What do you do with an American public — that does not care about its perpetually senseless wars?

© 2017 Peter Free

 

27 October 2017

 

 

On this question — ya got me

 

Perceptive Andrew Bacevich recently said that — here highly extracted:

 

 

First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven.  Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

 

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:

 

1. U.S. casualty rates are low.

 

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions.

 

3. [T]he American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part.

 

4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more . . . . it comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to the United States. 

 

5. American public discourse is . . . vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive. Cheerleading displaces serious thought.

 

6. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not . . . conducive to deep reflection. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago.

 

7. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well.

 

8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism.

 

A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America.

 

© 2017 Andrew J. Bacevich, Autopilot Wars: Sixteen Years, But Who’s Counting? TomDispatch (08 October 2017) (excerpts)

 

 

An obvious answer exists — but it is not politically achievable

 

Requiring national service from everyone would instantly turn apathy into concerned self-preservation.

 

Conscription's victims would question whether our wars are actually necessary. We might even conclude that we routinely murder and refugee-ize a whole lot of people who do not deserve dismemberment.

 

Funny, what putting your own blood in the ring will do for encouraging a more objectively assessed national morality.

 

 

Sadly, the "draft" will not return

 

The US population is generally too cowardly to entertain it. And the American Plutocracy would thereby lose its easily manipulated volunteer Praetorian Arm.

 

 

The moral? — Selfish apathy (and helpless despair) romp under most societal conditions

 

Wolves are pretty much always going to run sheep to wolfish purposes. Which answers the question posed here.