, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass”. The prevailing ethos among U.S. politicians, the media, and even most academics was that “preemptive war” against Iraq might be illegal but it was nonetheless legitimate.

This attitude applies not only to U.S. elites – It extends to most of the American people as well:

A 2005 German Marshall Fund survey found Americans far more willing than Europeans to dismiss the U.N. and other international organizations in situations where vital U.S. objectives might be compromised. The poll revealed that Americans have less interest in global events and institutions than do Europeans and, by a large majority, believe U.S. leaders should not be required to seek U.N. approval for military action… No doubt many years of U.S. outlawry and rejectionism were destined to have this sort of impact on the public opinion.

Propaganda in the cause of creating a culture of unreality

Carl Boggs speaks of how the U.S. propaganda machine usually persuades the American people to support the wars that our elites favor:

Immense financial and military resources, often secretly allocated, have been poured into such operations. Targeted groups are systematically demonized through efforts of government, the mass media, think tanks, and public relations campaigns, so that popular consent is manufactured for any U.S. military operation that the elites decide to pursue.

In the case of Iraq the propaganda machine went into action several years ahead of time:

The road to war never followed on the basis of actual problems and threats related to Iraq, but was opened up by a lengthy, expensive propaganda campaign managed in great part by the Rendon Group and abetted by the corporate media… The Pentagon secretly awarded Rendon tens of millions of dollars in contracts to provide the ideological context in which regime change in Iraq could be effectively pursued… Rendon was able to construct a public understanding of Iraq as the greatest menace to world peace…

Boggs explains that the American people have been so thoroughly documented into the cause of war that they have learned to overlook terrible crimes – crimes that the United States took the lead in defining with its leadership in the creation of the United Nations following World War II:

Of course no political actors admit to conscious intent when it comes to their criminal behavior… yet for the U.S. military the pattern of criminal behavior is so lengthy, so repetitive, so obvious, so extreme, and so clearly tied to imperial aims that only Americans indoctrinated in the pervasive ideology of Empire might blindly overlook it.

It’s not only active propaganda that indoctrinates the American people into this lawless culture. It’s also what is NOT spoken of.

In “The American Way of War”, Tom Engelhardt spends much space discussing the widespread use of American airpower in the cause of war, with emphasis on the resulting massive civilian casualties – otherwise known as “collateral damage”. Despite the fact that this use of airpower frequently and clearly constitutes war crimes, it is rarely mentioned by U.S. politicians, journalists, or other elites:

The expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story… Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event… that no one thinks it worth the bother?

Engelhardt also notes the strange criteria for what constitutes war experts in our country:

Among those automatically disqualified for expertise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of the catastrophe that ensued before it happened. Disqualified above all were any of those antiwar types…

Consequences

The consequences of U.S. militarism, outlawry, arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reality when it stares them in the face have not yet been fully manifested – not by a long shot. Boggs comments that the United States poses the greatest threat of any nation to the survival of world civilization as we know it:

By the early 21st Century, it would not be too far-fetched to depict the U.S. as the foremost menace to planetary survival. Washington has waged illegal warfare in flagrant contempt of the U.N., international law, and world public opinion; carried out indiscriminate attacks on civilians and life-supporting infrastructures; broken or disregarded many international treaties; perpetrated massacres and other atrocities; practiced torture; carried out crimes by proxy; planned the militarization of outer space; possesses by far the largest nuclear arsenal still encased in first-use doctrine; and imposed ruinous sanctions on nations designated as “enemies.” This horrific legacy remains very much alive within a still-expanding imperial edifice tied to a permanent war economy, security state, hundreds of military bases scattered across the globe, and a growing presence in outer space.

I would just add to that the U.S. role in planetary climate change, which threatens massive world-wide catastrophes for humans and animals the likes of which have never before been seen, in the not very distant future. The U.S. is the biggest per capita contributor to the problem, yet is the only rich nation in the world that refuses to contribute substantially to the solution.