Tyranny Reverse Engineered.

• Author: Calhoun, Laurie

Pacifists, who oppose the use of deadly force as a means of dispute resolution, have often been caricatured as laughably unrealistic. It seems a matter of common sense to many people that nonviolence is weaker, and therefore less effective, than violence. Bolstering the myth of military force as the only sure means to effect change, the story of World War II has been portrayed by the victors in such a way as to make it seem as though only the use of massive bombing and state-inflicted homicide could have stopped Hitler and the Nazis.

Gene Sharp is admired by many antiwar activists for having worked tirelessly to dispel the widely held misconceptions that nonviolence is purely passive and that violence can be defeated only through the use of yet more violence. Sharp's magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, painstakingly documents episode after episode throughout history where dissenters did not wield violence but instead undertook nonviolent resistance, ultimately prevailing in conflicts against adversaries whose primary modus operandi was the use or threat of deadly force in securing their aims. (1) As Sharp observes, sincere supporters of the use of military force often point to the case of World War II as a success story, while ignoring not only effective uses of nonviolent action but also the long series of failed military misadventures, as though those failures had nothing to do with the futility of homicide as a technique but instead had extraneous causes.

Despite the many successful campaigns of nonviolent resistance throughout the twentieth century, the prevailing pro-military presumption remains firmly in place still today, more than thirty years after the end of the Cold War stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States. Millions of lives were tragically destroyed in satellite wars during that period. The Soviet Union itself, however, dissolved not because the communists were annihilated by the capitalists but because the oppressive centralized bureaucracy of the U.S.S.R. did not deliver on its promises to produce a socialist utopia. Central committee bureaucrats and their "five-year plans" forged and rationalized as necessary for "the greater good" proved disastrous for the people of the Soviet bloc. Individual liberty was systematically suppressed in all areas of human life, squelching the very creativity and initiative that drive innovation. Tyrannically imposed communism, which severely constrained artists and entrepreneurs alike, also diminished productivity. Ultimately, communism gave way to capitalism through implosion, not the explosion of bombs.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy came to be heralded throughout the world as the primary and most desirable form of government. Imperfect as democracy can only be, given the very real dangers of ochlocracy, it is still arguably better than the micromob rule of a self-anointed few, i.e., oligarchy. One might have thought, given the widespread agreement that only democracy and free markets allow people to flourish, that war as a means of resolving conflict would by now have disappeared from the face of the planet. The Soviet experiment was a failure, and the Cold War ended more than three decades ago. Why, then, does the U.S. military budget continue to augment each year, as lawmakers rubber-stamp any and every initiative characterized by anyone as defense? (2) Why have interventions abroad become more, not less, frequent?

Since the end of the Cold War, the spirit of competition essential to free-market capitalism has indeed largely prevailed, but with notable exceptions, above all, in the for-profit military industry sector, where a symbiosis with government has created a lucrative feedback circuit of crony capitalism and a veritable industry of homicide. The primary companies in the for-profit military industry--Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others--whose largest contracts derive from the government itself, are ensured a steady stream of revenues and profit, no matter what transpires. Such companies partner directly with the Pentagon, which has remarkably "lost track" of trillions of dollars. Where has all of that money gone? It is anyone's guess, given the Defense Department's chronic inability to pass an audit (Anderson 2022; Morgan 2022). The sorts of waste, fraud, expensive delays, and general incompetence which would lead ordinary businesses to fail, do not affect the major players in the military industry. What is worse: because of a revolving door of government officials who become industry leaders, and vice versa, the persons who make decisions about how to allocate taxpayer funds in developing and procuring weapons systems are inclined to do what they can to ensure that the death industry cash cow never runs dry. (3)

When the attacks of September 11, 2001, on U.S. symbols of power and the people who worked there culminated in three thousand deaths on U.S. soil, the perpetrators were depicted not only as criminals but also as combatants. This conceptualization, perhaps unsurprising, given the symbiosis between military industry and the government, was used to promote the idea that it had become necessary to mobilize the massive U.S. military apparatus to invade and occupy entire nations, beginning with Afghanistan. Thus commenced the "war on terror," which spread like an amoeba as factional fighters fled countries under occupation, and previously nonviolent persons were galvanized to take up arms against what they perceived as "the evil enemy," the invaders of their own and other Muslim lands. (4) What ensued was a veritable free-for-all of killing, which continues on even today, more than two decades later, throughout the Middle East and Africa. (5)

The second decade of the occupations seemed particularly difficult to reconcile with the original rationalization of the 2001 invasion, for Osama bin Laden, the individual believed by many to have masterminded the attacks of September 11, 2001, was executed point-blank during a raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. But the campaigns of state-inflicted homicide continued on long after bin Laden was gone, with most U.S. citizens having effectively signed off on whatever their leaders deemed necessary in "national defense" and blithely unaware that the occupations were themselves creating the perceived need to perpetuate and expand the "war on terror." Eventually, in 2021, the U.S. military unceremoniously departed from Afghanistan, killing another ten innocent people on the way out the door (Lopez 2021). Today the Taliban rules that land, despite years of insistence by media propagandists and so-called foreign policy experts that the country was being democratized by its invaders.

All told, millions of people who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or its various splinter groups and franchises have been killed, maimed, displaced, and/or left bereft by the U.S. government's application of military force in response to the crimes of a small group of miscreants. If terrorism is the threat of the use of deadly force against innocent persons, then all such victims of the "war on terror" have been terrorized, not only on the ground, by the presence of occupiers, but also from the sky, with ominous lethal drones hovering above and threatening to strike without warning even in places where there are no soldiers on the ground to protect.

How are we to understand the abject hypocrisy of terrorizing millions of innocent people in the process of supposedly combating terrorism? How, in the wake of the twenty-year "war on terror" fiasco, can citizens and their representatives continue to believe in the presumed efficacy of military intervention? Deferring as they do to the self-proclaimed foreign policy experts, most of the taxpaying populace never entertain such thoughts, thanks to the Pentagon's infiltration of the mainstream media.

Controlling the Narrative

Already by 2009, nearly thirty thousand persons were employed full time in the public relations wing of the Pentagon, one of the aims of which is to promote the military to the very citizens who pay for this pro-war propaganda (NBC News 2009). Because the media has been effectively captured by military propagandists, through network sponsorship and advertising, positive results are invariably trumpeted as victories, while mistakes and crimes are minimized, if not entirely ignored. Out of sight and therefore out of mind, targets in places where there is no active war underway--and there are no troops on the ground to serve as a pretext for force protection--are regularly bombed by the U.S. government. Four successive...