The battle against War Culture

The following was written by Campus Coordinator Monica Lucas.

I was instructed to research U.S. National Security and culture for a school assignment, and what I found was disturbingly antithetical to liberty. Not only does war exist, but an entire culture forms around the idea of it, and we are left with a society that believes killing and violence are the norm. We, as peace-loving libertarians, should be disgusted.

I started by research by looking at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which has had a sizable impact on the American mindset in its decade of existence. Perhaps at the front of its impact has been the “culture of preparedness” that it aims to produce. DHS is responsible for the highly visible TSA and heavily scrutinized FEMA. These two agencies are metaphoric in that they seem to embody the culture of preparedness that DHS strives for. They are obvious, pervasive and operate under the lurking presence of imminent or actual disaster. They serve as a constant reminder that the United States is not and cannot be a truly safe place from domestic disasters. In this way, they act to instil, albeit consequentially rather than intentionally, the fear of danger.

In October of 2012, President Obama signed an Executive Order that established the White House Homeland Security Partnership Council. The council is meant to establish more intimate relationships between the federal government and state and local authorities in order to “support homeland security priorities.” By connecting federal security concerns with local authorities, the administration effectively formalized the blurred line that already existed between the military and the civilian, the warzone and the homeland.

This blurring of distinctions has been discussed as an underlying cause of “U.S. war culture.” In his article When Life Itself is War, Stephen Graham illustrates the effects of military urbanization, which he describes as the orchestrated change in the understanding of what is dangerous to homeland security and what is not. He explains that in an urban area, all aspects of life have the potential to threaten security—biological weapons, technological terrorism, physical attacks of subway systems and roads, as well as innumerable other activities. As a response to the opportunity for these kinds of threats, urban militarization occurs. This means that any person, place and action can be scrutinized as a possible threat to the homeland. Strikingly, Graham describes an upsetting notion that even migration into a city can be considered as dangerous as a traditional act of war. Importantly, he notes that military urbanization “gains power because of the way [it] fuses with…popular culture, political economy and state practice.”

In a special edition of Social Text, Patrick Deer states that “peace is not the end of war culture. At its core, war culture seeks…a state of permanent war.” Deer claims that the penetration of war into our media as a casual and stable occurrence has served to desensitize Americans to its reality. He cites movies such as Jarhead that suggest that the horrors associated with war don’t significantly interfere with a human’s psyche. Moreover, examples of American television news gawking at international conflicts abound. One such infraction was the Fox News network decorating a set to look like a military intelligence center and calling it the “War Room.” In his article, Deer indicates that these situations “bear witness to the unacknowledged cost of suffering, the moral confusion, the abuses of power, and the corruptions of empire.”

The prolonged state of war and the threat of a homeland disaster have persisted glaringly for over a decade in the United States. It is not surprising that images of war and pervasive domestic security measures have become imbedded as a part of American culture. Today, the current war is not temporal or geographical. Instead, “war is back and seemingly forever.” Graham sardonically exasperates that it is “no wonder Pentagon gurus convinced George Bush to replace the idea of the ‘war on terror’ with the new ‘big idea’ of the ‘long war.” American culture has reflected this.

It is important for us to reject war culture where we see it. Allowing war to seep into our everyday lives as if it is a fact of life only perpetuates violence. We should be defending peace and love at every corner, because to accept war culture is to accept violence, which means crowding out liberty.

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