After Ike: Can Charlottesville love both peace and war?
Sep 7th, 2011
From The Hook:
If I told you I would support women's rights as long as I didn't have to oppose rape, you’d think I needed lessons in
both logic and basic human decency. If I said I would favor freedom as long as I didn't have to be against slavery, you
might start backing away slowly.
Yet on September 1st, in a statement that's anything but out of the ordinary, the Daily Progress reported Charlottesville School Board Member Ned Michie's objection to a resolution in support of events celebrating
the International Day of Peace:
"I'm all in favor of peace and non-violence," Michie said, "but, for instance… to the extent that any of the events are
really sort of anti-war events, I'm not necessarily comfortable with supporting that."
It's a funny thing about peace and war: you really do have to choose between them. They don't mix any better than
freedom and slavery. You can't favor peace without opposing war. In fact, you can't support peace without opposing the
machinery that makes wars likely. And that machinery is all over Charlottesville, where it provides many local residents
with jobs.
Nonetheless, job creation is something else you can't support without opposing what President Dwight Eisenhower 50 years
ago warned of as the "military-industrial complex."
How can that be? Let me explain.
Charlottesville is home to the National Ground Intelligence Center, now north of town but previously downtown in what
became the SNL Financial building. The new location for NGIC also accommodates the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The
University of Virginia has built a research park next door. There's a Judge Advocate General's Legal Center attached to
UVA Law School as well. Then there's the Virginia National Guard, which does tend to guard nations, just not this one.
Local want ads offer jobs "researching biological and chemical weapons" at Battelle Memorial Institute (located in the
UVA Research Park) and producing all kinds of weaponry for all kinds of governments at Northrop Grumman. Then there's
Teksystems, Pragmatics, Wiser, and many others with fat Pentagon contracts.
Employers also recruit here for jobs in Northern Virginia with Concurrent Technologies Corporation, Ogsystems, the
Defense Logistics Agency, BAE Systems, and many more. BAE, which often runs a green full-page ad in the Progress, paid a $400 million fine last year to the U.S. government to settle charges of having bribed Saudi Arabia to buy its weapons.
From 2000 to 2010, 161 military contractors in Charlottesville pulled in $919,914,918 through 2,737 contracts from the
federal government. Over $8 million of that went to Mr. Jefferson's university, and three-quarters of that to the Darden
Business School. And the trend is ever upward.
The 161 contractors are found in various industries other than higher education, including: nautical system and
instrument manufacturing; blind and shade manufacturing; printed circuit assembly; real estate appraisers; engineering
services; recreational sports centers; research and development in biotechnology; new car dealers; internet publishing;
petroleum merchant wholesalers; and a 2006 contract with Pig Daddy's BBQ.
Back in March, the New Yorker magazine noted that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, "invited interested literary theorists,
anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and related "ists" to the Boar's Head Inn … to
answer a question frequently posed to junior-high-school students: 'What is a story?'"
DARPA is the same agency that has moved on from mechanical killer elephants and telepathic warfare to exploding
frisbees, cyborg wasps, and Captain America no-meals and no-sleep soldiers. The DIA, also in on this side of
"intelligence" work, used to train "psychic spies" (men who'd stare at goats if they could find one) at a place in
Nelson County called the Monroe Institute.
Jobs, jobs, military jobs everywhere you look. And yet, every billion dollars our government spends on the military
produces (directly and indirectly) fewer jobs, and lower paying jobs than would the same billion dollars invested in a
number of other industries or even in tax cuts for working people. Redirecting a fraction of our military spending to
education, green energy, healthcare, and tax cuts would create a job for every unemployed or underemployed person in
this country (29 million of them) as well as for those losing war industry jobs during this conversion. Such a shift
would leave the military with more funding than it had 10 years ago.
Do we have a debt problem? An unemployment problem? Or just a war problem?
U.S. military spending across numerous departments has increased dramatically during the past decade and now makes up
about half of federal discretionary spending. Yet the Defense Department has not been fully audited in 20 years, and as
of 2001 it could not account for $2.3 trillion out of the $10 trillion or so it had been given during that time. The
United States could reduce its military spending by at least 80 percent and still be the world's top military spender.
A move away from the military industrial complex would also reduce warfare. Our country is right now fighting drone wars
that create enemies by killing innocents, in large part because the Central Intelligence Agency created a bureaucracy
for drone wars and wants to use it. Experts from around the country and within the military will gather in
Charlottesville from September 16 to 18 to chart a different course, one that supports peace even if it means opposing
war. Any member of the public can sign up to attend at MIC50.org.
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David Swanson is helping to organize the MIC50 conference in Charlottesville. His previous essay in the Hook was a 2008 look at the hazards of voting machines, and his latest book is "War Is A Lie."