Every day there is war death, though not inside United States borders. We know about the deaths of our soldiers; sometimes we learn how well or badly they are treated when they return home. Of ally and civilian casualties in our war countries (Iraq, Afghanistan) little is said. And wars not involving us show up in our media if they are brand-new, unusually brutal, and/or related to what are called our “national interests.” (Note the importance of oil in the current Russian-Georgian War.)
Yet the machinery underlying war death, the engines of our permanent war economy, are less present to us than ARMY STRONG commercials, standard macho violence entertainment, and recruitment mail. Our military-industrial complex (MIC) is so complex, widespread, and amazingly well-financed it won’t necessarily reveal itself in civilian life, not as a physical building down the street manufacturing objects necessary to our world of war death, invented by neighbors. The MIC seems pervasive enough to be invisible, especially in states without huge military bases, like Minnesota.
Thanks to the peace movement, we know about Alliant Techsystems (ATK) in Anoka, because every week our friends gather to protest ATK’s weaponry, depleted uranium bunker bombs in particular. When members of AlliantACTION get arrested each spring, committing civil disobedience outside, they get ten seconds worth of often condescending media attention. And then, folks, it’s “Back to the Real Warfare World.”
Last July, a splashy headline appeared in City Pages (7.2.8): “Your Friendly Neighborhood War Profiteer.” Reporter Jeff Severns Guntzel broadened our knowledge of the MIC’s local range, from boots and foods to ingenious devices like the Recon Scout Throwable Robot. We may be 34th down on the list of states stimulated by our war/defense budget, but a lot is going on. Spend an hour at the website of the 300-member Minnesota Defense Alliance, a network in touch with a network of government agencies, senators, representatives, governors, lobbyists, “intelligence” workers, generals (former and current), grant writers, job search websites, and on and on.
This alliance wants to help you be a part of the national defense effort. It meets, showing movies about things which (ha, ha) “make the big booms.” It invites Senator Klobuchar to speak. She jokes about enjoying the meetings “despite the protesters” (another ha, ha), and she says, “I support the work you’re doing.” She worries that Minnesota is not getting enough of the contracts. War work means jobs, bacon, death, imagination, profits, more death, but it’s a package we don’t much notice on our shelves.
But it’s questionable whether Klobuchar could be elected Senator without having friendly relations with the alliance and its allies. Or whether Senator Norm Coleman could flourish politically without earmarking $47 million for Minnesota in the 2008 Defense Appropriations Act. No news to readers of the WAMM newsletter, our MIC is part of a larger system whereby private enterprise, government at all levels, and civil institutions (e.g., universities) create and sustain the Empire to which so many on this planet are currently subject. In this election season, it’s beyond disheartening how little the slogan “end the mindset of war” seems to be heard by either mainstream candidate.
Disheartening, but unsurprising. The mindset is the work of centuries, the result of economic coercion dressed up like choice, but also of powerful ideas about the nature of aggression, community, and justice. The people who invented that Throwable Robot didn’t just stumble into the marketplace of the MIC; having found out where the money is, they wanted to make some, and practice their arts and sciences, be good citizens, and keep soldiers safe. (Think, too, of this September’s brutal “security” arrangements on behalf of the RNC; $50 million for a Show and Tell of state power is a lot for four days. Once provided, it’s going to get spent.)
So, imagining peace is tough and exhilarating work, made a little easier during a time when so many of our systems are in free fall or slow decline, and when privatized versions of public good are cracking apart. Publications, organizations, and websites blossom with good ideas, many of them already in practice. I think of Van Jones’s radical Green for All jobs program. Everyone reading this article can think of ten friends with twenty fruitful alternatives to our Economy of Endless War—river protection efforts, public art/murals, unprisons, health care-without-fear, affordable eco-housing, no-schools-called-“Behind”—so many alternatives to the brains that think “BOOM”! |
