Some on the far right have been calling for civil war since an FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home. Some experts say the warning signs for civil war have been emerging in the US in recent years. They say that such a conflict would look very different from the Civil War of the 1860s.
A Business Insider report (The far right is calling for civil war after the FBI raid on Trump’s home. Experts say that fight wouldn’t look like the last one., August 14, 2022) said:
In the wake of an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, some far-right figures have been spreading violent rhetoric online — including calls for war.
After the raid has seen GOP lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene call for defunding the FBI.
Greene has also made references to “civil war” on social media as her Republican colleagues compare the FBI to the Gestapo and depict the raid as the sort of thing that only occurs in “third world” countries. A spokesperson for the Georgia Republican maintains that one of Greene’s tweets mentioning civil war was in reference to infighting or a “war of ideas” in the GOP. In another tweet, Greene referred to the FBI raid as the type of thing that happens “in countries during civil war.”
Meanwhile, pro-Trump internet channels have seen a spike in talk of civil war since the raid.
The report said:
The FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home came at a historically divisive time for the U.S., one in which millions of voters continue to believe the false notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
Historians and experts on democracy warn that these lies continue to foster the potential for further violence. They also say that if the U.S. did see civil war, it wouldn’t look like the first one.
Fiona Hill, who served as the leading Russia expert on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, said in a conversation with Insider last month that the distrust in the electoral process and government institutions fomented by Trump and his GOP allies has created a “recipe for communal violence.” Hill warned the U.S. could ultimately “end up in a civil conflict.”
The country is at a point in which “trust in the different communities and authorities” has eroded “to such an extent that people just start fighting with each other,” Hill said.
But she also underscored that a civil conflict in the present day would be unlikely to look like the American Civil War, an extraordinarily bloody fight between the Union and Confederacy that left an estimated 618,000 to 750,000 Americans dead.
“I do not think we would end up in the kind of conflict that we had between the states — the Union and the Confederacy — back in the day,” Hill said. “But people’s sense of the civil and civic ways of resolving disputes are out the window.”
The report added:
Less than a week after the raid on Trump’s home, an armed man attempted to break into the FBI field office in Cincinnati. Authorities have not announced a motive but are reportedly investigating whether the man — who was ultimately killed by police — had ties to far right extremism.
The suspected gunman, Ricky Shiffer, appears to have posted calls for war and violence against the FBI on Trump’s social media network Truth Social.
“If you do not hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.,” one post read. The account with Shiffer’s name repeatedly parroted Trump’s election lies, per CNN, and multiple reports also suggest that the suspect may have been at the Capitol on January 6.
Warning Signs For Civil War Have Emerged
The report said:
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego who specializes in political violence, warned in an April op-ed for the New Republic that over the past six years “all of the warning signs for civil war have emerged in the United States, and they have emerged at a surprisingly fast rate.”
Walter, who has done extensive research on civil wars, expanded on this in an interview with The Washington Post last month. Like other scholars looking at these issues, Walter said the U.S. is not heading toward a conflict akin to the fight between the North and South.
“When people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war. And in their mind, that is what a second one would look like. And, of course, that is not the case at all,” Walter told the Post. “What we are heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is.”
Walter went on to say that an insurgency is “more decentralized” and tends to be a fight between multiple groups. “They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs,” she said.
Right-wing extremists have been known to look to “The Turner Diaries,” a novel that has been referred to as the bible of the far right, for a blueprint on how to take down a powerful government like the U.S., Walter said. The book, which is revered by white nationalist groups, tells the fictional tale of a civil war against the U.S. government.
“One of the things it says is, Do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs. Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it is hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely,” Walter told the Post.
Research shows that terrorists like the Oklahoma City bomber have been inspired by “The Turner Diaries.”
During a recent meeting at the White House, a group of historians warned President Joe Biden that the U.S. is facing threats not unlike those the country saw in the pre-Civil War period, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
U.S. Democracy In Existential Danger
The report said:
Historian Michael Beschloss, who has made the case that U.S. democracy is in existential danger, was reportedly among the academics who spoke to Biden. Though he is sounding the alarm about the threats America’s democracy is facing at present, Beschloss also says that a civil conflict in the U.S. would be unlikely to resemble the devastating war of the 1860s.
Beschloss said in a social media post on Thursday that “if any kind of civil war faces Americans (may God forbid), it is unlikely to be two armies fighting over one paramount issue (slavery), as in 1861-1865, but sporadic, mounting bursts of violence against our federal government as it tries to enforce rule of law.”
Real Threat Of Civil Conflict
The report added:
Nina Silber, a Boston University historian and expert on the U.S. Civil War, told Insider that discussions of civil war have been a right wing talking point “for some time now” and “it reflects a kind of extremist mentality that goes along with the idea of ‘taking back the country from radical, left wing Democrats.'”
Silber said that “the more this chatter gets normalized, the more it also makes violent behavior seem normal or even inevitable.”
“There is a real threat of civil conflict,” she said, “Not just because of the talk of violence but also because of the increasing numbers of people who are armed and ready to use weapons to advance certain political goals.”
But Silber explained that such a conflict “would not be a repeat of what happened in the U.S. in the 1860s given the stark geographic split the country faced in 1861 between states where slavery was legal and states where it was not.”
There are “some geographic divisions” in the U.S. at present but it is not a North versus South divide like it was in the 1860s, Silber said, adding that there are instead “plenty of divisions” within various states such as urban versus rural — particularly in the “purple” states. She said that this could “manifest itself as pockets of violence in parts of the country.”
