Source: http://americanempireproject.com/blog/demobilizing-america/
A Nation Made by War and a Citizenry Unmade By It
by Tom Engelhardt
On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught
something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of
Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,”
an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on
psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art
Museum. To my surprise, it also included a few artifacts from a movement
crucial to my own not-especially-countercultural version of those years: the
vast antiwar protests
that took to the streets in the mid-1960s, shook the country, and never really
went away until the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn
from Vietnam in 1973. Included was a poster of the American flag, upside
down, its stripes redrawn as red rifles, its stars as blue fighter planes, and
another showing an American soldier, a rifle casually slung over his
shoulder. Its caption still seems relevant as our never-ending wars
continue to head for “the
homeland.”
“Violence abroad,” it said, “breeds violence at home.” Amen,
brother.
The next day, I went to a small Rosie the Riveter Memorial museum-cum-visitor’s
center in a national park in Richmond, California, on the shores of San
Francisco Bay. There, during World War II, workers at a giant Ford plant
assembled tanks, while Henry Kaiser’s nearby shipyard complex was, at one
point, launching a Liberty or Victory ship every single day. Let me
repeat that: on average, one ship a day.
Almost three-quarters of a century later, that remains mindboggling. In
fact, those yards, as I learned from a documentary at the visitor’s center, set
a record by constructing a single cargo ship, stem to
stern, in just under five days.
And what made such records and that kind of 24/7 productiveness
possible in wartime America? All of it happened largely because the gates
to the American workforce were suddenly thrown open not just to Rosie, the famed riveter, and so many other women whose
opportunities had previously been limited largely to gender-stereotyped jobs,
but to African Americans, Chinese Americans, the aged, the disabled, just about
everyone in town (except incarcerated Japanese Americans) who had previously
been left out or sold short, the sort of cross-section of a country that
wouldn’t rub elbows again for decades.
Similarly, the vast antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s
was filled with an unexpected cross-section of the country, including
middle-class students and largely working-class vets directly off the
battlefields of Southeast Asia. Both the work force of those World War II
years and the protest movement of their children were, in their own fashion,
citizen wonders of their American moments. They were artifacts of a
country in which the public was still believed to play a crucial role and in
which government of the people, by the people, and for the people didn’t yet
sound like a late-night laugh line. Having seen in those museum exhibits
traces of two surges of civic duty — if you don’t mind my repurposing the word
“surge,” now used only for U.S. military
operations leading nowhere — I suddenly realized that my family (like so many
other American families) had been deeply affected by each of those mobilizing
moments, one in support of a war and the other in opposition to it.
My father joined the U.S. Army Air Corps immediately after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He would be operations officer for the First
Air Commandos in Burma. My mother
joined the mobilization back home, becoming chairman of the Artist’s Committee
of the American Theatre Wing, which, among other things, planned entertainment
for servicemen and women. In every sense, theirs was a war of citizens’
mobilization — from those rivets pounded in by Rosie to the backyard “victory
gardens” (more than 20 million of
them) that sprang up nationwide and played a significant role in feeding the
country in a time of global crisis. And then there were the war bond
drives for one of which my mother,
described in an ad as a “well known caricaturist of stage and screen stars,”
agreed to do “a caricature of those who purchase a $500 war bond or more.”
World War II was distinctly a citizen’s war. I was born in
1944 just as it was reaching its crescendo. My own version of such a
mobilization, two decades later, took me by surprise. In my youth, I had
dreamed of serving my country
by becoming a State Department official and representing it abroad. In a land
that still had a citizen’s army and a draft, it never crossed my mind that I
wouldn’t also be in the military at some point, doing my duty. That my
“duty” in those years would instead turn out to involve joining in a
mobilization against war was unexpected. But that an American citizen
should care about the wars that his (or her) country fought and why it fought
them was second nature. Those wars — both against fascism globally and
against rebellious peasants across much of Southeast Asia — were distinctly
American projects. That meant they were our responsibility.
