Raising up dead horses

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.

Then too, what else did we expect? His economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn't need jobs. Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain't gonna sweat no mo' no mo' -- just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day.

Along with these economic hotwires came literally hundreds of K Street and Democratic lobbyists. Supposedly, every president is forced to hire these guys because no one else seems to have the connections or knows how to get a bill through Congress. Consequently, the current regime's definition of a recovery is more of the same as ever. A return of the mortgage market and credit to its former level -- the level that blew us out of the water in the first place. Ah, but we're gonna manage it better this time. There is no one-trick pony on earth equal to capitalism.

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes. News gathering in America is its own special hell, and reduces its practitioners to banality and elite sycophancy. But Big Money calls the shots.

With luck we will see at least some reverse of the Bush regime's assault on habeas corpus, due process, privacy. Changing such laws doesn't much affect that one percent whose income is equal to the combined bottom 50 percent of Americans.

Beyond that, the big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit. We can keep on pretending to be independent, free to keep on living in those houses on which we still owe $300,000. But they own and control the money that comes through our hands. And they plan to keep on owning it and charging us to use it.

On the positive side, there has probably been no more fertile opportunity to improve U.S. international relations since post World War II. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton were about as endearing as pederasts at a baby shower. And now that we have shot up half the planet, certainly there is no more globally attractive person to patch up the bullet holes than Barack Obama (yes, I know Bill Clinton's feelings are hurt by that). Awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize (again Bill Clinton's feeling are sorely wounded) was an invitation to rejoin the human race.

Of course, there are a significant number of Americans still who could not give a rat's ass about world opinion of the good ole USA. Nearly every damned one of my neighbors back in Virginia, in fact.

The sharks are still running the only game in town and they have never had it better. To be sure, with the economic collapse some of the financial lords won't pile quite up as many millions this year. Others will however have a record year. All are still squatting in the tall cotton.

Their grandfathers who so hated FDR's reforms must be chugging cognac in hell celebrating today's America. America's unions have been neutered and taught to beg. At long last we have established a permanent underclass and deindustrialized the country in favor of low wage service industries here and dirt cheap labor from abroad. We've managed to harden the education and income gap into something an American oligarch can take pride in. Hell, my bank card is issued by Prescott Bush's Union Bank and my most recent mortgage was held by J. P. Morgan's creation. My electricity is generated by Rockefeller's coal and energy holdings and my Exxon gasoline credit card is issued by a successor to Standard oil. The breakfast I eat comes from Archer Daniels Midland. So did my dog's breakfast. We are the very products and property of these people and their institutions.

With peak oil, population pressure, vanishing world resources and global warming, we can never again be what we once were -- a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of planetarily unsustainable growth. But no presidential candidate is going to run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there." Better to hawk the myth of profitable pollution through carbon credits. Which Obama is doing.

We burn the grain supplies of starving nations in our vehicles. Skilled American construction workers now unemployed drive their big trucks into town and knock at my door asking to rake my leaves for ten bucks. There is nothing ironic in this to their minds. "Middle class" people making $150,000 a year will get a new tax break (as if we were all earning 150K). Energy prices are predicted to stabilize because we intend to burn the state of West Virginia in our power plants. The corpses of our young people are still being unloaded from cargo planes at Dover Delaware, but from two fronts now. Mortgage foreclosures are expected to double before they slacken. I cannot imagine debtors not getting at least temporary relief, if not decent jobs or affordable health care. Surely we will see more "change."

But never under any conditions will we be allowed to touch the real money, or get anywhere near it, much less redistribute it. Because, as a bookie friend once told me, "You got your common man living on hope, lottery tickets, or the dogs or the ponies, and you got operators. People who can see the whole game in play. They set the rules. Because they hold the money. That ain't never gonna change."

On the other hand national opinion changes almost hourly. But if the starting gate bell rang right now for the next presidential race, I'd have to put ten bucks on Obama to place. We cannot assume the Republican party will remain stupid. Assumptions don't work at all.

Remember what happened when we assumed the Democrats were capable of courage and leadership?

Corporations, government are dehumanizing us

By Joe Bageant

Dear Joe,

After 56 years or so of watching the "powers that be" in operation, I have come to the conclusion that slowly, but surely, big corporations and the government are dehumanizing us.

