The Intoxication of War by Chris Hedges
America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development, and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic, reason, or fact. No nation is immune.
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A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic, and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry. The essence of the military is masked with subterfuges — using the military to carry out humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in the Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention” or a way to protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as carrying out a vital civic function by teaching leadership, responsibility, ethics, and skills to young recruits. The true face of the military — industrial slaughter — is hidden.
The mantra of the militarized state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.
It was not in our national interest to wage war for two decades across the Middle East. It is not in our national interest to go to war with Russia or China. But militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Also, elevating soldiers to near deity-hood and saying that questioning military intervention is not supporting the troops and unpatriotic. I have heard many veterans say they are sick of hearing thank you for your service. One said (on social media) if you want to thank me, tell politicians to stop the wars.
The elevation of patriotism to a near-religious status is concerning. People are considered to not be “real Americans” unless they vocally and unabashedly support rampant US militarism. Both parties partake in this practice.
Some are defending Daniel Penny, who choked Jordan Neely to death on a New York City subway, by saying that the former Marine was “doing what he was trained to do.”
While I am not sure this absolves him culpability, those people are making a valid point. Once someone is trained to kill, the impulse to use deadly force, especially if coupled with PTSD and triggered by an event, make such tragedies as Jordan Neely’s death, if not inevitable, then at least more likely.
It’s terrible that our economy is so militarized that many young people see joining the Armed Forces as a way out of the projects or into a remunerative career. I think of all of those people who join the Air Force because they want to fly (only a small percentage of people in the AF actually do so) or join one of the other branches to learn electronics or any number of other skills.
As a long-ago Army Reservist, I tell people, especially the young, who are thinking of joining the Armed Forces that if the military trains you in some useful skill or pays for your education, they are doing it because they think it will make you a better, more efficient killer. It doesn’t matter if you never shoot at, or are shot at, in anger, if you are working in the military, you are in some way aiding and abetting the slaughter or, at least, the decimation of communities and industries cannibalized by the ravenousness of the military-industrial complex and the rapaciousness of those who profit from it.
I know I’ve said this in other comments: Read Smedley Butler’s “War Is A Racket.”
National security shouldn’t be something America has to worry about, unlike Russia, China, Europe, we have our very own continent protected by two huge oceans.