FBI’s Search For Mar-a-Lago Reignites Conservative Calls For Civil War
Another Business Insider report said:
Bottom of Form
The FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is renewing calls among conservative groups and his supporters for a civil war in the US.
“An attack on Trump is an attack on True American Patriotism,” one Twitter user wrote on Tuesday. “Civil War will end up being Biden’s Government vs American Patriots.”
Another Trump supporter wrote on Tuesday, “Why would FBI Raif’s Trump’s home but Biden’s and Clinton’s they never touch. Civil war is coming folks, and it will not be pretty.”
Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for Arizona governor, threatened to invoke the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution over the FBI search if elected in November.
Political Scientists’ Warning
It is not the first time Trump supporters or extremist groups have threatened to ignite a civil war as the country remains bitterly divided by politics. Political scientists have warned the public for months that this could happen soon.
“It is possible that there will be other instances of violence like we saw on January 6,” Carole Emberton, a history professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in the American Civil War, said in a previous interview with Insider. “When you have politicians who are riling everyone up and law enforcement that is sort of wishy-washy or weak in its response, then I think you have a really volatile mix that emboldens these kinds of groups to continue with what they are doing.”
Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who studies civil wars and served as research director of the Political Instability Task Force, previously told Insider that a civil war could become a reality because Republicans have “normalized” extremist rhetoric.
“When that gets normalized, then it’s much easier to recruit people into those organizations … that would have been considered extreme or have radical views,” Ulfelder said.
Renewed calls for a civil war came after Trump announced on his social media platform Monday evening that the FBI had raided his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Other Republican lawmakers in several states have also embraced the idea of their state seceding from the U.S.
For instance, in New Hampshire, 13 Republicans voted last March to support a measure that would make the state independent from the U.S. Ultimately, the measure did not gain enough votes to pass the state House of Representatives.
Republican State Rep. Matthew Santonastaso previously told Insider it was just a matter of time before states began to secede.
“A national divorce is inevitable,” Santonastaso said. “The government is nothing but an illusion we all hold in our minds. If the people decide to reject their government, then there is little the federal government can do to stop it.”
Age Of Civil War
Barbara F. Walter, a professor of political science and Rohr Chair in Pacific International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in The New Republic (We Are Living in the Age of Civil War, April 14, 2022):
We are living in an age of civil war.
Countries we thought could never experience another civil war—such as the United States and the United Kingdom—are showing signs of unrest. We are, it turns out, living in the age of civil war.
This rise in civil wars comes at a time when all other types of interpersonal violence are declining.
The only type of violence that has not declined is civil war. Human beings may be less willing to kill each other over lots of different things. But they are more willing to kill each other over politics.
Barbara F. Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start (Crown Publishers, 2022, portions of this article have been adapted from that book) wrote:
People keep asking me if the United States could experience a second civil war. A few years ago, I would have said no. I have spent decades researching how and why civil wars start, and, until as late as 2016, the United States had none of the underlying conditions known to lead to war. I did not think American citizens would fight another war. But that has changed. Over the last six years, all of the warning signs for civil war have emerged in the United States, and they have emerged at a surprisingly fast rate.
We know the warning signs that a country is heading to civil war. The same patterns emerge whether you look at Bosnia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Northern Ireland, Israel, or the United States in the 1860s.
The January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was a window into what has been brewing beneath the surface of the United States for years. Democracy in the United States has been weakening since at least 2016. The 2019 report on the Global State of Democracy by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) found that the United States was one of eight countries around the world that had experienced the greatest widespread democratic erosion in the previous five years. (The other countries were Brazil, Hungary, Kenya, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and India.) A recent report by Freedom House announced that America’s democracy was “in trouble,” declining significantly in the past decade. And in 2020, the Center for Systemic Peace, a nonprofit organization in Virginia, downgraded America’s democracy to an anocracy for the first time since 1800 because a sitting president refused to accept the results of the election and attempted to overturn the results. (By the end of 2021, the United States was upgraded to a democracy as a result of the peaceful transfer of power and a new administration that respected the rule of law.)
The United States now also has, in today’s Republican Party, its first modern ethnic and religious faction. In 2007—one year before Barack Obama was elected—whites were just as likely to call themselves Democrats as they were to call themselves Republicans. But working-class white Americans moved their support to the Republican Party after Barack Obama’s first term and stayed there. Today, the Republican Party is more than 80 percent white, with a large base of evangelical Christians. America’s political parties have never been divided by race or religion. But one of America’s two big parties is now a quintessential example of an ethnic faction.
She added:
Open, unregulated social media platforms have made it easier for demagogues to use disinformation and misinformation to help get themselves elected—something that has happened in the United States, Britain, India, Brazil, and the Philippines.
The United States will be the first Western democracy where white citizens lose their majority status as a result of immigration and low birth rates. This is projected to happen in 2045, but other countries will follow. Around 2050, white citizens will become a minority in Canada. This shift could happen in the United Kingdom and New Zealand in the second half of the century. Far-right, ethnically based parties in all of these countries have attracted membership by issuing ominous warnings about the end of white dominance, emphasizing the great costs — economic, social, moral — of such a transformation.