I can recall a time when those who dealt with employee relationships were called "personnel departments and employees were referred to by name. The first step was to take away our names and give us "employee numbers", (under the guise of simplifying accounting procedures) so that we would no longer be thought of as a real person. Then it was to change the corporation department that deals with employees from the "personnel department" to the "human resources" department, which takes away our humanity altogether. With time and constant hearing of ourselves referred to in this manner we've come to accept it when we should be screaming at the top of our lungs against it. Even our media, whom I truly believe are on someone's propaganda payroll, refers to us in this manner.

Our government and the same media are now referring to servicemen as "boots on the ground" instead of soldiers who are "real" human beings with "real" lives. It has occurred to me that as long as they are allowed to refer to people as "human resources" and "boots on the ground" most of us will never think of them as real people, our next door neighbors or family members. When we start thinking in this manner it will be so easy to turn our heads and not to acknowledge the pain and sufferings of others because they will have become no more than a resource such as steel, plastics, oil, etc.

I am of the mind that this is deliberate on the part of government and corporate America. It's easier to destroy someone else's life if they have been dehumanized in this manner, and no one will object when we do actually become nothing more than a resource to the powers that be.

Now I'm not saying that the American public has not been complicit in this, because we certainly have been. We have behaved like sheep, not objecting to our dehumanization because we have been afraid of pissing off the boss and losing our jobs. (Can we all say ba-a-a-a-a-a?)

For some reason unbeknownst to me, we have allowed a non-human entity (I say non-human because quite frankly they don't act like they are human with the human qualities of compassion, and concern for others who are less fortunate) like corporate America to convince us that we can't possibly live without them. If they did not exist we wouldn't, couldn't survive as a society in general. It's strange how for several thousands of years humanity has done just that, survived without big corporations, but apparently no one told them that they couldn't. In short we have allowed them to get a stranglehold, and they are choking the life out of us.

I am strangely reminded of a tarot card that shows the figures of a naked male and female bedecked with horns on their heads, and chains around their necks. Above them is a figure that is supposed to represent Satan. Satan sits on a cube which is supposed to represent the material world to which the figures are tethered by their chains. The interesting part is that the ch ains around the figures necks are quite loose, and could be removed at will. However, there seems to be no "will" to do so. Instead of noticing that they are chained they are looking at one another and it appears to be that they are quite ignorant of their perilous situation.

I feel that we are for the most part, those loosely chained figures that are tethered to the material world but instead we are tethered to the material world of corporate America. We seem to be just as oblivious and ignorant of our own situation and slavery as those figures is. We could if we wished throw those chains off, but we don't seem to have the will to do so just as those figures seem not to have the will either.

Instead of exercising our own power, demanding our rights as human beings, and holding corporate America hostage during the financial crisis we handed over whatever they asked for on the premise that if we didn't they would collapse and we couldn't survive without them because we wouldn't have jobs. Small business would no longer be able to get loans and be able to employ (which they do the most of in this country not corporate America who mostly employs out of the country) and the whole economy would collapse. A premise that was one of their own inventions, by the way.

We as Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee, because if we don't do it voluntarily we will be forced to do so, and it won't be either pleasant or pretty.

Thanks for letting me spout off. It helps to speak of this to someone who understands.

I do so enjoy your articles, and many of those by your readers. It's a refreshing place to come and read when one desires the unadulterated and unabashed truth. I do hope it never ends.

Carol

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Carol,

Yes, we dehumanize ourselves through corporations. It's a symbiotic relationship. I don't think it's going too far to say that global corporations operating collectively now constitute an intelligent entity cultivating humanity for its providence and sustained animation. There's no rule that says all intelligent entities must contain blood or chlorophyll. I know that sounds a bit Matrix-y, but when you consider the relationship between man and the thick crust of machinery, technology and scientific industrial regimen now wrapping the planet -- it's hard not to draw that comparis on.