If my country fought the war from hell
in a distant land, killing peasants by the endless thousands, it seemed only
natural, a duty in fact, to react to it as so many Americans drafted into that
military did — even wearing peace symbols
into battle, creating antiwar newspapers on their military bases, and
essentially going into opposition while still in that citizen’s army. The
horror of that war mobilized me, too, just not in the military itself.
And yet I can still remember that when I marched on Washington, along
with hundreds of thousands of other protesters, it never occurred to me — not
even when Richard Nixon
was in the White House — that an American president wouldn’t have to listen to
the voices of a mobilized citizenry.
Add in one more thing. Each of those mobilizing moments, in its own
curious fashion, proved to be a distinctly American tale of triumph: the
victory of World War II that left fascism in its German, Italian, and Japanese
forms in literal ruins, while turning the U.S. into a global superpower; and
the defeat in Vietnam, which checked that superpower’s capacity to destroy,
thanks at least in part to the actions of both a citizen’s army in revolt and
an army of citizens.
The Teflon Objects of Our American World
Since then, in every sense, victory has gone missing in action and
so, for decades (with a single brief moment of respite), has the very idea that
Americans have a duty of any sort when it comes to the wars their country
chooses to fight. In our era, war, like the Pentagon budget
and the growing powers
of the national security state, has been inoculated against the virus of
citizen involvement, and so against any significant form of criticism or
resistance. It’s a process worth contemplating since it reminds us that
we’re truly in a new American age, whether of the plutocrats, by the
plutocrats, and for the plutocrats or of the generals, by the generals, and for
the generals — but most distinctly not of the people, by the people, and for
the people.
After all, for more than 15 years, the U.S. military has been
fighting essentially failed or failing wars —
conflicts that only seem to spread the phenomenon (terrorism) they’re supposed
to eradicate — in Afghanistan, Iraq, more recently Syria, intermittently Yemen,
and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. In
recent weeks, civilians in those distant lands have been dying in rising
numbers (as, to little attention here, has been true periodically for years now).
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s generals have been quietly escalating
those wars. Hundreds, possibly
thousands, more
American soldiers and special ops forces are being sent into
Syria, Iraq, and neighboring Kuwait (about which the Pentagon will no longer
provide even inaccurate numbers); U.S. air strikes have been on the rise
throughout the region; the U.S. commander in Afghanistan is calling for
reinforcements; U.S. drone strikes recently set a new record for
intensity in Yemen; Somalia may be
the next target of mission creep and escalation; and it looks as if Iran is now
in Washington’s sniper scopes.
In this context, it’s worth noting that, even with a significant set of
anti-Trump groups now taking to the streets in
protest, none are focused on America’s wars.
Many of these developments were reasonably predictable once Donald
Trump — a man unconcerned with the details of anything from healthcare to
bombing campaigns — appointed generals already deeply implicated
in America’s disastrous wars to plan and oversee his version of them, as well
as foreign policy generally. (Rex Tillerson’s State Department has, by now,
been relegated to
near nonentity-hood.) In response, many in the media and elsewhere began
treating those generals as if they were the only “adults” in the
Trumpian room. If so, they are distinctly deluded ones. Otherwise
why would they be ramping up their wars in a fashion familiar to anyone who’s
been paying attention for the last decade and a half, clearly resorting to more
of what hasn’t worked in all these years? Who shouldn’t, for instance,
feel a little chill when the word “surge” starts
to be associated again with the possibility of sending thousands more U.S.
troops to Afghanistan? After all, we already know how this story ends,
having had more than 15 years of grim lessons on the subject. The
question is: Why don’t the generals?
And here’s another question that should (but doesn’t) come to mind
in twenty-first-century America: Why does a war effort that has already cost
U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars
not involve the slightest mobilization of the American people? No war
taxes, war bonds, war drives, victory gardens, sacrifice of any sort, or for
that matter serious criticism, protest, or resistance? As has been true
since Vietnam, war and American national security are to be left to the pros,
even if those pros have proven a distinctly amateurish lot.