Until January 6, Americans did not realize how domestic extremism had grown in the United States, and how it was connected to larger patterns of violence. We have been distracted by lesser threats and crises and by elites who want to keep us distracted. While we have been fighting smaller battles over face masks and cancel culture, violent extremist groups on the radical right have grown. Since 2008, more than 70 percent of extremist-related fatalities in the United States were committed by members of far-right or white-supremacist movements. Every form of political violence has increased in the United States over the last 10 years. Mass shootings are up and affect every part of the country: San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, Charleston, Chattanooga, Santa Barbara, Fort Hood, Newtown, Orlando, Jeffersontown, Pittsburgh, and Thousand Oaks. Hate crimes are increasing, and far more are directed at people than property. And the number of militia groups (most of them white supremacist and anti-government) has more than doubled since 2008. These are exactly the types of groups that have emerged to fight in the new twenty-first–century civil wars.
How serious is the threat? If the task force were to study the United States (which it is not allowed to do), it would have put the United States on a “watch list” at the end of 2020.
The United States needs to reform its government to make it more transparent, more accountable to voters, and more equitable and inclusive of all citizens. Rather than manipulate institutions to serve a narrower and narrower group of citizens and corporate interests, the United States needs to reverse course, amplifying citizens’ voices, increasing government accountability, improving public services, and eradicating corruption. We need to make sure that all Americans are allowed to vote, that all votes count, and that, in turn, those votes influence which policies are enacted in Washington. Americans are going to regain trust in their government only when it becomes clear that it is serving them rather than lobbyists, billionaires, and a declining group of rural voters.
But we also need to address the problem of factionalism. Nothing abets and accelerates factionalism as much as social media. After January 6, people kept asking me: What should we do? Do we need better policing? Better domestic terror laws? Does the FBI need to aggressively infiltrate far-right militias? My first answer was always the same. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers, and enemies of democracy. America’s collective anger would drop almost immediately, as it did when Donald Trump could no longer reach every American 20 times a day, every day. (As the journalist Matthew Yglesias noted on Twitter: “It is kinda weird that deplatforming Trump just like completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.”)
The declining white majority can choose to further weaken our democracy in an attempt to institutionalize minority rule, and continue to stoke racial fears. They may think that this is an attractive strategy that ensures that power will remain in their hands for generations. What they do not realize is that this also leads them closer to civil war.
The Inflation Reduction Act is being hailed by the mainstream climate movement, Congress members, and the media as the most important climate bill in U.S. history. That’s a pretty low bar, and it says more about our government’s long record of failure on climate than it does about whether this law can prevent dangerous temperature increases in coming decades.
The lion’s share of spending in the IRA is directed toward producing new capacity for generating and distributing energy and for developing new technologies that consume energy. Only a small portion of the package will go to environmental justice, affordable housing and insulation, and the nation’s lands and waters. And it doesn’t mandate a reduction in use of fossil fuels. Indeed, rather than shutter gas- and coal-fired power plants, the government will reward them with subsidies or tax credits if they keep operating and capture the emissions. And rather than ban further drilling for oil and gas on federal lands, the bill guarantees that plenty of new oil and gas leases will be issued.
But wait! There’s more! In exchange for his essential “yes” vote on the IRA, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) extracted the promise of a second bill that would streamline the permitting of energy infrastructure projects, including oil and gas pipelines and coal mines. Manchin’s chief aim in this new bill was ensure completion of the Mountain Valley Gas Pipeline through his state of West Virginia. Once in use, the pipeline will be responsible for an annual quantity of greenhouse gas emissions equal to the output of 26 coal-fired power plants, while also imperiling hundreds of streams and wetlands.
IRA boosters claim that the emissions prevented by the IRA will far outweigh the emissions that its pro-fossil-fuel measures will engender. That assertion rests on economic modelers’ speculative assumption that the new law will work through market forces to steeply reduce the use of fossil fuels. In fact, the IRA contains no provisions for a direct, surefire phase-out of fossil fuels; therefore, no one can guarantee that it will reduce emissions by 40 percent. Yes, our society is better off with the IRA having passed than we would be without its passage. But if we don’t find a way to snuff out fossil fuels, directly, on a crash schedule, the climate emergency will only intensify.
Why Climate’s Off the Stovetop
General excitement over the IRA has not dispelled a heightening sense of dread and discombobulation throughout our society. The weather’s going haywire. Representative government and human rights are under increasingly violent threat from extremists, many of them public officials. States are stripping away women’s right to bodily autonomy. The economy of the 1970s has returned, and systemic racism never left.
Humans can pay close attention to only so many crises simultaneously, so we perhaps should not be surprised that several surveys show climate change falling lower on the list of public concerns. To make matters worse, passage of the IRA may engender a dangerous new sense of complacency on climate: “Oh, good! That’s one problem solved!”
All of this prompted me to speak with some perceptive climate writers and activists who continue to urge that movements unite across issues to confront all of these crises—including climate—all at once, however daunting that prospect may be.
Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She has written seven books, most recently Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice and Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, both from Beacon Press. When I asked her about the seemingly perverse, widespread apathy about climate, she said, “I think there’s still a strong sense that, oh, well, our institutions are going to take care of it. OK, maybe that’s the case with issues like abortion or gun violence that seem to have very clear and simple solutions that can be solved by our elected officials, if we just elect the right people.” But, she noted, greenhouse-gas emissions are deeply embedded in myriad ways throughout society and can’t be eliminated without a thoroughgoing transformation—and most politicians are allergic to that idea.
“To me, there’s no candidate who has an adequate platform on climate anywhere in the United States. So, as a voter, why should I rank climate as an important election issue? I’d be much more likely to vote for someone who’s going to protect abortion rights, because that’s something where I actually see there’s a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.” With that kind of calculus driving opinion-poll responses, Chomsky says, “I don’t think it necessarily means that people don’t care about climate.”
