The war that wasn’t
How politicians use fear to take away your rights, money and power
O n October 30th, 1938, tens of thousands of Americans had their worlds rocked by a radio drama about war. “The War of the Worlds,” an adaptation of H.G. WELLS’ novel of the same name, was a testament to the wit and creativity of its narrator and director, ORSON WELLES. It could have also been a complete success were it not for the considerable panic it generated.
The initial idea pitched by the producers was to narrate and broadcast the play in a way that would induce the public to believe they were listening to a real-world newscast, as Welles found the source material “quite dull and wanted to spice it up with inserts of news bulletins and real-world names”. Expecting potential issues, CBS’ legal department asked that the script be toned down and instructed the producers to start the play with an announcement making it clear that the public was listening to a dramatization. The measure proved to be insufficient though because around that time, radio listeners acquired a new habit that we today know by its specific name: zapping. Many of the play’s listeners who had tuned in while zapping between stations, missed the introductory disclaimer and were duped into believing that they were listening to a true account of a Martian invasion.
Much to CBS’ dismay and, we can assume, to the mix of panic and glee of Welles’ inner troll, the play caused quite a lot of commotion. Thousands rushed to spread the news of the Martian apocalypse, and there were even some suicide attempts. The police, although aware that there was no invasion, over-estimated the actual public panic. That very night law-enforcement officials invaded the CBS building from where the broadcast originated. The station’s employees were trying to destroy evidence of the recording and the lighted bulletin on the New York Times building read: “ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC.” What’s certain is that almost everyone, from the public to the press and the authorities, had been engaged in the mechanism of panic either by the play itself or by its perceived effects.
The show’s producer JOHN HOUSEMAN very keenly observed that:
Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes,” wrote Houseman. “During that time, men traveled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it — emotionally if not logically.
While the panic disseminated along multiple vectors, one stands out as particularly relevant to the state of journalism then and now. Since the play aired on a Sunday evening, very few journalists were present in the newsrooms. Consequently, most newspapers opened the next day’s edition with news from a single source, The Associated Press news agency, which had aggregated rumors and reports through its territorial offices.
Throughout the following weeks, newspapers across the country had published more than 12,000 articles covering Welles’ play and its real or imagined consequences. Some blamed the radio stations and asked for more accountability and increased censorship. Others, such as the Iowa senator Clyde L. Herring made clear their intention to propose a bill that would force radio stations to submit all scripts for approval to the Federal Communications Commission before broadcast. And then others just blamed the public for being excessively gullible.
Here we should stop and mark two differences in attitude or schools of thought evident at every level of human interaction, from individuals and communities to society and public policies. According to some, personal responsibility is the preferred alternative to regulations. In contrast, others believe that humans are incapable of self-government and, therefore, need to be led by the hand by some form of authority. There are, of course, several shades in between.
The public of the late 30s cannot be blamed for the panic triggered by Welles’ little hoax. In 1938 the world was on the brink of war, and Hitler was becoming increasingly aggressive. Americans were riding the end of The Great Depression, and just a year prior, they had witnessed the first live transmission of a disaster, the explosion of the Hindenburg. People were scared and apprehensive, and Wells’ play helped expose just how tense the population really was. This is especially true since at the time, war, whether the enemy was terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, was still alive in many people’s memory. Therefore, the mere mention of war was an extremely potent stimulant for the collective psyche.
Orson Welles wasn’t the only one to realize this. His contemporaries from a different trade, that of politics, discovered during the interwar period how efficiently the war metaphor could be used to secure additional powers, often unwarranted ones.
In their book “How public policy became war,” DAVID DAVENPORT and GORDON LLOYD remarked that this was no accidental phenomenon. Politicians leading executive branches realized that declaring fictitious wars or emergencies enabled them to grab a considerable amount of power otherwise inaccessible to them, by sidestepping the typical deliberative system of the legislative branch. In other words, we are dealing with one of the models used by politicians to usurp the separation of powers and the corresponding system of checks and balances. As we all know, the very function of the separation of powers is to prevent the abuse of said powers by one individual or group of individuals. Within the political ecosystem, the roles of the executive, in theory at least, are to faithfully and carefully execute laws enacted by the legislative, in certain situations, to use veto powers to prevent legislative abuse or propose bills that would help with the discharge of its legitimate powers. In emergencies such as wars, the executive branch may also enact law-like acts with a clear and limited scope meant to end or alleviate the invoked crisis. These acts come under different names in different jurisdictions, but Americans know them as executive orders.
In the entire history of the United States, there is a singular politician who stands out as the most talented in exploiting the war metaphor and milking it of all its potential. He set the tone of total abuse of executive power in the United States and, through his “New Deal” program or what Davenport and Lloyd call “America’s French Revolution,” set a dangerous precedent in abuse of power which inspired several of his successors.
During his presidential campaign, with the economic depression in full swing, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT declared that:
…it’s high time to admit with courage that we are in the midst of an emergency at least equal to that of war
and that:
…the presidential campaign is more than a presidential campaign it is a call to arms”
and:
We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline
Again, as observed by Davenport and Lloyd, by making use of the powerful war rhetoric, FDR and all politicians of a feather effectively eliminate all notions of individualism, community, rights, personal values or objectives and replace them with different ones: “troops to muster, enemies to fight and battles to win.”
When a politician, usually a president or prime minister, invokes war as the motive for their decisions, people are more willing to give away some or most of their rights and delegate more of their power to a centralized government that vows to protect them. We are at war, after all, are we not? Someone must protect us, right? Moreover, the appeal to the war metaphor and the people’s fear, now more collective than individual, puts additional pressure on the other branches of government, which will either rapidly fall in line with the executive branch or otherwise risk alienating their constituents.
