REVIEW
“ARSENAL OF HYPOCRISY”, A Film By Randy Atkins, 2003
Peace Researcher 37 – November 2008
- Jeremy Agar
The title of this disturbing documentary is a
play on the US’s
role, during World War 2, as the “arsenal of democracy”. The phrase was intended
as a compliment as it was American industrial capacity that armed Britain
when it was fighting alone against Nazi Germany. And of course the good guys
went on to win. By converting “democracy” to “hypocrisy” the filmmakers,
themselves Americans with an intense knowledge of their country’s Government,
are crediting their audiences with a historical perspective they might not
always have. As the reference assumes (though George Bush did all he could to
discredit it) American power is still regarded by many as essentially a
benevolent influence. This is in large part a residue of the War and the years
immediately after.
The wordplay is a neat, succinct jibe, one that
his film more than justifies, and it’s not the fault of Bruce Gagnon (the
film’s presenter and spokesperson for the US-based Global
Network Against Weapons And Nuclear Power In Space) that the
allusion might pass some by. The content he is presenting might be similarly
challenging to audiences with but a cursory understanding of American state
policy. The immediate charge of hypocrisy is levelled at any and all US
Administrations since 1945. Gagnon is looking at space policy, making the point
that all post-war American administrations have assumed the need to control
space and, thereby, Earth.
Put baldly like that, the accusation will
strike some viewers as overwrought. If so, the “Star Wars” imagery we see will
reinforce an assumption that Gagnon is exaggerating, that he can present his
contempt for his country’s leaders only by a selective use of the evidence.
This would be a pity. Although the American drive to rule space has received
less attention from the world’s media than it merits, there are more than a few
other reliable observers who have been making the same point for decades.
The DVD came out several years ago, but it is
not in any way dated. In a sense, it’s better to look at it now than it would
have been in 2003 in that during the intervening period we haven’t been able to
see past Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was around the time that Gagnon produced “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” that Bush
was launching his arsenal of deceit. Bush was no hypocrite: he lied to justify
his wars. Meanwhile the militarisation of space has continued, with no
essential change from the decades before Bush came into office. Had the doco
been released now, audiences might have found it hard to think past the
specifics to do with Dubya, whose follies could have been a diversion. Bush was
demonised as an individual, but unlike some uniquely Bushian aspects of American
“defence” policy, space policy has not essentially changed.
The specific hypocrisies underlying space
policy are that the US says
it wants nuclear disarmament, when in fact it wants nothing less than to give
up its own nukes. It suggests it has to keep its nukes in the meantime to
police the world, when their real purpose is to threaten the world. The drive
to dominate space is motivated in part by the need to use space as a launching
platform. Reagan’s Star Wars programme of the 1980s, so named because it seemed
more sci-fi than science, was not the fantasy that our wishful thinking
supposed. It is more accurately seen as a stage in an enduring policy. With the
demise of the Soviet Union, the stated need
for all the space shields and weapons has gone, but the programme hasn’t. It
just took another form under a new name. That’s been another hypocrisy.
Gagnon starts his story with Werner von Braun,
the man who used concentration camp labour to build Hitler’s rockets. In 1945,
American and British troops entered Germany from the west, while Soviet
troops entered from the east. As strategists wondered where the eventual
boundary would lie between the two emerging big power blocs, the US and Soviet Union raced to recruit German
scientists, who enjoyed a mystique in both Washington
and Moscow. The
Cold War had begun even before the hot war had ended. It did not matter
that many of the scientists were Nazis. To some cold warriors in the West this
was in fact a good thing as it proved their anti-communist credentials. 1,500
Nazis were smuggled into the US.
Von Braun ran the US
space programme, but he was only one of several top men with dubious
backgrounds.
US
Wants To Be “Master Of Space”
From the start the idea was to “conquer, occupy,
keep and utilise space” so that the US would win “the third world war”.
The motto “Master Of Space” was chosen to inspire what would now be called a
mission statement. America
must at all costs have “the ability to deny others the use of space”. Gagnon
discusses the seminal Vision For 2020, which set out the strategic context.
Because of its dominant military and economic position at the War’s end, the US did
not need to fear a potential rival - not if it consolidated its advantage by
taking over space. Neither the Russians nor anyone else could pose a threat.
But sometimes, because the threat of an external enemy is a great fundraiser,
it had to be pretended that they did.
