In 1985, President Ronald Reagan was attacked for visiting a German military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, because that cemetery included forty graves of members of the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the Schutzstaffel led by the infamous Heinrich Himmler. Reagan’s intent was to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ending of World War II in Europe, not to celebrate those forty graves among the 2000 in that cemetery. Nevertheless, he was deeply criticized for laying a memorial wreath at Bitburg, as the photo below shows.
Fast forward nearly 40 years to 2023 and we recently witnessed the spectacle of the Canadian Parliament giving two sustained standing ovations to a living (former) member of the Waffen-SS, a Ukrainian (Yaroslav Hunka) who’d joined the Nazis to fight against the Soviet Union in World War II.
No one it seems in the Canadian Parliament thought it odd to applaud a soldier who’d fought on the side of the Nazis during World War II against an ally of Canada. And, yes, the Soviet Union was an ally of Canada and the U.S., and more than any other country was responsible for defeating Hitler and his murderously racist regime, whose most fanatical followers were members of the SS.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apology, meanwhile, was done in two parts. He blamed the House Speaker (who resigned) for this colossal blunder even as he attacked Russia for seeking to exploit the mistake for political advantage. Meanwhile, Poland is seeking to extradite the former member of the Waffen-SS for possible war crimes committed during World War II.
How could such a colossal blunder have occurred, and just before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar?
Knowledge of history was simply cast aside, I think, because the Canadian political “elite” were so eager to showcase a Ukrainian who’d killed Russians, even if he’d done so as a member of the murderous SS. Of course, President Zelensky was present at this debacle, applauding along. It was all about showing support for Ukraine in its allegedly righteous war against Russia, with Canada naturally being on the side of the righteous.
In a recent podcast featuring Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, Kirn noted astutely that the Canadian Parliament, apparently to a person ignorant of World War II and Nazi history, was more than anything applauding itself, celebrating their own rectitude, in saluting an old soldier who’d killed Russians. What did it matter that he’d served Heinrich Himmler, who oversaw the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust? What mattered was showing you stood in solidarity today with Zelensky against Putin.
Heinrich Himmler (center), head of the SS, visits the unit of the Waffen-SS under question, the so-called Galicia Division formed in 1943 (Getty image; BBC News)
If America was “ashamed” of Ronald Reagan in 1985 merely for visiting a cemetery to commemorate war dead where two percent of the graves were Waffen-SS members, how should Canadians feel about their political elite standing as one to stormily applaud a living, breathing, former member of Waffen-SS and saluting him as a hero for killing Russians?
“Ashamed” doesn’t begin to capture the depth of this crime against history.
I remember seeing the first Rambo flick (“First Blood”) in a movie theater in 1982 when I was nineteen and rooting for Sly Stallone’s character against the police and national guardsmen who are sent to kill him. The police think it’ll be easy to subdue one man, but we the viewers know better. As Colonel Trautman, Rambo’s former commanding officer, says in the movie: In war, it’s wise to have “a good supply of body bags” on hand, a telling reminder about the harsh reality of combat.
In “First Blood,” military clothing and the flag offer no protection to John Rambo, who’s treated as a lowlife by the local sheriff
Yet, there’s a deeper meaning to “First Blood” captured near the end of the movie, when John Rambo, having improbably acted as a one-man invincible army (a true “Army of One”), bitterly reflects on his own post-Vietnam experiences. Rambo, breaking down, admits he can’t adapt to regular civilian life. A loner, he feels himself to be a loser, even though he was decorated for heroism in war with the Medal of Honor. Wounded and haunted by war, his soul seared by violence, he surrenders to Colonel Trautman.
The original Rambo movie wasn’t necessarily deep, but it did remind us that soldiers like Rambo carried hidden wounds of war; it also highlighted a societal suspicion, whether just or unjust, of military veterans. The sheriff in “First Blood” has no respect for Rambo as a military “hero”; he sees him as a disreputable and dangerous outsider and just wants to be rid of him, one way or another.
Subsequent Rambo films would portray him as a virtually unstoppable killing machine. In the first sequel, Rambo is sent back to Vietnam to rescue American POWs betrayed and abandoned by the U.S. government. Perhaps the most famous line from that movie is when Rambo asks Colonel Trautman whether, in returning to Vietnam, the government will finally allow U.S. soldiers to win this time. It was a concise statement of the stab-in-the-back myth, the idea the U.S. military would have won the war in Vietnam if only it hadn’t been betrayed by a duplicitous and spineless government.
