The Real Enemy Is Within
By Chris Hedges
September 07, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Truthdig"
- If you are not dedicated to the destruction
of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you
cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side
issue. It is the issue. It is why I refuse to give a pass in
this presidential election campaign to Bernie Sanders, who refuses
to confront the war industry or the crimes of empire, including U.S.
support for the slow genocide carried out by Israel against the
Palestinians. There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic
or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.
Militarists and war profiteers are our greatest
enemy. They use fear, bolstered by racism, as a tool in their
efforts to abolish civil liberties, crush dissent and ultimately
extinguish democracy. To produce weapons and finance military
expansion, they ruin the domestic economy by diverting resources,
scientific and technical expertise and a disproportionate share of
government funds. They use the military to carry out futile,
decades-long wars to enrich corporations such as Lockheed Martin,
General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. War is a business.
And when the generals retire, guess where they go to work? Profits
swell. War never stops. Whole sections of the earth live in terror.
And our nation is disemboweled and left to live under what the
political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls
“inverted totalitarianism.” Libertarians seem to get this. It is
time the left woke up.
“Bourgeois society faces a dilemma,” socialist
Rosa Luxemburg writes, “either a transition to Socialism, or a
return to barbarism ... we face the choice: either the victory of
imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient
Rome—annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard;
or the victory of Socialism—the victory of the international working
class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This
is the dilemma of world history, either-or; the die will be cast by
the class-conscious proletariat.”
The U.S. military and its array of civilian
contractors operate as enforcers and hired killers across the globe
for corporations, many of which pay no taxes. Young men and women,
many unable to find work, are the cannon fodder. The U.S. military
has served as the handmaiden of capitalism since it committed
genocide against Native Americans, carried out on behalf of land
speculators, mineral companies, timber merchants and the railroads.
The military replicated this indiscriminate slaughter at the end of
the 19th century in our imperial expansion in Cuba and elsewhere in
the Caribbean, in Central America and especially in the Philippines.
Military muscle exists to permit global corporations to expand
markets and plunder oil, minerals and other natural resources while
keeping subjugated populations impoverished by corrupt and brutal
puppet regimes. The masters of war are the scum of the earth.
It was the war profiteers and the military, as
Seymour Melman has pointed out, that conspired after World War
II to keep the country in a state of total war, deforming the
economy to continue to produce massive amounts of weapons and
armaments in peacetime. The permanent war economy is sustained
through fearmongering—about communists during the Cold War and about
Islamic jihadists today. Such fearmongering is used not only to
justify crippling military expenditures but to crush internal
dissent. The corporatists and the military, which have successfully
carried out what
John Ralston Saul calls a “coup d’état in slow motion,” have
used their political and economic clout to dismantle programs and
policies put in place under the New Deal.
Brian Waddell writes of this process:
The requirements of total war ... revived
corporate political leverage, allowing corporate executives
inside and outside the state extensive influence over wartime
mobilization policies. ... Assertive corporate executives and
military officials formed a very effective wartime alliance that
not only blocked any augmentation of the New Dealer authority
but also organized a powerful alternative to the New Deal.
International activism displaced and supplanted New Deal
domestic activism. Thus was the stage finally set for a vastly
extended and much more powerful informal U.S. empire outside its
own hemisphere.
The war machine is not, and almost never has been,
a force for liberty or democracy. It does not make us safe. It does
not make the world safe. And its immense economic and political
power internally, including its management of the security and
surveillance state and its huge defense contracts, has turned it
into the most dangerous institution in America.
Military expenditures bleed the federal
budget—officially—of $598.49 billion a year, or 53.71 percent of all
spending. This does not, however, include veterans’ benefits at
$65.32 billion a year or hidden costs in other budgets that see the
military and the war profiteers take as much as $1.6 trillion a year
out of the pockets of taxpayers. The working and middle class fund
the endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and
a host of other countries while suffering crippling “austerity”
programs, massive debt peonage, collapsing infrastructures, chronic
underemployment and unemployment and mounting internal repression.
The war industry, feeding off the carcass of the state, grows fat
and powerful with profits. This is not unique. It is how all empires
are hollowed out from the inside. As we are impoverished and
stripped of our rights, the tools used to maintain control on the
outer reaches of empire—drones, militarized police, indiscriminate
violence, a loss of civil liberties, and security and
surveillance—are used on us. We have devolved, because of the poison
of empire, into a Third World nation with nukes. We are ruled by an
omnipotent, corporate oligarchy and their Pretorian Guard. The
political class, Republican and Democrat, dances to the tune played
by these oligarchs and militarists and mouths the words they want it
to say.
C. Wright Mills in “The
Power Elite” warns of a military machine that not only holds the
political and economic life of the nation hostage but also has the
ability to form public opinion. The Pentagon spends $4.7 billion a
year and has some 27,000 employees who work on recruitment,
advertising, psychological operations and public relations,
according to a 2009 report by The Associated Press. But millions of
dollars more for propaganda are hidden within classified budgets.
The Pentagon places its commentators and pundits on the airwaves,
produces “news” stories for the press, has ubiquitous advertising,
runs junkets for Wall Street capitalists and elected officials and
manages how Hollywood and television portray war and the military.
Mills writes:
… [I]n all of pluralist America, there is no
interest—there is no possible combination of interests—that has
anywhere near the time, the money, the manpower, to present a
point of view on the issues involved that can effectively
compete with the views presented day in and day out by the
warlords and by those whom they employ.
