by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.
Coda:
It is WRONG — morally, ethically, legally — for any nation or people to pursue political, economic, and/or cultural interests, security and safety by openly or insidiously imposing on any other nation or people, a form of political, economic, culture (e.g., values, religion, language), and/or military invasion, occupation, and control, serving to colonize, oppress, and dominate this nation or people by any and all means which limit their rights, liberties, and freedom of self-determination.
These are my words; but THEY are not words solely of my making. These words, and the thoughts they embody and represent, appear in timeless historical documents inspired by many noble sources, including: (1) Founding documents of nations (e.g., Declaration of Independence); (2) Global organization statements (Universal Declarations of Human Rights – UDHR); (3) Statements of human aspirations for justice, dignity, freedom (e.g., The Montpelier Manifesto; Magna Carta, Gettysburg Address); (4) Liberation leaders and writers (e.g., Martin Luther Ling, Jr., Frederick Douglas, Paulo Freire, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Malcom X, Susan B. Anthony, Franz Fanon); and (5) Scores of anti-war and anti-violence advocates, who have sacrificed their lives in service to humanity and life.
The coda speaks to the timeless human impulse for self-determination, and to resist oppression. At the heart of coda is an abiding determination to resist domination by foreign powers seeking to subdue, subjugate, and eliminate resistance, by any and all means. This domination strategy is known as “total war.”
“Total War”
“Total War” is not restricted to the USA. It is a timeless strategy designed to defeat a targeted population through the use of any and all means. While “Total War” may initially give priority to military warfare over destruction of civilian and civil society survival needs; it can, however, easily morph into ethnic cleansing, mass extermination, and genocide. Recall how early American settlers and the USA engaged in the extermination Native American Indians via small pox infestations, starvation, famine, assassinations of leaders, uprooting of homelands, and punitive forced marches. Consider also the tragic consequences of USA “total war” on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Middle-East nations.
The USA has used “total war” to not only defeat, subdue, and subjugate a targeted population or nation, but also to humiliate and annihilate their historical traditions, languages, values, and potential sources of resistance. Total defeat and destruction of a people or nation offers the USA the continuing opportunity to pursue “global” political, economic, cultural, military, and moral dominance.
Among the “total war” strategy waged by the USA, is exporting popular American culture in an effort to undermine a targeted people or nation. As USA popular culture elements and forms are inserted or imposed, among a conquered people or nation, the impact is a total crushing of identity. There are those who say the impact is very much a function of the depth of the conquered people or nation, but this ignores the social upheaval, and selective accommodation to USA popular culture (e.g., Japan, Korea, Germany, and China)
There are many documentations of USA military interventions (e.g., http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html; https://www.transcend.or/tms/2017/01/from-wounded-knee-to-syria-a-century of u-s-military-interventions/ ).
Exportation of USA Popular Culture
For the United States of America, “total war” involves the direct and indirect exportation of USA popular culture, resulting in the “weaponization” of culture manifestations, representations, and expressions. Exportation becomes a powerful way for invasion, occupation, dominance, and ascendancy. Among the most notable consequences, often ignored or hidden from public awareness, are:
(1) Colonization of minds, in accord with USA values, knowledge content, and ways-of-knowing (i.e., epistemology), ways-of-being (i.e., ontology), and ways of acting (praxiology).
(2) Homogenization of human behavior, supporting global uniformity and conformity, while destroying variation, diversity, and differences;
(3) Promotion of major USA goals including hegemonic globalization, unregulated capitalism, corporate domination of local and national policies, dollar supremacy, and USA ascendancy as the sole world power.
(4) Formation of military alliances, distancing the USA from possible threats from other nations. There is increased dependency upon USA military protection, and sales of military arms to conquered people and nations.
(5) Unbridled exploitation of natural and human resources, in accord with USA needs.
(6) Presence of more than 1600 military bases and presence around the world, rationalized as needed to preserve peace.
(6) Decline and extinction of traditional and indigenous cultures and populations, local-life forms. Members of traditional and indigenous cultures are made to feel ashamed of prior ways. As the cultures collapse, alcoholism, prostitution, crime, family disintegration, and logo t-shirts emerge. It is called, “identity with the aggressor.”
USA citizens sense they are captive to their own culture, yet appear unable to liberate themselves from the matrix of omnipresent powerful events and forces. Amid pauses and respites from the comforts of pizza, wings, beer, shopping, TV football games, “unreality” shows, biased media, computer games, and seductive advertising, citizens sense something is wrong, but feel powerless to escape. I hear USA citizens cry: “What have we become? This is not the country I knew. I feel like a stranger in my own country.” There is citizen helplessness in grasping what has occurred. It is much like fish in water failing to recognize the milieu in which they are embedded. It is obvious, but oblivious.
A major source of the USA pursuit of hegemonic control and global domination is The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was advanced in the 1990s by “neo-con” interests controlling USA policy. The “winner-take-all” mentality promoted by the “Project for a New American Century (PNAC) serves the interests of a limited number of wealthy, powerful, positioned, and privileged people, organizations, and nations. Moral, ethical, or legal concerns are dismissed as “better for the world.” The tragic consequences of the hegemonic USA Project for a New American Century is now recognized as a primary source of far-reaching national and global destruction, including:
(1) Invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and other Arabic and Persian Middle-Eastern nations, societies, and cultures;
(2) Disastrous failures in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). It has been estimated 1.3 million lives have been lost to the GWOT (http://www.comondreams.org/news/2015/03/26/body-count-report-reveals-least-13-million-lives-lost-usled-war-terror ).
