After the Horror

When the Second World War was still in its darkest days for the United Nations (the name taken by the ultimately victorious allies against Fascism, such as the Soviet Union, China, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and México), people spoke about what should follow the suffering that was being endured and was yet to come.

Our parents were children of the Depression as well as that War. They grew up in poverty, then lost countless loved ones of their generation to battles waged in other countries.

All four had been born just after the Kansas Flu, misnamed of course as ‘Spanish Influenza.’ It claimed more lives than the two world wars put together.

By the time all that was over, they and millions of others wanted a better life for themselves and everyone else who had been on the right side of history.

That happened for many of them. Our fathers got educations, and by the time we were born, towards the end of the Baby Boom, they were middle class. It’s a typical white working-class story of the time—a tale of upward mobility. It was also a time for inspirational speeches of a kind entirely missing from contemporary politics.

One of the famous phrases coined by FDR during the Depression was delivered on the occasion of his first inauguration. That great call to solidarity, to togetherness, was this: ‘the only thing we have to fear is [pause] fear itself.’ (here is a video highlight)

Nice slogan.

But worthless when it comes to illness and conflict—unless it is read not as asinine bravery, but as a call to sociality. For when such hortatory rhetoric urges us to act alone, whether through religious fervor or individualistic arrogance, it’s just—well, stupid.

For example, Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor of the 2nd century, was renowned for his stoicism, helping shape an entire philosophical movement dedicated to it. He provided this famous maxim: ‘pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination.'

Many of his fellow Stoics died of the plague, still propounding just such a stiff upper lip, thereby exposing them and their followers to intolerable risk.

Similarly, Milton told us in Book 1 of Paradise Lost that:

‘The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’

Again, that rhetoric works well for those enamoured of the brutal fantasies of religious zealots looking to imagine their way out of peril, or rational calculators who care about no one and nothing beyond themselves.

It is laughable, pitiful—entirely inadequate—when faced with dangers that are beyond our individual ken or control.

That’s what happens when you must confront a shared danger—bombs, guns, men. Viruses.

Given its extraordinary research and technological capacity, the US is uniquely equipped to deal with biomedical threats. Except we’re not. The reason can be found sixty years ago.

In his farewell speech as US president at the birth of the 1960s, by far the most important decade in our post-Civil War history, former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and lifelong dutiful Republican Dwight D Eisenhower memorably condemned ‘the military-industrial complex.’

He was referring to the cozy relationships between the men running the military and the armaments industries. Those relationships were forged by class, gender, race, education, militarism—and the warfare welfare they received, which continues to distort our society and economy, egregiously.

Eisenhower was speaking at the height of the Cold War, when mutual disrespect, misunderstanding, ignorance, and aggression characterised the US-USSR relationship. He knew how silly was the massive military expenditure of both nations; that it was leading their societies towards misdirected, bloated budgets of violence and angry, anxious people. But that would supposedly end once “we” won.

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So, thirty years ago, we duly awaited a peace dividend. The Cold War was over, so much of the world’s mad and maddening expenditure on violence could be redirected towards social services and the Global South and away from the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower so presciently noted.

It didn’t happen.

The amount that wealthy countries continue to spend on the military shows how right Eisenhower was about the enduring power of the military-industrial complex, and how deleterious it was for their economies and societies.

In 2015, 39% of US income tax went to military institutions.

If only it had gone to education and health care for all. Instead, it went to guns and bombs—to the many in corps and corporations who benefit from taxpayers. They are a sizeable minority, and their business is about invading, controlling, and killing.

But let’s recall something from FDR’s 1933 speech. It had more to say than his famous, overly stoic, slogan suggests.

Roosevelt also emphasised the necessity of eschewing the ‘evils of the old order,’ by which he meant the horror of selfish speculative capitalism.

He spoke of the need for the US government to act as a ‘good neighbor’ and called for an ongoing sense of togetherness, of solidarity, that transcended individualism and anti-statism. We need that now.

But we’re already being told that even though we must rely on the state in the lonely hour of the last instance—which is assuredly this hour, this day, this month, this year—the future will see us pay financially and socially for the necessities of the present crisis, that we must go back to the economy as it was prior to COVID-19.

The neoliberal magazine The Economist, marked not only by its commitment to capitalism but also to democracy, science, environmentalism, and gender and racial equality, has warned us of any utopia forged from the rational use of government to provide a better life. It did so via an already-notorious cover story, “After the disease, the debt.”

Does that mean a return to austerity for the poor and the middle class and business as usual for the wealthy, be they beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex or other captains of casino capitalism?

It must not. The new lives that emerged from the horror of Depression and the ashes of War should be our inspiration. Those lives were made possible not through national bluster or selfish consumption, but thanks to solidarity—and being good neighbors.