by Chris Hedges
Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are often those they fought.
“Nobody comes back from war the same,” says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker’s book. “The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression.
“Many who served in the Malvinas,” he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, “committed suicide, many of my friends.”32
“I miss my family,” reads graffiti captured in one of van Agtmael’s photographs. “Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be happy if I don’t go home again.”
Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and written in thick, black marker: “Fag!!!”33
The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of small, terrified children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?
Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the Other, but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities—warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers—who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.
III
Dismantling the Liberal Class
To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus
against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanim-
ity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their
support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which
America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists,
new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with
each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the col-
lapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a
hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellec-
tuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture.
They are now complacently asserting that it was they who
effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim percep-
tions of the American democratic masses. A war made delib-
erately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict reluctantly
passed after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish
masses, too remote from the world conflict to be stirred, too
lacking in intellect to perceive their danger!
—RANDOLPH BOURNE, “The War and the Intellectuals,” 19171
WOODROW WILSON, escorted by a troop of cavalry because of fears of anarchist bomb attacks, left the White House on a dreary, rainy April evening in 1917 for the Capitol to call on Congress to declare war on Germany. He made the twelve-minute journey without his family, who had gone on ahead, and entered the packed House of Representatives to enthusiastic applause. He began his speech before the joint session of Congress in a quiet, conversational tone. He dryly listed the events that had transpired since the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Germany. He denounced German submarine warfare, which had resulted in the sinking of American cargo ships, as an attack against all humanity. He said that he had once thought armed neutrality would work, but had come to see that it was ineffectual.
“There is,” Wilson said, “one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people to be ignored or violated.”
Chief Justice Edward Douglas White, a veteran of the Civil War who had fought on the Confederate side, was sitting with the other members of the Supreme Court in the front of the Speaker’s stand, and he interrupted with applause that became contagious, spread through the assembly, and soon thundered throughout the chamber.
“With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking,” Wilson went on,
and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and the people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
Justice White, a staunch segregationist who liked to regale listeners with tales of his personal war heroics that were too fantastic to be credible, at this point let out what to many who were in the chamber sounded like a Rebel yell. The crowd responded and rose to its feet in whoops and cheers. Wilson, who in 1916 had campaigned for reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of the war,” had reversed himself. He had called on the Congress to commit United States troops to the brutal trench warfare and industrial slaughter that was tearing Europe apart and had already consumed the lives of millions of young men. He had done so although America was a fractious, divided nation that remained deeply skeptical about involving itself in Europe’s self-slaughter. The country of one hundred million had 14.5 million people born outside the United States, including 2.5 million born in Germany, and hostility toward England, especially among nationalistic German and Irish immigrants, ran deep. Pacifism, a legacy of the costly fratricide of the Civil War, was championed by popular orators such as William Jennings Bryan and remained widespread. Many Americans who lived in remote, agricultural communities were deeply isolationist, distrustful of government, and ill informed about world affairs. This resistance would have to be overcome.
The decision to go to war, however, was quickly ratified. The Senate voted 82 to 6 for war. The House voted 373 to 50. War was declared on April 6, four days after Wilson’s thirty-six minute address.
World War I ushered in the modern era. The war bequeathed industrial killing—wars fought with machines and sustained by industrial production—as well as vast wartime bureaucracies, which could for the first time administer and organize impersonal mass slaughter over months and years that left hundreds or thousands dead in an instant, many of whom never saw their attackers. Civil War battles rarely lasted more than two or three days. Battles in the new age of industrial warfare could rage for weeks and months with a steady flow of new munitions, mass-produced supplies, and mechanized transports that delivered troops by ship, rail, and motorized vehicles to the battlefield. A nation’s entire industrial and organizational capacity, as well as its centralized systems of information and internal control, could be harnessed for war. World War I gave birth to the terrible leviathan of total war.
Just as ominously, the war unleashed radical new forms of mass propaganda and mass manipulation that made it possible to engineer public opinion through the technological innovations of radio, cinema, photography, cheap mass publications, and graphic art. Mass propaganda
astutely exploited the new understanding of mass psychology, led by thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd), Wilfred Trotter (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War), Graham Wallace (Human Nature in Politics), and Gabriel Tarde (On Opinion and Conversation), as well as the work of pioneering psychologists such as Sigmund Freud.
The war destroyed values and self-perceptions that had once characterized American life and replaced them with fear, distrust, and the hedonism of the consumer society. The new mass propaganda, designed to appeal to emotions rather than disseminate facts, proved adept at driving competing ideas and values underground. It effectively vilified all who did not speak in the language imparted to the public by corporations and the state. For these reasons, it presaged a profound cultural and political shift. It snuffed out a brief and robust period of reform in American history, one that had seen mass movements, enraged at the abuses of an American oligarchy, sweep across the country and demand profound change. The rise of mass propaganda, made possible by industrial warfare, effectively killed populism.
The political upheavals in the years before the war had put numerous populists and reformers in positions of power, including the election of Socialist mayors in cities such as Milwaukee and Schenectady. While a few of these would linger until the 1950s, the war would chart a new course for the country. War propaganda not only bolstered support for the war—including among progressives and intellectuals—but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors.
The rise of mass propaganda signalled the primacy of Freud, who had discovered that the manipulation of powerful myths and images, playing to subconscious fears and desires, could lead men and women to embrace their own subjugation and even self-destruction. What Freud and the great investigators of mass psychology realized was that the emotions were not subordinate to reason. If anything, it was the reverse. Prior to World War I, much current American thinking, following post-Enlightenment European thought, relied on the assumption that reason could rule, that debate in the public sphere was driven most powerfully and effectively by strong, rational underpinnings. The dream was of a “pure dialectic,” embodied in data, facts, postulates, deduction, or induction, stripped of emotion and conditioning. What Freud and the mass psychologists, and in turn, their godchildren, the mass propagandists, had rediscovered was a deep psychological truth grasped first and perhaps best by the philosophers and rhetoricians of Classical Greece. Greek philosophers did celebrate reason as nous, as a reflection of divine truth enacted in the human mind. But the Greek philosophers were trained in rhetoric before dialectics. Logical argumentation had to have a rhetorical, emotional resonance if it were to sway and shape public opinion. On the Pynx of Athens and later in the Forum of Rome, rhetors exercised powers of persuasion that appealed to emotions, alongside the appeal to reason and fact. Many Classical philosophers, beginning with Plato, warned that the appeal to emotion was only as good as the man making the appeal. But in twentieth-century mass propaganda, this warning was cast aside. The idea was to sway, and to use any means to do it. The moral aspect of public persuasion was pushed aside in pursuit of the targeted arousal of mass emotions. As the Greeks already knew, and Freud and his followers rediscovered, the illusion of “pure dialectic” was just that—an illusion.
The war, sold with simple slogans such as “the war to end all wars” or “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” did not so much emasculate intellectuals, artists, and progressives as seduce them. The enthusiastic embrace of war by many intellectuals and dissidents stunned the few stalwarts, people like Randolph Bourne and Jane Addams, who watched in horror as the nation descended into a collective war madness. The great muckraking journalists, artists, and progressives who had used their talents to expose abuses of the working class joined the war effort.
Twelve thousand people, roused by German attacks on American cargo vessels and fiery denunciations in the press, rallied on March 22, 1917, in Madison Square Garden to call for war at a mass meeting organized by the American Rights Committee. William English Walling, Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair, and nearly all other intellectual leaders in the Socialist Party, abandoning their opposition, issued a call for war the next day. The antiwar movement crumbled, with widespread defections including stalwarts such as Governor Arthur Capper of Kansas announcing on March 24 that the United States had to fight to defend itself against Germany’s “murderous assaults on human life and human rights.”2 Preachers in the nation’s most prominent pulpits blessed the call to arms, and the few voices that continued to resist the intoxication of battle were attacked. President John Grier Hibben of Princeton University, for example, refused to permit the pacifist David Starr Jordan, the former president of Stanford, to speak on the campus. Jordan found refuge in the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton and tried to address the gathering but was booed by Princeton undergraduates. Huge rallies calling for war were held in Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, and Chicago, often addressed by progressive leaders and politicians. The beleaguered leaders of the Emergency Peace Federation, who tried to hold counter-rallies, were shouted down by crowds of war supporters, and were heckled and beaten by police.
“We have been doing the best we know to make known to the President and the Congressmen alternatives to war,” Jordan reported:
There would be no difficulty in the matter if the people concerned really wanted peace. Meanwhile, it is very evident that the Wall St. people are running this thing in their own interest, and that the thousands of conscientious men who think we . . . [should] do something for France or England are mere flies on the wheel by the side of the great prospects of having Uncle Sam endorse billions of European bonds and throw his money with Morgan & Company into the bottomless pit of war. . . . The Germans have behaved like sin, for such is the nature of war—but the intolerance and tyranny with which we are being pushed into war far eclipses [sic] the riotous methods which threw the Kaiser off his feet and brought on the crash in 1914.3
By the time war was declared by Congress, most of these last hold-outs, including Jordan, let nationalism overcome principle and backed the war effort. There were still significant pockets of opposition within the population, but the antiwar movement had been decapitated.
“An intellectual class gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness!” Bourne wrote:
A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices, from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their putative intuition.4
Wilson easily pushed through draconian laws to squelch dissent, but he hardly needed to have bothered. Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, which criminalized not only espionage but also speech deemed critical of the government. Wilson had hoped to include a provision for direct censorship of newspapers, but Congress denied his request. Next year Congress passed an amendment, known as the Sedition Act, that made it a crime to use “disloyal” or “profane” language that could encourage contempt for the Constitution or the flag. The Espionage Act and the Sedition Act became the coarse legal tools used by the Wilson administration to silence isolated progressives and the dwindling populist forces that questioned the war. Postmaster General Albert Burleson, empowered by the Espionage Act, cancelled the special mailing privileges of journals he condemned as unpatriotic, instantly hiking their postal rates and putting about a hundred out of business. A few thousand people, including the Socialist politician Eugene Debs, were arrested for their continued denunciation of the w
ar and calls for draft resistance and strikes. Debs was imprisoned after making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918. The Washington Post wrote after his sentencing that “Debs is a public menace, and the country will be better off with him behind bars.”5 Debs spent more than two years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary until President Warren Harding commuted his sentence on Christmas Day 1921. Vigilante groups, roused by the enflamed war propaganda and nationalist call to arms, physically attacked and at times lynched war opponents.
Progressive politics had enjoyed an upsurge before the war, bringing on a golden era of American journalism and social reform, but that was now ended. Progressivism would flicker to life again in the 1930s with the Great Depression and then be crushed in the next war. Progressives in World War I shifted from the role of social critics to that of propagandists. They did this seamlessly. The crusades undertaken for the working poor in mill towns and urban slums were transformed into an abstract crusade to remake the world through violence, a war to end all wars. Addams acidly pointed out that “it is hard for some of us to understand upon what experience this pathetic belief in the regenerative results of war could be founded; but the world had become filled with fine phrases and this one, which afforded comfort to many a young soldier, was taken up and endlessly repeated with an entire absence of critical spirit.”