Again, Franklin Delano Roosevelt provides the perfect example. During his terms as president, FDR issued over 3700 executive orders and frequently manipulated the US Congress using various tactics, from negotiation to his veto power. Congress was legislating less and less while most bills came directly from Roosevelt’s desk. On many occasions, members of Congress didn’t even get to read the content of the bills drafted by Roosevelt and proceeded directly to the vote. Roosevelt went on the offensive against the legislative branch using the same old war metaphor. During his first inaugural speech, Roosevelt declared that he would ask Congress “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis . . . broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
In Roosevelt’s shadow, another power-hungry politician was coming of age, a new pupil who, once president, continued the tradition of abusing executive power. LYNDON BAINES JOHSON was so obsessed with Roosevelt’s personality that he asked everyone to call him by his initials LBJ in a similar fashion to Roosevelt being called FDR. On the launch of “The Great Society,” yet another domestic program inspired by his predecessor and idol, Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” that would seek to “cure it” and, above all, to “prevent it.” Declaring a war, be it actual or metaphorical, presupposes the pre-existence of clear objectives which justify the declaration of war in the first place. But Lyndon Johnson had no such goals. Before his speech about “the war against poverty,” he gathered his staff and “told them he would carve out money for the effort and that they should figure out how to spend it.”
We are already very familiar with the other “wars” declared by other American presidents. Jimmy Carter proclaimed during his presidency “the equivalent of a war on energy consumption.” This war was followed by the war on drugs, the war on terror, etc. While the effects of the war on terror are somewhat visible and to an extent debatable, the war on poverty made no progress whatsoever, and drug trafficking continues to thrive. Meanwhile, all these “wars” remain active, wasting resources and causing myriad side effects that the executive power in its frenzied activity either fails to see or doesn’t care about. In the United States, the cost of the “war against poverty” alone has risen to over 22 trillion dollars, while 28 states of emergency remain active, with none successfully resolved.
The only thing we can be sure about is that starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and up to the Obama administration, politicians, with very few exceptions, used crises, real or imaginary, to declare wars meant not to solve issues but to help them grab and centralize power. In the words of George Orwell, political language is often meant “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
A quote from BARRACK OBAMA’s former Chief of Staff, RAHM EMANUEL, perfectly illustrates this pervasive attitude toward government:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste…[It’s] the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.
The year 2020 came bearing gifts for politicians looking for an enemy to declare war against. The COVID-19 virus gave politicians the exact type of crisis Obama’s chief of staff had in mind. Faced with an extraordinary situation, politicians, but sadly also those journalists and scientists orbiting them, rushed to declare war on the coronavirus.
Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, and Andrew Cuomo, among many others, chose to approach the issue by appealing to the public in clear, war declaration terms. Even DONALD TRUMP, otherwise known for his anti-war stance, fell into this trap. Unlike his peers and predecessors, however, Trump never went past rhetoric and into war-like policies. On the contrary, in March 2020, Donald Trump resisted Democratic Representative’s Nancy Pelosi calls to use presidential emergency war powers. Throughout the pandemic and, indeed, his entire presidency, Donald Trump avoided power grabs, leaving American states to deal with issues on their terms using their policies.
*A friend recently remarked that I was not making clear the fact that some republicans have also embraced the war metaphor. This is true. After almost forty years during which Democrats beginning with FDR and possibly even Woodrow Wilson made extensive use of the war metaphor on the US political scene some republican presidents (Richard Nixon and H.W. Bush come to mind) continued the Democrat-established tradition through the aforementioned war on drugs and war on terror.
Besides their main flaw of promoting and enabling excessive centralization of power, public policies grounded in the war rhetoric create additional nation-crippling issues. Since war requires “action and action now” complex problems are often oversimplified. At the same time, critical thinking, analysis, deliberation, and wise policies are all replaced by hastened measures and brute force, all in the name of expediency and the mirage of absolute control. The objective of actual war is to attain precise goals, preferably in the shortest time. In the absence of a real war, policies founded on the war rhetoric tend to remain forever active.
Another major drawback is that such policies are always driven by emotion, not reason or fact, and fueled by destructive negative imagery.
This brings us to the very corrupted essence of the war-like rhetoric and the policies that favor it. As laws only apply to people, we can only wage war against people. A virus cannot be fined or imprisoned, nor can it be surrounded or suppressed with an artillery barrage. War requires well-defined objectives and enemies in flesh and bone.
Since neither these fictitious wars nor those declaring them can destroy their purported adversaries, such as viruses, a new target is automatically selected. The people, from individual to collective, become “the enemy.”
The effects of these policies are abundantly evident in the strife that has gripped the world during these last two years. Animated and divided by the fear induced by journalists and politicians, neighbors got dragged into a smoldering conflict against neighbors. Some of those who dread illness or death by disease, being unable to “fight” in the true sense of the word against a virus, target the next available imaginary culprit: the individuals who refuse to obey government coronavirus restrictions. Those who want to be left in peace try to fend for themselves as best they can.
Most people care about their lives and have no wish to imperil other people’s lives. Fear is helpful as a survival mechanism but utterly damaging if it drives us to abandon individual responsibility and surrender our fundamental rights to those who call for bogus wars against imaginary enemies. Suppose we continue accepting and validating these empty war declarations. In that case, we would end up fighting against each other, friends against friends, brothers against parents, and parents against their kids while the virus or any other threat will continue to wreak havoc. In other words, we will be living in a semi-permanent, smoldering civil war.
I will conclude with the words of President Warren G. Harding, whose campaign slogan was “return to normalcy”:
…problems of maintained civilization are not to be solved by a transfer of responsibility from citizenship to government.