Personally, I do not believe there are enough brave, insightful Americans in existence to step forward and begin turning the machine around. Nor would enough people follow them to get the job accomplished even of there were. Man the mimicking socially oriented ape just wants to be normal -- and the corporate state issues the boundaries of what is normal when it issues products. Just as the early hominid was modified by environment, diet, terrain, existing shelter, so we have been modified by consumer product lines. It was inevitable that we would conform to our industrially manufactured environment of commodities and their associated marketing. And when you stop to think how corporations entirely dominate the needs hierarchy (try to think of some material aspect of your life that is not supplied by or distributed through a corporation). But hell, what do I know? I just look around me at very normal stuff and draw conclusions.

The blurring of the real world with manufactured imagery by media on behalf of the corpocracy has been going on a long time. And yes, the media does get paid to do the propaganda work. It's called advertising and marketing money, which is of course the lifeblood of the media. Nobody had to conspire with the media to use the media as propaganda. In a capitalist system that is the only purpose of media, given that media must be for-profit to even exist, and that its value is judged by its stock price, not by the quality of its product.

You can scream at the top of your lungs, but I'd suggest you save the strain on your larynx. Nobody can hear us, hermetically sealed in the vacuum of the nation's living rooms media streaming the national consumer message straight to their cerebral cortexes. We have reached the point where only media can be heard regarding anything significant. It the corpo-political machine wants to hear from us, it will stage a Tea Party or a Town Hall Meeting featuring what it considers the most entertaining and useful fools among us to rage against decent healthcare, or to rant against the war in Iraq, thus demonstrating that the Great American Capitalist Democracy Machine, in all of its goodness, allows freedom of opinion and speech.

The crimes of deception that sustain the empire and our mutual and consensual hallucination called "The American People," and "national purpose" is the 24/7 fare of American life. Yet, if mass deception is a crime, it is a crime accomplished with the victims' consent. Three generations of Americans have granted others great power to deceive us. Consequently, each of us is the principal in the crime, the perp, and the others are accomplices.

Discontent abounds in America these days, and that's good, since discontent is so often the first step toward progress. However, our mass illusions and false mass consciousness cause us to seek false villains, such as the Wall Street thieves that have ever had their hands in our purses, or the fat cat bankers and CEOs. Then it causes us to seek false heroes to rescue us, such as Barack Obama. Once the formula for mass deception was perfected by the corporate state through Madison Avenue, think tanks, etc., and proven effective, we were left with a terrible conundrum. There is no similar formula for mass disenchantment. Any attempt at mass disenchantment taps into the same mass induced enchanted magical thinking. Consequently, it only elaborates upon the ongoing illusion, because it is a product of that illusion. A pathogenic illusion that has colonized our group consciousness.

One tried and true solution, of course, is self realization and inner liberation. Seeing the world with the cold eyes of the simplest and purest sort of awareness, and a fiery compassionate heart. Seeing the world without illusion, which is very hard and constant work. Then keeping it personally unto ourselves. Keeping our traps shut about it but acting individually upon what we see before our eyes each day, and not according to the consensus of those around us.

Trying to persuade others or persuade the masses is a waste of time. Doing that only leads to mass embrace of yet another mediocre solution -- because the powers that manage our society know what to do with any mass behavior, including a mass appeal for change. They embrace it and make a profit from a fake solution, or a political career from the photo op of the embrace, but never delivering a solution or ending the popular outrage and discontent. That's where such things as "no child left behind," (the outrage over our crappy public education), or "the ownership society," (discontent regarding the disparity of home ownership, thus the subprime mortgage industry scam). Or "nation building" (worldwide discontent over massive U.S. military aggression and destruction.

Incidentally, this should have been called "nation rebuilding," since we dropped more explosive power on that country than we did in all of World War II). That's what I find disheartening about the so-called grassroots initiatives for change. They are well meaning, but nobody seems to understand that the grass is growing on the turf of a totalist corporate state, with its roots dependent upon the corporate hegemony for nourishment. If the big dogs don't continue to shit on them daily, they whither and die. The big dogs know that, and they know that the grassroots-ers are moreover powerless, and that only the local pups need worry about them at all -- unless they start burning some shit down and blowing some stuff up on a sufficient scale.

Raw power only understands raw power, and what was gained by force, for damned obvious reasons, can only be recovered by force. And who is gonna go first on that puppy? Not me. And not you either. So who throws the first firebomb? Sure as hell his or her ass will be publicly roasted alive if they are caught. And if not the corpostate will come up somebody to play the "domestic terrorist" role for the bread and circuses news hour. Still, we could learn a thing or two from Jihadist martyrs.

