TomDispatch
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Is Anything the Moral Equivalent of War?
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on August 15, 2017, Printed on August 15, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176318/ ;
Ever since 2001, when President George W. Bush launched an endless "global
war" not on al-Qaeda but on a phenomenon, or perhaps simply a feeling
("terror") and those who could potentially induce it, America's all-too-real
conflicts have become, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon writes today,
ever more metaphorical. In a sense, they have come to seem so distant from
our shores and lives (unless you happen to be a member of the country's
all-volunteer military or a family member of such a volunteer) as to be
little short of fantastical -- or nonexistent. Who here even notices when,
as in recent weeks, American military personnel again hit the ground in
Yemen, or the Pentagon considers loosing its drones on jihadists in the
Philippines, or U.S. raids occur in Somalia, or civilians in significant
numbers continue to die in a Syrian city under American air strikes? The
answer is essentially no one.
Washington's conflicts in those distant lands couldn't be more real and yet
here in the United States they have largely been replaced by a single
fantasy bogeyman: Islamic terrorism. It matters little that the actual
danger to Americans at the hands of such terrorists is vanishingly small.
Fear of them (and the need to feel "safe" from them) has filled American
screens and minds for years, helping fund our national security state at
levels that might once have staggered the imagination and prepared the way
for the election of a truly strange, even fantastical president.
Think of it this way: as Washington has engaged in a set of disastrous
spreading conflicts across the Greater Middle East, the population of this
country has been gripped by the strangest of war fevers -- a demobilizing
set of militarized fantasies largely focused on our own potential
destruction that have distorted how we look at our world in dangerous and
crippling ways. Rebecca Gordon, who has been writing about America's
"forever wars" and the fantasies that accompany them for some time now,
considers what happens when war and metaphor become one, when militarized
fantasies invade and occupy everyday life. Tom
When All the World's a War...
And All the Men and Women Merely Soldiers
By Rebecca Gordon
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting a "war on
terror." Real soldiers have been deployed to distant lands; real cluster
bombs and white phosphorus have been used; real cruise missiles have been
launched; the first MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal,
has been dropped; and real cities have been reduced to rubble. In revenge
for the deaths of 2,977 civilians that day, real people -- in the millions
-- have died and millions more have become refugees. But is the war on
terror actually a war at all -- or is it only a metaphor?
In a real war, nations or organized non-state actors square off against each
other. A metaphorical war is like a real war -- after all, that's what a
metaphor is, a way of saying that one thing is like something else -- but
the enemy isn't a country or even a single group of Islamic jihadists. It's
some other kind of threat: a disease, a social problem, or in the case of
the war on terror, an emotion.
In truth, it may not matter if the war on terror is a real one, since
metaphorical wars have a striking way of killing real people in real
numbers, too. Take the U.S war on drugs, for example. In Mexico, that war,
fueled by U.S. weapons, using U.S. drones, and conducted with the assistance
of the Pentagon and the CIA, has already led to the deaths of many thousands
of people. A 2015 U.S. Congressional Research Service report estimates that
organized crime caused 80,000 deaths in Mexico between 2007 and 2015. Most
of the guns used in what has essentially been a mass murder spree came from
this country, which is also the main market for the marijuana, cocaine, and
heroin that are the identified enemy in this war of ours. As with our more
literal wars of recent years, the war on drugs shows no sign of ending (nor
does the U.S. hunger for drugs show any sign of abating). If anyone is
winning this particular war, it's the drugs -- and, of course, the criminal
cartels that move them across the continent.
American metaphorical wars fought in my own lifetime began with President
Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty," first announced in 1964 when I was 12
years old. Indeed, my mother "served" in that war. We lived in Washington,
D.C., at the time and she worked for the United Planning Organization, a
community-based group funded under Johnson's Model Cities program. It fought
poverty in the slums of my hometown, just a few blocks from the White House.
As with other similar groups around the country, its personnel tested new
"weapons" in the war on poverty -- job training programs, citizen advice
bureaus, and community-organizing efforts of various sorts. I was proud that
my mother was a "soldier" in that war, which for a few brief years it even
looked like we might be winning.
And there were victories. After all, the legacy of Johnson's Great Society
and the war that went with it included Medicare for older people -- I'll be
starting on it next month myself -- and Medicaid for people of any age
living in poverty. The struggles, sacrifices, and deaths of civil rights
activists together with Johnson's political mastery gave us the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (Of course the Trump Justice
Department is doing its best to roll back both of these victories.) Then, as
now, poverty touched the lives of many white people, but it flourished most
abundantly in black and brown communities and so these new rights for people
of color, some of us believed, signaled a light at the end of the tunnel
when it came to the genuine abatement of poverty.
