Chris Hedges: The Disease of Permanent War

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



The Disease of Permanent War
Posted on May 18, 2009

By Chris Hedges


The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads – personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

“War,” Randolf Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”

In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090518_the_disease_of_permanent_war/

[elleng]

1. On endless war,

and bushies:

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/27683

[Peace Patriot]

2. True enough. The Republicrat Forever War is here. But what do we do about it?

My suggestion, what I think is our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY as a majority liberal people (which I am quite sure of): Undo the privatization of our vote counting system, and restore vote counting to the public venue. All of our voting systems are now run by a handful of far rightwing corporations, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. This was accomplished very swiftly, without public debate, during the 2002 to 2004 period, with a $3.9 billion boondoggle from the Anthrax Congress. And this is what 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting was and is for<[/i>: to perpetuate the Forever War.

We still have the potential power to restore transparent vote counting, by citizen movements at the state/local level, where control over voting systems still resides. Congress is never going to fix this. Once they take your right to vote away--or any other right, but this one is fundamental to democracy--they never 'give' it back. You have to TAKE it back. That is what we must do, Transparent vote counting is THE most important condition needed for real change. That is why they took it away.

The majority of Americans never supported the Iraq War (nearly 60% opposed, all polls, Feb. '03, just before the invasion--info that was backpaged in the corpo/fascist media bloodlust of that period), but were conned into thinking that the Afghanistan war was okay, because the pretext seemed reasonable (destroy the perps of 9/11). The bogus nature of that 'cause' has now become apparent. A couple of months ago, the Pentagon floated their new justification for the war on Afghanistan--to eradicate the opium poppy. I laughed out loud. Wherever the U.S. military and billions in U.S. military aid go, there the drug trade prospers. Colombia, Mexico, now Afghanistan. So they create the problem that they then use as an excuse for more boondoggle war looting. Whether that problem is the civil chaos in Iraq that Rumsfeld deliberately created, or U.S.-armed and funded Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan, established by the CIA, or--now--the poppy trade in Afghanistan (that the Taliban had destroyed, but that now flourishes, given the presence of the U.S. military), and whether, as many believe--and as I believe--it is a phony "Pearl Harbor" on U.S. soil, called for by the Project for a New American Century (Bush nazi war plan) and executed on 9/11/01--the story is always the same: The "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned against, in his final speech as president, creates the causes of war that it then sells as a mind-fuzzing narrative to the American people, who are looted for the humongous costs of maintaining this war machine.

What was remarkable was that so many Americans saw through the fog of warmongering bullshit on the Iraq war. That was the "legacy" of Vietnam that Cheney, Rumsfeld and their crony evildoers so wanted to eradicate: vast skepticism about the Forever War; hatred of unjust war; belief that war must be a last resort; belief in the international rule of law; the desire for a peaceful country and a peaceful world. They wanted to kill that legacy. Diebold & brethren's 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines were designed to overcome the American peoples' desire for peace, if these Darth Vaders should fail to kill that legacy and fail to nazify us. They did fail, and thus we got Bush/Cheney four more years of the Forever War anyway, compliments of Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia and their nazi owners, and now we have a much better-sounding president who was permitted to be elected to shut us all the fuck up, but who cannot stop the Forever War, because they can Diebold him out of office in 2012. They have already started the narrative!

The best thing we can do for Obama--whom I believe has good intentions, but compromised with these fuckwads to gain power (including agreement with the deal of no prosecution of the Bushwhack principles in exchange for their not nuking Iran, and for their leaving the White House peacefully when the time came--a deal that I believe was made back in 2006 when Rumsfeld resigned)--the best thing we can do, to untie Obama's hands, is to get rid of 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting. It will not solve all problems, but it is the essential first condition of real change.

[Uncle Joe]

3. An excelllent, chilling and thought provoking article.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[katty]

4. as always, Chris, excellent - we have been defense/war-based

econ/society for so long now--small wonder why our society, across the board is coming apart at the seems.

[CHIMO]

5. His Interview on Media Matters

This past weekend.

Chris Hedges, columnist for Truthdig

Our guest this week is Chris Hedges. Hedges, who writes a weekly column for Truthdig that is published every Monday, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of several books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and most recently When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists.

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/
http://willmedia.will.uiuc.edu/ramgen/archives/mediamatters090517.rm

[Wednesdays]

6. K&R

:kick: