Re: Nineteen Eighty Be4?

Mogens Michaelsen posted:

> When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to
> be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as
> military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most
> palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.
>
> George Orwell: "1984"

good 1.

~~

The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national
security was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by the
Council of Foreign Relations before and during the Second World War. This
development was recognized by the historian Charles Beard, who charged in
1948 that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the nation to war and
knowingly violated the Constitution to do so. Beard warned at that time
that Madisonian principles of checks and balances were in jeopardy and
that the executive branch would gain control of foreign policy and war
making in the postwar period through the expansion of state secrets.


<which it did>


It is tempting to interpret military growth and foreign policy adventures
after the war as the inevitable components of a grand conspiracy among
elites to build and consolidate the American empire. But a conspiracy
theory must be cautiously applied even though there is overwhelming
evidence that postwar policies were determined in a conscious and
coordinated fashion, for it must take into account the genuine divisions
that existed among elites about how to handle the Soviet Union. Roosevelt
himself seemed to adopt the position that the Soviet Union was entitled to
a sphere of influence of its own after the war, and he proceeded to
emphasize policies, such as strongly supporting the United Nations, that
would have consolidated a grand area for the United States excluding
Eastern Europe.

To the ideological right of Roosevelt were influential policy makers like
Averill Harriman and George Kennan, who saw the Soviet Union as an
expansionist power that needed to be contained without the constraints
that might be imposed by a United Nations. Their containment strategy
envisioned a military buildup complemented by aggressive diplomatic and
economic initiatives. More thoroughly conservative advisers like Dean
Acheson favored provocative military measures. Even further to the right
stood fanatical anticommunists and opportunists like Joseph McCarthy and
Richard Nixon, who argued that the Soviets had penetrated the halls of
government within the United States and who advocated "rolling back" the
Soviet area of domination rather than merely "containing" it. (Nixon,
however, became more pragmatic as his career progressed.)

Even if Roosevelt had not died and been succeeded by the hawkish Harry
Truman, developments at home and abroad would probably have accelerated
militarization and propelled U.S. foreign policy rightward. The desire by
both liberals and conservatives to purge the labor unions and the
Democratic party of leftist influence undermined elites who favored a
pragmatic orientation towards the Soviets. Stalin's pathological behavior
toward his real and imagined political opponents strengthened those who
sought to recast the Soviets in place of Nazi Germany as the incarnation
of an evil empire that could be deterred only by an aggressive foreign
policy backed by a worldwide military presence.

The theory of "totalitarianism" helped legitimate the new national
security state by providing the theoretical underpinning for casting the
Soviets in the role of aggressor. Proponents of the theory argued that
Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany were alike because both regimes were
characterized by a single party dominated by a charismatic dictator driven
by an imperialistic ideology, who used terror and imposed state control
over the economy and communications system. It did not seem to matter to
promoters of the "Communist conspiracy" theory that there were fundamental
differences between the histories and regimes of Germany and the Soviet
Union (or that many right-wing policy makers in the United States
continued to feel sympathy for the Nazis). The theory was useful in
creating an image of an aggressor who would this time be deterred, not
appeased-a new enemy that was particularly dangerous because it sought to
spread an anticapitalist ideology.

Within the United States, those who sympathized with socialism, Marxism,
or communism, or even with civil rights groups, were defined as threats to
the security of the nation. Legislation like the Smith Act of 1940, a
wartime act aimed at Nazi sympathizers, was now turned not only on
Communists but on anyone suspected of holding leftist ideals. In 1950, the
Internal Security Act was passed, requiring communist or "sympathetic"
organizations to register with the Attorney General, who possessed the
authority (under the Smith Act) to declare certain organizations a threat
to national security for allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the
United States government. This provision was routinely applied to
organizations that had never advocated such a position. Together with the
National Security Act of 1947, these pieces of legislation remain as the
cornerstone of the government's authority to suppress internal dissent
under the guise of national security.

In 1948, bombers capable of striking the Soviet Union with atomic weapons
were placed in Britain, and General Lucius Clay, who headed American
occupation forces in Germany, tried to convince President Truman to
provoke a war with the Soviets. But the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb
in 1949 raised doubts about whether the United States could confront the
Soviets without fear of unleashing atomic warfare. The planners were
forced to return to the drawing boards.

The result was NSC-68, a document that became the Magna Carta of postwar
national security doctrine. It laid a blueprint for moving beyond the
concept of defense to the idea of aggressively challenging Soviet
interests by any means short of declaring war. In the document, secretly
approved by the National Security Council in 1950, foreign policy planners
argued against negotiating differences with the Soviets until a new, more
terrifying weapon, the hydrogen bomb, could restore unquestioned U.S.
military supremacy. In the meantime, it advocated an alliance system
dominated by the United States and a buildup of conventional military
strength so that U.S. objectives could be met short of resorting to
nuclear arms.

Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing this
grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a permanent
state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for an official
state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E. Wilson,
president of General Electric and later Director of Defense Mobilization
under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under President
Eisenhower, warned in an internal memo that "the revulsion against war not
too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome.
For | that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the
machinery in motion for a permanent war economy.'' Almost forty years
later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan,
argued that "democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in
the absence of a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression
that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we
diminish that sense of apprehension."


--
TheTruthHurts.
.

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