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Of
Militarism, Fascism, War And National Consciousness:
Any Authentic
Pilgrimage Toward A Nonviolent Society
Requires
A Clearer Understanding Of The Beast Within
"The sinews of war are endless profits."
:
- Cicero, Orationes Philippicæ, v, c (c. 60 B.C.)
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they shall be called children of God." :
Every nation that authentically
seeks to become a peacemaking society must make
an introspective pit-stop, somewhere along its pilgrimage to nonviolence,
to wrestle self-critically with
this thorny question: "What is this strange killer
instinct doing inside of human nature -- both mine and yours?"
As the above quotations would
indicate, two mutually-exclusive paths exist -- the national
path to war's filthy lucre or the national path to God's just peace
-- and yet there are no easy answers to this difficult question.
However, as if to provide an answer, a group of social scientists from the Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict Research Group devoted their entire conference in June of 2004 -- entitled "Why Neighbors Kill: Explaining The Breakdown Of Ethnic Relations" -- to understanding human nature's genocidal warmaking instinct [1]. To deepen their inquiry into the bellicose side of human nature, these scholars posed the following 3 questions. 1. Anthropological -- "Individual
animals fight but do not collectively engage
in war; what, then, causes human beings to wage war against each
another?" In answering their third question,
these scholars concluded that a hierarchical
network of social planning is required to mobilize people for war.
It must include: Therefore, when viewed from the illuminating standpoint of the social sciences, it appears inevitable that there is a first step in the multicausative genesis of MILITARISM -- which is an essential component of any nation's decline into FASCISM [7] -- and that is deliberate top-down social organization to produce the infrastructural capacity with which to conquer other peoples and nations through force of arms. To achieve the societal transition to militarism, the upper classes must indoctrinate themselves with a morally-blind imperialist war-profiteering mentality before they will organize the lower classes into a hierarchical society that can harvest the poisonous fruits of war. Hence, militarism's belligerently self-righteous jingoistic mindset tends to originate with the economic interests of upper class, and then to disseminate downward. Furthermore, so as not to unduly place blame for the phenomenon of militaristic fascism onto any one socioeconomic class, it should be reiterated that human nature itself contains the seeds that have repeately sprouted, throughout history, into the lethal tree of war. Or, as the renowned ethologist Konrad Lorenz once trenchantly observed, "The need today is for a gentler humankind, for the hand that wielded the axe against the ice and the saber-toothed tiger now cradles the machine gun equally as lovingly." Additionally, as Cicero wryly observed some 2,064 years ago, war can be extraordinarily profitable for those who invest in, or are members of, the military-industrial complex. And, as political economist Joseph Schumpeter correctly pointed out in his magnum opus, Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy (Perennial, 1962), global capitalism inherently contains within itself the very real danger that even a democratic nation could become economically addicted to war -- and hence to militarism -- for several reasons, but primarily to lessen the recessionary impact of "creative destruction" during its volatile business cycles. Indeed, the twenty-first century began with a global recession that was a major factor in proximately causing at least one illegal war of aggression, from which one might infer that multinational corporate capitalism's postmodern version of "creative destruction" is going to be significantly more destructive than creative! This is NOT to contend that capitalism is itself the sole cause of wars! Rather, it is to state that global capitalism, when objectively viewed in its sociopolitical context, can truthfully be said to exacerbate the bellicose propensities in human nature by cyclically supplying nations -- especially the industrialized nations -- with an economic motive to engage in militaristic warmongering. The Bottom Line: America's national consciousness is undergoing an incremental regression toward fascism because hubristic nations are always locked into a blinkered mindset of self-righteous denial, which cannot recognize its own darker nature, and which seeks to exalt itself among the nations as if it was "the shining city upon a hill," but which instead sets itself up to experience a long hard fall into militaristic fascism; and that's why any nation's pilgrimage beyond militarism to a mature state of nonviolent peacemaking requires that its citizens must genuinely recognize the darker impulses within human nature, and then become self-critical enough to stop feeding the feral beast that lurks within us all -- individually and collectively [8-10].
1. Olivia Ward's 6-5-04 CD essay, "Battling
to Understand Our Genocidal Instinct,"
at: |
