War Games

Slop is on the menu, again.

Back in the medieval days, wars were the hobbies of princes and kings. They had little to nothing to do with the interests of the overwhelming majority of people, who were peasants. Nobles fought to expand their kingdoms, but if you were a farmer in the French countryside somewhere, it didn’t make much tangible difference to you whether the lord of the lord of your lord pledged his fealty to the Duke of This Place or the Duke of That Place. You or your sons might be conscripted into battle as part of your feudal duties, or hired to join the fight. Or your village might be plundered by some invading horde. But even then, your only real stake in the battle was your life. After the dust settled, so long as your rents or obligations remained the same, the title claimed by the head of some victorious army on some battlefield miles away was immaterial to you, even if the land he was fighting for included the little plot out of which you eked your living.

Back then, when wars were fought with swords, there was a physical limit to how destructive they could be. At their very worst — say, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England — they might displace or kill everyone you know, force a foreign religion on your community, and end your way of living forever. But these kinds of wars were rare, world historical events that we remember to this day. Much more often, wars were just a series of skirmishes between people much richer and more renowned than you. You might take a voyeuristic interest in them but they were otherwise inconsequential to your household, like the NFL playoffs or the Academy Awards.

Then came the modern world and the innovation of total war. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war became something impossible for regular people to ignore. The bureaucratic machinery of the nation-state made it feasible to mobilize every last physical resource within a geographical territory, most importantly its population, and direct it toward war-fighting. Advances in military technology made it possible to slaughter civilian populations on a scale never before known to humanity.

Now everyone had a stake in the battles carried out by their governments, and success or failure in war relied as never before on the active participation of the national population. It became necessary, then, for the state to persuade regular people to embrace the cause. Without their consent, one risked, at best, a lackluster war effort, and at worst, a social revolution.

In the European world wars, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make this case. Defeat in war could mean conquest and occupation by a vengeful and bloodthirsty enemy. You could expect all of your wealth and possessions to be expropriated, your traditional legal and political rights denied, and, potentially, your family murdered. You didn’t have to be a flag-waving patriot to be highly motivated to do whatever was necessary for your government to prevail.

It was a different proposition, however, with conflicts overseas. There was a limit to how many Americans in the twentieth century could be convinced that a German victory in World War 1 would fundamentally degrade their lives an ocean away. Even in World War 2, it wasn’t completely self-evident that a Nazi victory in Europe or a Japanese triumph in the Pacific would turn the lives of U.S. citizens upside down. A more laborious propaganda effort was needed to overcome the natural reluctance of Americans to fight someone else’s war.

The Nazis, of course, provided more than enough material to make an alarmingly convincing case, as did the Japanese. Likewise, the scale of Stalin’s crimes against humanity fueled a half century of effective propaganda against the Soviet Union. After that, in Vietnam, Iraq, and even Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to do more with much less. In each case, the absence of a plausible argument for seemingly endless war required levels of fear mongering and ideological bullying that produced only diminishing returns as each war dragged ever more disastrously on.

Now we’re seeing the start of a new propaganda effort, this time against Iran, and the case is so weak that it feels as if we’ve returned, full circle, to those medieval days when waging wars was the blood sport of an indifferent aristocracy, with no connection whatsoever to the stakes of our everyday lives. You open the paper and read about 60-day deadlines, uranium enrichment capabilities, and the ominous geo-strategic aspirations of a distant civilization few of us spend much time even thinking about. It’s all very abstract, technical, and intellectual. These are the concerns of princes in castles, not peasants on their plots. They’re hopelessly foreign. They’re vaguely reminiscent of the war games of dueling empires from an era we thought we had left behind. There is no line you can draw between them and the price of eggs, your inadequate health insurance, the addiction crisis on our streets, and your children’s shitty public schools.

To make it more visceral, we’re told that the enemy is weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon, the same as we’ve been told for decades. We’re warned of an impending nuclear holocaust, which is exactly how we were sold the invasion of Iraq. We’re told of the valor and heroism of the Israeli military and the backwardness of its dark, exotic enemies.

But it doesn’t feel like it did when the threat we were warned of consisted of thousands of Russian ICBMs pointed at American cities, when we climbed under our desks in classroom nuclear attack drills. Back then it felt like there was substance behind the propaganda, because there was. It felt like we might all pay the price if our country wasn’t vigilant enough. It was legitimately scary.

This time it feels cheap. It feels like we’re being fed fish sticks and french fries because they don’t think we’ll eat the fresh vegetable salad they’ve served themselves. It feels like they don’t even believe the bullshit they’re selling. It feels like 2003, when they whipped us up into a hysterical frenzy through the brute force of their vulgar and melodramatic war propaganda. It feels like the Dukes of This Place and That Place have a disagreement over the borders of their duchies and, to raise armies, need the rest of us to believe that it has anything to do with our lives. It feels like exactly the lie that it is.