This means, for one thing, that there is no
free and wider debate of military policy or of policies of
military relevance. But that, of course, is in line with the
professional soldier’s training for command and obedience, and
with his ethos, which is certainly not that of a debating
society in which decisions are put to a vote. It is also in line
with the tendency in a mass society for manipulation to replace
explicitly debated authority, as well as the fact of total war
in which the distinction between soldier and civilian is
obliterated. The military manipulation of civilian opinion and
the military invasion of the civilian mind are now important
ways in which the power of the warlords is steadily exerted.
The extent of the military publicity, and the
absence of opposition to it, also means that it is not merely
this proposal or that point of view that is being pushed. In the
absence of contrasting views, the very highest form of
propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a
definition of reality within which only certain limited
viewpoints are possible. What is being promulgated and
reinforced is the military metaphysics—the cast of mind that
defines international reality as basically military. The
publicists of the military ascendency need not really work to
indoctrinate with this metaphysics those who count: they have
already accepted it.
The naked greed and violence that define empire,
understood by writers such as Joseph Conrad,
Eduardo Galeano and Arundhati Roy, is masked within empire
behind the cant of patriotism and nationalism, which sanctify
self-exaltation and racism. Imperial war is transformed through the
magic of propaganda into glorious spectacle. Galeano once wrote that
“each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the
good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It’s always
the same story repeating once and again and again.”
The hypermasculinity of the military, celebrated
by Hollywood and the media, is seductive to an underclass trapped in
menial, dead-end jobs. Empires feed like vultures on these pools of
frustrated surplus labor. They manipulate their feelings of
powerlessness. This is why capitalists create pools of surplus
labor. Those who are desperate to secure a place in society are easy
fodder for the military and ready candidates for underpaid jobs
without benefits or job security. Our corporate, neofeudal society
is by design.
The sons and daughters of the elites rarely serve
in the military. The military, even at the service academies such as
West Point, attracts those who have been cast aside by neoliberalism.
Often, before joining the military, they lack a clearly defined
identity or sense of purpose. They are terrified of being pushed
permanently into the underclass. They are especially susceptible to
indoctrination. The military teaches soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines not to think, not to challenge assumptions and structures,
but to obey and to be “tough” and “strong.” This hypermasculine
culture glorifies the state and state violence. It renders all human
beings outside the sacred national circle as objects to control or
exploit. It creates a binary world of good and evil. It sanctifies
violence, especially male violence. It is why rape is endemic in the
military. It is why pornography and violence against women are so
pervasive in the culture. Tenderness, nurturing and empathy, along
with intellectual inquiry and artistic expression, are banished. The
weak and the vulnerable deserve to be cast aside. Our enemies
deserve to be killed. It is the culture of death. And we drink deep
from this dark elixir.
W.E.B. Du Bois warns that
empire was the primary tool used to break the working class in
Europe and later in the United States. As workers organized and
fought for rights and fair wages, the masters of empire started to
shift production to countries more easily controlled, countries
inhabited by “darker peoples.” This is a shift that is largely
complete.
“Here, are no labor unions or votes or questioning
onlookers or inconvenient consciences,” Du Bois writes. “These men
may be used down to the very bone, and shot and maimed in ‘punitive’
expeditions when they revolt. In these dark lands ‘industrial
development’ may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the
industrial horror of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and
maiming, with one test of success—dividends.”
Du Bois also knew that the costs of maintaining
empire were offset by the profits. “What do nations care about the
cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and
gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
he asks.
The reality of empire is nearly impossible to see
from the heart of empire. Those who speak its truth are banished
from the airwaves. They are condemned as traitors or
“anti-American.” The cries of empire’s victims are rarely heard. The
crimes that empire commits are rendered invisible. The greed of the
war makers, along with the corruption and dishonesty of the
political, judicial, academic and media courtiers who serve empire,
is blocked from public view. The image of empire is scripted like a
Walt Disney movie. This mythical narrative is disseminated in films,
on television, by the press, in churches, in universities and by the
state. It is a lie. But it is a lie that works. And it works because
it is what we want. It appeals to our fantasies about ourselves:
that we are a virtuous people, that God has blessed us above others,
that we have the highest form of civilization, that we have been
anointed to police the world and make it safe, that we are the most
powerful and righteous nation on earth, that we are always assured
of victory, that we have a right to kill in the name of nationalist
values—values determined by our naked self-interest and that we
conveniently define as universal.
Noam Chomsky, more than perhaps any other American
intellectual, has laid bare the latent forces of totalitarianism in
our midst and warned us against the contagion of empire. He says:
Those with deep totalitarian commitments
identify the state with the society, its people, and its
culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the
Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as “anti-Soviet” or “hating
Russia.” For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize
the policies of the U.S. government are “anti-American” and
“hate America”; those are the standard terms used by
intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply
committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even
recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history,
tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways.
For the totalitarian, “patriotism” means support for the state
and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds
that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose
instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, “patriotism”
means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society,
its people, its culture. That’s a natural sentiment and one that
can be quite positive. It’s one all serious activists share, I
presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But
the kind of “patriotism” fostered by totalitarian societies and
military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by
much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of
the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all
in before too long.
There can be no rational debate about empire with
many desperate Americans who have ingested this as their creed. The
distortion of neoliberalism has left them little else. Here lies the
virus of fascism, wrapped in the American flag, held aloft by the
Christian cross and buttressed by white supremacy. It is a potent
and dangerous force within the body politic. And it is growing. The
real enemy is within.
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa
and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The
Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.
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