One Fear to Rule Them All

This summer marks the 70^th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the beginning of an era of nuclear fears that dominated the childhoods of people of my generation. We were raised in fear. I can remember civil defense drills when we marched single-file out of our classroom and stood against the lockers in the hallways; training for what to do when the bomb dropped. My husband Arthur, who was born six weeks after the bombs dropped on Japan, remembers marching from the school to a train depot; he never knew where they’d have been taken if war had started. Our parents were just as terrified by the nuclear brinkmanship our leaders were engaged in.

I was reminded of this when I read a column by Fareed Zakaria in today’s Washington Post, about the opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Zakaria paints Obama as an optimist resisting a sea of pessimists. As an example of a pessimist he quotes John McCain saying, last year, that the world is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime” (which includes World War II and the Cold War).

Zakaria then goes on to show how a pessimistic attitude has been a common American reaction to events for decades now:

In an essay in 1989, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington noted that the United States was experiencing its fifth wave of that kind of pessimism since the 1950s.

First, he explained, Sputnik shocked the United States, and by the early 1960s, the country was convinced that the Soviet Union was on a path to overtake it economically, technologically and militarily. When the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, people saw the Middle East’s petro states as the world’s new power brokers. By the end of the 1970s, with the Soviet Union modernizing its nuclear arsenal and on the march — from Afghanistan to Central America — scores of commentators prophesied that Moscow was winning the Cold War. And when Huntington wrote his essay, conventional wisdom was that an invincible Japan would soon become the world’s No. 1 economic power.

None of these came to pass. The pessimists were wrong. The optimists, who saw the unique power and vitality of America as strengths that would enable us to overcome obstacles, were right.

Nowadays the pessimists are warning about a nuclear Iran being an existential threat to the United States. That’s as absurd as George W. Bush’s warnings about Iraq in 2003, and yet people still believe it. Just as absurd is the belief that ‘The Terrorists’ are an existential threat, yet our country’s policies are built around the need to overcome this ‘threat’ at all costs.

Yesterday I talked with two people, in completely separate conversations, who are both convinced that the economy is about to go into free-fall and the dollar will soon be worthless. “The only thing left of value will be gold,” they both nervously told me. Needless to say, they were both extremely pessimistic about the future of this country.

There’s power in fear. Fear makes people passive. They are less likely to challenge their leaders. Fear causes people to shrink their expectations of life so that all that matters is survival. When a citizenry is afraid, they will only ask their government for protection. They won’t ask for a decent life, educational opportunities, good roads, decent health care, etc. When there is an existential threat, these priorities pale in comparison to the importance of survival. Spending half of the federal budget on defense looks like a bargain, not a theft.

Collective Beliefs and War

One of the premises of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that much of our worldview is influenced by the collective beliefs of our culture. We are programmed to think the way people in our culture do. A trip to another country is an interesting way to see this programming in action. Culture shock is the way we describe the experience of visiting people who have different assumptions about reality. A favorite example of mine is the time I went to Fiji, and saw big strapping policemen wearing skirts. That conflicted with one of my culture’s sillier assumptions, that men can’t wear skirts.

But the assumptions that make up our collective reality are not all silly by any means. In fact they have profound consequences in how we think and interact with each other.

One that has been on my mind lately has to do with war. As I noted in a recent post, after Syria used chemical weapons why was the Obama administration so focused on bombing to the exclusion of diplomacy? Why do we have so few non-violent mechanisms for enforcing international norms?

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, recently published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Are We Hard-Wired for War? that argues that our fundamental assumptions about human nature affect our attitudes toward violence in general and war in particular.

The Peace Candidate Always Wins

Bill Maher is celebrating his show’s 10-year anniversary. Every week he shows a memorable clip from a past show. In the August 31 show’s clip he was speaking to Ron Paul in May of 2007. Paul said, “The peace candidate always wins. Logic tells us we can make a better world in a much easier way than causing wars.” Paul was talking about the 2000 election when George W. Bush said he opposed Clinton’s nation-building adventures and the attempts to make America the policeman of the world. Bush had insisted that his administration wouldn’t do those things (which they of course proceeded to do but it was too late then), and that’s one of the reasons W. beat Gore.

