Militarizing the Homeland

Published on August 10, 2009

Special military “advisers” are appointed to ensure the desirable changes are retained by the film makers. The Air Force was so happy to work with Hollywood on the movie “Iron Man,” that it had Capt. Chris Hodge as the DoD’s project officer for the film. He is said to have gloated about the movie, “The Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars.”

According to Turse, “By co-opting the civilian ‘culture of cool’ the military corporate complex is able to create positive associations with the armed forces, immerse the young in an alluring, militarized world of fun, and make interaction with the military sound second nature to today’s Americans. The military is now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than America’s debacle in Iraq.”

Even members of the US Congress have been captivated by the military’s melding of fiction and reality. On July 27, 2004, the American Forces Press Service, in an article titled “Future Warrior Exhibits Super Powers,” “The Army’s future soldier will resemble something out of a science fiction movie, members of Congress witnessed at a demonstration on Capitol Hill July 23.”

The successful integration of “culture of cool” and the culture of military is evident in the language of the veterans when they return home and speak of their actions against the people of Iraq. Expressions straight out of video game vocabularies like “lit you up,” and “smoked ‘em” are commonplace in their speech.

In a recent article, that documents Iraq war veterans engaging in violence and crime upon returning home, soldiers have described their experience in Iraq. Veteran Daniel Freeman told a reporter, “Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated, you came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.”

His friend Anthony Marquez, of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, added, “With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions and just light the whole area up. If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ‘em.”

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All available avenues have been explored by the Pentagon in its quest for a wide-based acceptance of its policies. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have also been utilized for the tasks of seeking out young recruits and spreading its messages.

That the US military has made blatant use of the Media and the entertainment industry to indoctrinate the young American mind is common knowledge. What has perhaps gone unnoticed is how the military is insidiously infiltrating our social and public lives. Earlier this summer, on Memorial Day weekend in Times Square, New York City, the military showcased weaponry while recruiters posed for pictures and engaged in small talk with women, men, children and families. Women fondled rocket launchers, small children pretended to fire heavy machine guns, young boys posed with assault rifles, and even housewives enjoyed the act of aiming rocket launchers.

The militarization of US culture in the minds of US citizens has grown ubiquitous. Just this month, the sounds of combat choppers, automatic weapons fire, and other battle noises being broadcast nearby a rural neighborhood prompted locals to protest. The sounds were part of a combat training exercises for SWAT team members and Marines. When civilian neighbors complained of the noise, live ammunition being used and smoke machines as being annoying as well as dangerous, the county opted to allow the war games to continue.

Author/journalist Chris Hedges articulated the issue for Truthout, “Well, the myth of war, at its core, is really a very visceral form of self-exaltation. It is about the empowerment of our nation, of our society, and by extension, our own empowerment. In the coverage, for instance, of the invasion of Iraq, this was clearly evident on the cable news channels where the way the war was covered was to bring in retired military to explain the power and precision and might of our own weapons. And I think, very much, one was made to identify with the power of those weapons and the power of the state. So war has a kind of seductive appeal. The entertainment industry makes a lot of money off it. The politicians perpetuate the myth of war, they romanticize war, they use words like glory, honor, courage, manhood, to appeal to desires on the part of large segments of the population who feel relatively powerless and relatively anonymous. And war is a way of elevating them, or at least so they believe, into a kind of nobility that peace time existence doesn’t offer them.”

If the US is to recover any of its waning international reputation and this civilization is to sustain itself, the nation and its citizens will have to invent safer, more human ways of elevating themselves.
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Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,” (Haymarket Books, 2009) and “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,” (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.

Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film “Justify My War,” which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Coppola has worked in Iraq as well as on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Bhaswati Sengupta also contributed to this report.

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