War as the Public Face of Injustice
“The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show.” So said Caitlin Johnstone in a recent post.(https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2108/S00055/serious-news-for-serious-people-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix.htm)
I see this intensive awareness about and unplugging from propaganda streams as the key necessity underpinning our struggles for real freedom of speech and more importantly, for psychological liberation. The propaganda is dappertutto — everywhere, in Italian — derived from da per tutto (from all over). There is hardly a social interaction that fails to cleverly find a conduit into your brain. And don’t blame advertisers. They’re doing their job, notwithstanding the smarminess associated with constructing anxiety-provoking drama, hyperbole, innuendo, and outright lies for your daily bread.
Neuropsychologically, what the industry and its imitators do is to find ways into your brain for the purpose of tapping into whatever neurological subroutines and pathways underpin semi-conscious propaganda incorporation. We’ve been unwittingly practicing these subroutines throughout our entire lives. Through media, music, product vendors, personal and group communications and beyond. The lifelong experience of propaganda incorporation changes your brain, like any other reiterated experience. It gets harder to resist without almost heroic effort. And it holds the potential to turn each of us into mini-propagandists in our own right. But resistance can turn the tide, tuning your awareness to potential influxes of propaganda to shut down those neuropsychological mechanisms.
For example, the moment you hear arguments about war and U.S. militarism posed as D or R, liberal or conservative, stop reading, stop listening. Run the other way. Recognize that you’re being propagandized. War is bipartisan because moving wealth upward to elite overlords is bipartisan. As Ms. Johnstone has also repeatedly pointed out, “When all you’ve got is an insanely overfunded military every problem looks like a job for your insanely overfunded military.” ( https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/17/stop-believing-us-military-invasions-have-noble-intentions-notes-from-edge-narrative-matrix/ ). As your resistance stiffens, go back to scanning historically pro-war sources like the NY Times, with an eye toward identifying the subtle implicit propaganda; this can strengthen your propaganda-detection neural pathways. And your resistance.
As another military example, both wings of the U.S. corporate state will assure you that the U.S. has never been attacked with nuclear weapons because of the deterrent value of our nuclear weapons stockpile. Such propaganda seeks to induce you to focus attention on this manufactured concept of “deterrence,” rather than on the far more fundamental likelihood that any exchange of nuclear weapons would lead to environmental cataclysm heaped atop the ones we’ve already set into motion. The whole idea is an absurdity. Perhaps ask yourself: at what point did I acquiesce to the propaganda that this concept of deterrence is in any sense a reasonable method of international relations.
Having worked as a science writer for two of the three nuclear national laboratories, there are two impressions that stick with me from observing, talking to scientists, and writing about some of it.
First was an uncertainty I saw about nuke functionality, an ongoing hand-wringing about computer modeling instead of actual testing. Second was the sense of an internal competition for both Department of Defense dollars and ego-burnishing among nuclear engineers; it made the enterprise seem a bit fragmented, not a pleasant observation considering potential consequences.
These observations made me wonder how inept would be a nuke deployment if it ever unfortunately occurred. Extrapolation of the propaganda about “surgical strikes” carried to an absurd and entirely fallacious extreme. It would begin in chaos and end in complete chaos. Game over, without waiting for the more gradual demise of ecocide.
To speak about war in terms of victory or defeat seems pointless. Injustice is implicit in the destruction wreaked by warfare. Hence, even naming winners or losers is propaganda in its own right. In an age of impending climate disaster and a largely unabated assault on biodiversity, all military conflicts unaffordably waste resources. That they also unequally distribute wealth through military adventurism is hardly reflecting the will of a country’s citizenry, particularly in the U.S., with its unacceptably high incidence of un-housed and under-fed children. Instead, it is injustice in every sense.
•Injustice to the attacked noncombatants, rendered homeless, dead, or injured.
•Injustice to surrounding countries flooded by refugees.
•Injustice to the enlistees, duped into feeding their bodies and minds to the war machine for patriotism, for college, for a desperate escape from poverty.
•Injustice to the citizenry, who watch national wealth disappear into the greedy maws of corrupt politicians, generals, and military-contractor elites. And it’s even harsher injustice to witness that wealth profligately wasted by incompetence, greed and corruption. The story of the MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected) vehicle is but one example: produced at a cost of a million dollars per vehicle, then scrapped after a few years on the ground. And then there’s the larger Afghanistan saga, where one diplomat quoted in the Afghanistan papers opined that a major accomplishment of U.S. intervention may have been systemic corruption. Although I blinked, I could hardly fail to recognize that a fundamentally corrupt enterprise like war would leave its stench behind in a variety of corrupt contexts.
•Injustice to the natural environment, which is almost always damaged — even beyond the waste from those military-contractor boondoogles or the statistic that B-52 bombers consume 3,300 gallons of fossil fuel per hour. The U.S. military is one of the planet’s preeminent polluters. And we’re talking PFAS and other environmentally and physiologically persistent toxins, not just carbon dioxide and methane.
If, as Brother Cornel West posits, justice is the public expression, the public face of love, then one might also posit that the cumulative injustices of war are the public face of a deteriorating culture steeped in hatred.
Empires end by overstretching themselves, operationally and financially. The feckless failed military adventures of the U. S. since Korea are certainly illustrative of such a trend. The financial overstretch is less visible because the U.S. dollar is still the world reserve currency (not for long according to some prognosticators). And, despicably, because it’s a country hell bent on restraining necessary domestic spending in favor of militarism and corporate giveaways.
But the demise of empires strikes me as more profound, with a connection to injustice in the Cornel West sense. Like other corrupt socioeconomic systems before it, Imperialist Capitalism is doomed to die of its own hatred, through its rejection of love-in-public — of justice.
