"When one compares the anti-war movement that emerged in the 1960's with the pale imitation today, one not only recognizes the lack of real organizing and movement-building, but also the transformed historical conditions. The insurgencies that marked the 60's attack on the war machine from anti-draft activities to military mutinies to factory uprisings to blockading supply trains were part of a collective revolt against the state's colonization of the body and the mind. Alternative institutions flourished in college towns, on the outskirts of military bases, and within communities of color and young people in general. Where are those forces or sectors in the US willing to reject in the most radical way the military neo-liberalism that has become the hallmark of the latest incarnation of American imperial project?
"Have our imaginations become so impoverished and our social conditions so debased that we have neither the mental nor material capacities even to disrupt the war-machine, let alone dismantle it? Given Retort's argument that any oppositional movement in the U.S. is itself an "afflicted power" as a consequence of "weak citizenship" and the ubiquitous effects of advanced pacification and spectatorship, perhaps the only hope for dismantling the war machine is its own self-destruction through imperial over-reach.
"On the other hand, to consign our role as radical agents of social change to waiting for the inevitable demise of U. S. military hegemony or cheerleading for some external salvation from Latin America or elsewhere is another form of pacification. As Roberta Flack reminds us in her song about "letting Pharaoh go," whatever form the state takes we must refuse to be its conduits. The war machine isn't only about the military-industrial-infotainment complex; it is also about complicit bodies and co-opted minds caught in the very deep structure of a state/militarist matrix. Understanding how pervasive that matrix is and what we need to do to overcome it may enable us to begin the long and difficult task of dismantling the war machine.
Found on Counterpunch.org
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