“Do we get to win this time?” That’s a question that should haunt all Americans, since we haven’t won a war since 1945. But who is to blame for not winning? And have the wars America has fought since World War II really been worth fighting to begin with?
Update (9/2923): A lot has changed in forty years, as a couple of my friends pointed out in response to this article. We could imagine at least two scenarios for a revised Rambo made in 2023:
Version 1: In 2023, the sheriff wouldn’t have to call in the National Guard. All his deputies would gear up with assault rifles, sniper rifles, body armor, and MRAPs donated by the Pentagon as excess gear and the local SWAT team would be mobilized and deployed to find and kill Rambo.
Version 2: Perhaps the most likely one: Rambo would be wearing a “blue lives matter” flag, the sheriff’s patrol car would be festooned with “support our troops” stickers, and they’d call a town meeting to give Rambo the keys to the town as a Medal of Honor winner.
A progressive Pentagon? Talk about an oxymoron! The Pentagon continues to grow and surge with ever larger budgets, ever more expansive missions (for example, a Space Force to dominate the heavens and yet more bases in the Pacific to encircle China), and ever greater ambitions to dominate everywhere, including if necessary through global thermonuclear warfare. No wonder it’s so hard, to the point of absurdity, to imagine a Pentagon that would humbly and faithfully serve only the interests of “national defense.”
Yet, as a thought experiment, why not imagine it? What would a progressive Pentagon look like? I’m not talking about a “woke” Pentagon that touts and celebrates its “diversity,” including its belated acceptance of LGBTQ+ members. I’m glad the Pentagon is arguably more diverse and tolerant now than when I served in the Air Force beginning in the early 1980s. Yet, as a popular meme has it, painting “Black Lives Matter” and rainbow flags on B-52 bombers doesn’t make the bombs dropped any less destructive. To be specific: Was it really a progressive milestone that the combat aircraft in last year’s Super Bowl flyover were operated and maintained entirely by female crews? Put differently, are the bullets and bombs of trans Black G.I. Jane somehow more tolerant and less deadly than cis White G.I. Joe’s?
A progressive military shouldn’t stop with “more Black faces in high places,” more female generals “leaning in” around conference tables, and similar so-called triumphs for diversity. Consider Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, whose views and actions have been little different from those of former Defense Secretaries James Mattis or Donald Rumsfeld, and whose background as a retired Army four-star general and well-paid former board member of Raytheon makes him the very stereotype of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.
No, all-female air crews aren’t nearly enough. Indeed, they are, I’d argue, a form of “woke” camouflage for a predatory military leopard that refuses to change its spots — or curb its appetite.
A truly progressive military should start with the fundamentals. All service members swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, the system of laws that defines and enshrines our vital rights and freedoms (speech, a free press, the right to assemble, privacy, and so on); in short, the right to live untrammeled by domineering forces. Yet, almost by definition, that right is threatened, if not violated, by a massive military-industrial-congressional complex that penetrates nearly every domain of American life. That complex, after all, is anti-democratic, shrouded in secrecy, and jealous of its power, as well as fundamentally and profoundly anti-progressive. Indeed, it’s fundamentally and profoundly anti-truth.
Consider these hard facts. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Vietnam War until the Pentagon Papers emerged near the end of that disastrous conflict. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Afghan War until the Afghan War Papers emerged near the end of that disastrous conflict. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Iraq War until the myth of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (which had been part of the bogus rationale for invading that country) crumbled; nor did they know how badly they continued to be lied to until the myth of the American “surge” there collapsed when the Islamic State forces triumphed all too easily over an American-built Iraqi security structure that collapsed like a rotten house of cards. Perhaps some of them didn’t truly know until a loudmouthed Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, dared to say that the Iraq War had been an unmitigated disaster, or, in Trump-speak, “a big fat mistake.” That burst of honesty helped him win the presidency in 2016. (His rival in that election, Hillary Clinton, remained essentially the chief spokesperson for the Pentagon.)