By 1968, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council
were addressing poverty across racial divides, organizing a Poor People's
Campaign. It was to include a march on Washington and culminate in the
building on the Capitol Mall of a "Resurrection City," which was to serve as
a model -- a metaphor -- for a United States risen from the cross of
poverty. King was, however, murdered that April and so didn't live to see
that city. It turned out, in any case, to be a plywood encampment that
would be drowned in mud from days of torrential rain. In the minds of those
who still remember it, Resurrection City became a sad metaphor for Lyndon
Johnson's war. "The war on poverty," as the saying went, "is over. Poverty
won."
Meanwhile, much of the country was distracted from that metaphorical war by
an actual war in Vietnam, where the only metaphor around was the insistence
of commander of U.S. forces General William Westmoreland that there was
"light at the end of the tunnel" when it came to that disastrous conflict.
What's in a Metaphor?
The war on poverty was hardly this country's first metaphorical war. In the
1930s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched a "war on crime," anticipating
by some 40 years Richard Nixon's war on drugs, which itself has lasted
another 40 years with no end in sight. Nixon also gave us the "war on
cancer" -- still ongoing -- even as he continued to pursue the actual war in
Vietnam, a rare American conflict in the second half of the twentieth
century, metaphorical or otherwise, that came to a definitive end (even if
in defeat).
Nor is the United States alone in fighting "wars" against nonhuman enemies.
The World Bank, for example, ran a seven-year "total war" on AIDS in Kenya.
The project ended in 2014, by which time 1.6 million people, or 6% of the
population, were infected with HIV. Perhaps the bank was smarter than the
U.S. in choosing to declare victory and go home, as at one point Vermont
Governor George Aiken famously suggested we should do in relation to
Vietnam.
What, you might wonder, is the problem in using the metaphor of war to
represent a collective effort to battle and overcome some social evil?
Certainly, fighting a war often requires from whole populations a special
kind of heroic focus, a willingness to mobilize and sacrifice, a commitment
to community or country, and for those in uniform, loyalty to one's fellow
soldiers. It also requires people to relinquish their own petty interests in
the service of a greater whole. Correspondent Chris Hedges caught this
aspect of war in the title of his powerful book War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning. Aren't such qualities useful ones to bring to the struggle to solve
urgent, life-destroying problems like disease, poverty, or addiction?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if human beings could confront those horrors with
the same kind of passion, intensity, and funding we bring to actual wars?
Yes and no. A metaphor is, of course, an implied comparison in which two
things share enough qualities in common that calling one by the other's name
will be illuminating. If, for instance, you said, "Donald Trump is a giant
Cheeto," you wouldn't be suggesting that the president is actually a large,
puffy piece of junk food. You would be highlighting the way he shares with
that particular delicacy a certain orange coloration, as well as an airy
structure that crumbles when you try to get your teeth into it -- as so many
of Trump's statements crumble in the jaws of truth.
Metaphors only work when the similarity between two things is striking
enough that you learn something about one by comparing it to the other.
Those two things must also, however, be different in crucial ways, or what
you have isn't a metaphor but an equation. For instance, Trump as Cheeto
works exactly because you and I are unlikely to transfer to Donald J. Trump
the feelings and attitudes we have toward Cheetos. We know enough about the
nature of both never to want to eat the president, however much we may love
the salty crunch of that snack food. When, however, you know less about at
least one of the terms of comparison -- or less than you think you do --
then a powerful metaphor can be a deceiver, making us think we understand a
phenomenon that actually goes over our heads (another metaphor). A bad
metaphor can affect how we act individually and as a society and in some
grim cases even whether we, or others, live or die.
And the use of war as a metaphor -- the treating of every human ill as if it
were an enemy that could be defeated by a battle plan -- works just that
way. When we declare war on phenomena like crime, drugs, or terror,
instantly militarizing such problems, we severely limit our means for
understanding and dealing with them.
The Power of Metaphor
What happens, for example, when we transform the problem of human addiction
into a war on drugs? For one thing, fighting a war requires an enemy, at
least one group that, given the logic of war, we can imagine as not quite
human as well as an existential danger to the rest of us. It's easy to
forget that the ultimate aim of the war on drugs is not, or at least should
not be, to destroy drug users but to release them from the prison of
addiction (to mix metaphors dangerously). Instead, not just drugs but drug
users often become the enemy.
One consequence of militarizing the problem of drugs -- a lesson from the
war on terror, too -- is that our survival comes to seem dependent on
ensuring that captured enemies be detained until the end of hostilities.
And since such hostilities never seem to end, that means essentially
forever. In other words, as soon as you make war on drugs (and so on those
who use them), the urge to end the real human suffering that drug addiction
causes quickly devolves into, in Trumpian terms, "winning." That, in turn,
means ensuring vastly more suffering through actual violence and the endless
incarceration of millions of people, a startling number of them for drug
offenses, or what might be thought of as the Guantanamo-ization of America.
