The Epistemology of War

by Mona Shaw

Her tight, gray curls would bounce when Miss Hunger, our kindergarten teacher snapped away another chair.

"You're not even trying, Becky," she told a small, timid girl in our class.

"I thought it was nicer to share," Becky whispered.

"This is the cakewalk game," Miss Hunger replied with strained patience, "You win the game if you sit in a chair before someone else takes it."

"But, Miss Hunger," Becky said, perplexed that Miss Hunger didn't see the obvious, "we have plenty of chairs."

Not to be undone by a five-year-old's naiveté, Miss Hunger smiled, "We have plenty today, but one day there may not be enough chairs, and you need to learn how to compete for a chair when that time comes."

Becky was still confused and asked, "But, then, wouldn’t it be better if we were learning how to make more chairs?"

It was a moral contradiction.  Moral contradictions learned in childhood are rarely resolved and normalize a routine of situational ethics that leave us chronically qualifying if not rationalizing these contradictions.  In this context, how does one define “ethics,” let alone war?

We say that sharing is a virtue, but "success" is measured by our ability to hoard or acquire.  Lying is wrong when we're lied to, but becomes prudence if it keeps us in a job or otherwise seems to protect us.  Secrets are labeled with vicious metaphors like “backbiting” when we've been hurt by lies, but lies become “the better part of valor” or discretion when they serve our personal interests. 

While we pretend we believe being “two-faced” is bad; we honor it as a marketable skill under job titles with names like “diplomat, lobbyist, or community relations director.”

Knowledge, when we seek it, is not so much about wanting to know anything, but about wanting to earn a credential, to pass a test for "success," a test written and graded by those we perceive to have power over that "success."  Students rarely enroll in college to learn—you can learn with a library card—but to haul out certificates toward even higher privilege or status.  "Knowledge" becomes a commodity, routinely reduced to parlor games (figuratively and literally, e.g, Trivial Pursuit) in which those who are “certified” to have more of it position themselves as lords over those with less of it.

Inevitably these rationalizations form information itself and create a structure of knowledge comprised of what we believe of what we've been told, and, in turn, we teach or pass on "knowledge" that isn't necessarily, or even usually, what we believe.

Because this is our collective situation, how we know what we know (or epistemology), holds more information about us than what we know, and therefore how we know is more important than what we know.

Accredited history textbooks do not contain facts and events, but are selected interpretations of facts and events written by the victors of war.  Had England won the U.S. Revolutionary War, our scholarly characterizations of the British monarchy, or even monarchy itself, would read very differently.  Had Spain conquered England during the European colonization of North America, elementary school students would engage in pageants about St. Augustine in Florida, rather than about Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.  Had U.S. history not almost exclusively featured the lives and deeds of less than half its population (white, land-owning men), we would read a very different history indeed.

Significant details of battles won and lost, and the actions of the "heroes" involved are routinely obscured or eliminated altogether to the extent they cannot be exhumed by even the most sedulous scholars.  Howard Zinn did the world a great service when he rescued much of our evaded history in his text, A People's History of the United States.  However, Zinn is quick to concede that even in this effort, "There is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.  Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment."

Moreover historical "facts," particularly the details of U.S. wars are endlessly revised—revisions that sometimes challenge proscribed thought as in Robert McNamera's Fog of War confessions regarding Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam, and sometimes reinforce the victor's right to power, as in Dick Cheney's Kings of The Hill: How Nine Powerful Men Changed The Course Of American History.

Given that our knowledge of the details of wars is partial and selective at best (and often intentionally misleading); our understanding of what war is can be no more enlightened or true.

In corporate controlled media "if it bleeds it leads" and in the canon of the empire "war is gore."  War defined as gore and weaponry is a contrivance by the authors of war that intends to limit and obscure the horror of war.  The sanitization of recent wars through corporate and governmental censorship of photo and video journalism of battles and casualties is a clear attempt to prevent public opposition to war that was provoked by disturbing coverage during previous wars.  (If there is no gore; there is no war.)  Not so clear, is the cover-up of other acts of war in which the gore is less apparent and military weaponry is not required. (There is no war because there is no gore.)  The covert (not to mention patriarchal) restriction of acts of war to gore and weaponry certainly supports the perpetuation of war by dulling stimuli for resistance.

Other acts of war are hidden on shredded paper under the desks of corporate executives whose wealth depends on war.  The relationship between war and profit lead some to suggest we are indulging in Military Keynesianism, a national economic policy in which the government apportions outsized spending to the military in an effort to stimulate economic growth.  When, actually, Military Keynesianism resides in the good old days or is a phase we passed through in the mid-1990s, when we became an unmitigated war economy. 

Canadian author on the economics of war, Philippe Le Billon defines "war economy" as "a system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain violence."  The reality of the U.S. functioning under a war economy is not only evinced by the supremacy of the military industrial complex predicted by Eisenhower in the 1950s.  The military industrial complex now controls the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S.

The deliberate procession to a war economy was entrenched in the 1980s and 90s by Presidents Reagan (busting unions) and Clinton (NAFTA, GATT and the WTO) when manufacturing jobs were driven out of the country.   Given that the GDP measures output generated through production by labor and property which is physically located within the confines of a country, if we set aside the provision of services used in daily living such as education, health care, and auto repair, we generate only two national products: war and capital.

Weapons and war are now our major (and essentially only) exports.  Consumer goods are almost entirely manufactured outside the U.S.  While investments in these goods profit the investors, they do little to grow the domestic economy (i.e. create jobs).  Jobs are now dependent on venture capital (proven by the fact that floundering banks and financial institutions require chronic bailouts in order for our economy to survive), and venture capital is dependent on war.  War, the production of military training and weapons, the military industrial complex, the privatization of war, the control of international territories of capital investments, et al, are the only viable leverage the U.S. can wield to retain profitability in the global economy.  In a war economy, the economy is not simply stimulated by war; the survival of the economy requires war.

In a war economy, every NASDAQ exchange is an act of war, and every financial CEO is a war general.  The current war economy is so insidiously entrenched and partnered with greed so pathological that the collapse of Wall Street may not merely be inevitable, but required and, yes, even desirable in order for human life to ever cease being sacrificed for human greed.

If we are to end war, as well as confronting military sites, we must pressure and abolish the institutions that profit from war.  The health insurance industry is a good place to start.  There is no equivocation in stating that healthcare denial is an act of war.  This is true on prima facie evidence and not only because of the industry's symbiotic relationship with the military.  (Health Net, a major health insurance corporation, is the seventh highest-paid defense contractor.)  Denial of healthcare treatment by this industry leads to at least 20,000 deaths each year.  (Some studies estimate these annual deaths number as high as 100,000.)  Healthcare apartheid and genocide account for an astronomical portion of the casualties of war.

If we are to accept Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assertion, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice," we cannot pretend there is a distinction between a justice issue and a war issue.  We can either capitulate to the lies of the Empire that such distinctions exist, or we can study war no more.  We can study peace through our witness to all war profiteers (i.e. all venture capitalists) that we're on to them.  We can teach others how to build more chairs.