The first Shalom House book club started yesterday.  The book we’re reading? “The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War,” by Andrew Bacevich.
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Something caught my attention from Emily’s previous blog post.  She writes, “I think most of us can agree that war is not a desirable thing.  There are always casualties, there are always inordinate sacrifices on all sides.”  I agree, war is not desirable.  I also would have agreed that as a society, we would collectively agree that war is not desirable.

But then I read this from Bacevich’s book (2005), “As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that ‘this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense.’ The American public’s ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.

The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness and sheer waste grew out of World War I…the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike…that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane.  After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths.  Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking-expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia.

…by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war’s reputation.  Thus reimagined – and amidst widespread assurance that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war – armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all.    In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attraction option – cost-effective, human, even thrilling.”

Shalom House Guidance Team member and Pastor of Circle of Hope, Rod White recently wrote about the frog in the militarism kettle. Bacevich’s book is revealing how the waters are boiling in the kettle, especially in the last 50 years.  He is taking off the mask and revealing to us how we as Americans are increasingly accepting more and more war-making and militarism by our country’s military.  Do we even realize what we’re  accepting as normal, necessary and right?

Please join us for the remaining 2 book club gatherings with “The New American Militarism”.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 7:30 pm
Monday, April 12th, 7:30 pm

 Email Emily, at emily.kephart@shalomhouse.us if you are interested in reading along and discussing with us!