9. The United States did not have to develop the pledge of allegiance and the one-arm salute
10. The United States welcomed Nazis into the U.S. military
11. The United States did not have to engage in an arms race with Japan
12. WWII does not prove that violence is needed for defense
13. WWII was the worst thing humanity has done to itself and the earth in any short period of time
14. WWII in western culture is a dangerous set of myths
15. There was resistance to WWII in the United States
17. The world has changed: Hitler is not coming to get us
18. WWII and the case for war abolition
For Anna, Wes, and Ollie.
1. What WWII has to do with military spending
“I’m going to perform a magic trick by reading your mind,” I tell a class of students or an auditorium or video call full of people. I write something down. “Name a war that was justified,” I say. Someone says “World War Two.” I show them what I wrote: “WWII.” Magic!1
If I insist on additional answers, they’re almost always wars even further in the past than WWII.2 If I ask why WWII is the answer, the response is virtually always “Hitler” or “Holocaust” or words to that effect.
This predictable exchange, in which I get to pretend to have magical powers, is part of a lecture or workshop that I typically begin by asking for a show of hands in response to a pair of questions:
“Who thinks war is never justified?”
and
“Who thinks some sides of some wars are sometimes justified, that engaging in a war is sometimes the right thing to do?”
Typically, that second question gets the majority of the hands.
Then we talk for an hour or so.
Then I ask the same questions again at the end. At that point, the first question (“Who thinks war is never justified?”) gets the vast majority of the hands.3
Whether that shift in position by certain participants lasts through the next day or year or lifetime I do not know.
I have to perform my WWII magic trick fairly early in the lecture, because if I don’t, if I talk too long about defunding militarism and investing in peace, then too many people will have already interrupted me with questions like “What about Hitler?” or “What about WWII?” It never fails. I talk about the unjustifiability of war, or the desirability of ridding the world of wars and war budgets, and somebody brings up WWII as a counter-argument.
What does WWII have to do with military spending? In the minds of many it demonstrates the past and potential need for military spending to pay for wars that are as justified and necessary as WWII.
I’ll return to the question of why this matters in the final chapter of this book, but let me sketch it out briefly here. Over half of the U.S. federal discretionary budget -- the money the Congress decides what to do with each year, which excludes some major dedicated funds for retirement and healthcare -- goes to war and war preparations.4 Polls show that most people are unaware of this.5
The U.S. government spends vastly more than any other country on militarism, as much as most other major militaries combined6 -- and most of those are pressured by the U.S. government to buy more U.S. weapons7. While most people do not know this, a majority does think that at least some money should be moved from militarism to things like healthcare, education, and environmental protection.
In July 2020, a public opinion poll found a strong majority of U.S. voters in favor of moving 10% of the Pentagon’s budget to urgent human needs.8 Then both houses of the U.S. Congress voted down just that proposal by strong majorities.9
This failure of representation should not surprise us. The U.S. government hardly ever acts against powerful, wealthy interests simply because a majority favors something in poll results.10 It’s even very common for elected officials to brag about ignoring polls in order to follow their principles.
To motivate the Congress to change its budgetary priorities, or to motivate major media corporations to tell people about them, would require a lot more than giving the right answer to a pollster. Shifting 10% out of the Pentagon would require huge numbers of people passionately demanding and protesting for a much larger shift than that. The 10% would have to be a compromise, a bone tossed to a mass movement insisting on 30% or 60% or more.
But there’s a big hurdle on the way to building such a movement. When you start talking about a major conversion to peaceful enterprises, or nuclear abolition, or the eventual abolition of militaries, you run headfirst into a surprising topic that has very little to do with the world you currently live in: WWII.
It’s not an insurmountable hurdle. It’s always there, but most minds, in my experience, can be moved to some degree in under an hour. I’d like to move more minds and to make sure the new understanding sticks. That’s where this book comes in.
This book lays out the case for why misconceptions about World War II and its relevance today should not be shaping public budgets. When less than 3% of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth11, when the choice of where to put resources shapes more lives and deaths than all the wars12, it matters that we get this right.
It ought to be possible to propose returning military spending to the level of 20 years ago13, without a war from 75 years ago becoming the focus of the conversation. There are far better objections and concerns that one might raise than “What about WWII?”
Is a new Hitler coming? Is a surprise recurrence of something resembling WWII likely or possible? The answer to each of those questions is no. To understand why, it may help to develop a better
