Militarism Blurs Peace/War

Militarism Blurs Peace/War

Militarism blurs civilian and military life – the erasure and indistinction between war and peace means we live in a state of constant war.

Though war is an essential condition of militarism—the apex, the climax, the peak experience, the point of all the investments, training, and preparation—militarism is much, much broader than war, comprising an underlying system of institutions, practices, values, and cultures. Militarism is the extension of war-related, war-preparatory, and war-based meanings and activities outside of “war proper” and into social and political life more generally. Peterson and Runyan (1999, 258) explain that “militarization refers to processes by which characteristically military practices are extended into the civilian arena—as when businesses become dependent on military contracts, clothing fashions celebrate military styles, or toys and games embody military activities.” Peterson and Runyan’s definition captures an important part of militarism, but a conceptual extension helps us see its pervasiveness. Instead of envisioning militarism as the extension of military practices into civilian life, it is possible to see it as the blurring or erasure of distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian. Scholars cognizant of the impacts of war and militarism on women, like Betty Reardon who is cited earlier, have always argued that the artificial construction of boundaries between “war” (one day) and “not war” (the next day) do not represent the political realities or the humanitarian situations in conflict zones. Instead, as Chris Cuomo (1996, 31) has explained, war is best seen as a process or continuum rather than a discrete event. Where an event has a starting point and an ending point, militarism pervades societies (sometimes with more intensity and sometimes with less) before, during, and after the discrete event that the word “war” is usually used to describe. Because of this, “the spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal human life” (Cuomo 1996, 30).

Prez Control/Military  Violence

The damage to democracy makes violence and all their impacts are inevitable-checking military elite control of policy is key

Boggs, National University (Los Angeles) social sciences professor, December 1997

[Carl, Theory and Society, vol26 no6, "The Great Retreat: Decline of the Public Sphere in Late Twentieth-Century America, JSTOR]

The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites an already familiar dynamic in many lesserdeveloped countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75

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