Yet despite the horrendous failures (and war crimes) of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other U.S. military ventures of this century, no one is ever punished! Sure, you could point to Donald Rumsfeld being cashiered as secretary of defense amid the rubble of “the Global War on Terror,” a belated admission by the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that the Iraq War was going poorly indeed. Still, all those cracks were later papered over with the myth of “the surge” and when Rumsfeld died in 2021, he would receive remarkably glowing tributes in obituaries, as well as bipartisan salutes for his “service” to America rather than condemnation for his numerous crimes and blunders.
The Pentagon’s rampant culture of dishonesty, a cancer that above all infects the brass, led one serving Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, to write a now-renowned (or, if you’re part of the Pentagon, infamous) paper for Armed Forces Journal in 2007 on America’s failure of generalship. As he memorably noted, a U.S. Army private suffered far more dearly for losing a rifle than America’s generals did for losing a war. The Army’s response was — no surprise — to change nothing, leading Yingling to retire early.
13 Tasks for a Progressive Pentagon
Venturing into the Pentagon’s innermost corridors of power, one might be excused for recalling Obi-Wan Kenobi’s warning to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars as they approached the spaceport of Mos Eisley: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
How does one possibly reform such a top-heavy, self-serving, and dishonest institution along progressive lines? A moment in Greek mythology comes to mind: Hercules and the Augean Stables. Let me nevertheless press ahead with this all too herculean task.
Dreaming is free, as Blondie once sang, so why not dream a little dream with me? Here’s a list — a baker’s dozen, in fact — of ways a progressive Pentagon would both exist and act far differently from America’s current regressive (and very, very aggressive) version of the same.
A progressive Pentagon would:
* Take the lead in working to eliminate all nuclear weapons everywhere — that is, total nuclear disarmament — rather than investing vast sums in the coming decades in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It would disavow using nuclear weapons first (“no first use”) in any conflict. It would cancel all plans to “modernize” the current nuclear triad of missiles, planes, and submarines at an estimated cost of $2 trillion. It would also immediately eliminate obsolete and vulnerable land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, and cancel as redundant the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber.
* Oppose sending any more of those devastating cluster munitions or depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine; indeed, it would take the lead in eliminating such awful weaponry.
* Stop inflating threats and end all talk of a “new Cold War” with China and Russia.
* Celebrate the insights of Generals Smedley Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower that war is fundamentally a racket (Butler) and that the military-industrial-congressional complex poses the severest of threats to freedom and democracy in America (President Eisenhower).
* Reject the language of militarism, including describing its troops as “warriors” and “warfighters,” as profoundly undemocratic and un-American.
* Recognize the costs of wars already fought to those troops and ensure full funding of the Department of Veterans Affairs, including for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and moral injuries, among the other wounds of war.
* End the war on terror, launched just after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and urge Congress to repeal the open-ended war authorization it passed then with but a single dissenting vote, because war itself is terror.
* Refuse to go to war unless there’s a formal congressional declaration of the same as the Constitution demands. If the United States had followed that rule, the last war we would have fought was World War II.
* Reject its present culture of secrecy as profoundly counterproductive to success not just in war but in general. That doesn’t mean, of course, sharing specific battle plans (of which there should be far fewer) or detailed information about weaponry with potential enemies. It does mean a willingness to speak truth to the American people, whose support would be needed to prosecute any genuinely necessary war, assuming there even is such a thing.
* Embrace honor and integrity including a willingness of the U.S. military to fall on its own sword — that is, take genuine responsibility for both its deeds and its misdeeds.
* Recognize that one cannot serve both a republic and an empire, that a choice must be made, and that a Pentagon of the present kind in a genuine republic would voluntarily downsize itself, while largely dismantling its imperial infrastructure of perhaps 800 overseas bases.
* Lead the way in demilitarizing space, including eliminating America’s fledgling Space Force and its “guardians.”
* Clearly acknowledge that large, standing militaries and constant wars, as well as preparations for more of the same, are corrosive to democracy, liberty, and the Constitution, as America’s founders recognized.
Imagine that! A progressive Pentagon of peace rather than a regressive one of power and unending warfare. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
What was $550 billion down the crapper in 2014 is approaching $900 billion a decade later
Three Maxims for a Progressive Pentagon
Careful readers won’t be surprised to learn that I was an early Star Wars fan. Naturally, I rooted for the underdog rebels against the evil empire and its henchman, Darth Vader. I saw myself as a potential Jedi Knight, wielding an elegant weapon, a protector of freedom and the republic. (In my defense, I was 14 years old in 1977 when I first saw Star Wars.)