(This difference in tractability between climate and other issues was illuminated a few days after Chomsky and I spoke, when my adopted home state, deep red Kansas, voted in a landslide to defeat an amendment to the state constitution that would have stripped away the right to an abortion. Needless to say, the probability of such a sudden, dramatic victory on eradication of fossil fuels is microscopic.)
I also spoke with Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, most recently Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (New Society, 2021). “Our ability to act at scale,” he said, “is being hampered by all this other stuff. Suddenly all these crises are coming at us from all these different directions. So doing something really big and long term [about climate and our transgression of ecological limits] gets pushed not just to the back burner, but off the stovetop altogether.”
Heinberg said that in the 1970s, when some environmentalists were arguing that industrialized societies cannot be sustained over the long term without deep transformation, the environmental establishment’s response was, in effect, “Oh, well, we can’t really do all of that.” Therefore, he recalls, “Legislative efforts to fix the unsustainability of industrial society devolved down into little projects to target this area of pollution, or clean up that toxic waste site or whatever. I think the general idea was that all these little efforts would eventually add up to something major, which they really haven’t done.” Now, a half-century later, the political establishment remains stuck in “little efforts” mode.
Liz Karosick, a visual artist and climate activist with the group Extinction Rebellion in Washington, D.C. (XRDC), agrees that the urgency of fending off an array of political and human-rights disasters has, at least temporarily, kept climate in the background. “It feels like all of this is splintering us further in a lot of ways, because you have all of these specific problems that are intersectional and all feed back into one another. It’s like they’re just trying to keep dividing us. And that’s the last thing we need right now.”
We Don’t Have to Accept This
There could be a twist, though. The fact that we are seeing so much of what we value being imperiled all at once can be energizing. Says Karosick, “All of these threats are under the umbrella of an unjust system. It fundamentally has to be changed. And that’s why, with Extinction Rebellion, we’re disrupting business as usual.”
Chomsky also believes, based on her experience as a historian of Latin America, that cascading crises shouldn’t inevitably trigger despair and apathy. “Our culture of acceptance of capitalism,” she says, “just doesn’t exist in the same way in the formerly colonized countries; they see very clearly how much exploitation occurs in the capitalist system, whether it’s exploitation of labor, of land, of peasants, or of the natural world.” She believes that “the kinds of comforting myths about how capitalism works” that permeate our society just don’t work as well in regions like Latin America. And that opens up other, better routes to the future in those regions.
“How,” for example, she asks, “have Latin Americans united and brought about fundamental social change, either through armed revolution, or through the ballot box, or through some combination thereof? And why does the left seem so much stronger, even when they’re in much more dangerous, difficult circumstances than the left in the United States?”
Chomsky offers one answer: “In Latin America we see the real strength of peasant movements, indigenous movements, African-descended movements, peasant struggles for land against a corporate dominated economic model. You know, every Latin American revolution has had strong peasant participation. And every Latin American government has confronted the peasant struggle for land, which is a class struggle. And it’s a global struggle, because they’re struggling against not only local elites but also global corporations. That’s something we don’t have here in the U.S.”
Karosick thinks she may see a ray of light through the gloom, even in the U.S.: “At this year’s Juneteenth celebration in D.C., one of the organizers was talking about how before Covid, there was so much momentum. So many people working across organizations, something really building, and then Covid really just took the wind out of the sails. But it’s interesting—there’s now a general sense that these relationships are coming back together, across organizations.”
That same weekend, at the June 18 Poor People’s March on Washington, Karosick says, “You had all of these hundreds of groups coming together. And across the climate movement, specifically in Extinction Rebellion, we are joining with local residents and marginalized people who are being affected disproportionately by the climate crisis. There are definite opportunities to unite, and we’re definitely starting to sense that this is happening.”
Useful Pessimism?
In his recent writing, Heinberg has argued that in the affluent world, the ecological crisis is in part a result of what he terms deadly optimism. He described it to me this way: “We’ve now had seventy years or so of extreme optimism. Our public discourse has been dominated by the idea that we’re always going to enjoy ‘more, bigger, and faster’ because that’s good for business. But now we’ve reached the point where we can’t continue down that road. And a lot of bills are coming due from that era of excessive optimism—climate change, but lots of other things, too. So suddenly, we have a kind of pervasive pessimism sweeping society.”
For decades, Heinberg has been warning of what he’s now calling a “Great Unraveling.” In his book Power, he writes that in recent years, in his private conversations with scientists and activists, a common theme is that an unraveling looms in our near future. “We understand that a lot of our institutions are going to fail,” he told me. “We’re going into a difficult time and we’re going to have to adapt. But we have to be determined to exclude the worst possible outcomes.”
If, instead, we were to “just give up on doing whatever they can to make things better, if we were to spend all our effort only looking out for ourselves, the result would be a dystopian nightmare.” The best alternative to either deadly optimism or fatalistic pessimism, he says, is “sort of like what psychologists call ‘defensive pessimism.’” Those folks chose an extraordinarily unappealing term, so Heinberg has suggested alternatives, including “useful pessimism.” But whatever we call this stance, he suggests, “the motivating ideal . . . might be stated as ‘respecting limits and living well within them.’”
Chomsky also advocates for channeling pessimism constructively, and that, she believes, will require even more on-the-ground organizing: “I almost feel like we don’t even have enough of a critical mass in this country to engage in serious protest. We should be focusing on building that critical mass. In Witness for Peace, which I worked with a lot in Colombia, every time we had a protest or other activity, the question was, what’s the ask? In Latin America, street protest has been criminalized, yet massive street protests occur nonetheless. And they generally have very clear and coherent asks. And they’ve often been successful. If we achieve the critical mass, and if we have a coherent ask, we can do it, too.”
