Education and Culture
I recently watched the second installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. If you saw the first, you won’t be surprised to hear that this latest edition is mostly fun and games, the kind of confection that one expects in a summer blockbuster.
But at least a few scenes struck me as deadly
serious. The film features a number of pitched battles between the heroic
Guardians and a fleet of spaceships belonging to the Sovereign, a highly
advanced race of beings who, as it turns out, are scrupulous to a fault (and
then some). Their skirmishes look and feel very Star Wars-esque until one
realizes that only the Guardians have skin in the game. While the Sovereign are
shooting to kill, they’re doing so remotely, from the comfortable confines of
their planet. When one of their craft is gunned down, it’s merely “game over”
for that particular pilot, who is then freed up to watch over the shoulder of
another as he or she attempts to shoot the Guardians out of the sky. This would
be just another playful twist if it were not so resonant with the real world.
In the first seven years of the Obama Administration, the US military initiated some 500 drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities.
In the first seven years of the Obama Administration, the US military initiated some 500 drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities—meaning this total does not even include strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria—that killed as many as 4,189 persons, several hundred of whom were non-combatants and at least seven of whom were American citizens (all of these numbers are disputed, with significant variance between official and non-governmental sources).
The technology bears names that admit no reticence about its death-dealing power. Predator drones, controlled in one moment by a “pilot” on the ground in Kandahar and in the next by one in Las Vegas, launch Hellfire missiles at unsuspecting enemies. A generation-old partnership between the American military and the commercial gaming industry has yielded one long-sought outcome: the ability to conduct war on a virtual basis.
Of course, we do still drop bombs the old-fashioned way sometimes. The world got a vivid reminder of this when in April the Pentagon authorized the first-ever use of the 10-ton GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) in Afghanistan. The $170,000 bomb is so large that it cannot fit onto a drone or even a fighter jet. It has to be dropped out of the back end of a cargo plane. The sheer size of the MOAB was enough to evoke some consternation on social media and its nickname, the “mother of all bombs,” caught even the attention of the Holy See. “I was ashamed when I heard the name,” Pope Francis remarked. “A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother. What is going on?”
War is . . . so interwoven into the fabric of contemporary life that civilians hardly notice it anymore.
War is going on. It is so interwoven into the fabric of contemporary life that civilians hardly notice it anymore. Sixteen years after 9/11, the United States remains embroiled in the longest war in its history in Afghanistan. This spring there are rumblings that the Trump administration is considering a new surge of American troops there. They would join the 200,000 U.S. soldiers already deployed abroad in some 170 countries. While the two major parties quibble on the finer points of military spending, the notion that the American war machine must remain the world’s mightiest is bipartisan orthodoxy. In 2015, the United States spent $596 billion dollars on its military, while the next seven biggest players—China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, France, India, and Japan—spent a collective total of $567 billion. But even that is not enough for some. The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength lamented “defense spending far below requested levels,” deeming the army “weak” and the rest of the branches “marginal.”
“I am a Socialist, a labor unionist and a believer in the Prince of Peace first, and an American second.”
It hasn’t always been this way. Michael Kazin’s brilliant new book, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918, lends credence to the old saying, “the past is a foreign country.” It tells the remarkable story of how, one hundred years ago, a diverse coalition of Americans struggled to keep the nation out of the Great War.
Socialists and suffragists, white mainliners and black Pentecostals, northern Republicans and southern Democrats did not all agree about much, but together they powered a historic campaign for peace. Kazin uses the stories of four particularly influential characters—the socialist Morris Hillquit, the suffragist Crystal Eastman, House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin, and Republican Senator Robert La Follette—to open a window onto the life of this larger movement. Along the way, we encounter a variety of other activists too, including eminent personalities such as Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan, and Henry Ford as well as lesser-known lights like Kate Richards O’Hare, who, at an emergency convention of the Socialist Party of America in March 1917, thundered, “I am a Socialist, a labor unionist and a believer in the Prince of Peace first, and an American second.”
