MILITARISM IN AMERICA
Militarism, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, displays certain characteristics, including (1) the policy of maintaining a strong military organization in aggressive preparedness for war, and (2) the glorification of a military spirit or attitudes in a nation.
One need not search the dictionaries or contemplate the impending war with Iraq and the bloated "defense" budget to determine whether or not American society is infected by the scourge of militarism. Occasionally, just listening to a fairly trivial radio news item will suffice. This surely was the case on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" broadcast Nov. 20, when a news reader recited an upbeat, cheery little glorification of how our nation's military leaders cleverly exploit weather patterns and predictions to determine the best time to drop bombs or even when to launch a new war. The Pentagon has such sophisticated technology, the audience was informed, that it virtually "owns the weather."
Militarist moments such as this impregnate our entire mass media, and our society. Militarism, said the late 19th century reformer Jane Addams, "can never be made a democratic instrument." And Martin Luther King Jr. noted that, "Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism." Helen Keller went further: "Militarism...is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, and the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fail."
"Militarism," according to the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, "is a value system that stresses the superiority of some people over others. Under militarism, the people deemed inferior are dehumanized as enemies who must be overpowered by any means necessary. Those who deem themselves superior are permitted to take whatever they want from others — land, freedom, natural resources, cultures, lives — by force."
A non-militarist society studies the weather patterns to determine the schedule of a picnic or a ballgame, not to destroy another society for oil and empire.