Give peace a chance: Don’t believe the war profiteers, Part 3

Detail from Vereshchagin’s painting The Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism – Public Domain

by Roy Eidelson

Let’s move to the third core concern manipulated by the war profiteers: distrust. We tend to divide the world into those we find trustworthy and those we don’t. Where we draw that line matters a lot. When we get it right, we avoid harm from those who have hostile intentions, and we’re able to enjoy the rewards of collaborative relationships. But we often make these judgments with only limited information of uncertain reliability. As a result, our conclusions about the trustworthiness of particular people, groups, and sources of information are frequently flawed and problematic, especially when others with ulterior motives—warmongers immediately come to mind—have influenced our thinking.

For instance, “They’re Different from Us” is one distrust mind game that war profiteers rely on when trying to win over the public’s support. They use it to encourage our suspicions of other groups by arguing that they don’t share our values, our priorities, or our principles. We see this regularly, including in the highly lucrative business of promoting Islamophobia, and also when other nations are repeatedly characterized as primitive and barbaric. This mind game works because, psychologically, when we don’t perceive someone as part of our ingroup, we tend to view them as less trustworthy, we hold them in lower regard, and we’re less willing to share scarce resources with them. So, convincing the American public that a group is truly different or deviant is a significant step toward diminishing our concern for their welfare.

At the same time, representatives of the war machine turn to a second distrust appeal—the “They’re Misguided and Misinformed” mind game—to smear anti-war opponents. They spur distrust toward these critics by arguing that they lack sufficient knowledge, or suffer from unrecognized biases, or are the victims of others’ intentional misinformation—and that, as a result, their dissenting views are unworthy of serious consideration. So, for example, the war profiteers disparage and try to discredit anti-war groups like World Beyond War, Code Pink, and Veterans for Peace with demonstrably false claims that the activists don’t understand the real causes of the problems they seek to fix, and that their proposed remedies will only make matters worse for everyone. In fact, the actual evidence rarely supports the positions of endless war enthusiasts. When this mind game is successful, the public disregards important voices of dissent. And when that happens, crucial opportunities for tackling out-of-control militarism and advancing the common good are lost.

Turning now to the fourth core concern, superiority, we’re quick to compare ourselves to others, often in an effort to demonstrate that we’re worthy of respect. Sometimes this desire is even stronger: we want confirmation that we’re better in some important way—perhaps in our accomplishments, or in our values, or in our contributions to society. But in these efforts to bolster our own positive self-appraisals, we’re sometimes encouraged to perceive and portray others in as negative a light as possible, even to the point of dehumanizing them. And since the judgments we make about our own worth—and the qualities of others—are often quite subjective, these impressions are also susceptible to manipulation by the war machine.

For example, the “Pursuing A Higher Purpose” mind game is one way that war profiteers appeal to superiority in order to build public support for endless war. Here, they present their actions as an affirmation of American exceptionalism, insisting that their policies have deep moral underpinnings and reflect the cherished principles that lift this country above others—even when what they’re defending is the pardoning of war criminals; or the torturing of terrorism suspects; or the internment of Japanese-Americans; or the violent overthrow of elected leaders in other countries, to name just a few instances. When this mind game succeeds, contrary indicators—of which there are a lot—are disingenuously explained away as the mere, small imperfections that always come with the pursuit of collective greatness. Too often, the public is fooled when greed is disguised in ways that tap into our sense of pride in our country’s accomplishments and its influence in the world.

Representatives of the war machine simultaneously aim to marginalize their critics with a second superiority appeal: the “They’re Un-American” mind game. Here, they portray those who oppose them as disgruntled and unappreciative of the United States and the values and traditions that “real Americans” hold dear. In doing so, they take particular advantage of the public’s entrenched respect and deference toward all things military. In this way, they prey on the allure of what psychologists call “blind patriotism.” This ideological stance involves the staunch conviction that one’s country is never wrong in its actions or policies, that allegiance to the country must be unquestioning and absolute, and that criticism of the country cannot be tolerated. When this mind game is successful, anti-war forces are further isolated and dissent is ignored or suppressed.

Finally, in regard to our fifth core concern, real or perceived helplessness can sink any undertaking. That’s because believing we can’t control important outcomes in our lives leads to resignation, which wrecks our motivation to work toward valuable personal or collective objectives. Social change efforts are severely hampered when people feel that working together won’t improve their circumstances. The belief that adversity can’t be overcome is something we fight hard to resist. But if we reach that demoralizing conclusion anyway, its effects can be paralyzing and difficult to reverse, and warmongers use this to their advantage.