I was struck by this comment because I have had the opinion that Americans are a war-like people. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe we’ve just been manipulated over and over again. I thought of WWI—Woodrow Wilson won because he promised to keep America out of the European war, but as soon as he won Wilson started figuring out how to get us into the war. The U.S. didn’t join in WWII until we were actually attacked. Nixon won in 1968 partly because he said he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War—he didn’t but we didn’t find that out until after he was elected. I’m sure a historian could provide plenty more examples.

In 2008 McCain was joking about “bomb bomb Iran” while Obama talked about healing our relationship with the world. Obama won. Romney just made clear in his acceptance speech at the convention that he has embraced the neocons of the W. era. Romney used bellicose rhetoric not only about Syria and Iran but also about Russia. I found myself wondering, ‘could this Republican war-mongering mean Obama will be re-elected?’

In this show’s New Rules Maher made a fascinating comment about the Republican Party’s attempts to erase the past. For a party that positions itself as the guardian of traditional values, of the Norman Rockwell-America of our dreams, in last week’s convention they worked hard to obscure their own recent past. The most recent Republican president and both the most recent view-president and vice-pres candidate weren’t invited: no W., no Cheney, no Palin.

Endless War Part Two

When I wrote the previous post, "Endless War," I had no idea about the latest outrage that Republicans are cooking up in Congress.

A provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, approved last week by the House Armed Services Committee, would allow the president to use military force anywhere in the world where terrorism suspects are reported to be present, even if no U.S. citizen has been harmed or the United States has not been attacked. It allows the president to detain “belligerents” until the “termination of hostilities.”

The New York Times editorialized yesterday,

"That deliberately vague phrase could include anyone who doesn’t like America, even if they are not connected in any way with the 2001 attacks. It could even apply to domestic threats...Since it does not give a plausible scenario of how those hostilities could be considered over, it raises the possibility of endless detention for anyone who gets on the wrong side of a future administration...As more than 30 House Democrats protested to Mr. McKeon, a declaration of “global war against nameless individuals, organizations, and nations” could “grant the president near unfettered authority to initiate military action around the world without further Congressional approval.” If a future administration wanted to attack Iran unilaterally, it could do so without having to consult with Congress."

Endless War

I watched Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" again recently. During the first few minutes of the film a narrator describes how during the Cold War, U.S. bombers flew at "fail-safe" points, ready to strike at targets in the Soviet Union. These planes flew 24/7/365 for decades. As my mind was reeling with the calculation of the dollar cost of this madness, it occurred to me that the United States has been continually at war for 70 years, with only the slightest break during the 1990s.

As soon as World War II was over the Cold War with the Soviet Union began (actually you could probably date the start of the Cold War to some time before the end of the Pacific campaign). There were hot wars during the next fifty years, notably Korea and Vietnam, which lulled people into believing there were years of peace, but that was a delusion.

In 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Cold War came to an end. Silly Americans dreamed of a "peace dividend": the defense budget could be slashed and all that money devoted to education and health and building a more prosperous world. How naive.

The military-industrial complex spent the next decade figuring out how to keep the peace dividend disaster at bay. The breaking apart of Yugoslavia provided a handy justification for military action, and the Iraq no-fly zone kept American jets in the air, but these weren't good enough.

On 9/11 Osama bin Laden provided the perfect excuse to begin another war without end. This one will be better than the Cold War, because the Soviet Union was an opponent that could disappear. Terrorism is a tactic and there is no worries about that disappearing anytime soon.

We naive Americans dream that with the death of bin Laden the war in Afghanistan will end and that peace dividend will finally show up. Fat chance.