However, I do believe that rediscovering the natural self and truly discovering that there is a whole wide world outside the national hallucination liberates the individual and pokes a stick in the eye of authority. Admittedly a small one, but if there are enough of them. A liberated individual does not consume very much, nor succumbs to the sales job that permeates our consumer society, and therefore does not own or purchase very much. Nor pay many taxes, since he or she does not need to earn anything near the national average, being the worst kind of rogue imaginable by the state -- the rogue non-consumer.

The Screaming Man inside Joe Bageant's head: "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU GIN SOAKED OLD GASBAG! GET BACK TO THE LADY'S LETTER!"

OK. Sorry folks.

Actually, we might not want to be too hasty to throw off those chains. If all the corporations vanished today, most of us would literally be dead inside of a month, for lack of food production and transport, medicines, communications, power for the national power grid. Which gives some indication why we allow them to continue and grow and why we the people cannot imagine life without corporations. And some indication of just how massive any effort toward real change would have to be.

Given that corporations own and dominate the needs hierarchy, I don't see any mass uprising. Especially when we consider that the moving parts of those corporations are perfectly nice people just as unconscious as the rest of the nation. They are simply going to work every day and doing their jobs and taking care of their families and doing everything according to the directions issued by god and the manufacturers of society. Doing what our educational system trained them to do and what their parents, their church and their high school civics teacher taught them was right. Just like the millionbs of people they are fucking over so badly.

Also, it might be a good ideas to dump the "We as Americans" group think. To indicate why, I will leave you with these words of Harold Pinter in his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature:

"Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people. It's a scintillating stratagem. ... The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of r eassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."

In art and labor,

Joe

One nation, under illusion

By Neal Gabler

THE HOARIEST and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician, Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. This country is “the last, best hope of mankind,’’ or the “shining city on the hill,’’ or the “great social experiment.’’ As if this weren’t enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called for a “government as good as the American people,’’ thus taking national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

Carter was speaking when Watergate was fresh, and government had been disgraced, but still. The fact of the matter is that whenever anything really significant has been accomplished by our government, it is precisely because it was better than the American people.

Think of World War II, America’s entrance into which was strenuously resisted by the populace until Franklin Roosevelt carefully laid the groundwork and Pearl Harbor made it inevitable. Think of civil rights, which Lyndon Johnson pressed despite widescale opposition, and not just in the South. Even then it took more than 100 years. Or think of the current health care debate in which Americans seem to desire some sort of reform, just not a reform that would significantly help people in dire need, while the Obama administration is pushing to provide that assistance. In the end, government has inspired Americans far more than Americans have inspired their government. They are too busy boasting.

There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world.

Consider what it means. By what standard is one nation any greater than any other nation? Yes, the United States has vast material resources - we rank eighth in gross domestic product per capita - but we also have, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the “highest inequality and poverty rate’’ in the world, outside of Mexico and Turkey, and things are getting worse. Nothing to boast of there.

Yes, we have a relatively high median income, but our standard of living as measured by the Human Development Index of the United Nations ranks us only 15th in the world, behind, among others, Norway, France, Canada, and Australia. Are they better than we are? Even our home ownership rate trails that of the citizens of Canada, Belgium, Spain, Norway, and even Portugal.

Yes, the United States has the best system of higher education in the world, but, according to an Educational Policy Institute report, we rank 13th in the affordability of that education, and we are much less successful with lower education - 11th in the percentage of the 25 to 34 population with a high school diploma and 22d in science education.

And though Americans love to crow about the “best health care’’ in the world, the fact is that according to the World Health Organization Index, we actually rank 37th in the quality of our health care. And we are still the only industrialized country in the world without a national health care system.

Even when one considers anecdotal evidence - “If this isn’t the greatest country then why do so many people want to come here?’’ - the case isn’t particularly persuasive. Mexicans cross the border to the United States for economic opportunity. Turks go to Germany, Indians and Pakistanis to Great Britain, Arabs to France. This isn’t a sign of our special greatness, just a sign that desperate people seek a more powerful economy for their betterment.

