The Roots of War - By Barbara Ehrenreich
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Monday April 14, 2003 16:58
by Barbara Ehrenreich
I'd like to be the good marxist and say it is all about the economy (or oil) but some how I doubt it. boys love their toys, and will most certainly use them if they have the chance. is the civilisation destroying force the same the built civilisation?
The Roots of War
By Barbara Ehrenreich
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15604
//Marx was wrong, then: It is not only the "means of production" that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or war-readiness, are probably larger than at any time in history, in relation to other human needs, due to the pressure on nations not only to maintain a mass standing army – the United States supports about a million men and women at arms – but to keep up with an extremely expensive, ever-changing technology of killing. The cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best termed a "depleted" state, in which the military has drained resources from all other social functions. North Korea is a particularly ghoulish example, where starvation coexists with nuclear weapons development. But the USSR also crumbled under the weight of militarism, and the United States brandishes its military might around the world while, at this moment, cutting school lunches and health care for the poor.
"Addiction" provides only a pallid and imprecise analogy for the human relationship to war; parasitism – or even predation – is more to the point. However and whenever war began, it has persisted and propagated itself with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey, feeding on human effort and blood.
If this is what we are up against, it won't do much good to try to uproot whatever war-like inclinations may dwell within our minds. Abjuring violent speech and imagery, critiquing masculinist culture, and promoting respect for human diversity – all of these are worthy projects, but they will make little contribution to the abolition of war. It would be far better to think of war as something external to ourselves, something which has to be uprooted, everywhere, down to the last weapon and bellicose pageant.
The "epidemicity" of war has one other clear implication: War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish war.//
Comments (10 of 10)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Do you count Thatcher as a boy, then ? She was as big a militarist as Blair.
but so-called 'masculine' values; and in that respect, Margaret Thatcher was pretty masculine wasn't she? I've always thought it quite ironic that the first and only female Prime Minister in British History was a member of the Conservative Party; hardly a party itching for women's rights now is it?
If Ehrenreich really doubts that it's about control of oil then she'll have to come up with a good reason to show why this hypothesis is discountable.
this seems a bit truncated so I wonder if its the entire text. nevertheless shes kind of half right. once the logic of war kicks in the boys will be boys and play as war toys become the toys of war. the most recent war in iraq is another where there is also the logic of accumulation in full effect. the 'running down' of missile inventory promises a windfall for the producers and that is before we ever get to the spoils themselves which run to countless billions of dollars. indeed the reconstruction contracts combined with the privatisation of everything in Iraq which was formerly publicly owned, regardless of the mendacity of the regieme, suggests that any consideration of the adventure can have no bearing on reality without considering it as a war of the capitalist elites against one of the most debased populations around. the americans and their british co conspirators will steal everything of value and reorder the iraqi economy to guarantee that all surplus value will go west.
this war is neoliberalism by other means.
See all the different articles about the war?
Next time, instead of posting a new article that's just a copy of what someone else said somewhere else, add a comment to an existing article, and post the link there. The newswire is swamped. Are you helping or not?
...and the bit that's reproduced doesn't do justice to the her argument (with which I don't fully agree, actually, but it's well put in the original article). "Nickel and Dimed" is an excellent book, but having written such a book it strikes me as strange that she can divorce the question of war from the roots of oppression within her own country, where, as she has pointed out, it's impossible to live properly on a minimum wage and many full-time workers are homeless. The idea that war is nothing to do with capitalism or Western imperialism and should be a separate issue from other types of oppression (of minorities, etc.) strikes me as very myopic. It's all part of the same beast-like system.
Isn't it (not) funny that after leaving the iraqis go wild with looting and rioting on the streets, the yanks now have to employ Dyncorp (private company) to provide policing services.
Whatever about the disgusting practise of letting all the reconstruction contracts to US companies, the idea of letting the police to unaccountable foreign disgraced private companies is indescribable.
Dyncorp are the mercenary crew who release the banned Roundup (by Monsanto) all over the Colombian jungle.
"Commenting on the unfolding chaos an unnamed Pentagon official told the New York Times that they were seeking something more than the United Nations peace-keeping troops: "We know we want something a little more corporate and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority and responsibility." "
Which assumed that the posted material was the entire essay and that the "boys and toys" slant was Ehrenreich's.
Having read the article at AlterNet I find it much more reasonable. It doesn't have anything to do with "boys'n'toys" and indeed dismisses or relegates the biological propensity argument.
Instead Ehrenreich makes a subtler argument that avoids discussing any ultimate causation and settles on examining the mechanisms that facilitate war. Disturbingly she concludes that "civilisation" is the cause itself of war having arisen in conjunction with it. Very similar to some of the primitivist arguments.
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