The justification for first going into space,
and then, militarising it, was rationalised in terms which foreshadow the more
recent analyses of outfits like the American-dominated World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund: “The globalisation of the world economy will also
continue, with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’”. The Vision For 2020
anticipated that “accelerating rates of technological development will be
increasingly driven by the commercial sector”. Military policy was an extension
of economic policy, and economic policy was to establish neo-liberalism around
the globe.
Despite the hypocrisy that bangs on about how
the rising tide of American power lifted all boats (a remark of Kennedy’s),
policy makers have always known what has become so obvious in our new century:
that the touted “free market” economies would lead to increased inequality,
and, with it, increased regional instability. That, Gagnon explains, is why,
whether or not there is a Soviet Union, space
remains important as a place from which to spy. Every country being either a
potential rival or a potential trouble spot, it’s safe to assume that we’re all
being watched.
How Reagan would love being still around now
that his Star Wars has become technologically possible: the purely military
aspect of wars, the destruction of the enemy’s ability to retaliate, can be
achieved almost entirely from space. The trick, which Gagnon thinks is now in
place, is to destroy any potentially hostile missile while it’s still on the
ground or, at worst, as it takes off. He dubs Gulf War 1 as Space War 1. The
second space war was Kosovo; the third, Afghanistan. Since then of course
we’ve had Gulf War 2 (Space War 4). Reagan could hope only to erect a barrier
in the skies.
To buttress his case, Gagnon could have looked
at lots of White House and Pentagon think tankers. His choice of Zbigniew
Brzezinski is apt. Brzezinski advised Jimmy Carter, the 1970s’ President whom
Republicans like to pretend was wimpy. From way back in the 1960s’ Kennedy era
and since, Brzezinski had been one of the main Cold War strategists. He
operated at a time when the notion of detente (the hope that the nuclear
warriors could have a cuppa) made occasional appearances. Whenever it did,
Brzezinski would panic. Ever eager to arouse tension, he crafted Presidential
Directive 59, which committed the US to a nuclear war-fighting
stance. This was quite an achievement in that there remains doubt as to whether
he consulted either the President or the Central Intelligence Agency. It was
Brzezinski who insisted that the US needed to blur the boundary between
nuclear and so-called conventional weaponry, thus making extreme violence more
thinkable. It was Brzezinski who insisted that the US had to push for a military
advantage whenever and wherever opportunity arose. In characteristic vein he
once told an interviewer that “it’s inaccurate thinking to say that the use of
nuclear weapons would be the end of the human race. That’s egocentric thought”
(quoted by Fred Halliday, “The Second Cold War”, Verso, London, 1983. See also “With Enough Shovels:
Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War”, by Robert Scheer, Random House, New York, 1982).
Post-Gorbachev (i.e. after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the world is supposed to be a different
place, yet Brzezinski’s pronouncements have moved neither ideologically nor
geographically. Gagnon mentions a book called “The Grand Chessboard” in which
Brzezinski detects two global “collision points”. One collision point is
central Asia and the “Stans”, next to the oil pipelines running through Afghanistan.
The other hotspot is the coast of China. Developments since the book
came out in 1997 indicate that Zbiggy is still influential. Gagnon’s other
point is also as relevant as the latest news. The US wants to control space as it is
a potential source of minerals. A NASA scientist is seen predicting that there
will be mines on Mars by 2025. When, in July 2008, TV pictures showed the probe
on Mars, the reporter repeated exactly that. According to Gagnon, Congress had
before it a bill to make space profits tax exempt. If so, then America
wants to privatise the universe in its own interests.
That’s why this film might seem too Darth
Vader, too bad to be true. Because it has so much to say, and so much
background information to provide, “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” is intense in both
tone and content. It’s essentially a lecture with the odd shot of a rocket or
the Moon, interspersed with Gagnon’s talking head mate, Noam Chomsky, himself
an uncompromising critic. As an unremittingly harsh dissection of US
policy, “Arsenal Of Hypocrisy” has the potential to dismay the popcorn brigade.
As an analysis of global insecurity, it’s essential viewing.
Global Network Against Weapons And
Nuclear Power In Space, Box 652, Brunswick ME O4011, USA, globalnet@mindspring.com http://www.space4peace.org
Anti-Bases Campaign has been receiving information from them for years and we
exchange publications. We can thoroughly recommend them. Ed.