WAR IS A SWELL RACKET, Part 2
counterpunch.org
According to sources cited by Joel Andreas, in his excellent book, Addicted to War, between 1948 and 2002, the U.S. spent more than 15 trillion dollars on its military. The military budget for 2002 was 346.5 billion dollars, and when the budgets for the pentagon, the Energy Department's nuclear costs, NASA's military portion, foreign military aid, veterans' benefits, and the interest paid for our military debt, the total reaches 670 billion dollars. In comparison to the amount spent per American during WWI (400), we each give 4,000 dollars annually to cover a military budget that could not even protect us from nineteen box-cutter wielding airline passengers. For that amount, we could each afford to save up for an electric car, so that we could reduce our dependence on oil, which largely dictates our military presence in the Gulf in the first place.
Meanwhile, high school students are made to peddle corporate products in order to fill in the gaps left behind by the drain that is the military budget and other counterproductive federal expenditures. While the military receives 50.5 percent of federal tax money, education receives 8 percent. During his campaign, George W. Bush claimed that his number one priority would be education, just like the proclaimed priority of most other politicians. Meanwhile, high school students can be suspended for wearing Pepsi shirts on Coke day (which happened in a Colorado high school), and teachers must designate fifteen minutes of class time each day for the commercial-rich Channel One, as many schools are obligated to these types of corporations for their supplies.
The amount of companies that benefit from this militaristic system makes Butler's analysis pale by comparison. Over 100,000 companies depend on the pentagon for their profits each year, which means that many people depend on "national defense" for their livelihoods. These people, especially the leaders of the corporations, are what the peace movement is largely up against in its fight to end our nation's permanent war footing. Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon, and thousands of others, rake in billions each year, which means that they will not give up the business of war without a fight. Therefore, ending war does not only mean struggling for peace in general, it means challenging the ways in which the currently-powerful corporations make money. Moreover, because corporations who benefit from war also support political candidates, the candidates have every reason to defend those corporate interests who depend on war making, and the politicians have very little reason to defend the nation's interests as a whole.
Therefore, it is pointless to argue how we can make education a higher priority for our country without understanding this system. It is in the best interest of the power elite on Wall Street and in Washington that we remain undereducated with respect to our nation's use of force in world affairs, and that the education we receive directs us toward supporting the power elite while deterring us away from learning the truth about the functioning of the militaristic system. I believe that we do live a semi-democratic society, but because we as a whole are so fundamentally blinded to the criminality of our elected leaders and their wealthy supporters, we live in a "plutocracy," to borrow Ramsey Clark's description.
So, how does the government get away with the hypocrisy? As long as people are in the dark about the atrocities our nation commits, one will find the media's complicity to be almost total. I find a couple of simple examples helpful for illustrating this. First, in all of my public and private talks with people, ranging from high school age to history graduate students, only one person (a high school senior) could identify the significance of one of these dates: 09/11/1973 and 12/07/1975. Most Americans surely recognize 09/11/2001 and 12/07/1941, as these were the days "that will live in infamy", because they led the U.S. into expanding the global War on Terror and World War II. Yet, for some reason, all but one of the hundreds of people I have asked to identify the former dates has heard of them.
These dates (09/11/1973 and 12/07/1975), are quite important to the people who still suffer their consequences. Take the Chileans, who lost at least 3,000 people because of a military coup that the U.S. supported on September 11, 1973, or the East Timorese, who lost 200,000 people (1/3 of the population) after we assisted Indonesia in their destruction of that nation beginning with the invasion of the small island on December 7, 1975. Of course, Chile's population was only 10-12 million at the time, and in comparison to our loss of 3,000 people on 09/11/2001, it would be like losing 80-90,000 U.S. citizens. The Chileans had no such recourse against us for aiding General Augusto Pinochet in his torture and murder of thousands of his people, which we supported. Nor have the East Timorese, or the dozens of other poor nations we have assisted in the repression and/or destruction of, been given the right to retaliate against us. Government documents detailing the U.S. involvement in the Chilean coup and the genocide of East Timor are provided in full text on the National Security Archive's website, supported by George Washington University: hfni.gsehd.gwu.edu.
Even though there is overwhelming proof of what we did to Chile and East Timor (not to mention the dozens of other nations we have intervened in) why do we not know about their dates of infamy, each of which our government had an enormous role in? Does our lack of knowledge about these dates mean anything? The fact that the public knows little of them demonstrates that we are doomed to repeat history. I am disappointed that we are collectively blind to these dates precisely because the dates in which atrocities were perpetrated against us are days "that will live in infamy", which the media and government have and will forever use as rallying cries to promote the nationalism that will ultimately lead to more deaths in the developing world, as well as on our own soil. Moreover, the atrocities in East Timor and Chile are but a drop in the bucket in comparison to the perhaps 8 million others we have helped kill over the past fifty seven years in the name of national security. The question is, if we are oblivious to the horrible atrocities our government has committed on such America-significant days of "infamy", how will we prevent our government from committing such atrocities in the future? How will we prevent the continuation of the "racket" so notorious in Smedley Butler's and our time, which will inevitably come back to bite us again?
Chris White is an ex-Marine infantryman who is currently working on his doctorate in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He served from 1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan, and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace. He can be reached at: juliopac@swbell.net |