“Even though it looks grim, and it is grim for many already,” says Karosick, “every degree of warming we can prevent matters. So we can’t let up.” Pointing to a Yale University survey finding that 28 percent of voters would support nonviolent civil disobedience by climate groups, Karosnik said, “That’s huge. There is a sense that people are starting to get really frustrated with the government’s inability to do anything with this crisis, and are willing to push them harder. I think people are very aware of what the problem is,” and, she says, they’re coming to realize that “nonviolent civil disobedience is a mechanism to get the government to pay attention and to make change.”
Regarding movements like the Poor Peoples’ Campaign and Extinction Rebellion that are striving for critical mass and do have very clear demands for systemic change—even against what could be the longest of odds—Chomsky was reflective: “Yeah, I think we have no choice but to push harder despite everything, on two grounds. One, because even if it seems impossible, we’re making it impossible if we don’t do anything. And two, because we just have to. Even if there’s no hope of success, we still have to, if we’re to live with ourselves.”
Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond (2020) and The Path to a Livable Future (2021). The original version of this article was published as part of the ‘In Real Time’ series by City Lights Books. See the ‘In Real Time’ archive and evolving visual work here; listen to the ‘In Real Time’ podcast for the spoken version; and hear Stan on the monthly Anti-Empire Project podcast.
The American military is now having trouble recruiting enough soldiers. According to the New York Times, its ranks are short thousands of entry-level troops and it’s on track to face the worst recruitment crisis since the Vietnam War ended, not long after the draft was eliminated.
Mind you, it’s not that the military doesn’t have the resources for recruitment drives. Nearly every political figure in Washington, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, invariably agrees on endlessly adding to the Pentagon’s already staggering budget. In fact, it’s nearly the only thing they seem capable of agreeing on. After all, Congress has already taken nearly a year to pass a social-spending package roughly half the size of this year’s defense budget, even though that bill would mitigate the costs of health care for so many Americans and invest in clean energy for years to come. (Forget about more money for early childhood education.)
Nor is the Pentagon shy about spending from its bloated wallet to woo new recruits. It’s even cold-calling possible candidates and offering enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000.
As it happens, though, its recruiters keep running into some common problems that either prevent young people from enlisting or from even wanting to do so, including the poor physical or mental health of all too many of them, their mistrust of the government (and its wars), and the recent pandemic-related school closures that made it so much harder for recruiters to build relationships with high-school kids. Many of these recruitment issues are also all-American ones, related to the deteriorating quality of life in this country. From a basic standard of living to shared values or even places where we might spend much time together, we seem to have ever less connecting us to each other. In a nation where friendships across socioeconomic classes are vital to young peoples’ access to new opportunities, this ought to trouble us.
Playing Alone
When I arrived to pick my kids up from camp recently, an elementary school classmate playing basketball with them was yelling “This is for Ukraine!” as he hurled the ball towards the hoop. It promptly bounced off the backboard, landing on a child’s head just as he was distracted by a passing bird. Another mother and I exchanged playful winces. Then we waited a few more minutes while our kids loped back and forth between the hoops, not really communicating, before taking our charges home.
By the time I had gotten my young kids signed up for a camp so that my spouse, an active-duty military officer, and I could continue our work lives this summer, basketball was all that was left. The sun often baked the courts so that less time was spent outside playing and more time talking, while trying to recover from the heat. Though our children were new to group activities, having largely engaged in distance learning during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, they did find a couple of things to talk about with the other kids that reflected our difficult world. “Mommy,” said my seven year old when we got home one day, “a kid said Russia could nuclear bomb us. Could they?” On another occasion, he asked, “Is Ukraine losing?”
They know about such subjects because they sometimes listen in on nighttime discussions my spouse and I have. We might typically consider Russian President Vladimir Putin’s elusive nuclear redline and how close the U.S. will dare creep to it in arming Ukrainian forces. As a therapist who works with active-duty military families, I’m all too aware that kids like ours often worry about violence. Similarly, it’s my experience that military kids tend to wonder whether some kind of repeat of the January 6th attack on our Capitol by Trump’s armed mob could, in the future, involve our military in conflicts at home in which our troops might either kill or be killed by their fellow citizens.
Such violence at home and abroad has become routine for daily life in this country and been absorbed by troubled young minds in a way that left them attracted to video games involving violence. Those can, under the circumstances, seem like a strangely familiar comfort. It’s a way for them to turn the tables and put themselves in control. I recently had a perceptive neighbor’s kid tell me that playing the military game Call of Duty was a way of making war fun instead of worrying about when World War III might break out.
My family is fortunate because we can afford to be home in our spacious yard long enough to let our kids play outside with one another, delighting in nature. I also watch them play “war” with sticks that they reimagine as guns, but that’s about where their militarism ends.
I know that military spouses are expected to encourage their children to join the armed forces. In fact — don’t be shocked — some 30% of young adults who do join these days have a parent in one of the services. But I guess I’m a bit of an odd duck. Yes, I married into the military out of love for the man, but I’ve led a career distinct from his. I even co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which played a vital role in critiquing this country’s wars in this century. I also became a therapist with a professional, as well as personal, view of the healthcare deficits, internal violence, and exposure to tough work conditions that military life often brings with it.
To take one example, my spouse and I have been waiting for months to get care for a life-threatening condition that those with comparable insurance coverage in the civilian population would often have access to in weeks or less. A host of related health conditions are no less poorly treated in our all-too-well-funded military these days.
