Dulce Et Decorum Est

At school, Bradley Manning was clearly different from most of his peers. He preferred hacking computer games rather than playing them, former neighbors said. And they said he seemed opinionated beyond his years about politics, religion, and even about keeping religion out of politics.

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,” he wrote, “if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press.”

By Thoreau

I just read War is a Racket by Gen. Smedley Butler.  Butler served in various interventions in the Philippines, China, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America in the first quarter of the century, as well as World War I.  He does not regard any of those conflicts as justified in retrospect, and views them as having been fought for the sake of big business.  He doesn’t even spare the military from his wrath, saying that the standing army doesn’t just exist for the sake of the weapons industry, but also for the sake of generals and admirals who would lose positions and prestige if they didn’t have  fleets and armies to preside over.  The only people he has any pity for are the troops, and even then he doesn’t glorify them as the foot-soldiers of freedom, but rather says:

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks.  There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to  “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day.  They were put should to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed.  We used them for a couple years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Descriptions like that cannot be countenanced in our culture.  Our culture will not allow us to use the word “murder” in regard to what the military does.  Even Lt. William Calley was only regarded as a “murderer” by one faction of our political culture, with the other faction regarding him as a victim.  (If you don’t believe me, read Nixonland.)  We are supposed to revere The Troops as being better than regular citizens, and regard their task as admirable rather than, at best, a sometimes necessary evil.

But it gets better.  He said of his career:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Rhetoric like that is not acceptable in our political discourse.

The biggest difference between then and now is that whereas his book describes the way that profits go up during war, now we have such a massive and permanent military-industrial complex that the weapons manufacturers don’t need a war to turn a nice profit (although a war always helps).  Indeed, as much as I support massive cuts in military spending, a part of me does worry about the short-term economic impacts of such cuts, when so much of our economy is devoted to the tasks of murder and espionage, oh, sorry, I meant, defense and homeland security.

At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later, a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 "It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

… Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify the $2 billion ($26 billion in today’s dollars) expense to Congress and the public… Byrnes…warned Roosevelt that political scandal would follow if it [the atomic bomb] was not used. … "How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research [after the war] if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?" …the U.S. had produced two types of bombs–one using uranium, the other plutonium. Whenever anyone suggested that the moment the bomb was dropped the war would be over, [bureaucrat] Groves countered, "Not until we drop two bombs on Japan." As [historian] Goldberg explains… "One bomb justified Oak Ridge, the second justified Hanford." Hiroshima was hit with the uranium bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy"; the plutonium bomb, "Fat Man," was used against Nagasaki.

From Why We Dropped The Bomb By William Lanouette, CIVILIZATION, The Magazine of the Library of Congress, January/February 1995

It’s hard for Americans who identify with the U.S. Government to accept the idea that that organization could have engaged in such horrendous acts – twice in three days – without pristine motives.

Here’s what Vietnam era U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara – who was part of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s command when the bombs were dropped – thought about it:

McNamara: "He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals."

It seems things haven’t changed much, doesn’t it?