[Peace-discuss] Be careful what you assume…

[Robert Naiman]

I would guess that most people who cite Eisenhower's speech cite it
not as evidence that Eisenhower was a wonderful human being, but
rather because the fact that *Eisenhower* said it gives it greater
weight. So it's almost the opposite. I suppose that it could be argued
that the citing has some residual effect of making people feel more
positively about Eisenhower. But, seeing as he is long dead, any
social harm caused by this seems minimal. If you could shut down one
foreign base, cancel one weapons system at a cost of inadvertently
discouraging people from hating Eisenhower as much as they're supposed
to, it seems like a small price to pay.

There are a lot of arenas where someone's usefulness as an authority
is almost inversely proportional to one's opinion of their intrinsic
moral worth. Some pacifist denounces the war in Afghanistan: great.
George Will and Ann Coulter denounce it: now you got something. If I
point out that Ann Coulter has denounced the war in Afghanistan, am I
guilty of Ann Coulter-promotion?

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Morton K. Brussel <mkb3 at mac.com> wrote:
> I too have used Eisenhower's words in hopes that they be taken literally
> from someone who understood the perils of militarism, but Wolff explains why
> to do this is to give a false image of Eisenhower.
>
> Eisenhower's "warnings about military overreach were couched, it's usually
> forgotten, in passages insisting on the need for a military of unprecedented
> size." The famous final warning about the military-industrial complex is the
> best example: It was immediately followed by words that are typically
> ignored: "We recognize the imperative need for this development [of the
> complex].... Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action" because the
> communist threat "promises to be of indefinite duration."
>
>  http://www.truth-out.org/how-one-paragraph-a-single-speech-has-skewed-eisenhower-record66953
>
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-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org