Militarism

With the horrific police lynching of George Floyd, militarism has been freshly perceived as a universal affliction, a planetary tragedy. In America, young whites and blacks march peacefully together, only to come face to face with nightsticks, pepper spray, and tear gas. In Delhi a Christian father and son are arrested by Hindu police for violating curfew and end up tortured and dead. In places like the Philippines and Brazil, mass extra-judicial police killings continue unabated.

Militarism—the use of overwhelming force as a first resort—rarely works, either as an instrument of domestic control or as an international system of security. It may help power and wealth succeed in temporarily pacifying the unruly poor, but it does nothing to strengthen the web of equal opportunity that lessens the need for control in the first place. It has not built democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. Chinese militarism cannot contain the desire for freedom in the hearts of the citizens of Hong Kong or Taiwan. Russian militarists, Iranian militarists, Syrian militarists will not be able to control the democratic aspirations of their own citizens. Israeli militarism will never resolve the conflict with Palestine. And on the nuclear level, a militaristic arms race continues unabated, toward an apocalypse that no one wants, a conflagration that will burn millions of men, women and children to ash and leave no victors.

The militarism of international armed forces has much in common with domestic police militarism. Only the scale is different. The extent of America’s global military reach is impossible for the average civilian to comprehend. We have had almost zero debate about what size our military ought to be in a world of limited resources, including open discussion of the strategic usefulness—or uselessness—of nuclear weapons. This just doesn’t come up, even in entire Presidential campaigns, let alone debates. That very silence shouts the extent to which militarism’s infection may have weakened us. Pentagon accountants are apparently unable to plumb the mysterious depths of their own budgets. The juggernaut rolls on, unopposed except by a peace movement which, while robust, remains too small.

No one would argue that soldiers and the police do not sometimes exemplify duty, courage, and sacrifice. But in a more enlightened world, the police would be trained and equipped to put emphasis on tactics that de-escalate violence rather than to use violence to preserve an artificial and unjust “law and order” that only applies to certain people. If the armed forces of nations were motivated by the same spirit of de-escalation and not control or conquest, there would be all the more opportunity for heroic courage. There have been situations, like ending the Bosnian war, where diplomacy backed by military force was essential, just as there have been failures to intervene where loss of life could have been prevented, like the Rwandan genocide. Peacemaking is a high calling, blessed by the sages of the world’s religions.

Mr. Trump, though expressing it with his usual tone-deafness, was onto something when he said that the death of George Floyd was a great day. With that horrific video, something cracked open around the world. The curtain was drawn back upon the naked face of “law and order,” for all to see that it was often crude, selective, malign, corrupt with power for its own sake, systemically unfair. The violent militarism of police forces all across our country unleashed upon mostly peaceful protesters rubbed our noses in something usually more distant and abstract, especially for white people.

Militarism has always been rationalized by the ancient Roman bromide: if you want peace, prepare for war. With the deaths of George Floyd and too many others, this has become a deeply questionable notion. Are the trillions presently pouring into weapons systems like the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter, or the renewal of our nuclear arsenal, really the best way to strengthen our nation and overcome the perpetuation of racist injustice? Doesn’t our renewed strength lie in diverting some of those bottomless resources into schools, hospitals, Medicare for all, free college for all, mass transit, putting people to work on infrastructure renewal, and conversion to sustainable energy sources? That kind of shift would encompass reparations that would benefit everyone, not just those whom our violent history has deprived of the blessings of liberty. Such movement toward an equal-opportunity society would ultimately make the demanding work of the police far less difficult, as well as making America stronger internationally.

Protesters are not only pulling down statues of generals and statesmen because they abetted a racist political system. The statues are also the symbolic embodiment of militarism, in all its hollow mythic glory, a militarism which suffuses our civic culture, visible in the millions of guns we own. Militarism is found in the rhetoric of all those, from the president to Rush Limbaugh, who push a joyless, simplistic us-and-them worldview that tries to negate the existential reality that we are in this together, all challenged to acknowledge our interdependence and steward the life-support system that sustains us. For this great task, militarism is obsolete.

