Militarized Economy, Brutalized Society

by Doug Dowd

The economic consequences of the endless, always substantial, and now obscenely increasing military expenditures by the United States since World War II have deserved the amount of critical scrutiny they have received in the past and the present. And it would have been reasonable to expect such military outlays and the attendant criticism to have produced considerable alarm and outrage among all sorts of people in our society — given that they demonstrably

1) waste human and nonhuman resources in prodigious degrees and ways (e.g., the Pentagon using as much oil as all but seven nations),

2) distort educational and occupational structures and leach away productivity in the economy, and, among other matters,

3) are a low-yield producer of jobs and incomes for ordinary people, when compared with non-military (or reduced) government spending.

That alarm and outrage have been paltry and easily deflected in the face of all this is explained by the non-economic accompaniments of high military spending since World War II: what has been done to the consciousness and the character of our population by the decades of economic militarization.

We the people have been socially novocained, brutalized. We have allowed ourselves to be numbed to the violation of our ideals and the degradation of the quality of our lives, have traded away our sanity, our decency, our good sense, even our instinct for survival, in the frantic chase after MORE! — more of anything and everything, come hell or high water. Our long habituation to living in a voraciously commercializing society, the real and imagined jobs and incomes from the militarized economy, and the relentless socializing processes of the Cold War and institutionalized anti-Communism, have lowered what were already feeble defenses against the erosion of humanistic standards.
There is little new to be said about any of this, but our times have become so very dangerous that it seems necessary to reemphazise this political sociology of military expenditures which, when all is said and done, is what will destroy us, what will finally allow “the button” to be pressed.

About two centuries ago, when Samuel Johnson observed that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, he could have had no conception of what would happen if and when such “patriotism” became institutionalized, spreading like an oil spill into every nook and cranny of the society, becoming for politicians (among others) not just a last refuge, but a starting-point — even, for all too many, a way of life. There is of course a Ron Dellums now and again, but he is the Berkeley exception proving the national rule: one needs only the fingers on one hand to count his likes in the Congress of the United States.

The squalid uses of patriotism are not novel to our times or this place, nor did military spending and its accompaniments first take on significance in or outside the United States only after World War II; of course not. But the whys and wherefores of a perpetually militarized economy in today’s world have a uniquely vivid meaning for us, here and now: what has taken shape in our lifetime must be understood and fought against very well, if life — let alone a decent life — is to be preserved on this planet., That is new.

It could be argued that the Germans under Bismarck.(and his successors) were the great innovators in the arts of social brutalization, in the half century that produced World War I. The French did not lag far behind in those arts, and the United States — with Hearst and the “splendid little war” that took us into overseas imperialism — were coming up fast. The Germans held their lead along enough to create what was, until World War II, the greatest triumph of the emerging techniques of mind manipulation — namely, Nazi Germany.

But just as the United States was for both simple and complex reasons to become Number One in such skills for the selling of commodities, by the close of World War II it had also become the pace-setter in mind managing for the selling of political candidates and social perspectives: for, that is, altering the consciousness and the character of the people so as to bring forth on this continent the new social order of “corporate liberalism” (or “monopoly capitalism” or “the warfare-welfare state”). Call that new order what you will, sitting close to its hot center was the political economy of military expenditures, an essential development if capitalism was to survive the 20th century — and itself impossible without the political sociology of those expenditures.

That after World War II the United States had to and could create such a society stemmed from its needs and from its power. We were the sole surviving major nation possessing either economic or military strength. Only the United States could hold global capitalism together, bring it back to life, make it flourish once more. As we moved to do these things, we created the most extensive and profitable empire in history. That achievement, in turn, was made possible only by two organically related and essential processes: the orchestration of a Cold war foreign policy and an anti-Communist crusade at home and, secondly, from 1940 through 1980 (to be taken further and faster by Reagan) the highest and most persisting levels of military expenditure in world history: conservatively estimated, more than three trillion dollars worth by the United States. So imperialization, militarization, and brutalization marched shoulder to shoulder, requiring and making possible a massive state apparatus and an increasingly cunning mass communications industry (with its greatest strength in television — think what Hitler could have done with television!).