Then, in 1980, I watched The Empire Strikes Back, just as I was pursuing an Air Force ROTC scholarship for college. I heard Yoda, the Jedi master, declare to Luke that “wars not make one great.” That pearl of wisdom floored me then and continues to inform my life.
I’ve read my share of “heavy” philosophy and have the academic credentials to pose as a “serious” enough thinker. Yet I come back to the homespun wisdom captured in certain movies and TV shows that still carries weight for me. Let me share bits of such wisdom with you.
The first is from Kung Fu, the 1970s TV series starring David Carradine. As a young Kwai Chang Caine meets Master Po for the first time, he is astonished to discover that his master is blind. He takes pity on Po, suggesting that his life must be one of endless darkness. Master Po instantly corrects him. “Fear,” he says, “is the only darkness.”
The second is from The Outlaw Josey Wales, a classic western starring Clint Eastwood, also from the 1970s. Josey Wales is a renegade, a wanted man who leaves dead bodies in his wake wherever he travels. Yet he’s also tired of killing, a man in search of peace. In a moving scene, he negotiates just such a peace with Ten Bears, a Comanche chief, saying that there must be a way for people to live together without butchering one another, without constant bloodletting, without race-based hatreds.
A progressive Pentagon would recognize the deep truth of those three maxims: that wars not make one great, that fear is the only darkness, and that there’s a better way for people to live together than constantly butchering one another.
As a Catholic youth, I was taught that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. Today, I’d put that differently. The beginning of wisdom is the quest to master one’s fear, the urge to turn away from fear-driven hatreds, to find better, more pacific, more loving ways.
At the core of the original Star Wars trilogy, George Lucas implanted a message that anger, fear, aggression, and violence — the “dark side” of the Force, as he put it — should be resisted. As Darth Vader confesses to Luke, the power of that dark side is nearly irresistible. Fear and related negative emotions, eerily seductive as they are, can consume our minds (and, as it turns out, given the Pentagon budget, our taxpayer dollars as well).
Too many Americans are prey to the dark side, allowing fear to be the mind-killer. It’s not entirely our fault. From the end of World War II until this very moment, we’ve been told time and again to fear — and fear some more. Fear the communists in Korea and Vietnam. Fear Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Fear Russia and its Hitleresque leader, Vladimir Putin. Fear China and its growing authoritarian power. Closer to home, we’re even now regularly told to fear our neighbors, MAGA or “woke,” depending on your “blue” or “red” team allegiance.
In truth, though, fear is the true darkness. You shouldn’t have to be a Jedi master to know that wars not make one great, that the darkness of fear (and arming ourselves against it) is a path to hell, and that people could indeed live together without eternally slaughtering one another. Those, then, would be my three maxims for a newly progressive Pentagon.
To echo the words of Steven Tyler of Aerosmith: Dream until your dreams come true.
Guess who’s exempt from a potential government shutdown?
I saw this today at CNN.
The Pentagon has also determined that the training and support of Ukrainian forces is exempt from a potential government shutdown, and will continue even in the increasingly likely event that Congress fails to pass a spending bill in the coming days.
Isn’t it nice to know that even if the U.S. federal government shuts down, Ukraine will still get all the weapons and related military aid they need to continue to fight and kill Russians? Americans may be furloughed from their jobs or have to work for no pay, but Ukraine will get paid.
That one sentence shows you the priorities for “your” government. Guess what? You’re not a priority, but war overseas is. You’re not exempt from a government shutdown, but Ukrainian military forces are.
So, if you want to get paid, America, or enter a federal facility that may be closed due to a shutdown, just wave a blue-and-yellow flag and tell the government it’s all for the war effort in Ukraine.
Bring this flag with you and tell the government you’re exempt from the looming government shutdown
The Stunning Banality of Democratic Messaging for 2024
It’s not often I get a personal letter signed by former President Barack Obama. It came in yesterday’s mail, and of course it was a fundraising letter for the DNC and the Biden campaign for 2024. Obama is selling Joe Biden as “delivering a better future for our children and grandchildren,” but how the future will be better because of Biden is left unspecified.
Biden, I’m told, is for freedom and opportunity. He wants “a brighter, more inclusive, more hopeful future,” whereas the Republicans are “extreme” and want to give “even more tax breaks for billionaires” along with banning more books and attacking “our fundamental rights.”