The point of all this isn’t that America doesn’t have a lot to be proud of. It does. The point is that just about every country has a lot to be proud of, and America has no more right to assume it is the greatest nation in the world than does France, Switzerland, China, or Russia.

None of this would make much difference if the self-congratulation was just harmless bragging. But there are consequences. A country that believes it is the greatest in the world is also less likely to be constrained by that world. One could argue that the Iraq war was a direct result of a sense of national infallibility. So was our willingness to torture, our reluctance to admit our mistakes in Afghanistan, our culpability in the global recession, and our foot-dragging on global warming. Such a nation is also less likely to introspect or to strive for true greatness because it believes its greatness has already arrived.

There is something bizarre about a country whose leaders have constantly to toady to their constituents and in which any criticism is tantamount to a lack of patriotism, but that describes America today. Every politician feels compelled to ape Jimmy Carter’s old words to the point where our alleged greatness has also become our national mantra.

It seems eons ago when Bobby Kennedy, a politician who didn’t like to stroke even his own supporters, actually scolded a rally for booing Lyndon Johnson because, Kennedy said, Johnson couldn’t have done what he did in Vietnam if he didn’t have the American people, including Kennedy’s audience, as his facilitators.

We aren’t going to hear that sort of honesty from political leaders any more because the American people are too thin-skinned and arrogant to tolerate it. Arrogance in an individual is unbecoming. It is no more becoming for a nation. The Greeks understood that the gods punished mortals for their hubris - for feeling that they were godlike. They knew that overweening pride preceded a fall. One suspects that nations are no more immune to punishment than individuals. A nation that brooks no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. The result may be a government that is as good as the American people, which is something that should concern everyone.

Neal Gabler is the author, most recently, of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.’

Nobel Prize for Promises?

by: Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize. But then I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates and for its susceptibility to rhetoric and empty gestures, while ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations - that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he also bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War - surely, among stupid and deadly wars, at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains around that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel Prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the Committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, was given a peace prize!

People should not be given a peace prize on the basis of promises they have made (as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises) but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war. Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel Peace Committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

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Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist, and has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for "A People's History of the United States."

IOC Sparks SNL to Laugh at Obama

Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia

By Chris Hedges
Truthdig

War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.

I blame our war memorials and museums, our popular war films and books, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as George W. Bush. They provide the mental images and historical references to justify new conflicts. We equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler. We see al-Qaida as a representation of Nazi evil. We view ourselves as eternal liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war are the social and moral props used to create the psychological conditions to wage new wars.

War memorials are quiet, still, reverential and tasteful. And, like church, such sanctuaries are important, but they allow us to forget that these men and women were used and often betrayed by those who led the nation into war. The memorials do not tell us that some always grow rich from large-scale human suffering. They do not explain that politicians play the great games of world power and stoke fear for their own advancement. They forget that young men and women in uniform are pawns in the hands of cynics, something Pat Tillman’s family sadly discovered. They do not expose the ignorance, raw ambition and greed that are the engine of war.

There is a burning need, one seen in the collective memory that has grown up around World War II and the Holocaust, to turn the horror of mass murder into a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit. The reality is too unpalatable. The human need to make sense of slaughter, to give it a grandeur it does not possess, permits the guilty to go free. The war makers—those who make the war but never pay the price of war—live among us. They pen thick memoirs that give sage advice. They are our elder statesmen, our war criminals. Henry Kissinger. Robert McNamara. Dick Cheney. George W. Bush. Any honest war memorial would have these statesmen hanging in effigy. Any honest democracy would place them behind bars.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, fought against the mendacity of collective memory until he took his own life. He railed against the human need to mask the truth of the Holocaust and war by giving it a false, moral narrative. He wrote that the contemporary history of the Third Reich could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wondered if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” He wrote of the Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lodz ghetto on behalf of the Nazis, that “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums.’ ” We, like Rumkowski, “come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” We are, Levi understood, perpetually imprisoned within the madness of self-destruction. The rage of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq, is a rage Levi felt. But it is a rage most of us do not understand.

A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.

There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this violence always deforms and maims those who use it. My uncle, who drank himself to death in a trailer in Maine, fought for four years in the South Pacific during World War II. He and the soldiers in his unit never bothered taking Japanese prisoners.

The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.

These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).