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THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE WARFARE STATE
- Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole
living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family depend on the
Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is concentrated on
military ends. The press mimics conventional cold war opinion in its editorials.
In less than a full generation, most Americans accept the military-industrial
structure as "the way things are." War is still pictured as one more kind
of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic
bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past "policy
necessities" that preceded the wonderful economic boom of 1946. The facts
that our once-revolutionary 20,000 ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled by 50 megaton
weapons, that our lifetime has included the creation of intercontinental ballistic
missiles, that "greater" weapons are to follow, that weapons refinement is
more rapid than the development of weapons of defense, that soon a dozen or
more nations will have the Bomb, that one simple miscalculation could incinerate
mankind: these orienting facts are but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous
separates the citizen from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the result
of a lifetime saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where could we
begin, even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can only assume
things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University of Kentucky says,
"we regard peace and war as fairy tales." And a child has asked in helplessness,
perhaps for us all, "Daddy, why is there a cold war?"
- Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is prelude
to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral history of
the twentieth century, from the First World War to the present. A half-century
of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual's ability to
make moral distinction, it has made people understandably give up, it has
forced private worry and public silence.
- To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology itself,
determines the political and social character of the state being defended
-- that is, defense mechanism themselves in the nuclear age alter the character
of the system that creates them for protection. So it has been with American,
as her democratic institutions and habits have shriveled in almost direct
proportion to the growth of her armaments. Decisions about military strategy,
including the monstrous decision to go to war, are more and more the property
of the military and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians
assuming a ratifying role instead of a determining one. This is increasingly
a fact not just because of the installation of the permanent military, but
because of constant revolutions in military technology. The new technologies
allegedly require military expertise, scientific comprehension, and the mantle
of secrecy. As Congress relies more and more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the existing chasm between people and decision-makers becomes irreconcilably
wide, and more alienating in its effects.
- A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to "sell" the need
for congressional appropriations, to conceal various business scandals, and
to convince the American people that the arms race is important enough to
sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare. So confusion prevails about
the national needs, while the three major services and the industrial allies
jockey for power -- the Air Force tending to support bombers and missilery,
the Navy, Polaris and carriers, the Army, conventional ground forces and invulnerable
nuclear arsenals, and all three feigning unity and support of the policy of
weapons and agglomeration called the "mix". Strategies are advocated on the
basis of power and profit, usually more so than on the basis of national military
needs. In the meantime, Congressional investigating committees -- most notably
the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee
-- attempt to curb the little dissent that finds its way into off-beat magazines.
A huge militant anticommunist brigade throws in its support, patriotically
willing to do anything to achieve "total victory" in the Cold War; the government
advocates peaceful confrontation with international Communism, then utterly
pillories and outlaws the tiny American Communist Party. University professors
withdraw prudently from public issues; the very style of social science writing
becomes more qualified. Needs in housing, education, minority rights, health
care, land redevelopment, hourly wages, all are subordinated -- though a political
tear is shed gratuitously -- to the primary objective of the "military and
economic strength of the Free World."
- What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this human
sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected the quandaries
and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated nation in a turbulent
world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes a sheer inability to react to
a sequence of new problems.
- Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence of poised
nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former colonial powers. In
the both areas, the Soviet Union and the various national communist movements
have aggravated internation relations in inhuman and undesirable ways, but
hardly so much as to blame only communism for the present menacing situation.