As we plan to wind down our family’s stint in the military, it’s hard to ignore how little of our fat military budget with its ever fancier weaponry goes to help Americans in those very services. A line from the new film Top Gun: Maverick comes to mind, as title character’s commanding officer warns him: “The future is coming. And you’re not in it.”
Capitalism’s Military Marriage
Thanks in part to growing wealth inequalities in this country and what often seems to be a perpetual stalemate in Congress regarding social spending, the next generation of would-be fighters turn out to be in surprisingly rough shape. It’s no secret that the U.S. military targets low-income communities in its recruitment drives. It has a long record, for instance, of focusing on high schools that have higher proportions of poor students. Recruiters are also reportedly showing up at strip malls, fast-food joints, and even big box stores — the places, that is, where many poor and working-class Americans labor, eat, or shop.
So, too, has the military and the rest of the national security state piggybacked on an American love of screens. The alliance between Hollywood and military recruiters goes all the way back to World War I. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, the government stepped up its efforts to sell this country’s latest wars to the public, presenting them as a ticket to greater opportunities for those who enlisted and, of course, a patriotic fight against terrorism. The smoke had barely cleared from the site of the Twin Towers when Pentagon officials began meeting with Hollywood directors to imagine future war scenarios in which the U.S. might be involved. Present at those meetings were the directors of movies like Delta Force One, Missing in Action, and Fight Club.
It appears that those efforts had an effect. A 2014 social-science study found, for instance, that when it came not to the military directly but to the U.S. intelligence community, 25% of the viewers of either the combat film Argo or Zero Dark Thirty changed their opinions about its actions in the war on terror. Who knew that, with the help of stars like Jessica Chastain, waterboarding and sleep deprivation could be made to look so sexy?
Some kids were more likely than others to pick up such messages. On average, low-income children have more screen time daily than higher income ones do. And many teens increased their screen time by hours during the pandemic, particularly in poor families, which grew only poorer compared with wealthy ones in those years. As a result, in a country where basic services like school and healthcare have been harder to access due to Covid-19, the few spaces for social interaction available to many vulnerable Americans have remained saturated with violence.
A Frayed Social Safety Net and the Military
In such communities, it turns out that the military might no longer be able to promise opportunity to that many young people anymore. After all, our government has done an increasingly poor job of providing a basic safety net of food security, a decent education, and reasonable healthcare to our poorest citizens and so seems to have delivered many of them to adulthood profoundly unwell and in no condition to join the military.
Annually, the proportion of young people who are mentally and physically healthy has been shrinking. As a result, roughly three quarters of those between the ages of 17 and 24 are automatically disqualified from serving in the military for obesity, having a criminal record, drug use, or other similar reasons.
To take one example, obesity among kids has skyrocketed in recent years. During the pandemic, in fact, it began rising a stunning five times faster than in previous years. While obesity may not always disqualify young people from serving in the military, it usually does, as do obesity-related diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure. While its underlying causes are complicated, two things are clear: it’s far more prevalent among the lower- and middle-income segments of the population and per capita it’s strongly linked to wealth inequality.
Legislation like the Healthy Food Access for All Americans bill, which has the potential to expand access to less fattening foods through tax credits and grants for grocers and food banks, was introduced in the Senate more than a year ago. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it has yet to pass.
The casualties of not caring for our own in this way are high. According to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 300,000 deaths each year are due to this country’s obesity epidemic. Unfortunately, deadly as such a phenomenon might prove to be, it doesn’t make for the sort of gripping plots that popular movies need.
Similarly, the military’s recruitment efforts suffer because of poor mental-health levels among young people. One in five young women and one in 10 young men experience an episode of major depression before turning 25. Meanwhile, the suicide rate in this country is the highest among wealthy nations and now — thanks, in part, to all the weapons flooding this society — it’s also the second-leading cause of death among 10-to-24-year-olds. Worse yet, poor kids are significantly more likely to die by suicide. Globally, wealth- and race-based inequalities are key determinants of mental health, in part because people who sense that the world they live in is deeply unfair are more likely to develop clinical mental-health disorders.
A 2019 United Nations report suggested that, in order to improve mental health, governments ought to focus on investing in social programs to support people who have experienced trauma, abuse, and neglect at home or in their neighborhoods. It seems unlikely, though, that our elected representatives are ready for such things.
This Is for Democracy
The human frailties that hinder enlistment are symptoms of something more sinister than a military lacking bodies. The threat that is guaranteed to further undermine any American readiness to face life as it should be faced in this discordant twenty-first century with its ever more feverish summers is the dismantling of our democratic system.
A recent survey ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its democracy. And that’s sad because functional democratic systems are better at creating the conditions in which people can help each other and be involved in public service of all sorts, yes, including in the military.
Democracies are also better at educating people and generally have more efficient health-care systems in part due to the lesser likelihood of corruption. Ask anyone who has sought care in an autocracy like Russia and they’ll tell you that even being rich doesn’t guarantee you quality care when bribery and political retaliation infuse social life.
Democracies have less criminal violence and less likelihood of civil war. In a true democracy where the peaceful transition of power is a given, the kinds of emergencies that necessitate a strong military and law enforcement response are much less likely, which is why the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was so ominous. Worse yet, investing in weapons rather than human livelihood is guaranteed to have costs that are not only far reaching, but hard to predict. One thing is certain, though: war and ever greater preparations for more of it do not lay the groundwork for a good democracy.
