An everyday example of the first would be the mugger who devalues the humanity of an elderly woman until he sees her only as his victim, a source of ready cash. Another, broader example is demonstrated by the Nazis devaluing the humanity of the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and intellectuals; declaring them “enemies of the Reich,” and murdering them in their hundreds of thousands, using bullets, poison gas, or simply working them to death as slave labor.
The second example includes the situation where a business puts profits ahead of the safety and well-being of its workers, or the community it serves. Another broad example would be the forced assimilation of native peoples to the cultural norms of the colonists, e.g., Native Americans in the United States.
President Eisenhower's infamous “military-industrial complex” combines aspects of all of these examples, especially today in Iraq.
The first example of the mugger is mirrored in the fact that most of the defense industries look at the United States Treasury as a limitless source of money, not as a resource that must be carefully husbanded, unless it should bankrupt the nation.
Defenders of the military-industrial complex will say that it is at worst a necessary evil. But, when we consider that a Pentagon audit says that about one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000.00) could not be accounted for by the Defense Department before the occupation of Iraq, we must consider how truly necessary an evil it is.
I am not saying that we should (or can) abolish the Defense Department. Until such a time as the world has a change of heart, until we somehow find a way to stop madmen from becoming world leaders, we are stuck with the Pentagon.
However, We the People and our elected representatives need to improve our oversight over our war machine. When Harry Truman was a U.S. Senator, he said that fraud, waste and corruption in our military-industrial complex constituted treason. This is more true today than it was sixty years ago. The ever increasing concentration of so much of our military's procurement machinery in the hands of fewer and fewer giant corporations increases the probability of waste and fraud, rather than diminishes it. Checks and balances need to be instituted, excess power needs to be broken up and redistributed, and the cry of national security should never prevent tight control of the purse strings by the Congress.
Even the example of the Nazis is not as far fetched as we might hope. Names like My Lai, Kaditha, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo arise from our history over the last forty years. The United States military was once famous for the mercy our soldiers showed their enemies. We have forgotten the great American tradition of George Washington concerning the humane treatment of prisoners, even when our enemies have acted barbarically. Torture is an symptom of fear and weakness, and our failure to comply with the Geneva and Hague conventions endangers Americans (now and in the future) more than it instills terror in our enemies. Terrorizing civilians only works in the short term, and then only if you are willing, like the Romans and the Nazis, to kill or enslave millions.
The second examples, individuals and corporations maximizing their profit without consideration for the effects of their actions, and forcing the people of a nation to assimilate to certain behaviors insisted upon by the conquering forces, are very evident in our occupation of Iraq.
Both Benjamin Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower noted that every gun, every munition, every military adventure, reduced the government's ability to improve and maintain a nation's infrastructure, educate its young people, reduce poverty, and otherwise make the nation a better place to live. It is money which—in a non-imperialist nation—is wasted if those munitions and material are ever used. It is only in its deterrence that the military has value to the interests of the nation as a whole. When these munitions and other materials are used, it indicates that a nation is no longer safe from whatever enemies their military power was supposed to deter.
The manufacture of war materials is (regrettably) a necessary function of the state, to maintain the rights of the people who grant their consent for that state to exist, against extra-national forces that might wish to take away those rights. However, the monies and lives expended are not recoverable. We have spent one-half trillion dollars in Iraq, as well as the lives of more than 3500 of our service men and women, with no realistic hope of recovering any of it.
The Bush Administration is attempting to impose both a political and economic system on the people of Iraq, the first of which (Jeffersonian democracy) the Iraqis have no experience with, the second of which (free market capitalism) has never worked to equal, long term benefit to all of a nation's citizens. In “free”(?) elections, the Iraqi people chose to go with something more familiar to them, a theocratic republic, rather than the chaotic uncertainty of representative democracy. All that free market capitalism has done for Iraq is deny millions of Iraqis any meaningful part in the reconstruction of their nation, while the proposed take over of Iraq's oil by foreign multinational corporations will leave their nation in perpetual poverty.
By these examples, I submit to you that war is the ultimate expression of evil.
In a perfect world, we could always be certain that we could achieve peace and freedom for ourselves and others solely through non-violent resistance to violence and oppression. However, non-violence fails when we have to deal with conscienceless, sociopathic individuals and groups. Their complete lack of moral compass, and insensitivity to moral pressure from within or without, means that violence must be met with violence in turn, when dealing with these sociopathic personalities. Had someone like Hitler ruled India in the 1920's and 30's, Gandhi, Nehru, and the rest would have disappeared into labor camps, and up the chimneys of crematoria.
War should always be a nation's last resort: there is no justification for a pre-emptive war. But even as we defeat the nations who are led by sociopaths or antisocial, anti-human ideologies, we must always remember Abraham Lincoln's admonition to Generals Sherman and Grant, about the post-Civil War American South: “Let them up easy.” Because in the end, no matter how morally wrong their ideologies and actions, the people who constitute an enemy nation are still human beings.
Nowhere has the benefits of the idea of letting your former enemy up easy been more clearly demonstrated than in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. The First World War saw a very hard peace imposed upon the Central Powers (especially Germany) that directly precipitated the Second World War a generation later. While Europe's and Asia's devastation in the Second World War was far worse than in the First, in the postwar areas under the control of the Western Powers, the Marshall Plan helped our erstwhile enemies (Germany and Japan) back on their feet, a generation later, to become economic powerhouses, as well as our friends. The areas under Soviet control did not fare nearly as well.
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