(3) Growing criticism and distrust of possible internal government participation in the 9/11 disaster;
(4) Bitter conflict within USA executive and security branches as revelations of conspiracy emerge;
(5) Issues of “False Flag” operations, and systematic media deceit.
(6) Fractionation of the populations along regional, political, gender, racial, ethnic, age, and wealth lines;
(7) Destruction of images and perceptions of the USA as a democratic nation governed by law.
The USA is exporting a popular culture threatening global peace and justice, and ultimately human survival.
Dimensions of USA Popular Culture:
- Consumerism:The promotion of the constant and unlimited purchase of goods as a source of personal satisfaction and status. Consumerism has little concern for the consumption and exploitation of natural and human resources. (Sustainability)
- Materialism: The belief that personal worth and well being is directly related to the acquisition of tangible goods and personal possessions. Materialism is a major source of consumerism. (Spirituality)
- Commodification:The assignment of a monetary value to all things so they can be treated as commodities (i.e., articles of commerce or trade on the commodity market and exchange) to be considered in determining worth and value. Within this ethos, money becomes a critical arbiter of personal, governmental, and commercial decisions. (Human Worth)
- Inequality/Privilege/Diversity:This American cultural ethos seeks to hide or disguise itself amidst spin, platitudes, and self-righteous assertions in government, commerce, media, and religion, but the harsh reality is that the very diversities we claim to support constitute sources of their absence or minimal existences. Racial, ethno-cultural, gender, sexual preferences, social class, and a host of other biases define popular culture, and are sustained by it (Diversity/Equality)
- Violence and Power: The impulse and tendency to use harsh and abusive force for both pleasure (e.g., football, computer games), and to pursue power (e.g., bullying, gangs, war). There is a tolerance of violence and, in many ways, a fascination with its expression and consequences. (Peace/Justice)
- Individual Self Interest:A focus on the “individual” to such an extent that there is minimal attention to the consequences of this for the social and collective nexus. Support for individual rights, while essential for the protection of human freedom and liberty, is often in conflict with the needs of a society and nations (Social Interest, Gemeinschaftesgefuhl).
- Celebrity Identification and Pre-Occupation:The attachment and concern for the lives of celebrities to such an extent that there is preoccupation with the events in celebrity lives at the expense of concern for critical issues in one’s own life and events of the wider world (e.g., People Magazine, TV shows, fan clubs, social networks). (Attachment to “Ordinary” Citizens and Neighborhood Life)
- 8.Competition:Competition is a defining trait of the American national character and daily life. Throughout education, commerce, entertainment, athletics, and political arenas of life, competition is considered good and to be encouraged. “Survival of the fittest” is an ingrained virtue, and there is often little concern or admiration for those who are second best. (Cooperation)
- Financial Greed:In accord with its capitalistic system and attachment to competition in all areas of life, the unbridled pursuit of profit has turned into greed—an excessive desire to acquire money and material wealth often at the sacrifice of all ethical, moral, and often, legal standards. (Sharing)
- Rapid and Constant Change:The emphasis on rapid “change” and the pursuit of the new is a valued goal and activity. This is powered by the new technology. This emphasis continually pushes the boundaries of current and conventional beliefs and activities to new limits. This is especially true for TV programs, movies, computer games regarding explicit sexuality, violence, and dress styles and fads. (Tradition, Continuity)
- Hedonism:While the pursuit of pleasure is certainly a “normal” human value and behavior, first articulated in great detail in ancient Greece, and subsequently in Western psychology (behavior is motivated to seek pleasure and to avoid pain), its pursuit in America is unhampered by the extensive freedoms to self-indulge, and to disregard tradition or convention. These views often conflict with religious beliefs that see seeking pleasure as a sin. (Self-Denial, Endure, Restraint)
- Time Compression and Management: The response to time as a commodity tom be negotiated via multi-tasking, cost-benefit tradeoffs, immediacy rewards, quotas, computer speeds, and highly scheduled family and children’s lives pervasive throughout USA culture. Other cultures share this obsession, but it seems to me, the USA is the major advocate of time compression and management (Aside from sweatshop slave labor in various Asian countries caught in production quotas). (Enriched Time, Fulfilling Time)
- Fast Foods: I suspect “fast food,” if any food was available in distant times and lands was a critical part of building ancient monuments. While labor may have been cheap, feeding tens of thousands of bodies under the pressure of completing the Pyramids, Great Wall, or Cities, required a “fast food” mentality and an efficient organization.
Elements of “fast food” include brief, immediate, or non-existent eating breaks, inexpensive food, high-caloric energy foods, salt and sugar taste-disguises, and poor nutrition value. Fast food is not unique to popular USA culture. However, the USA Fast-Food Industries have refined the contents, production process, distribution, and taste to mass population appeal. It is hard to resist bacon, hamburgers, fries, fried chicken, wings, hot dogs, pizza, tacos, and sweetened carbonated beverages. The consequences: malnutrition, fatty liver disorders, metabolic syndromes, diabetes, chronic illnesses. (Healthy Diets).
- Transgressive Ideology: An emerging cultural ideology that accepts as normative, violations of human decency and morality by promoting illicit behaviors (e.g., violent murder, torture, rape, pedophilia, incest, pornography, substance abuse, sado-masochism) involving all ages. This is manifesting itself in literature, movies, music, and television. (Civility, Decency, Respect)
- Pills and Products: While all cultures produce and use pills and products to treat illness and to promote health, wellbeing, and appearance, the USA supports massive national and international industries (e.g., cosmetic, pharmacological) in these areas. In combination with effective and seductive advertising, homes in the USA are filled with pills, lotions, potions, salves, and devices. (Natural substances; Question Big Pharm).