For instance, the “We’ll All Be Helpless” mind game is one way that war profiteers appeal to helplessness in order to win over to the public’s support. They warn us that if we fail to follow their guidance on purported national security matters, the result will be dire circumstances from which the country may be unable to ever escape. In short, we’ll be much worse off, and without the capacity to undo the damage. The threat that so upsets advocates of endless war may be a proposal to restrict domestic surveillance; or an effort to intensify diplomatic overtures rather than military interventions; or a plan to place limits on runaway Pentagon spending; or calls to reduce our nuclear arsenal—all reasonable paths to protecting human rights and encouraging peace. Unfortunately, prospects of future helplessness are often frightening enough that even deeply flawed arguments against worthwhile recommendations can seem persuasive to an apprehensive public.

At the same time, the war machine works to disempower its critics with a second helplessness appeal: the “Resistance Is Futile” mind game. The message here is simple. We’re in charge and that’s not going to change. Innumerable lobbyists, high-tech displays of “shock and awe” weaponry, and not-so-subtle carrots and sticks with our elected officials are used to create an aura of invincibility against anti-war efforts that aim to moderate the military-industrial complex’s outsized footprints and profits. They work to demoralize, sideline, ostracize, threaten, and intimidate those who seek to restrain them. This ploy works if we’re convinced that we can’t succeed against the war profiteers, because then our change efforts quickly grind to a halt or never get off the ground.

Note from Kathie MM: Visit Engaging Peace Friday for the final post in Dr. Eidelson’s current series. And think activism.

Give peace a chance: Don’t believe the war profiteers

Vereshchagin’s painting The Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism – Public Domain

by Roy Eidelson

Last month I had the opportunity to share some thoughts at a Divest Philly from the War Machine event, hosted by Wooden Shoe Books and sponsored by World Beyond WarCode PinkVeterans for Peace, and other anti-war groups. Below are my remarks, slightly edited for clarity. My thanks to everyone involved. 

In late May, Vice President Mike Pence was the commencement speaker at West Point. In part, he told the graduating cadets this: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen…And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”

What Pence didn’t mention that day is why he could be so sure that this will come to pass. Or who the primary beneficiaries will be, if or when it does. Because the winners won’t be the American people, who see their taxes go to missiles instead of healthcare and education. Nor will they be the soldiers themselves—some of whom will return in flag-draped caskets while many more sustain life-altering physical and psychological injuries. The winners also won’t be the citizens of other countries who experience death and displacement on a horrific scale from our awesome military might. And our planet’s now-fragile climate won’t come out on top either, since the Pentagon is the single largest oil consumer in the world.

No, the spoils will go to our massive and multifaceted war machine. The war machine is comprised of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others, that make billions of dollars each year from war, war preparations, and arms sales. In fact, the U.S. government pays Lockheed alone more each year than it provides in funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, and the Interior Department combined. The war machine also includes the CEOs of these defense contractors, who personally take in tens of millions of dollars annually, and the many politicians in Washington who help secure their jobs by collectively accepting millions of dollars in contributions from the defense industry—roughly evenly split between both major parties. And let’s not forget the retired politicians and retired military officers, who travel the pot-of-gold pipeline to become highly paid board members and spokespersons for these same companies.

Vice-President Pence also didn’t mention to the cadets that the U.S. military budget today exceeds that of the next seven largest countries combined—an enthusiastic display of Congressional bipartisanship at its very worst. Nor did he note that we’re the largest international seller of major weapons in the world, with ongoing efforts to promote even bigger markets for U.S. arms companies in countries run by ruthless, repressive autocrats. That’s how it came to pass last August, for example, that Saudi Arabia used an expensive Lockheed laser-guided bomb to blow up a bus in Yemen, killing 40 young boys who were on a school trip.

Given these realities, I’d like to offer my perspective—as a psychologist—on a question that has never really been more timely: How is it that the war profiteers, card-carrying members of the so-called 1%, continue to thrive despite all the harm and misery they cause for so many? We know that the 1%—the self-interested very rich and powerful—set the priorities of many of our elected officials. We also know that they exert considerable influence over the mainstream media regarding which narratives are promoted and which are obscured. But in my own work, what’s most important—and what too often goes unrecognized—are the propaganda strategies they use to prevent us from realizing what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame, and how we can make things better. And nowhere is this more apparent or more consequential than when it comes to the one-percenters who run our war machine. In my next three posts, I describe these strategies.

