What a War Economy Really Means for Those Living in It

While the world, especially the online world, is a cesspool of contrarianism at its most vile and stupid. However, I suspect comparatively few would deny the dangers, and wrongs, of romanticizing war.

This is not only the case with regard to the hard reality of physical destruction of bodies and minds and property, and the moral effects of organized violence and all that goes with it and follows in its wake, but what war means for people far removed from the scene of the overt, direct, violence, like those on the "home front"--even in a supposedly "good" war. Yes, the war economy meant the end of unemployment--but it also meant longer hours at higher work intensity (more strain and stress, more danger and accident, more injury and death in many an occupation) under more severe discipline and often outright state compulsion in return for (between wage suppression and war-generated inflation) lower real wages, on top of which wartime taxes government and its proxies pressured, harassed or did worse still to get them to put that money into war bonds (i.e. loan it to the government) took a bite out of the rest, all as "production for the front" meant there was less to buy. All of this went hand in hand with their experiencing the alienation of having their own labor organizations, which were supposed to represent them in at a minimum their struggle for better pay and conditions, etc. turned into effective collaborationist outfits with government and the bosses for the sake of disciplining them (not least, with the threat of yanking them out of the job and sending them to the front along with the goods they were making or paying for), the more thoroughly in as what civil liberties are allowed them are in abeyance--the right to strike, even the right to speak, taken away as they were not just gulled but shamed and bullied by those who browbeat them with a thousand-times-outworn "Don't you know there's a war on?" clichés of "sacrifice," never mind that it is not a matter of the public sacrificing but its being sacrificed by those who really do make the decisions, and the have-nots who get sacrificed and are expected to sacrifice what is left to them as they are told that they have "had it too good for too long" and selfishly "forgotten what really matters in life," that they, their families, their children don't "need" all the things they have, in contrast with the haves who get coddled, their right to reap colossal war profits and enjoy all the comforts of prosperity in peace treated as sacrosanct, with all this extending to an indulgent attitude toward outright criminality on their part ("Prosecute them? But don't you know there's a war on?")--such that those in power, especially to the extent that they are concerned for nothing else but their power and what they can do with it to advance their selfish interests (from which standpoint the sufferings of the less well-off are no sacrifice at all), have abundant reason to love the situation, but the population at large every reason to despise it.

Considering it all I find myself thinking of George Orwell, my opinion of whom is, I think, a little more complicated than most. I have found his anti-intellectualism (his inane assaults on political language, for example, his ceaseless bashing of intellectuals for their supposed quirks, his exaltation of the unthinking, his cowering before the irrational, his tiresome display of self-hatred. etc.) lazy and cheap and wearisome in the extreme, while I suspect that the sufferings of his final years deranged him on some level--and that this had much to do with his failures as a writer, not least the fact that for all its real accomplishments, his masterpiece has ever since been wielded as a club by the enemies of what he stood for. ("Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it," Orwell said, and I believe him when he says that, but it is hard to think of any novelist who has done quite so much for the enemies of democratic socialism as he--such that neoconservative royalty John Podhoretz confidently claims Orwell for neoconservatism, while John Newsinger finds himself obliged to "reclaim" Orwell for the left. Whatever one thinks of Orwell's ends, one cannot call the ways in which his work made such a disparity between those ends and his results more than a mere "misunderstanding" a complete success.)

Still, I would not be referring to Orwell if he did not get a great deal right as well as wrong, not least in regard to the reality of war and what a wartime mood means, even on a home front that may be remote from the carnage. No matter how apparently just or necessary the cause for which even elites make the decision to go to war, the public should never forget that all through history War "is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects" first and foremost "to keep the very structure of society intact," such that "continuous" War is an end in itself, and they must think and act accordingly--and expect that even the most just and necessary War that ever was or ever could be will, in anything remotely resembling civilization as we have hitherto known it, become something far less noble in purpose sooner than later, the more in as the people wax in vigilance of those menaces to freedom of which Orwell, even nearing the end, remained thoroughly alert."