Todd: “The Reality Is that America Is Always at War”

“War in America” is the work of a young historian, Thomas Rabino. He’s interested in the culture of war and the militarization of the American superpower. A global and efficient diagnostic, read by Emmanuel Todd for Marianne2.

It was a happy time when Auguste Comte could believe that industrial societies would succeed military ones, that modernity would one day make war a dated period in human history. World War I, followed by World War II, put an end to this illusion. However, it remained for us a dream that the world’s adoption of democracy was perhaps going to finally put humanity on a fairy-tale track.

In a world free of William the Second, the Czar of Russia, Hitler, Stalin, Japanese soldiers and English and French colonial powers, peace could finally reign. The Europeans’ current state of mind is rather close to this ideal. Their military power has weakened in the rhythm of deficits and budgetary restrictions. They believe in peace so much that they don’t want to see their huge ally and protector, the ideal democracy, America, go in a completely different direction and bring the mortal and definitive blow into the schema of Auguste Comte.

In an important and rich book, a young historian, Thomas Rabino, has finally managed to look reality in the face. War in America cannot only be analyzed by studying the international action of the United States, by observing, as is the custom, in the Middle East or elsewhere, its imperial fight for oil control.

The Reality is that America is Always at War

Thomas Rabino creates a cultural and social history as much as a military and diplomatic one, and he brings along a global diagnostic on the militarization of American society. He studies everything, with an innovative enthusiasm: the relationship between big business and the army, the overrepresentation of veterans in Congress, having the flag in school and also, in games and video games, a complex militarized cinematography, culturally useful to the military-industrial complex discouraged by President Eisenhower at the end of his term.

Rabino studies the contribution of the army to the creation of war films, torture in television series, the barbaric language used among leaders of military communications, the debate about the resulting sanitary damage due to uranium found in weapons, giving us, whenever possible, statistics on the evolution of significant phenomena.

The fluctuation of mobile opinion, patriotic and democratic, manipulated or resistant, according to circumstances, adhering to or refusing official discourse, is seized and followed by polls. It’s necessary: The reality is that America is always at war; its immense army, giant military budget, bases and incessant intervention is testament to it.

But it is also an officially anti-colonial democracy, and its war culture cannot be that of simple imperialism, simple fascism or even that of an Old Europe that was at war for so long that it could honestly consider it a necessity of meteorological order.

America will not make peace with weapons. And the population must follow, approve and participate. It can even impose a certain flux of military practice, invasions, in Vietnam, in Iraq. But a root tendency, overall, transcends certain conjectural fluctuations. Rabino is interested in long-term phenomena and, in retracing the rise in power of this war culture, he frees us from short- term journalism.

His description of the continuity of external American politics with regard to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is particularly impressive in terms of efficiency, from the first Gulf War to an embargo that allows the control, via the United Nations, of Iraqi oil exports, until an invasion made necessary by the rise of criticism of the deplorable humanitarian consequences of the embargo. For Thomas Rabino, Sept. 11 wasn’t a turning point, but rather an event that didn’t fundamentally affect the continuity of American action. The privilege of the historian is to not let himself wrap everything up in instant emotion or televisual spectacle.

The fact still remains that the post-9/11 world marks, regardless, an acceleration, a packaging phenomenon of manipulation of opinion with fear, from the encouragement of violence to the dehumanization of the enemy.

Where Are We Today?

America is still a military nation that lives by and for war.

Europe, with its dream of perpetual peace, wanted to believe that Obama’s being elected marked the end of the Bush accident and that a military and anti-humanist, and even thus accidental, wave was finished. Rabino is obviously skeptical about this point and shows at the end of his book to what extent the good intentions and beautiful discourse of Obama haven’t really affected the habitual parameters of American action. But beyond Obama’s acts, there’s the thickness of American war culture that must make us extra careful.

Criticism of America attaches itself most often to denouncing its economic regime, its inequalities, its financial scams. Thomas Rabino goes much further, and hits more on target. He tells us that America is a military nation, that lives by and for war, and that we should continue to be very wary of it.