All this is to say that our government ought to stop using movie screens and strip malls to sell its bloody practices overseas. It ought to stop investing in the national (in)security state and the corporations that support it in a way that has become unimaginable for the rest of society. It ought to develop a truly functional social-support system at home that would include the Americans now not quite filling the Pentagon’s tired ranks.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
August 12, 2022: ToxicsWatch Alliance (TWA) and Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI) welcome the announcement of Johnson & Johnson, a multinational company headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA to stop the sale of baby talc powder across the world including India from 2023. It is apparent that Indians will continue to be exposed to asbestos laden talcum powder throughout 2022 unless the Government of India acts to stop the sale of talcum powder with immediate effect. Companies like Johnson & Johnson have been insensitive towards public health for quite a long time. They have been practicing practising racism too. Johnson & Johnson and other companies which sell talcum powder should be made to stop the sale of adult talc powder besides baby talcum powder. TWA has been pursuing the demand for ban on sale of asbestos laden talcum powder with the National Human Rights Commission and Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), Directorate General of Health Services, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for several years without success.
TWA and BANI demand that Government of India should promote use of cornstarch and stop the sale of talcum powder of all the companies now that Johnson & Johnson has decided to stop its sale across the globe including India. Other companies which are selling talcum powder to unsuspecting consumers in India too should be ordered to stop their sale to safeguard the public health.
When TWA approached Dr. V.G. Somani, Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), Directorate General of Health Services, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in this regard, he informed that “as far as the asbestos in talcum powder is concerned, asbestos is already prohibited to be used in the cosmetic products as per the Indian Standards IS 4707 Part 2:2017. Further, recently, the BIS has amended Indian Standard, IS 1462 ‘Talc for Cosmetic Industry- Specification’, with regard to the requirement and test method for the absence of asbestos.” But the continued sale of asbestos laden talcum powder in India whose sale has been discontinued in North America shows that this law has not been enforced. DCGI is yet to address the complaint regarding ongoing exposure of Indians to hazardous asbestos mineral fibers contaminated talcum powder of Johnson & Johnson and other brands and enforce prohibition of the sale of talcum powder products to safeguard the health of residents and citizens of India.
In April 2022 when Johnson & Johnson’s shareholders voted against a proposal to stop sales of the talc baby powder in India and other non-North American markets, TWA and BANI had accused shareholders of Johnson & Johnson of practicing double standard and racism. In a classic case of double standard and racism, US shareholders of Johnson & Johnson had agreed to stop sale of asbestos laden talc powder in North America but had acquiesced to continue sale of toxic talc to countries like India. It is inhuman and immoral to knowingly expose humans to killer asbestos fibers. The claim of Johnson & Johnson that its “Baby Powder is safe, does not contain asbestos, and does not cause cancer” is an exercise to save itself from liabilities emerging out of fatal diseases caused by the consumers of its asbestos laden talc powder. In this regard it is relevant to recall that responding to questions about safety of talcum powder and whether talc contains harmful contaminants, such as asbestos, in January 2022, USA’s Food and Drugs Administration (USFDA) released a White Paper and technical appendices on testing methods for asbestos in cosmetic products containing talc. Talc is an ingredient used in many cosmetics, from baby powder to blush.
On May 19, 2020 Johnson & Johnson had announced that it will discontinue sale of its Talcum Powder products in North America. This announcement was aimed at safeguarding the health of residents and citizens of North America but not the residents and citizens of India and non-North American regions. It also announced that “the Company will wind down the commercialization of talc-based Johnson’s Baby Powder in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. Existing inventory will continue to be sold through retailers until it runs out.” Now that it has agreed to stop sale of talc based powder across the globe, it emerges that it is and has been knowingly exposing Indians and non-North Americans to carcinogenic asbestos for years.
A study titled “Asbestos in commercial Indian talc” published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine states that “this product study of various talcum powders marketed to combat prickly heat, purchased from Indian retailers both over‐the‐counter and online, demonstrates the ease of general population access to such products and the potential for significant exposure to asbestos. The analytical results of this study confirm that asbestos exposure of the Indian and potentially greater Southeast Asian populations is not limited to traditional occupational settings.” The findings of this study “imply that the asbestos‐related medical and public health implications to consider will need to extend to persons of both genders and all ages among this population group. This study’s confirmation of an underappreciated source of asbestos exposure, through personal care products, also highlights the risk that anyone within breathing range of these aerosolizeable, contaminated, talcum products incurs.” The authors of the study observe, “Until asbestos is also viewed as a hazard in India and banned, there will still be considerable risk to health.”
Notably, Word Health Organisation (WHO)’s International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) has recognized the presence of asbestos in talcum powder. IARC Monograph on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans on Carbon Black, Titanium Dioxide, and Talc (2010) refers to the presence of asbestos in talcum powder. It also refers to “Use of talc for feminine hygiene”. The use of body powder for feminine hygiene can be estimated from the prevalence reported for controls in case–control studies that investigated the association between the use of cosmetic talc for feminine hygiene and the risk for ovarian cancer. It refers to exposure to respirable dust during the use of talcum powders on the face, body and babies. Talc is used as a surface lubricant on the majority of condoms manufactured; contact with condoms may also represent a direct means of exposure of the female genital tract to talc. Exposure to talc can also occur during surgical procedures when using powdered gloves. Talc particles were observed in the navels of small children, in the testes, on the vocal cords, in the urinary bladder tract and after removal of varicous veins. Besides this the Food Chemical Codex (2003) provides specifications for food-grade talc, including the statement that “talc derived from deposits that are known to contain associated asbestos is not food grade.” Under the voluntary guidelines initiated in 1976, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrances Association stated that all cosmetic talc should contain at least 90% platy talc (hydrated magnesium silicate) that is free from detectable amounts of fibrous, asbestos minerals. Meanwhile, some 67 countries have banned all kinds of asbestos. World Health Organisation (WHO)’s recommendations have established the infectious nature of Covid-19, the same WHO has underlined that “All types of asbestos cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, cancer of the larynx and ovary, and asbestosis (fibrosis of the lungs).”[Reference: https://www.who.int/ipcs/assessment/public_health/asbestos/en/ and https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/asbestos-elimination-of-asbestos-related-diseases.]
