Tag: Mars

Americans Place Too Much Faith in War

W.J. Astore

Beware worshipping the god of war

Too many Americans see war as a positive force as they applaud Ukraine’s ongoing resistance to Russian aggression; along with seeing war as admirable, they see it as predictable and controllable.  Of course, it’s easy to cheer Ukraine on from thousands of miles away, celebrating their surprising victories over Russia, even as both sides suffer tens of thousands killed, many more injured, and many more forced from their homes.

When Americans think about war, there’s a tendency to focus on favorable outcomes while eliding war’s worst aspects. So, for example, the American Revolutionary War is celebrated for enabling U.S. independence. The U.S. Civil War freed the slaves. World War II liberated the world from the twin threats of Nazi fascism and Imperial Japan’s militarism. Other wars that are far less easy to simplify and spin as positive, such as the Vietnam War or recents wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are dismissed or forgotten, to say nothing of open land grabs as in the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War. Let’s not even talk about the wanton brutality of various wars against Native American peoples glorified in so many westerns of my youth.

Looking at America’s history, Christ, the Prince of Peace, is clearly not America’s favored god. America’s god is a warrior one, like Ares for the Greeks and Mars for the Romans. “Blessed are the war makers” could be a guiding tenet of American life, especially considering how much money is made and power wielded by those who embrace war.

The Greeks had wisdom in seeing war as akin to a god, a powerful force, capricious, unpredictable, intoxicating, and uncontrollable. War can consume a person, a people, a nation. It appeals to our irrational nature, our darkest passions. “War fever” is thus an accurate descriptive phrase. We can be seized by it, deluded by it, consumed by it. 

I’ve never run across “peace fever” as a phrase or descriptor of American behavior.

This being said, here’s an article I wrote a decade ago about the persistence of war. When will we learn that wars not make one great?

The Persistence of War (2013)

A young Tom Cruise loving his machine gun in "Taps"
A young Tom Cruise loving his machine gun in “Taps”

“[W]ar is a distressing, ghastly, harrowing, horrific, fearsome and deplorable business.  How can its actual awfulness be described to anyone?”  Stuart Hills, By Tank Into Normandy, p. 244

“[E]very generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.”  Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, p. 81

The persistence of war is a remarkable thing.  Two of the better books about war and its persistence are J. Glenn Gray’s “The Warriors” and Chris Hedges “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.”   Hedges, for example, writes about “the plague of nationalism,” our willingness to subsume our own identities in the service of an abstract “state” as well as our eagerness to serve that state by killing “them,” some “other” group that the state has vilified.

In warning us about the perils of nationalism, Hedges quotes Primo Levi’s words: “I cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he belongs.”  Levi’s lack of tolerance stems from the hardest of personal experiences: surviving Auschwitz as an Italian Jew during the Holocaust.

Gray takes this analysis in a different direction when he notes that those who most eagerly and bloodthirstily denounce “them,” the enemy, are typically far behind the battle lines or even safely at home.  The troops who fight on the front lines more commonly feel a sort of grudging respect for the enemy, even a sense of kinship that comes with sharing danger in common.

Part of the persistence of war, in other words, stems from the ignorant passions of those who most eagerly seek it and trumpet its heroic wonders even as they stand (and strive to remain) safely on the sidelines.

Both Hedges and Gray also speak to the dangerous allure of war, its spectacle, its excitement, its awesomeness.  Even the most visceral and “realistic” war films, like the first thirty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan,” represent war as a dramatic spectacle. War films tend to glamorize combat (think of “Apocalypse Now,” for example), which is why they do so little to put an end to war.

One of the best films to capture the dangerous allure of war to youth is “Taps.”  I recall seeing it in 1981 at the impressionable age of eighteen.  There’s a tiny gem of a scenenear the end of the film when the gung ho honor guard commander, played by Tom Cruise before he was TOM CRUISE, mans a machine gun.  He’s firing against American troops sent to put down a revolt at a military academy, but Cruise’s character doesn’t care who he’s firing at.  He’s caught in the rapture of destruction.

He shouts, “It’s beautiful, man.  Beautiful.”  And then he himself is shot dead.

This small scene with Cruise going wild with the machine gun captures the adrenaline rush, that berserker capacity latent in us, which acts as an accelerant to the flames of war.

War continues to fascinate us, excite us.  It taps primal roots of power and fear and ecstasy all balled together.  It masters us, hence its persistence.

If and when we master ourselves, perhaps then we’ll finally put an end to war.

Iran Wants War!

W.J. Astore

You won’t see this illustration in the mainstream media:

iran-war-us-bases1

If the Iranians really wanted peace, they’d move their country.

In all seriousness, U.S. media talking heads, many of them retired military officers, are constantly talking about the aggression of others and their weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  Never do these “experts” speak of U.S. aggression and the WMD we have in our possession.  Indeed, the U.S. maintains an earth-busting arsenal of nuclear weapons, and we remain the only country to have used atomic bombs for real (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945).  Yet we’re the ones who have to worry about Iranian nuclear weapons that don’t yet exist (and probably never will)?

Tom Engelhardt has a great new article at TomDispatch.com on how the U.S. always sees itself as the victim, as the aggrieved party, as the one who’s being threatened.  Here’s an excerpt:

So here’s the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an “aggressor” anywhere?

What you might say about the United States is that, as the self-proclaimed leading proponent of democracy and human rights (even if its president is now having a set of love affairs with autocrats and dictators), Americans consider ourselves at home just about anywhere we care to be on planet Earth.  It matters little how we may be armed and what we might do. Consequently, wherever Americans are bothered, harassed, threatened, attacked, we are always the ones being provoked and aggressed upon, never provoking and aggressing. I mean, how can you be the aggressor in your own house, even if that house happens to be temporarily located in Afghanistan, Iraq, or perhaps soon enough in Iran?

The U.S. as an aggressor?  Impossible!  Our military installations, our weaponry, even our wars are all about keeping the peace.  Right?

There was a time, almost 250 years ago, when Americans successfully fought for their independence (though quite a few “loyalists” preferred compromise with the British crown).  There was a time, 75 years ago, when Americans landed on the beaches of Normandy to defeat Nazi aggression.  But when you look at America’s long history of wars, precious few of them can be said to have been defensive in nature.  Indeed, most were acts of aggression, e.g. the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the long bloody wars against Native Americans, the Vietnam War, and more recent, undeclared, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dare I state the obvious?  Americans are generally not shy, diffident, passive people.  Ask most foreigners about Americans and you’ll hear words like pushy, outspoken, loud, and, yes, aggressive.  (Of course. not all Americans fit this description, but think of recent representatives like Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton or Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.)  Yet, with all our aggressiveness, with all our violent tendencies, why do we continue to see others as the pushy ones, the headstrong ones, the ones who want war?

A little empathy, America?  Forget about it!  Come on, Iran.  It’s time to move.  And since the U.S. dominates this planet, I have the perfect destination for you.  How about Mars?

But wait: NASA wants to launch a manned mission there!  And since Mars is named after the god of war, it’s a natural for us.  Red and fiery in the sky — how long until we build our first military base there?