Satirist-playwright George Bernard Shaw never claimed to be a futurist. But in his 1905 comedy, Major Barbara, he illuminated perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, and maybe better than anyone since, the hypocrisies that would weave the calamities of the 20th century.
The play’s protagonists are the Salvation Army’s Major Barbara and her vexing father, Undershaft, a wealthy munitions maker. Undershaft personifies so prophetically the arms race, in which WWI soon would spawn in airpower the weapon systems that would rule all the wars coming through the century, and beyond.
Ironically, the arms race has failed to cure the hypocrisies on which it rides, as it rolls unabated into the 21st century, growing feverishly in the endless search for the next supreme weapon system. Why would we expect something else?
Yes, the arms race is the race that never ends.
No other nation has contributed more to it, nor paid a heavier price for, than the United States. It’s the pithiest paradox of American history. As we continue to widen our lead in armaments over the rest of the world, in the name of national and homeland security, our economic security and our future as a viable constitutional democracy have never looked shakier.
Is history going to find that Americans are unable to subdue the hypocrisies that Shaw so stunningly exposed in Major Barbara? Or, unable to avoid a replay of the Romans’ folly of thinking that military superiority guarantees homeland security?
The arms race today rides on the very same hypocrisies that Shaw portrayed. The churches and charities of the 21st century are just as dependent as the Salvation Army of Shaw’s day on donations flowing from wealth coming not infrequently from arms makers or their suppliers. With few exceptions, our charities and churches waste no time worrying about the roots from which donations grow. Any and all gifts made to the Lord are sanctified by the act itself, aren’t they? What surer cure for hypocrisy and sin than standing with the Lord?
The arms makers suffer little hypocrisy or shame in what they do. They aren’t hiding what they do. Whatever secrecy veils their work comes from the government and is enforced by it. The arms makers aren’t responsible for making national security the nation’s biggest industry. They have simply answered the call. If their profits are coming increasingly from borrowed money, they are not responsible for the national debt. That’s the people’s burden. Much as we’d like to blame the government, we are the government, or should be.
Are we going to see our democracy perish in the arms race? Will we squeeze this genie back into the bottle, before it squeezes us to death? It’s actually the same genie that roams our neighborhoods toting “heat.” The sidearms that are supposed to make us safer in the streets and the malls do just the opposite. Their source is the same: the Undershafts are as happy making small arms as delivering weapons of mass destruction. They’re happier still that the National Rifle Association does their marketing for them. And, neither would ever tell you that almost any big U.S. city often has as many gun deaths in a month as either the United Kingdom or Scandinavia has in a year.
As much as the 20th century has been viewed by the world and ourselves as the American Century, how willing are we to ponder its still greater weight as the unprecedented century of calamitous wars? Coming out of World War II, we wasted little time thinking of it as the war that would end all wars. To much time had been wasted thinking that about World War I.
We’ve been preparing for the next war ever since our a-bombs ended WWII. We were not about to surrender our lead in nuclear muscle or any other edge in weaponry. We would always be ready for war, as we’ve proved too often, and too hopelessly. Only in saving South Korea has our muscle done the world a lasting favor.
At that time, my dear Dad, Harry Mensel, insisted that any more American military intervention in Asia would do no more than waste our economic and military power. No future war across either big ocean would ever be worth life of another American soldier, he said. We failed to prove him wrong in Vietnam, but its lesson has gone unheeded by our political and military establishments.
We acquiesced in the military’s desire to keep us a superpower that would prove capable of winning two regional wars at the same time. The price we continue to pay for the false promise of unassailable security is staggering. We allowed the Bush-Cheney administration to pull us into two wars, while pooh-poohing any need for offsetting sacrifices, that have put us on the brink of national bankruptcy, at the same time leaving us with too few jobs outside the arms race to move back from it.
We hardly need Harry Mensel to remind us they’ve become wars we could not, and cannot afford.
Forgetting President Eisenhower and his sternly voiced fear of the creeping power of the military-industrial complex, as well as the pain of Vietnam, the Republican administrations of Reagan and Bush-Cheney have pushed the arms race harder still, driving reckless jumps in the debt. True conservatives of Republican faith must chafe endlessly, knowing that the national debt twice nearly tripled under these Republican presidents.
As conservative as Reagan and Bush II may have imagined themselves to be, they staffed their presidencies with neoconservatives who mocked Republican history and principle. They proved themselves eager to milk the treasury for corporate welfare, part of it favoring the arms makers with indiscriminate cost-overruns, while touting tax cuts and “trickle down” as engines of revenue that would forestall budget deficits. To the added consternation of conservatives, federal employment also grew overall in both administrations.
The arms makers, like Big Oil, feel no pangs of conscience as they sponge perpetually on Uncle Sugar’s corporate welfare. When you’re too big to fail, conscience can’t matter. Do Americans actually believe that spending a dozen or more times more than the next dozen biggest spenders on defense devote to it is worth living at the brink of bankruptcy? If we do, then we deserve the dimming future that the endless arms race – and the endless wars it’s sure to spawn – holds for the world. History has proven too grimly that the next unbeatable weapon, whatever it may be, will not, cannot save either America or the world. Will the world find the courage to put down the arms race, before it puts away the world?
– Frank Mensel June 2012