Tonight Nellie and I watched Why We Fight (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a documentary about the American military industrial complex. At least, that’s how it started out, centering around Dwight Eisenhower’s 1960 farewell address, but it veered off to a few different topics, some of which were related to the main thesis only indirectly, if at all. The kid who joined up after his mother died, had little to do with anything, except perhaps to make the viewer seem anxious that such a twitchy kid would ever carry a firearm. The retired New York cop whose son died in the World Trade Center represented the general national anger and desire for revenge, ultimately manipulated by the Bush administration for its own purposes, but director Eugene Jarecki wasn’t really able to tie that to the central theme: that America is pushed into war because of the close relationship between the Pentagon, the armaments companies, Congress and (more recently) the Washington think tanks. The military budget — at $750 billion annually — is the single largest discretionary spend in the government’s budget. As one interviewee put it, when war is that profitable, you can be sure there will be more of it.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is Dwight Eisenhower himself. The man was Supreme Allied Commander of Europe in WWII, was head of NATO and had served as a Republican president for eight years during the Cold War. Given all that, I’ve always found it interesting that he called so vehemently for the careful monitoring of what he dubbed the “military industrial complex” and asked citizens, in his farewell address, to remain vigilant against it lest it garner too much power. He once expressed worry at what would happen if someone ever sat in White House who understood the military less well than he, a fear that now seems well-founded indeed. Eisenhower understood the fear of standing armies, but probably accepted the present-day need for them; what worried him was the influence commercial concerns had on military policy, and the sacrifices that the accelerated and unnecessary spending would entail. He himself made speeches pointing out what could have been bought for the cost of one bomber…how many schools, how many hospitals, how many homes, and so on.

Had Jarecki stayed on this topic I think the documentary would have been even more powerful, but it instead moved on to next part of the theory: that, in order to sustain military spending, the government colludes with armaments manufacturers to seek out war. Every president eventually deploys the military to safeguard America’s interests in some part of the world or another, usually under the guise of defending freedom or spreading democracy, but in fact for much less noble reasons. Jarecki jumps back and forth between blaming this on the military industrial complex and neo-con plans for world domination; regardless of the specific cause, it happens, and it’s as predictable a pattern as one could imagine. Skipping over Grenada, Panama, Chile, Iran and dozens of others, we see a little more background on Saddam Hussein: how, as we all know, America propped him up when he opposed Iran, but in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, the campaign began to portray Saddam as the devil himself. Even in 2003, when the media had twelve years to do a little research, the fact that he was a former ally was not mentioned. The message had to go out: he was a madman, bent on destroying America; he had always been a madman, and was suddenly the most pressing security concern on the planet. Evidence was manufactured to support this decision, and America chanted, “Oceania is at war with Eastasia! Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!”

As you may have guessed from my last comment, I’ve just finished reading 1984. This film — describing in such depressing detail the propaganda methods Orwell described so many years ago — was just one coincidence I experienced within days of finishing the book. I also happened across this essay by Orwell on what compelled him to write, and this Salon article about Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book We, a dystopian novel in the same vein as 1984. Despite the eerie accuracy of 1984‘s detail, I never bought its central premise: that a political body would seek power only to have power, and to keep it only within their totalitarian grasp. I fancied this, in itself, a form of communist elitism that ran counter to human nature, and which would collapse on itself. I suppose the thought that we’re too corrupt to ever completely dominate each other was almost reassuring, until I watched Why We Fight. It reminded me that domination can happen quietly, spurred on and steered by the very capitalist human nature which, in my estimation, protects us from Orwell’s imagining of the future.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Doublethink doesn’t just exist; it’s available for half price.