Artists Embedded within the Military-Industrial Complex

by Marie Ourganjian

In 1961 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” By the time Eisenhower uttered his speech the military-industrial complex (MIC) was 20 years old. Beginning in 1941 after the U.S. officially entered World War Two, the U.S. industrial and manufacturing industries began to produce the weapons and vehicles needed by the military. As a result of the MIC’s creation, the U.S. economy rebounded from the depression that had plagued it since the 1929 stock market crash.

Today the military-industrial complex (MIC) permeates all of American society. Even some of the artists who speak out against the Iraq war are clearly embedded within the MIC as is evidenced by the language they use when speaking about military veterans.

On March 20, 2006 a number of singers and bands performed during an anti-war concert called “Bring ‘Em Home Now.” The date of the concert marked the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Michael Stipe, REM’s front man, spoke about his admiration and respect for all who served in the military, and cited his father’s war record in Korea and Vietnam.

A number of musicians appear on the soundtrack for Body of War, a documentary about an Iraq war veteran paralyzed from the chest down after being shot in Baghdad in 2004, including singer-guitarist, Tom Morello. Known for his activism, Morello commented on Iraq war veterans who speak out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “Too often, acts of resistance against this war are tepid. When veterans who have made the ultimate sacrifice speak out, it can have a very galvanizing effect,” Morello said.

Months before the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, Dave Matthews wrote a letter in protest. Questioning the motives of the Bush administration, Matthews asked, “What is the motivation? Regime change? Shouldn’t that be up to the people of the region and the people of Iraq?” Towards the end of the letter, he boldly states his fear that “our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy.” He ends the letter with the statement: “This war is wrong and this war is un-American.”

Last summer Matthews again expressed his outrage over the Iraq war, and spoke about the letter he wrote to Congress concerning the care of Iraq war veterans, and the 23,000 signatures he collected. “It’s not partisan. It’s not about whether it’s a Republican or a Democratic administration. It’s only about how we treat people who have given, essentially, their lives, put their lives in the hands of our country.”

The Dave Matthews Band performed free shows for the United States Military Academy in 2003. The Academy competed with universities across the country for the free show. Billed as “The World’s Loudest Pep Rally,” AT&T sponsored the contest.

“It was really inspiring to us,” Matthews said about performing for the Army cadets. “It’s a beautiful place and it’s attended by exceptional minds and just to entertain that demographic is a great honor. If it became anything of a tradition, I don’t know, but I certainly won’t turn down the opportunity to do it again,” he added.

Al Franken is a writer, comedian, former host of an Air America radio program, and currently running for U.S. senate. A critic of the war in Iraq from the beginning, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune published his opinion piece on December 31, 2006 where he blasted the Bush administration:

The truth of the matter is that the Bush administration has made enormous and tragic mistakes at every stage of this debacle. It overplayed the threat from Iraq and undersold the price, in lives and resources, of a war. It failed to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, ignored the threat of an insurgency and allowed a shoddy reconstruction rife with fraud, abuse and sheer amateurism to sabotage our efforts to put the pieces back together. Worst of all, it has failed to admit to its mistakes or adjust to emerging realities along the way, leaving us in what now seems to be a no-win situation.

Franken performed for troops in Iraq as part of a USO tour in 2004. During a 2006 interview he said it was an “honor” to perform in Iraq. “I’m from the Vietnam generation. I didn’t serve. This is my way of serving,” he said.

Protest the war, but support the troops

Artists who criticize the Iraq war, but perform for military troops are a product of American culture where every school child is taught a plethora of lies about history and made to pledge allegiance “to the flag and to the republic for which it stands.” The national anthem is proof that America culture glorifies war. Written by Francis Scott Key during a battle in the war of 1812, the Star Spangled Banner is filled with images of war:

Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

For decades the mainstream media (MSM) has pummeled into the minds of Americans that the majority of Vietnam War veterans suffered psychological scares over the lack of grateful parades in their honor attended by grateful citizens waving American flags.

According to scholar and activist Noam Chomsky, slogans such as “support the troops” do not really mean anything:

“…the point of public relations slogans like “Support Our Troops” is that they don’t mean anything…that’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about.”

Chomsky traces war time propaganda back to the Creel Commission of World War I in his book Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. The Creel Commission, chaired by George Creel, was created as a government committee to disseminate propaganda concerning World War I. Edward Bernays, considered to be the ‘father of public relations,” served on the commission.

“It was in recognition of public opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts,” Creel wrote in a 1922 essay. Since then U.S. presidents have made use of the weapon called the main stream media to manipulate public opinion. In the words of Chomsky, presidents like to “manufacture consent” for war.

Journalist Donna Saggia echoes Chomsky:

The roots of our deference to military authority are deep, but more important are the ongoing rituals that entrench the cult of the military firmly within the American psyche. Of these, the most potent and insidious is the incantation, “support the troops.” These three words may seem to be a simple statement of support for the men and women in uniform. In reality, they say more about the embedment in the American psyche of the cult of the military than could any presidential war speech or Pentagon defense budget.

In fact, in the absence of a legitimate causis belli, “support the troops” has become the glue that binds the American people to the war, and it is no coincidence that, until recently, the dominant cry from the American public has been “support the troops” rather than “stop the war.”

Howard Zinn & Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Artists who know the truth about war

Playwright and historian Howard Zinn was a bombardier during World War II. During a 2006 interview he expressed his regret:

Now I am very regretful and very sad. I indiscriminately killed, which is what bombing is, and it was acceptable. It was only afterward that I began to think about what I was really doing to human beings. I was participating in atrocities. Over half of those dead were not soldiers, but civilians. So, I look back regretfully at that experience and have since tried to make up for it by educating people and by participating in the anti-war movement.

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a member of the U.S. Navy during World War II and served as a skipper of a submarine-chaser in the Normandy invasion. During the last year of the war he went to the Pacific, and saw Nagasaki after a U.S. plane dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

And one day ashore, we took a train over to Nagasaki. It was just a few hours away. And I think it must have been about seven weeks after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. And there had been time to “clean things up,” quote/unquote, for some time, but still it was a devastating scene. It made me an instant pacifist. There was just three square miles of mulch with human hair and bones sticking out, and on the horizon a sort of—a landscape you’d find in the painting of Anselm Kiefer these days: blackened unrecognizable shapes sticking up on the horizon and teacups full of flesh, teacups—

The Free Articulator is anti-war

March 20 marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq. At the Freelance Articulator we are opposed to the continued occupation of Iraq, and equally opposed to artists who claim to be opposed to the war in Iraq but are clearly embedded within the MIC. When artists perform for the troops they give approval to the MIC and the greed on which it stands.

“Artists who claim to oppose the war—no, slaughter—in Iraq and then go there to perform for troops are spineless bastards who talk a lot for the sake of controversy and publicity and then do something else for the sake of a first-class flight to a paying gig.”

Joel Falconer, Editor-in-Chief of the Freelance Articulator.

“I am sick of gutlessness; of the pretending to courage and bravery that is endemic in our cultures…A value we are expected to embrace on the battlefield and not in the boardroom or society itself. Fight and die for our rights, so that we may never forget you, who died and gave your lives for us to have the freedom to celebrate your sacrifices each year at monuments and memorials decorated with wreaths so long as we….shut up!”

NDK Creative Artist.

“Artists who stand in opposition of the Iraq war, but then perform there are are singing, dancing corporate monkeys trying to be war profiteers.”

Eric Brown, Creativity desk editor

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