Well, obviously the Democrats are against Republicans and for freedom, our children, and I suppose puppies and rainbows as well. And Biden, according to Obama, “feels the struggles of American families in his bones.” No wonder Biden looks so old and moves so slowly!
Seriously, nothing in the letter tells me how Biden is going to help those struggling American families. There’s not a word about raising the federal minimum wage, about single-payer health care, about student loan debt relief, about helping the unhoused, and so on. Remember LBJ’s ambitious “War on poverty” in the 1960s? Forget about anything like that. Just vote for Joe, “who truly knows how to get things done in Washington.” Really?
If American families are struggling, as they are, shouldn’t Biden be working his tail off to get them the relief they need? There’s no help in vapid phrases like Biden “carries your dreams with him wherever he goes.” No wonder he’s muddled and confused at times: he’s carrying all our conflicting dreams with him in his head.
I’m not sure the photo postcard included with this fundraising plea sends the message the DNC wanted to send. It shows Obama and Biden yukking it up. What about those suffering families, Barack and Joe?
It was November 1967. The Vietnam War was at its height. His brother, the President, had been shot and killed in Dallas four years earlier. He himself would die of an assassin’s bullet within the next year. It was time for Robert F. Kennedy Sr. to “Face the Nation.”
TV was more serious back then, and very few politicians today, certainly not Donald Trump and Joe Biden, could speak with RFK’s clarity and eloquence.
It’s worth listening to Bobby Kennedy’s interview from 1967, but especially the last six minutes (beginning at the 18-minute mark) as he attempts to explicate his moral reservations and objections to America’s war against Vietnam. Such moral objections to war are rarely if ever heard today from Democrats and Republicans in DC. Bobby Kennedy wasn’t just saying the Vietnam War was dumb, that the U.S. military was employing bad strategy, that the war was too expensive, that it was a distraction from pressing domestic concerns, and so on.
Near the end of this interview, Bobby Kennedy called for serious and deep moral reflection on the use of U.S. military power overseas. He asked Americans to examine their consciences and cited the tens of thousands of civilians killed and wounded (not just U.S. troops). He said America was losing its moral position in the world due to the war. He was right.
RFK wasn’t anti-war. He recognized war was occasionally unavoidable. Yet he was willing to articulate war’s horrors. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent women and children from wanton American firepower and especially napalm. The creation of millions of war refugees. The harsh realities of war should trouble Americans, Kennedy said, especially when its awful costs are justified on dubious grounds. Was it truly the case, Kennedy asked, that America had to fight communism over there so that we didn’t have to fight it over here? Did the U.S. have the moral right to wage a ghastly war against North Vietnam on the off-chance that a communist victory there might eventually pose a threat to America?
What I heard here from Bobby Kennedy was a dramatic appeal to conscience. An appeal to Americans to look within themselves and to stop needless violence, not only in Vietnam but also here at home in America’s streets.
In November 1967, Bobby Kennedy said something truly vital. Appealing to moral conscience, he recognized we are all human. That all lives matter, not only those of U.S. troops in Vietnam. And that far too often the decision makers in Washington had forgotten this most basic of moral facts.
I can’t say what Bobby would have achieved, killed as he was by an assassin’s bullet. But I think he was a healer, a man who had matured much since the death of his brother, a man of compassion and conscience, a man willing to reject the notion that might makes right and that million of “others” can and should be killed, wounded, or made refugees simply because it could be justified in terms of “protecting America.”
Do we have that right? Bobby asks. Plainly, he believed we didn’t.
Just saw a newsflash that Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Speaker, is opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, specifically involving alleged business dealings with his son, Hunter Biden.
From The Boston Globe:
McCarthy said the House Oversight Committee’s investigation so far has found a “culture of corruption” around the Biden family as Republicans probe the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, from before the Democratic president took office.
“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy, R-Calif., said outside the speaker’s office at the Capitol. “That’s why today I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.”
Naturally, the Democrats are saying this is politically motivated (of course it is), and that it suggests a false equivalency between Biden and former President Donald Trump. I’ll leave that to the voters to decide.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on the march (AP and Boston Globe)
All I could think of when I heard this news is that what goes around comes around. A Democratic House impeached Trump twice. They suggested he was a Putin puppet. He’s been indicted four times with more than 100 charges since he left office. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Republicans would seek to reply in kind.
