[Peace-discuss] An interesting commentary

[C. G. Estabrook]

David Bromwich’s “America's Wars: How Serial War Became the American Way of 
Life” misrepresents the recent US propaganda about our wars and -- more 
seriously -– misunderstands their source. 

It is nevertheless an interesting piece, as David says, and it would surely be 
worthwhile if the issues it raises were debated more widely -– particularly how 
empire contradicts democracy.  The author is a scholar of 18th-century English 
literature who has written on Edmund Burke.  "His book ‘Politics by Other 
Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking’ defends the ideals of liberal 
education against political encroachments from both Left and Right."  Uh-oh.

I think David has got it just right when he says that Bromwich "takes the 
professed rationales for wars too literally and neglects the economic context 
that has arguably made war 'the normal state of things' throughout our 
(capitalist, land-grabbing, industrialist, resource-controlling) history." 

Of course, David’s phrase probably also describes the American history that 
most of us were taught and even what we’ve read apart from higher education. 
But that group thinking was challenged by a tradition of American historical 
writing that runs from Charles Beard (a serious critic of FDR) thru William 
Appleman Williams and his students in the 1960s. Its best general expression 
is surely Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” which deserves 
reading thru all its successive updates.

Bromwich is right to raise the question of American militarism, and it surely has 
a history.  I think an American from 1909 suddenly returned to our midst, 
Edward Bellamy-style, would be shocked at the pervasiveness of US militarism.  

But Bromwich’s notion that it is “surprising” that we “have begun to talk 
casually about our wars” seems wrong. We’d like to believe that, “in the history 
of the United States, war has never been considered the normal state of things,” 
but when J. Q. Adams said in a Fourth of July address in 1821 that “she [i.e., 
the US] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” he was expressing 
a pious hope, though he may have wished it so.  But he had designed the 
Monroe Doctrine, much used to descry monsters. 

Perhaps more importantly, Bromwich simply ignores the constant background 
of war that accompanied the formation of the United States – the destruction of 
the native inhabitants.  That was the “normal state of things” from the 17th 
thru the 19th centuries, and it established a fixed paradigm.  During the 
Vietnam war, US soldiers called territory controlled by the Vietnamese 
resistance “Indian country.”  That’s probably true in AfPak today (despite the 
risk of confusion with territory of the nation of India).

What Bromwich has descried in SecDef Gates’ speech is what the Pentagon 
frankly calls “The Long War,” and it is the functional successor to the Cold War.  
(I recently wrote about these matters in an article the “public i” refused to 
publish, apparently because it wasn’t nice enough about the Democrats, “It 
Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons” 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook04162007.html>, and in another 
piece, “Minion of the Long War” 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook05012009.html>.)  Contrary to 
Bromwich’s suggestion, the new war like the old is a result of the consistent 
and perduring foreign policy of the US, under successive administrations.

It’s strange to read, “For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years 
of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of 
armed conflict remains a palpable memory,” because it was exactly these 
people (like me) who were brought into line by the selling of the communist 
threat in the Cold War (including the Democratic party program inadequately 
known as “McCarthyism”). And the principal thing that has changed in the 
current generation is the replacement of the communist threat with the 
terrorist threat.  The myths are structurally similar --  altho’ they have 
instructive differences – because they express similar policy goals, which can be 
traced back at least to the “Grand Area planning” by US policy makers in the 
early days of WWII.  (See Laurence Shoup and William Minter, “Imperial Brain 
Trust” [1977], 130ff.)

Contrary to the invocation of a Second Enlightenment by the French rightist 
Alain Finkielkraut are, e.g., recent books by Nicholson Baker (“Human Smoke: 
The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization”) and A. C. Grayling 
(“Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a 
Necessity or a Crime?”), which chart the destruction of earlier anti-war 
sentiment.  The coming of nuclear weapons made war seem inevitable, not 
avoidable, as those of us who sheltered under our school desks remember.  
The nuclear umbrella protected the major powers’ police actions, keeping their 
own subjects in line, from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia; and even noted pacifist 
Bertrand Russell – whose political views were generally admirable -- briefly 
advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1948.