Supplying consumer and capital goods and arming most of the world in the years after 1945 meant rising real per capita consumption for the people of this country, or at least a substantial majority of them; and the “consumerism” that was thus made possible also provided an objective foundation for the subjective alterations of the era: better Cold war than cold breadlines, any day.

Difficult though it may be to believe, now, the mind of the public in the United States before World War II was in general non-militaristic, anti-militaristic, even pacifistic: World War I was viewed as senseless, a European mess at least partially brought on by munitions makers, “the merchants of death.” (In most of the interwar period, federal expenditures on the postoffice exceeded those on the military — something the latter neither forgot nor forgave.)

But the processes accompanying and following World II succeeded in changing the negative outlook toward the military, as those years also whittled away at what had never been more than a slender reed of social concern. There were, of course, the social and antiwar protests of the 1960s, and they were in some sense effective considering the small percentage of the population directly involved. But their effectiveness was fleeting anc even, finally, perverse: the years following the protests were, after all, the years of Nixon, of Ford, Carter and now, a standing affront to reason and decency, of Reagan. Through all those changes, however, there were great ropes of continuity.

The institutions of this country, more than any other’s, have been framed around the search for individual gain, what else they may have been., for better and for worse. We have had a schooled tradition teaching us that social concern and social action are not only unnecessary in a market society, but harp to all. (Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan are products, creators of that attitude.) In the past generation or so there has been a noticeable thickening of our always thick crust social aloofness, changing acquisitiveness into infantile greed, causing an always blinkered social outlook to become one blindness, deafness, and dumbness. This nation, “conceive liberty,” becomes increasingly brainless, thoughtless, careless heartless, dehumanized: brutalized.

It should not be necessary to do more than just touch high points of the process by which all this was brought to Analytically, one may distinguish four overlapping periods: World War II; the years 1946 through the 1950s; the 1960s early 1970s; and the post-Indochina years, during which the Cold War has simmered down (until Reagan) and the economy has fallen into the mire of stagflation.

The enduring significance of World War II is that it — and only it — ended the twelve years of deep depression that began in 1929. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 (at least some provoked and anticipated by the White House) the official employment rate (always a significant understatement of reality) stood at 9.9 percent. It had not been that low since 1930 since which year the rate had been between 14 and 25 percent; but since 1939 military production had been rising. In 1944 the rate was the lowest ever recorded: 1.2 percent, that was the same year in which almost half of the gross national product went to the military.

As Studs Terkel has shown so well in his book Hard Times, the people of this country have never forgotten either the depression or the war that got us out of it; and it is evident that those who remember such things will go along with anything “to keep the wolf away from the door.”

World War II was not only an economically stimulating, it was also a very well propagandized war, a popular war, a war in which the mass media — radio, films., newspapers, magazines — developed and honed the skills of selling ideas and attitudes. I then that they learned also how to enlist celebrities Ronald Reagan and John Wayne) to dazzle the masses while personifying the proper attitudes and behavior. In short, the war placed to rest the anti-militaristic attitudes that had been widespread in the United States, while readying the population for the further transformation to be created in the years after 1946, years of Cold War, pervasive and intense anti-Communism, and hot war.

“First things come first, and our defense program must have top priority.” Ronald Reagan? No, Harry S. Truman, more than thirty years ago. Truman loved the military. Until he was elevated to the U.S. Senate by the rotten and powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City (Missouri), the high point of Truman’s life had been his services as an artillery officer in World War I. He was nothing but enthusiastic in his support for dropping the atomic bomb, twice, against what were by August 1945 the militarily helpless Japanese (they had run out of oil long before). These were the first blasts of the Cold War against the Soviet Union more than the last shots of World War II.

