June 22, 2024
The term is
“banal militarism”—that is to say, violence and the preparation for violence so
utterly commonplace that most people don’t even notice. Banal militarism is as
American as apple pie. It’s also global in scope.
Demonstrators protest arms sales to Israel outside the Eurosatory weapons expo in Paris on June 17, 2024.As Richard
Rubenstein writes: “Part of the reason for the relative immunity of militarism
to criticism is the extraordinary cultural power in American society of
pro-military institutions and ways of thought. What some analysts call ‘banal
militarism’ is omnipresent, so much so that it becomes virtually invisible,
part of the air that one breathes.”
That is to say,
banal militarism manifests itself in the stories we tell, the symbols we
revere, the movies we watch. Even the metaphors we use! The war on drugs... the
war on (my God!) cancer... on and on. Once the nation even went to war against
obesity (I think we lost).
“The term,”
Rubenstein continues, “points to the ways in which the use of armed force is
legitimized or encouraged by a thick network of everyday assumptions, customs,
rituals, and emotions that are accepted semi-consciously as constituting part
of our personalities and our collective identity.”
This is the
essence of what must change about who we are. We’re at, you might say, an
evolutionary stopping point. The path to peace—the path to tomorrow—is wide
open and stunningly visible, if we just open our eyes and push ourselves beyond
our banal certainties. I usually maintain my focus on the militarism of my own
country, but because heavily guarded national borders are part of the problem,
looking beyond the “sweet land of liberty” is also necessary. Thus I definitely
went into wake-up mode when I read about a recent arms-show controversy in
France, which was oh so laden with irony.
It involves a
semiannual event called Eurosatory, which is no less than the largest weapons
show in the world, involving, as TheNew York Times explained, more than 2,000
arm dealers from more than 60 countries. It’s an event “where military and
security officials from around the world rub shoulders with manufacturers
showcasing drones, missiles, and other weapons and technologies.”
Wow! The whole
world is making itself safer!
What happened
this year, however, is that French President Emmanuel Macron became outraged
after an Israeli bombing raid on a a tent camp in Rafah killed dozens of
Palestinians and, a month ago, the government of France declared that Israeli
arms manufacturers would not be allowed to attend Eurosatory. (Note: Russian
weapon dealers were also banned because of the war in Ukraine.)
This led to
outrage by the Israelis, who challenged Macron’s decision, and just a few days
ago, as Eurosatory was about to start, a Paris court ruled that the ban was
discriminatory and ordered that it be lifted. That’s the essence of the
controversy, which certainly put the arms show into the public spotlight—at
least for me. So I got a chance to read about the show and such matters as its
expanding focus on, oh... “suicide drones” and the ubiquity of cluster bombs
and such.
And I found
myself more or less split down the middle by the irony of the Israeli arms ban
and reinstatement and the incursion of “moral integrity” into an event about
the most up-to-date ways to kill your enemies. It’s a grandstand celebration of
war profiteering—but the wars have to be good and just and approved by NATO.
Note: U.S. weapons dealers were certainly welcome.
Speaking of
which, I turn to the words of William Hartung, who reflects on the gradual
normalization of war profiteering. Arms dealers have successfully uncloaked
themselves from the insulting term “merchants of death,” as exemplified by a
recent speech by President Joe Biden, which Hartung quotes:
You know, just as in World War Two, today, patriotic
American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of
freedom.
The actual
merchants of death—the corporate arms manufacturers—are suddenly invisible. In
their place are ordinary men and women, patriotic Americans, creating the
bullets and missiles, the MRAPs and suicide drones, maybe even the nuclear
weapons, that constitute the arsenal of democracy. Freedom exists only for
those who are well armed and, ipso facto, ready to kill. And the job of the
president is to sell this message to the public. As I have noted previously,
he’s the country’s public-relations director in chief. That may be his main
job.
So there you
have it. Banal militarism. Is there an alternative?
Theologian
Walter Wink, in his book The Powers That Be, puts that question into an eerily
large context, calling it “the myth of redemptive violence”—the belief, the
lie, that violence is the foundation of freedom. “It doesn’t seem to be mythic
in the least,” he writes. “Violence simply appears to be in the nature of
things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first
resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence
certainly functions as a god.”
A banal god, I
would say, quietly sneaking into our consciousness, telling us we need to wage
war on all our problems—you know, bang! Just make ’em go away, whether evil
nations, terrorists, insulting gunmen in a Dodge City saloon, drugs, or crime,
or cancer.
Think of all the
evil we’ve purged in the 21st century alone. And it’s all consequence-free.
Just ask the arms dealers.
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