Hunter Biden’s business dealings are dodgy indeed; whether the “big guy” (Joe Biden) was involved in ways that were illegal and corrupt is unknown.
What depresses me is that Congress is fiddling while America burns. Congress should be working to help Americans who are suffering. Who are underpaid, overworked, maybe unhoused, perhaps drowning in debt, and who otherwise need support from “their” government. Instead, Republicans and Democrats are engaged in endless rounds of partisan bickering, using up most of the oxygen in the room. How long before Congress implodes from all this partisan posturing and pressure?
Of course, unlike the crew of the ill-fated Titanic probe, members of Congress will emerge just fine; after all, they make their own rules and laws. What about all those Americans who need help? Who need a Congress that actually cares about them? They will not be fine.
So, it’s more political circuses in Washington without any of the bread that the people need to survive. How much longer can America survive on these terms?
Clearly, on this 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the dogs of war have won and continue to win.
It hasn’t mattered that, over the last 16 years, after a 20-year military career, I’ve written hundreds of articles critical of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) and in support of peacemaking and diplomacy rather than war making and gargantuan military expenditures. My writing hasn’t slowed America’s collective march toward nationalism, militarism, and war.
Lately, I’ve been working more closely with antiwar groups. They mean well. America needs them. But they are losing.
There are many reasons for this, the main one being the sheer size, reach, and power of the MICC. But there’s another reason that’s become apparent to me that’s perhaps best described in metaphorical terms.
The dogs of war run in packs obedient to the alphas. They know exactly what they want: power, profit, dominance. They are usually cocksure in their confidence and think of themselves as realists and patriots. They are rewarded with loads of money.
My cat. She does not back down to the dogs of war. But she’s territorial and doesn’t play well with others. She’s been known to show me who’s boss.
Critics of war are more like cats. They tend to be territorial, prickly, and disobedient. They may be against war, but they are often at cross purposes on how best to resist it. They may be quick to take offense at perceived slights and don’t always play well together. They also have a lot less money. They are likely to see themselves as idealists and to reject patriotism as “combustible rubbish” and “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
America is a dog country. Cats are suspect, especially antiwar ones. Especially brave cats (Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning) are locked away in cages. Meanwhile, the alpha dogs make billions barking and growling and howling for war and yet more war.
Until we change this dynamic, the alpha dogs will continue to spread havoc in America and indeed across the globe.
As a retired Air Force officer and military historian, I’m familiar with all kinds of euphemisms about killing, e.g. “precision bombing” and “collateral damage.” Just as it’s easier to kill at a distance, it’s easier to kill when we use words that provide distance from the act. Words that facilitate detachment. Words that befuddle and confuse our minds.
When writing honestly about war, it’s best to use bullet-hits-the-bone words: atrocity, murder, war crime, slaughter. Rape, pillage, burn are “old” words associated with war, and these words often most fittingly describe war and its likely effects and outcomes.
Powerful, blunt, and accurate words should remind us that war is inherently horrible and also profoundly anti-democratic. War is consistent with authoritarianism and lack of freedom, yet Americans nowadays seem to think war (and words about war) is conducive to democracy and freedom, e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine.
We used to know better. Military people are fond of the saying, “freedom isn’t free,” but neither is war. Indeed, war and its various manifestations are costing this nation more than a trillion dollars a year while weakening democracy and our constitutional freedoms. And that is a very high price to pay to keep the factories of the merchants of death humming and the generals and admirals happy.
Grisly images like this one (of a dead Iraqi soldier) were censored in America. Language is censored as well.
Fortunately, there’s a new guide and website available that alerts us to the importance of language and war. The website is wordsaboutwar.org, from which you can read and download suggestions on how best to use words to convey the horrors and costs of war to people everywhere. I urge you to visit the site and peruse the guide. (Full disclosure: I was an advisor to this effort, which was ably led by David Vine.)
Here’s a sample of a few comments I made in passing to the group:
A war on terror is truly a war of terror because war itself is terrible.
Friendly fire is being killed by one’s own, often due to the chaos of war, the sheer waste of it all, exacerbated by incompetence. “Fire” is always unfriendly.
Very few troops are “heroes,” and indeed most aren’t, because heroes are rare in all walks of life.