In the years of the developing Cold War against the Soviet Union after 1946 what kinds of “defense” did the United States require? Every economically and militarily significant nation had been flattened by World War II, and the Soviet Union more than any other. Representative of the destruction to that country is the number of their people killed during the war (as estimated by the United Nations) 28 million. (The U.S. lost 400,000.)

But just as the United States was unlikely to become engaged in World War II had it not been attacked, so it was unlikely that the people of this country would have supported the expansion of our global role and the continued militarization of our economy and society unless it could be shown that the United States was threatened from abroad: running in and out of Cold War arguments was the specter of “Munich” and of Pearl Harbor, the notion that World War II was a product of military weakness, and of “isolationism.”

And so, after Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, Truman standing by his side (1946), Truman and his Pentagon and corporate cronies orchestrated the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. The C.I.A. and the National Security Council and the Truman (Greece-Turkey) Doctrine all were established in 1947 (the same year in which the War Department had its name changed to the Department of Defense), and not for the last time the United States participated in the crushing of popular forces (in Greece) while facilitating the installation of a military dictatorship. From that year on there ensued what seemed to be an endless proliferation of “mutual defense” organizations — from NATO to SEATO. All these arrangements required armies and navies, supplied mostly by the United States and supplemented by U.S. armed forces (arid the C.I.A.): by 1970 there were 3.5 million men and women in the U.S. armed forces, 1.2 million. of whom were stationed in over two thousand locations in 119 countries spread over the globe.

Between the “employment” of so many millions in the military, the production and incomes generated by military expansion here and abroad, and the ongoing consequences of expanding aid, trade, and investment programs abroad, the U.S. economy could not help but flourish — and Cold War propaganda had no difficulty finding receptive minds.

It is now generally understood and stated that no responsible person in the State Department or the Pentagon thought there was any likelihood whatsoever that the Soviet Union would seek to gain territory in Europe or elsewhere by military force (as distinct from using force to hold control in “their” territories in Eastern Europe) in the decades during which the Cold War was developed. The Soviet threat was a Cold War fabrication. Its fraudulence was quickly joined in the late 1940s by the fabricated threat of Communism in the United States. The main instrument of that accomplishment in the propaganda arts was Senator Joe McCarthy. A drunk, a cynic, and an incompetent, McCarthy searched in 1950 for some means of gaining support for his hoped-for (and realized) reelection in 1952. His equally cynical advisers helped him to find that issue: Communists in the (Democratic) Administration. His first step in that process has become a classic: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [employees] that were made known to the Secretary of State [Dean Acheson] as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

It mattered not then, (and evidently it matters not still) that no single person. on that “list” was ever in fact named, let alone proved to be “guilty.” It matters a great deal, however, that the society was altering in such a fashion that an irresponsible mediocrity such as McCarthy could gain enormous and intimidating power, achieved by climbing a ladder made solely of lies and innuendo. When he was finally brought to earth it was because his basic stupidity led him to accuse the U.S. Army of harboring communists at high levels, not because of the damage he had done to the processes of government and the rest of society. Its spine temporarily stiffened by an enraged Pentagon, the U.S. Senate ,finally voted to criticize McCarthy for bringing “dishonor and disrepute” to that presumably august body — all things considered, something like carrying coals to Newcastle. Even that mildest of affronts was voted against by twenty-two of our distinguished senators.

After that, McCarthy dithered into oblivion and died, a few years later (1957), of cirrhosis of the liver. But the death of McCarthy did not mean the death of McCarthyism, a ,noxious weed that lives and flourishes to this day. If anything, his removal from the scene allowed virulent anti-Communism to continue, but without the embarrassments of the vulgar Joe McCarthy.

