"The 'D' Word"
by Marilyn J. Lehan
Special to Antiwar.com
6/6/00

Is this what we have come to? As antiwar activism assumes the guise (and numbers) of an arcane cult and permanent war seems to be the accepted way of life for mainstream Americans, are we reduced to calling for a reinstatement of the draft as a means of raising national consciousness about the nature of US imperialism? Is there a "national consciousness" left to be raised?

In a presidential race more remarkable for what is not being said than what is, the mainstream political parties no longer even feel the need to pay lip service to the "search for peace," "peace in our time" or "peace on earth towards men of good will."

Why doesn’t the Buchanan call to "bring the troops home" resonate? Every political act these days is committed on behalf of our kids. Why aren’t we worried about the possibility of our kids being killed in global interventions? Dead kids still rate a headline or two. Could it be that, village ethics notwithstanding, they aren’t really "our kids"?

The baby boom generation, with characteristic solipsism, views the end of the draft as one of the great achievements of the "anti war" movement. Of course, the performance of the peaceniks in power has shown that they are not particularly "antiwar" at all. They just didn’t want their youth blighted by fighting in one; Quite understandable.

But, in one of history’s many little jokes, the dirty job of planetary cop, social worker and therapist has fallen to these idealists. In some unknown telephone booth they shed their Vietnam era identities as overfed, long-haired, leaping gnomes, and emerged as latter day Carrie Nations;

Grim, purposeful and zealous; Firmly averting their eyes from passing nuisances like collateral damage; Making the world safe for people just like themselves.

The high-mindedness of their cause is accentuated by the fact they don’t force American citizens to fight. The all volunteer army is the pride and joy of the War Party. It has provided an almost impenetrable layer of cover for all their interventions; If you don’t like collateral damage, you don’t have to commit any. And, since those foreigners who may, unfortunately, be killed cannot register to vote in our elections, these idealists display a refreshing, down to earth, political practicality. It really does seem rather rude to burst in with accusations of "warmongering" against such enlightened people. And in these polite times almost nobody does. The rude work falls to the tiny group of cranky reactionaries who describe themselves as "antiwar."

The spectacle of antiwar activists demanding a reinstatement of the draft is an image too strange to countenance for most peace loving people, even as a means to an end; But as the United States reinvents itself as a Spartan success story, it may be time for people to consider adopting this paradoxical cause.

We who have witnessed antiwar activism become a minority pursuit, even as the government blithely admits to targeting civilian populations as a more efficient, humane means of bringing about world happiness, must ask ourselves: Why did the antiwar philosophy become an oddity?

The most obvious answer is that the economies of modern, progressive states are far more dependent upon war than even the toughest critic of the military/industrial complex could dream. The current national pastime of analyzing the Russian economic disaster always contains large amounts of self-congratulations for our farsighted choice of a capitalist economic system.

But our leaders know better. They know how much worse it could be in the United States if anyone seriously threatened to dismantle our war economy. That is why the quaint post-Berlin Wall phrase "peace dividend" mysteriously and completely fell out of use two weeks after it was first publicly uttered; Replaced, as we know, with "national greatness."

Imagine the length of the unemployment lines if we excused ourselves from our responsibilities as global hegemon and fashioned a military whose purpose was to defend our borders. Either directly, through jobs in defense plants and the myriad police agencies waging the war on drugs, or indirectly through the industries that supply the wants and needs of these workers, a huge percentage of families would immediately fall out of the middle class.

Luckily, we will be spared the horrors of peace if our governing class has its way. Looked at in the correct way, war can be a beautiful thing. Once the philosophical error of material determinism is accepted, and all political parties from left to right in Western democracies do accept it to some degree, then warfare inevitably becomes the quickest means of imposing improvements upon recalcitrant humans. No modern state wages war for selfish purposes. No elected leader would be caught dead calling the nation to arms for the sake of filthy lucre. It is always for the ultimate benefit of the misguided humans we are attacking.

Warfare and welfare are now indistinguishable. So much so that opposing war is a sin. Opposing intervention in the Balkans is proof of Christian bigotry. Opposing intervention in Africa is proof of racism, ethnocentricity, and now with Clinton’s designation of Aids as a threat to national security, bad hygiene. Opposing war in Asia is proof of a greedy, money grubbing soul.

The darkest, and most troubling explanation for the enduring popularity of war is, contrary to modern piety, that human beings love war. How else to explain the fact that peace, not war, is unusual; That the greatest works of literature, poetry, music, and art are centered upon war? Could warfare be simply one of many human activities – anthropological and cultural, not, as Clausewitz claimed and all military academies teach, politics by other means? John Keegan has been probing this heretical possibility in his books: The History of Warfare, The Face of Battle, and The Mask of Command. If one accepts the anthropological view, it makes the overwhelming popularity of the Gulf War as a visual spectacle even more sinister. The War Party has finally learned to market warfare as pop culture.

Most peacemongers, in particular libertarians and religious, would say that no amount of melancholy over the apparent triumph of Imperialism should drive us to the desperation of uttering the ‘D’ word with approval; That antiwar activists must never support the militarization of society that a draft portends. But once we accept the gloomy fact that our country is already deeply, perhaps irrevocably, militarized – then perhaps we can accept the necessity of societizing the military via the draft with more equanimity.

The creeping impersonalization of modern America is nowhere more evident than in our reliance upon a volunteer army. If you are truly against imperialistic war, the last thing you want to do is grant people the right to vote for a ghastly, profitable war machine without requiring them to grasp the machine with their own hands. The draft may be the only way to give back to Americans the horrors of war. And in so doing give back some of the humanity that has been lost to them as Last Remaining Superpower on Earth.