And here’s one more question: With an oppositional movement gearing
up on domestic issues, will our wars, the military, and the national security
state continue to be the Teflon objects of our American world? Why, with the sole
exception of President Trump (and in his case only when it comes to the
way the country’s intelligence agencies have dealt with him)
is no one — with the exception of small groups of antiwar vets and a tiny number of similarly determined activists
— going after the
national security state, even as its wars threaten to create a vast arc of
failed states and a hell of terror movements and unmoored populations?
The Age of Demobilization
In the case of America’s wars, there’s a history that helps explain
how we ended up in such a situation. It would undoubtedly begin with an
American high command facing a military in near revolt in the later Vietnam years and
deciding that the draft should be tossed out the window. What was needed, they
came to believe, was an “all-volunteer” force (which, to them, meant a
no-protest one).
In 1973, President Nixon obliged and ended the draft,
the first step in bringing a rebellious citizen’s army and a rebellious
populace back under control. In the decades to come, the military would
be transformed — though few here would say such a thing — into something closer
to an American foreign legion. In addition, in
the post-9/11 years, that all-volunteer force came to shelter within it a
second, far more secretive military, 70,000 strong:
the Special Operations Command. Members of that elite crew, which might
be thought of as the president’s private army, are now regularly dispatched
around the globe to train literal foreign
legions and to commit deeds that are, at best, only half-known to
the American people.
In these years, Americans have largely been convinced that secrecy
is the single most crucial factor in national security; that what we do know
will hurt us; and that ignorance of the workings of our own government, now
enswathed in a penumbra of
secrecy, will help keep us safe from “terror.” In other words, knowledge
is danger and ignorance, safety. However Orwellian that may sound, it has
become the norm of twenty-first-century America.
That the government must have the power to surveil you is by now a
given; that you should have the power to surveil (or simply survey) your own
government is a luxury from another time. And that has proven an effective
formula for the kind of demobilization that has come to define this era, even
if it fits poorly with any normal definition of how a democracy should function
or with the now exceedingly old-fashioned belief that an informed public (as
opposed to an uninformed or even misinformed one) is crucial to the workings of
such a government.
In addition, as they launched their Global War on Terror after
9/11, top Bush administration officials remained obsessed with memories of the
Vietnam mobilization. They were eager for wars in which there would be no
prying journalists, no ugly body counts, and no body bags heading home to
protesting citizens. In their minds, there were to be only two roles
available for the American public. The first was, in President George W.
Bush’s classic formulation,
to “go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families, and enjoy life the
way we want it to be enjoyed” — in other words, go shopping.
The second was to eternally thank
and praise
America’s “warriors” for their deeds and efforts. Their wars for better or
worse (and it would invariably turn out to be for worse) were to be people-less
ones in distant lands that would in no way disturb American life — another
fantasy of our age.
Coverage of the resulting wars would be carefully controlled;
journalists “embedded” in the military; (American) casualties kept as low as
possible; and warfare itself made secretive, “smart,” and increasingly robotic
(think: drones) with death a one-way street for the enemy. American-style
war was, in short, to become unimaginably antiseptic and distant (if, that is,
you were living thousands of miles away and shopping your heart out). In
addition, the memory of the attacks of 9/11 helped sanitize whatever the U.S.
did thereafter.
In those years, the result at home would be an age of
demobilization. The single exception — and it’s one that historians will
perhaps someday puzzle over — would be the few months before the Bush
administration’s invasion of Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of Americans (millions globally)
suddenly took to the streets in repeated protests. That, however, largely
ended with the actual invasion and in the face of a government determined not
to listen.
It remains to be seen whether, in Donald Trump’s America, with that
sense of demobilization fading, America’s wars and military-first policies will
once again become the target of a mobilizing public. Or will Donald Trump
and his Teflon generals have a free hand to do as they want abroad, whatever
happens at home?
In many ways, from its founding the United States has been a nation
made by wars. The question in this century is: Will its citizenry and its form
of government be unmade by them?