The Cold War and McCarthyism made anti-Communism the major theme of’ U.S. politics, and produced one of the major ironies of postwar history: it was a relatively easy (and predictable) matter for anti-Communism to mutate into anti-liberalism (and not for the first time, here or elsewhere). As that process took hold, around 1950, anti-Communism came to be used as a weapon against its progenitors, the Democratic Party. The career of Richard Nixon more than symbolized this process. His elections as U.S. Representative, then U.S. Senator, then Vice-President, and finally, twice, as President, all had their foundations solidly in his mastery of the anti-Communist mode, a mode he perfected as a model for others from 1946 on. A veteran of such deceptions already in 1952, when he campaigned for Eisenhower’s election as Ike’s bully boy, Nixon’s style was nicely exemplified in his attacks on the staunchly conservative Cold Warrior Adlai Stevenson: “Adlai the appeaser…a Ph.D. graduate of Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist containment.” (Acheson, of course was one of the prime architects of the Cold War, and a Wall Street heavy.) For the Democrats, anti-Communism had become a Frankenstein monster; to this day they have been unable to shake off the suspicion that beneath the skin of anyone to the left of Grover Cleveland lurks a potential Soviet spy. There is some justice, if not much.

So it was that the United States was enabled by its population to engage in enormously wasteful and excessive military expenditures while pursuing a largely covert and aggressive foreign policy. That foreign policy had three main dimensions to it: overthrowing legally-elected governments, as in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and, much later, Chile (1973); installing and maintaining repressive military dictatorship, as in Nicaragua and Greece (among many other countries); moving from such activities into full-scale war, as in Korea and Indochina (and now El Salvador?). There were also serious meanings for the powerful allies of the United States: the West Europeans had to cut and trim their military and their economic policies to suit their continued dependence upon the United States, as did Japan. And late we shall look at some of what this meant to the “enemies” of the United States.

Until Vietnam, and except for Vietnam (and now, perhaps, E. Salvador?) the people of this country sat by approvingly o: silently. The 1950s were called “the silent Fifties”; the year: since Watergate have been about as silent — until yesterday. If the 1940s and 1950s, as the groundwork for all this was being laid and built upon, there was not, in the land of the brave anc the home of the free, much of a peep. Why?

Where and how are minds shaped? In all aspects of oui lives, of course: in the family, in schools, in organized religion, in the media, entertainment, and sports, in our jobs. Ir all those corners of our lives minds were being shaped in the same way, after 1946, shaped to fit the assumptions and accept the actions of the Cold War and the anti-Communist crusade; purges in the film industry (once more, Ronald Reagan, front and center), loyalty oaths in the universities and in much of public employment (even for church tax. exemptions), vociferous patriots such as Cardinal Spellman and Norman Vincent Peale in the pulpits; a steady drumbeat of patriotism and vilification of “Reds” in the movies, in the press, on radio and TV, with the Star-Spangled Banner increasingly becoming -a requirement for all sporting events; and ALL politicians mouthing the pieties of the era.

After 1946 the entire universe of political and social discourse, what was and what was not discussed and in what manner, shifted over to the Right, leaving criticisms of what was happening outside the Pale, to “Communists” — or, at best, to “dupes.” The phenomenon of Nixon tells the tale: hard though it is for some to believe now, Nixon in the late 1940s was seen as an extremist of the Right. By the late 1960s, Nixon was viewed as being a moderate, and had Spiro Agnew do his “extremist” hatchetwork for him (much as Nixon had done the same for Eisenhower in the 1950s): that was “the new Nixon.” Today, in comparison with Reagan, Nixon is looked back upon with some longing by many as a paragon of common sense and restraint in foreign policy and as being reasonably decent in domestic policies. But Nixon never changed, except to gain more power over time. It was the nation, the people, that changed, moving steadily to the right under the influence of permanent Cold War and entrenched anti-Communism: leaving Nixon in the middle, standing still. When Nixon was re-elected in 1972, he was more popular than he had been ever before; and when he was pushed from office in 1974 it was not because he was seen as being overly bellicose (although we now know he was prepared to use nuclear weapons rather than lose in Vietnam), or too conservative, but because he was caught in a blunder and was too arrogant to bend enough to get out of it. The people were made ready for Nixon over the years from 1946; he was his own undoing. And Ronald Reagan is a logical continuation of the very process that produced Nixon.