White Supremacy and World Supremacy

Recently the Equity Leadership Steering Committee associated with an almost entirely white school district in Maine came out with a strong letter asking citizens to acknowledge not just the anodyne “white privilege,” but the actual “white supremacy” pervasive in our nation. Not unexpectedly, they received some kickback. Fortunately the Superintendent of Schools had the courage to back them up.  

Selective listeners heard “you’re accusing me of Klu-Klux-Klan-level racism.” But “white privilege,” compared to “white supremacy,” has the ring of a garden party to which I somehow deserved an invitation. “White supremacy,” enforced by the police and structures too long set in cultural concrete, is closer to the truth. The events of the past two weeks, especially so many young whites demonstrating alongside blacks in the streets, have made it easier for whites to acknowledge the depth of the injustice in which they play an integral part.

We humans are selective listeners. We hear what we want to hear, because it “fits” our mindset. When Donald Trump hears “defund the police,” he thinks “anarchy, chaos, abandonment of law and order.” When the millions of American protestors hear the same phrase, it means “the militarization of the police only brought out their worst tendencies. Reform is a failure. Time to reconceive the police, and put far more funds into social services that meet human needs directly.”

A pervasive paradigm never dies a painless death—in this moment the real deaths of far too many black people. While we’re on the subject of defunding an overmilitarized police corrupted, perhaps from the beginning, by invulnerable power, structural racism, a code of conspiratorial secrecy, and resistance to reform, let’s also remember just how big a paradigm shift we are undergoing in our historical moment—bigger even than racism. Because in this shift, everything is connected.

When Mr. Trump hears “Green New Deal,” he thinks “radical socialism,” where Ocasio-Cortez thinks “new job opportunities and a more sustainable living system; what’s not to like?” Pushed out of the headlines by the pandemic and the police lynching of Mr. Floyd, international challenges like climate change do not abate.

When Donald Trump hears “full spectrum dominance” or “we have more nukes than any other country,” he hears that the “strength” of supremacy enforces law and order internationally as well as domestically. A growing number of the rest of us hear foreboding elements of weakness, decay, misappropriation of limited resources, double standards, and possible nuclear catastrophe.

It isn’t just the police that are overmilitarized; it’s the military itself. Not just in the United States, but the United States is a case in point. The Lockheed F-35 Strike Fighter is expected to cost a trillion dollars over its sixty year lifespan. The plan to renew our nuclear arsenal over ten years will cost us taxpayers 1.6 trillion—leaving aside our futile and unnecessary wars, including the racist one in Vietnam and our indecisive long-running campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine the trillions expended upon bloated military programs and stupid wars that end up diminishing our security repurposed to give everyone in our nation authentic equality of opportunity, equal access to health care, equally well-funded schools.

We, and not just in the U.S. but also in other autocracies like Brazil or Hungary or Russia or China or Iran or Myanmar, are invited to rethink the age-old question of fundamental relationship between the state and the individual citizen. Is the purpose of the state to control, or is it to support human dignity and equal opportunity and clean air and water?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence says that citizens will create an ideal society and government by “laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

The people in the streets yearning for something new and hopeful, not only in the U.S. but all around the world, including Hong Kong, don’t want to be controlled by an intrusive state; they want to be free from the state unless it is repurposed to more effectively champion their needs and rights.

Nuclear weapons, like our over-armed police, are also the expression of a brutal, dysfunctional, obsolete attempt at supremacy and control. Defund and reconceive the police. Defund subsidies for fossil fuels and support alternative energy systems. Defund and reconceive international security by forging new arms agreements which lift the anxiety of being annihilated off our necks. “I can’t breathe” has more than one meaning.