The word “casualty” is too benign. I much prefer killed and wounded: the victims of war.
What are “enemy noncombatants”? They are usually innocent civilians.
With respect to the “War on Terror” that the U.S. has prosecuted for 22 years and counting, I noted that:
We (the U.S.) manifested a Manichean world view; as George W. Bush said soon after 9/11, you’re either for America (and all its violence) or you’re for the terrorists (with their violence). If you wanted a non-violent approach, you were dismissed as naive or “for them.” It was good versus evil, thus the infamous “axis of evil” the U.S. allegedly faced.
This is, of course, a problem with all discourse related to war. Subtlety and nuance are thrown out the window. Language is greatly simplified. The U.S. is “doubleplusgood” and the enemy must be the opposite while simultaneously being dehumanized. We kill “cowardly” enemy troops or terrorists (by drone they’re “bugsplat”) yet our “heroic” troops “fall” in battle and are revered as “the fallen.” Violent combat is disguised as “kinetic action” in U.S. military communiques.
In my view, the dishonesty of this language captures the dishonesty of America’s wars.
General William T. Sherman (U.S. Civil War) famously said that “War is all hell.” Sherman knew the hellish and harsh realities of war; he knew, as he wrote, that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Too many people today are using and manipulating words to refine war. They’re camouflaging war’s harshest realities. Writers should write plainly and honestly, as General Sherman did, to capture war’s hellish nature. By choosing honest words, we also help to create a better future in which the threat of war recedes precisely because we recognize more clearly its horrific nature and terrifying costs.
Other high-ranking military officers, like General Smedley Butler, for example, also wrote plainly about war. As Butler famously said, war is a racket, and he described himself as a gangster for capitalism. Now that was plain speaking about war!
The chief intent of speaking and writing plainly about war is to discourage war and save lives. Some might see it as patriotic—saving the lives of U.S. troops by helping to prevent bloody awful wars—but more broadly the goal is humanistic—to save the lives of all those on the receiving end of bullets and bombs.
Interestingly, U.S. troops at lower levels are generally blunt about what war is about. Talk to sergeants at the front and you’ll hear visceral truths, probably enhanced by choice expletives. I’ve heard U.S. Marines shout “Kill!” at graduation ceremonies. Killing, after all, is what war enables. Mass killing leads to atrocities like My Lai in Vietnam. This fact should never be sugarcoated.
Few people, however, truly want to confront war’s horrors. Gazing upon the face of war is profoundly disturbing, which is why we’re encouraged to look away. And so the face of war is airbrushed and camouflaged with euphemisms and buried under a blizzard of acronyms.
If we are to end war and prevent atrocity, we must seek to name things accurately while calling up mental images (no matter how disturbing) appropriate to the horrors of war. The guide at wordsaboutwar.org is an important step in that direction.
Update: I went on Podcast by George today to talk about all this:
As the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia grinds on (or falters?), as U.S. disaster relief for Hawaii is tied to more military aid for Ukraine, as depleted uranium shells join cluster munitions as America’s latest gift to a blasted war zone, as calls for diplomacy continue to be muted when they’re not actively discouraged and dismissed, I was reminded of the alchemy of war.
Alchemists of the early modern period were sophisticated experimenters driven by an often quasi-religious quest for perfection. We tend to remember only the most craven part of their experiments: the attempt to transmute lead into gold. This transmutation could not be effected, but alchemy itself transmuted into chemistry as its practitioners, through trial and error, developed a better understanding of the nature of the elements, reflected in part by today’s Periodic Table.
Seeking a divine spark
Yet the business of war succeeded where alchemists failed. In their alchemy, the merchants of death turned bullet lead into corporate gold. And what gold! Yearly war budgets continue to soar in the United States toward the trillion dollar mark. Weapons shipments to Ukraine continue at a pace that promises many more shattered and blasted bodies, Ukrainian and Russian.
In a sense, dead bodies are also being transmuted into corporate gold.
Transmutation, I was taught as a Catholic, is a miracle. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jesus Christ, the Son of God, of course). We have made the miraculous the mundane, and indeed the profane. We take lead and spill blood which becomes gold. And some even celebrate this as good for business in the United States.
All these weapons: they’re job-creators! So we crucify the Word and elevate the life-takers and widow-makers as gods.
We are far more deluded than the alchemists of the past.
Bracing Views 