Henry Giroux’s Essay — “Killing Machines and the Madness of Militarism” — Goes to the Heart of the Moral Disease that Afflicts the United States and Israel — Both of which Have Now become the Evil that They Once Professed to Fight

25 July 2014

Citation — to the recommended essay

Henry A. Giroux, Killing Machines and the Madness of Militarism: From Gaza to Afghanistan, TruthOut (24 July 2014)

The deadliest evil is the one that lurks inside us, unrecognized

War and self-defense are ultimately spiritual questions.

The concept of evil is occasionally useful, not as an idea about a separate and outside force, but as an indicator of moral wrong-doing that one is obligated to rise above — simply by virtue of being an allegedly evolved human being.

By accepting that moral wrong is our doing, we accept responsibility for that which we can socially alter in enough people to arguably improve society.

These truths probably prompted Henry Giroux’s essay, which presents an insightful look at the moral decay into which the United States and Israel have both fallen by virtue of their infatuation with militarism.

In practical terms — militarism weakens us

Like former Army colonel (now professor) Andrew Bacevich, I favor a strong American military. That said, we both see U.S. militaristic imperialism and its penchant for making perpetual war as weakening America in real as well as ethical terms.

There is a difference between ethically wielded strength and powerfully armed cowardice

Today, the United States and Israel repeatedly engage in the latter, ironically using the most courageous elements among each nation’s youth to achieve militarism’s viciously unproductive results.

It would be difficult to craft a more penetrating allegory.

Quotes from Henry Giroux

He insightfully wrote that:

We live in a time in which political illiteracy and moral tranquilization work in tandem to produce the authoritarian subject, willing to participate in their own oppression and the oppression of others.

The result of ignorant and morally dulled American and Israeli publics is militarism.

Militarism is bad

Giroux continues:

Militarism is like a lethal virus that takes as its first victim both historical memory and any sense of moral and social responsibility.

Incapable of thinking beyond military solutions to social problems, militarism absolves individuals and governments, if not the general public, of the horror produced by the weapons it builds . . .

[J]ust as it erases the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it suggests that the hundreds of children killed in Gaza [see here] is a military necessity.

All that has to be invoked are the words "collateral damage" or "military necessity" and the death-laden actions produced by the new militarists disappear into the dark vocabulary of authoritarian doublespeak.

In broader context, he adds that:

Thus, the silence over filling our prisons with poor people of color, treating desperate immigrant children as if they were vermin, and allowing elected officials to replace reason with forms of militant religious fundamentalism.

What kind of moral arrangements does a society give up when there is no outrage over the fact that the United States supplies billions of dollars in armaments to other states and thus is complicit in the killing of young children and others through acts of state terrorism?

The militarists come from various political parties and are hooked into a market-driven logic that disdains thinking about social costs or the despair they create.

They are unadulterated agents of cruelty and their power serves a corrupt form of casino capitalism that breathes and breeds the ideology and policies of the military-industrial-surveillance complex.

In the United States, trillions are spent on wars that were based on and initiated with lies.

Why this matters — freedom and soul

We enslave ourselves, when we oppress and dismember others.

As Giroux implies, the Military Industrial Complex — which profits from actively wielding death — bases its power to do wrong on the American public’s willingness to believe its lies and surrender our freedoms and moral responsibilities, so as to advance the Complex’s viciously self-interested profit-making.

The moral? — The United States and Israel have become what they once professed to hate

The United States and Israel have become inhumane oppressors of others. Our oppression is exercised through the courageous physical actions of those, who are too young to doubt the pretended wisdom of their cowardly and avaricious elders.

In doing this, we harm the world three ways:

First, by injecting troops into fields of fire where they do not belong.

Second, by casually believing that they must bear the collateral deaths and trauma that result.

And third, by leaving thousands upon thousands of foreign innocents dead and maimed at our hands.

War is, by moral necessity, a last resort.

That America and Israel essentially use deadly violence as a first alternative completes the ethical and strategic cases against them. Practically speaking, for realists like me, because human beings have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness and proportion, American and Israeli militaristic excesses are already weakening the two nations' geopolitical positions.

No nation can perennially bleed blood and money, while further tilting world opinion against it, and survive.

Stupidity, combined with national nastiness, eventually kills its wielder. That is why moral disease, as Henry Giroux implicitly defines it, is not something that a nation can turn its back on.

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Henry Giroux’s Essay — “Killing Machines and the Madness of Militarism” — Goes to the Heart of the Moral Disease that Afflicts the United States and Israel — Both of which Have Now become the Evil that They Once Professed to Fight