It turns the policy of the Kennedy intellectuals in the 1960s on its head to see 
it as anti-war (there’s a recent example, too).  To anyone who lived through 
them in America, it is simply fantasy to assert that “neither [the Korean] nor the 
Vietnam War, fierce and destructive as they were, altered the view that war as 
such was a relic of the barbarous past”!

Bromwich remains firmly in the realms of make-believe (he does profess 
literature, after all) when he addresses Vietnam.  For all the arguments then 
and now, it is not even remotely true that “within the liberal establishment … a 
lone-assassin theory is preferred: as with the Iraq War, where the blame is 
placed on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, so with Vietnam the culprit of 
choice has become Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.”  He refutes his 
fantasized position with a quote from Kissinger that Chomsky recently 
discussed (I’ll bet that’s where Bromwich got it) and ignores what American 
liberals of various stripes said about SE Asia for fifty years. (You won’t be 
surprised that Chomsky’s discussion of the matter is much sounder: e.g., 
<http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20070827.htm>.)

Bromwich notes but doesn’t appreciate the need for a new rhetorical stance for 
US foreign policy after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and he sees correctly 
that the field trial of the new propaganda line (“humanitarian intervention”) was 
Clinton’s attack on Serbia.

It’s hardly new that “the American military now encompasses an officer class 
with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy” – during the Jackson 
administration Congressman Davy Crockett led the opposition to the military 
academy at West Point on the understanding that such a thing was happening – 
and hardly true that “the American military now encompasses … a rank-and-
file for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized”!  Anyone 
who believes that must also believe that Obama is a socialist.

Bromwich treats it as a recent realization of American planners that “Only a 
puppet government can be thoroughly trusted to act against its own people in 
support of a foreign power.” But the officers of the British Raj in India learnt 
that from Thucydides, and even Americans subsequent to the Founders had 
heard of it, despite their lack of a classical education. 

And it’s rhetorically nice but meaningless to conclude, “The passive 
beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.”  In the antebellum South, the obvious 
passive beneficiaries of masters were the children of the salve-owner, and they 
were hardly slaves. (It’s true that in ancient Israel there was an elision of the 
difference between the children and the slaves of the household, but that 
worked to the benefit of the latter, not to the detriment of the former.) 

But the phrase raises however awkwardly the question of the manufacture of 
consent to American militarism by a 20th-century American populace that did 
not want war – even if it suggests the wrong answer.  It won’t do to say they 
were bought off – the compensation offered was niggardly.  So how was it 
done?  We should be AWARE…  --CGE

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:51:04 -0700 (PDT)
>From: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>  
>Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An interesting commentary  
>To: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
>
>   I'm not Carl, but my initial reaction to Bromwich's
>   interesting piece is that he takes the professed
>   rationales for wars too literally and neglects the
>   economic context that has arguably made war "the
>   normal state of things" throughout our (capitalist,
>   land-grabbing, industrialist, resource-controlling)
>   history.
>    
>   DG
>
>     ------------------------------------------------
>
>   From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
>   To: LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at advancenet.net>
>   Cc: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>   Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:26:13 PM
>   Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An interesting
>   commentary
>   This is a good article - the entire article, I
>   mean.  I have to wonder what Carl thinks of this
>   one.
>
>   On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 11:02 AM, LAURIE SOLOMON
>   <LAURIE at advancenet.net> wrote:
>
>     David Bromwich | America's Wars: How Serial War
>     Became the American Way of Life
>
>     http://www.truthout.org/072209C?n
>
>     David Bromwich, TomDispatch.com: "We have begun to
>     talk casually about our wars; and this should be
>     surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in
>     the history of the United States war has never
>     been considered the normal state of things. For
>     two centuries, Americans were taught to think war
>     itself an aberration, and 'wars' in the plural
>     could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger
>     generations of Americans, however, are now being
>     taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of
>     wars."
>________________