We need linger no longer on the details. When the 1960s began, and the young Kennedy spoke of his New Frontiers, it was not suspected that those frontiers would be at the Bay of Pigs, would bring the world to the edge of world war in the Cuban missiles crisis and take us to other frontiers in Indochina and the longest war in our history. Kennedy was himself a product and a beneficiary of the Cold War, an enthusiastic anti -Communist. It was Kennedy, after all, who made the most significant early escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam, where he placed 22,000 of our soldiers by 1962. What came to be called “the best and the brightest” were neither good enough nor bright enough to even seek to find their way out of the poisonous vines strangling the possibilities of decency and good sense for this country, and much of the rest of the world. It is not the Nixons and the Reagans who represent the full meaning of the Cold War-shaped consciousness and character of the United States in the past several decades; it is those for whom we have had at least some respect or, if not that, then some affection: for Eisenhower, for Kennedy, even for LBJ. Many people wept when they died; but the tragedy was in their lives not their deaths, in the deadly and soul killing policies that they all supported and helped to create, policies the support of which made it possible for them to become Presidents of the United States.

And now there is something else to be said, of great importance: as the people of the United States were losing what remnants of sanity and decency they possessed after World War II, the peoples of other countries were having their lives deformed and diverted, not least the peoples of the non-capitalist (“enemy”) countries. In laying out its Cold War battalions abroad, the U. S. was not only militarizing its own society, and, to a lesser extent the societies of its allies, it was also requiring the non-capitalist (socialist, communist) countries of the world to become militarized. In that process, and one must believe this to have been a self-conscious and deliberate intent on the part of the Cold Warriors, the U.S. was crippling the possibilities of those countries moving toward realization of their economic and political ideals. And, in those countries, leadershiF could endure only insofar as it was a militarily-inclined arc fear-dependent leadership. ‘Who can say how much damage has beer. done thereby to the future possibilities of our species, done by intransigent capitalism?

Still, saying all this, and there is much more of the same that has been left unsaid, there is hope. The domestic and foreign crusades of the brutalizers have not brutalized everyone nor, probably, fully brutalized more than a few. The upheavals of the 1960s may have been less effective and durable than necessary and desirable; but neither those who joined them nor those who appreciated them faded from the scene, and this country will never be the same. (Nor will other countries that then and subsequently have produced such upheavals — whether one means by that France in 1968 or Poland in 1981–82.) It is at least as important to note that the global capitalism pieced together by the United States in the decades after World War II had begun to come unstuck in the 1970s, and does so at a faster pace in the 1980s. The U.S. no longer has either the carrots or the sticks to create the world in its own image; indeed we have problems enough trying to keep our economy from sliding down the tubes.

And Reagan: Reagan, a dogmatic ideologue of the free market economy and of Macho America — “I have drawn a line in the dirt,” says he, of his fiscal policies — is, dangerous and inane though he may be, is perhaps just what we needed to begin to regain our sanity, our decency, our sense of survival. He is, after all, the incarnation of what years of militarization and brutalization mean. He shows us what we have become, for he would not otherwise be our President. Viewing his regime, it is not difficult to conclude that any further steps in the same processes and we are done for.

Life does not thus become easy; indeed it becomes more difficult. To get out of this deep and messy hole, we shall have to climb out without help from above. It will not be the Congress of the United States (or its Big Business, Big Agriculture, and Big Labor supporters) that will take the first or any decisive steps to bring this society back to its senses. The members of the Congress are in their positions of power because, with varying degrees of consciousness, they accepted the train precepts of the past generation or more. They have shown themselves time and time again to be foolish, cowardly and corrupt (McCarthyism, Korea, Tonkin Gulf and Indochina, the Reagan budget, etc., etc., etc.).

It will have to be the ordinary people of this country who save us, if we are to be saved; it will have to be we who will initiate, develop, shape, and continue a set of processes that will enable us to move toward becoming whole human beings. And those processes will be worth developing only if they are democratic, peaceful and cooperative in means and ends. Either we have learned that by now or our time to learn it is over.

June 24, 2003