Can a metaphor really do all that? It can indeed when it so limits our
vision that any other approach becomes unthinkable, unimaginable. In the war
on drugs, as in all wars, there must be good guys and bad guys, good
citizens who are to be mobilized (at least in their sympathies) against
not-quite-human drug users. Similarly, when we declare war on a disease,
like cancer, we risk limiting understanding of the disease process to models
like invasion, or territorial aggression, and so limit imaginable treatments
to therapies that eradicate the invaders with poison or radiation. In
effect, we accept that in the case of cancer, as in the case of the
Vietnamese village of Ben Tre, it may be necessary to destroy the patient in
order to save her. (This is not to say that chemotherapy and radiation don't
save lives; they do. Rather, it suggests that a military approach to disease
can cause doctors to think of patients as battlefields, rather than as
people.)
There's another problem with declaring "wars" on threats to human
well-being: a tendency to conflate the threat and the victim of the threat.
A war on AIDS becomes a campaign to protect "society" from "AIDS carriers,"
as happened in 1986 when California voters were asked to approve Proposition
64, which would have made it possible to quarantine everyone in the state
with HIV. Proposition 64 was soundly defeated, but by then almost 30% of
that state's voters had been convinced that the enemy they confronted wasn't
AIDS, but people living with AIDS.
Suppose we were to think about the struggle to deal with drug abuse not as a
metaphorical war, but as a real public health problem (as seems to be
happening in the case of the opioid crisis that presently affects mainly
white people). What might change? For one thing, we might be able to
separate the concepts of drug use and criminality in our minds. Not
automatically identifying drug use with crime might make it possible to
imagine adopting a program similar to Portugal's decriminalization of drug
possession. In 2001, that country stopped prosecuting simple possession of
all illegal drugs and made government-run drug treatment easily available.
Unlike the rest of Europe, let alone the United States, Portugal's addiction
rates have plummeted since decriminalization took effect and that country
began putting funds that would previously have gone into incarceration into
treatment instead. With Americans stuck on the idea of fighting a drug war,
however, the Portuguese example remains beyond imagining here. It would be
the moral equivalent of surrender.
Another problem with war as a metaphor for social ills is that warring and
caring call upon very different moral qualities. While both share
characteristics like courage, persistence, and often the need to endure real
hardship, the prosecution of war also requires other qualities: obedience,
indifference to the suffering of oneself and others, and the necessity of
viewing the world in black and white. War requires that we recognize in
ourselves only virtue and, in our foe, only inhuman evil. We should not be
surprised when President Trump informs us that, in his wars on crime and
drugs, the human enemies -- gang members, and by extension immigrants in
general -- are not people, but "animals." And to be good soldiers, the rest
of us are expected to practice dehumanizing the enemy, too.
When, in the twentieth century, the United States began fighting
metaphorical wars against social ills, most Americans understood actual war
as something with a beginning (requiring a congressional declaration) and an
end (the surrender of one side, with a peace treaty to follow). However, the
American wars of the second half of that century turned out to lack such
clear demarcations. With the exception of outright defeat in Vietnam,
starting with the Korean War, our military conflicts have lacked endings. We
now have a generation of young people who have never known a time when the
United States was not involved in war, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
Somalia, Syria, or Yemen.
In a 2001 essay, "The War Metaphor in Public Policy: Some Moral
Reflections," the philosopher James Childress argued that, like real wars,
metaphorical wars against social evils ought to be just wars. In the
tradition of what ethicists call "just war theory," legitimate wars begin
for just reasons (primarily defense against direct aggression), are
necessary and proportionate (military action taken is in proportion to the
aggression suffered), and have a reasonable expectation of success.
Most crucially, just war theory imagines wars with beginnings and ends. But
in the twenty-first century, Washington's wars have essentially become
endless, or as the Pentagon has taken to saying, "generational." Former CIA
head Michael Hayden is typical these days in predicting that the fight
against ISIS alone will last 30 years. And the country's metaphorical wars
have followed an eerily similar pattern.
War metaphors mainly have the effect of distorting legitimate efforts to
resolve real social problems, while at the same time cheapening our
understanding of actual war. We misunderstand the complexities of a problem
like poverty when we approach it as if it were an enemy to be defeated. We
also fail to appreciate the horrors of actual war when we equate the
destruction of entire nations with attempts to end the suffering of
impoverished people. A bad metaphor obscures at least as much as it
illumines. Unlike attempts to improve people's lives by eradicating poverty
or curing disease, actual war involves the imposition of the will of one
group on another, through acts causing injury, pain, destruction, and death.
Of course, as we've seen with recent Republican attempts to repeal
Obamacare, policy proposals can kill, too, but they are not wars. It's
important to maintain that distinction.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
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a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Rebecca Gordon
C 2017 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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