Fitzgerald et al observe, “With products of this nature being readily available and appealing to both genders, it is necessary to consider what the potential health risks and burdens of disease are for millions of exposed women of childbearing age and the children for whom they provide care. IARC has confirmed the causal association of asbestos with ovarian cancer and other cancers”.
TWA and BANI demand that CDSCO must undertake the enviro-occupational health audit of the workers who handle asbestos laden talcum powder in the manufacturing facilities of talcum powder products in general besides the health audit of the communities who are in the vicinity of such factories and recommend adequate compensation for those who are exposed to the carcinogenic mineral fibers and are suffering from asbestos related diseases. This will be also relevant for assessing the harm which the unsuspecting consumers continue to face. These consumers include all judges, legislators, officials, their children and grandchildren and the residents of India.
It is noteworthy that in an investigative report titled “Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder” published on December 14, 2018 which too is relevant for protecting the human rights of Indians. The investigation was conducted by Reuters, a news agency. This investigative report is consistent with the findings of a study by India’s Industrial Toxicology Research Centre (IITR), Lucknow, a constituent laboratory of Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India on “Exposure risk to contaminants in pharmaceutical and cosmetic powders” has found that “There are different types of cosmetic powders such as body powder, baby powder, face powder, eye shadow and powdered blush as well as pharmaceutical powders available in the market. Both the sexes of all age groups are using these powders. These are talc – based. Talc is a mineral product and often contaminated with asbestos fibres.”
The aim of the IITR study “was to investigate the safety of such powders being sold in the market, initially by analyzing the asbestos content. Five branded samples of talcum powder were analysed and all were found contaminated with asbestos fibres. Asbestos fibre contamination in these powders ranged from 10.3 – 15.4%. Fibre length study on two samples revealed that asbestos fibres were 22.8 – 34.7%, 48.2 – 55.1% and 17.1 – 22.1% in the range of <10 10=”” 20=”” and=”” m=””> 20µm, respectively. The study indicates risk of human exposure to asbestos through the use of naturally contaminated talcum powder. It is noteworthy that asbestos takes many years to cause asbestosis and carcinogenic malignancies which are irreversible. It also necessitates a regular monitoring and surveillance on all the cosmetic and pharmaceutical powders being marketed for asbestos contamination.” This has been published in the Annual Report 2005-2006 of IITR. IITR is accredited by National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) for chemical and biological testing and is recognized for GLP (Good Laboratory Practice) toxicity testing.[Reference:http://www.itrcindia.org/ITRC_Annual_Report_2005-06.pdf ]
The investigation by Reuters had corroborated the findings of IITR. This recent investigation was undertaken in the wake of three verdicts in New Jersey, California and St. Louis awarding compensation to plaintiffs who blamed asbestos-tainted Johnson & Johnson talc products for their mesothelioma, a type of cancer that develops from the thin layer of tissue that covers many of the internal organs. The connection between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma was discovered in the 1970s. The third verdict was a watershed in in St. Louis: The 22 plaintiffs were the first to succeed with a claim that asbestos-tainted Baby Powder and Shower to Shower talc, a longtime brand the company sold in 2012 that caused ovarian cancer, which is much more common than mesothelioma. The jury awarded them $4.69 billion in damages. Most of the talc cases have been brought by women with ovarian cancer who say they regularly used Johnson and Johnson talc products as a perineal antiperspirant and deodorant. The inclusion of ovarian cancer besides mesothelioma has broadened the potential liability of Johnson & Johnson, a 132 year old multinational medical devices, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods manufacturing company headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
This announcement of Johnson & Johnson dated August 11, 2022 is of deep relevance for the public health of present and future generation of Indians given the fact that Johnson & Johnson company has admittedly been in India for the last 70 years. The company has brought many products in consumer healthcare, medical devices and pharmaceuticals. In 1947, Johnson & Johnson expanded into India, marketing Johnson’s Baby Powder. In September 1957, Johnson & Johnson incorporated as a legal entity in India. The production in its first manufacturing facility began in 1959 at the Johnson & Johnson India plant in Mulund, Mumbai, for Johnson’s Baby Powder and other specialized products. In 1968, the company introduced the Stayfree brand to India. A situation emerged wherein Johnson & Johnson reached almost every household in India.
In India, the import, manufacture, distribution and sale of cosmetics is regulated under the provisions of Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Rules made thereunder. Schedule ‘S’ of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945 specifies that the cosmetics in finished form shall conform to the India Standards specifications laid down from time to time by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). The non-enforcement of these standards has created a situation where in the face of global outrage against asbestos laden talcum powder, these products continue to be in the Indian market unmindful of its disastrous public health consequences.
For Details: Dr. Gopal Krishna, ToxicsWatch Alliance (TWA)/Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI), E-mail:krishnagreen@gmail.com Web: www.asbestosfreeindia.org, www.toxicswatch.org
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