The End of “Othering”: Another Kind of Global Climate Change

  

There is another kind of climate change, a mental one, we are undergoing, catalyzed by the combination of the pandemic and the gruesome lynching of George Floyd. Mr. Trump’s non-leadership is a classic example of the mental climate that is dying. His way is division—into the Us of his base, and the Other: the left, minorities, protestors.

But the world of “Othering” is dying to make way for the world of “We Are All in this Together.”

As one who benefits from white privilege yet still believes in the power of loving, trained non-violence, I revere the example of Martin Luther King Jr.—not the cleaned-up King of the holiday, but the “radical” King who not long before he was assassinated, spoke truth to the triple evils of American militarism, racism, and materialism, the King who made uncomfortable connections between the war in Vietnam and poverty at home.

I wish all the protest was disciplined in the Gandhian tradition, because that would be a further expression of the new world in the making. Such creative protest, exemplified by the Chief of Police of Flint, Michigan who put down his baton and walked with protestors, heading off mayhem in his city that night, makes it harder for Trump to sustain his tired Us-and-Them schtick.

But that is too much to ask at this further moment of pain for African-American citizens, one more link in an endless chain of injustice and deprivation going back to the slavery that was written into the Constitution. Obedience to law is liberty, but if the law is perceived to be structurally unjust, then, as President Kennedy said in 1962, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

I have the honor to be the grandfather of five mixed-race grandchildren ages 15 to 2. In my country, if it does not fundamentally and quickly change, these children are going to undergo a transformation in the eyes of our systemically racist culture. As they enter puberty, their adorable qualities will mysteriously evaporate, replaced by the reality that too many white people will see them as a threat, especially too many of the police. They will require “the talk,” about how to respect police officers as a matter of survival. To have to explain to the innocent why they are an “Other” is a kind of madness, one that fuels the rage that is pouring into the streets of our cities.

My grandchildren also have the opportunity to be citizens of a possible new world of which we see faint signs, a world in which whites will finally accept that their coming status as a racial and political minority in America need not be threatening—that whites will no longer need an Other to help us define ourselves as superior. That challenge must be met entirely by us whites—a change of mental climate indeed.

But this cultural tendency toward “Othering” encompasses so much more than the present racial divide in the United States. It explains and connects so much of what is wrong and false and dying in our world, and what is right and true and being born, a birth upon which depends the very survival of us all.

In the world I hope is possible for my coffee-colored grandchildren, citizens will have made the intimate connection between all of the big challenges facing the planet: ecological degradation, nuclear weapons, world-encompassing pandemics, the polarizing divide in our politics made worse by sneering demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. All of these huge challenges emerge from the human tendency to “Other,” a fire upon which Limbaugh and Trump happily pour gasoline.

Out of our fears and desires to maintain an illusory control, we humans have created world-ending weapons to keep the Other at bay.

Out of their fears and desires to maintain an illusory control, the super-wealthy, enabled by the president and his legislation-burying Senate toadies, enjoy far too much influence over our government. Often they pay no taxes at all (surely a kind of welfare, if not outright looting), and have “Othered” ordinary citizens, forgetting that these ordinary citizens are the interdependent source of their wealth.

Big Pharma and Big Insurance have “Othered” Americans into health care haves and have-nots, when for the cost of a few less aircraft carriers and F-35 fighters, we could all afford preventive and curative care.

Out of our desire to control and monetize our industrial food-supply, we have “Othered” nature itself, when nature is telling via pandemics and many other signs and portents that we ourselves are an integral, interdependent part of the living system.

There is no Other. As someone once wrote, “the earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.” True self-interest has become what is in the best interest of all, not the nations, but this small planet. At this moment of pain and destruction in America, obviously we’re far from being all on the same side. Still, the sentiment of seeing the earth as a one-sided sphere means a lot more than some easy Kumbaya bromide. It is a reality that grounds us in interdependence, and points toward a mental climate change where “Othering” of all kinds is obsolete.