Reclaiming the Truth about Vietnam

 by Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service

20 Sep 2017 – “From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”

OK, I get it. Soldiers suffer, soldiers die in the wars we wage, and the commander in chief has to, occasionally, toss clichés on their graves.

The words are those of Barack Obama, five-plus years ago, issuing a Memorial Day proclamation establishing a 13-year commemoration of the Vietnam War, for which, apparently, about $65 million was appropriated.

Veterans for Peace calls it money allocated to rewrite history and has begun a counter-campaign called Full Disclosure, the need for which is more glaring than ever, considering that there is close to zero political opposition to the unleashed American empire and its endless war on terror.

Just the other day, for instance, 89 senators quietly voted to pass the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, signing off on a $700 billion defense budget, which ups annual military spending by $80 billion and, as Common Dreams reported, “will dump a larger sum of money into the military budget than even President Donald Trump asked for while also authorizing the production of 94 F-35 jets, two dozen more than the Pentagon requested.”

And of course there’s no controversy here, no media clamor demanding to know where the money will come from. “Money for war just is. Like the tides,” Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tweeted, as quoted by Common Dreams.

Oh quiet profits! The Full Disclosure campaign rips away the lies that allow America’s wars to continue: GIs slogging through jungles and rice paddies to protect the ideals we hold dear. These words are not directed at the people who put Obama into office, who did so believing he would end the Bush wars. The fact that he continued them mocks the “value” we call democracy, indeed, turns it into a hollow shell.

The U.S. Air Force dropped over 6 million tons of bombs and other ordnance on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1964 and 1973, more than it expended in World War II, Howard Machtinger notes at the Full Disclosure website. And more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals, including the infamous Agent Orange, were dumped on the Vietnam countryside.

“Accurate estimates are hard to come by,” he writes, “but as many as three million Vietnamese were likely killed, including two million civilians, hundreds of thousands seriously injured and disabled, millions of internally displaced, croplands and forests destroyed: incredible destruction — physical, environmental, institutional, and psychological. The term ecocide was coined to try to capture the devastation of the Vietnamese landscape.”

And: “All Vietnamese, as a matter of course, were referred to as ‘gooks.’ So the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which had been eroding throughout 20th century warfare, virtually disappeared.”

And then there was the war’s effect on the soldiers who fought it and the “moral damage” so many suffered: “To date,” Machtinger writes, “estimates of veteran suicides range from a low of 9,000 to 150,000, the latter almost triple the number of U.S. deaths during the actual conflict.”

So I pause in the midst of these numbers, this data, letting the words and the memories wash over me: Agent Orange, napalm, gook, My Lai. Such words link only with terrible irony to the clichés of Obama’s proclamation: solemn reverence . . . honor . . . heads held high . . . the ideals we hold dear…

The first set of words sickened a vast segment of the American public and caused the horror of “Vietnam Syndrome” to cripple and emasculate the military-industrial complex for a decade and a half. Slowly, the powers that be regrouped, redefined how we fought our wars: without widespread national sacrifice or a universal draft; and with smart bombs and even smarter public relations, ensuring that most of the American public could watch our clean, efficient wars in the comfort of their living rooms.

What was also necessary was to marginalize the anti-war voices that shut down the Vietnam War. This was accomplished politically, beginning with the surrender of the Democratic Party to its military-industrial funders in the wake of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. Eventually, endless war became the new normal, and blotting the shame of our “loss” in Vietnam from the historical record became a priority.

The Full Disclosure campaign is saying: no way. One aspect of this campaign is an interactive exhibit of the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers rounded up and killed more than 500 villagers. The exhibit was created by the Chicago chapter of Vets for Peace, which hopes to raise enough money to take it on a national tour and rekindle public awareness of the reality of war.

A slice of that reality can be found in a New Yorker article written in 2015 by Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the story some four and a half decades earlier. In the article, Hersh revisits the story of one of the GI participants in My Lai, Paul Meadlo:

“After being told by (Lt. William) Calley to ‘take care of this group,’ one Charlie Company soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-soldier ‘were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.’ When Calley returned and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier said, ‘Meadlo just looked at him like he couldn’t believe it. He says, “Waste them?” When Calley said yes, another soldier testified, Meadlo and Calley ‘opened up and started firing.’ But then Meadlo ‘started to cry.’”

And that’s the war, and those are our values, buried with the dead villagers in a mass grave.

Reprinted from TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 25 September 2017

_____________________________________________

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com.

 

Go to Original – commonwonders.com