The culture of militarism encroaches on civil liberties. The necessity of war is taken for granted and its destructive downside not exhibited. The trucks are on the road 230 days per year. note5 Students can play in simulators and fight tank battles or fly Apache attack helicopters and don Army gear for photo ops and get the pitch to join up. In the U.S., the Army Marketing and Research Group National Assets branch maintains a fleet of semi-trailer trucks whose highly sophisticated, attractive, interactive exhibits glorify warfare and are intended for recruiting in “hard to penetrate high schools.” The fleet includes the “Army Adventure Semi” and the “All Army Experience” semi and others. Recruiting posters do not show maimed and dead soldiers or blasted villages and dead civilians. Nations go to great lengths to enlist young people in the military, calling it, “the Service.” Recruiters go to great lengths to make “the Service” appear attractive, offering cash and educational inducements and portraying it as exciting and romantic. Almost nowhere does one learn of an alternative.Ī single small example of just one pillar of the culture’s militarism is military recruiting. For example, in the United States (a robust example of a war system participant), not only are there war-making institutions such as the executive branch of government where the head of state is also commander in chief, the military organization itself (army, navy, air force, coast guard) and the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, the several War Colleges, but war is also built into the economy, perpetuated culturally in the schools and religious institutions, a tradition carried on in families, glorified at sporting events, made into games and movies, and hyped by the news media. Wars are highly organized, preplanned mobilizations of forces prepared long in advance by the War System which permeates all institutions of society. It is deeply embedded in society and its various parts feed into each other so that it is very robust. The War System also includes institutions and weapons technologies.
Robert Dodge (Board Member of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation) “We must abandon unexamined assumptions, e.g., that war will always exist, that we can continue to wage war and survive, and that we are separate and not connected.” A Global Security System: An Alternative To War.
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