What a War Economy Really Means for Those Living in It

While the online world is a cesspool of contrarianism at its most vile and stupid I suspect comparatively few who are not stupidly and loathsomely trolling the speaker would flatly 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 for those who participate in it or otherwise suffer it personally, 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, a war economy has many a time meant the end of unemployment--but it also meant a combination of higher demand for production with eagerness to keep the demand for labor in check, inflation as governments show less concern for holding down prices than they do for holding down wages, wartime taxes that tend to weigh much more heavily on workers rather than bosses, "moral suasion" to buy war bonds, and much, much else, translating to longer hours at higher and more dangerous work intensity under more severe discipline and often outright state compulsion in return for lower real in-their-pockets wages, all as "production for the front" meant there was less for workers to buy with what money they did have. All of this went hand in hand with their experiencing the alienation of having the labor organizations supposed to represent them in at a minimum their struggle for better pay and conditions, etc. turned into another instrument of the bosses for disciplining them in line with the program delineated from above (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 had ever been allowed them were 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 "making a sacrifice" means being subject not object, and choosing to give up what one has, while here others who do not speak for them are in fact making the decisions to take--by and large, take what little the have-nots have (given that not only must one give what is one's own for one to speak of sacrificing it, but one must also regard it as of value, this, again, no sacrifice given their lack of regard for the poorer members of the community), as they pretend the process is ennobling and any reluctance about it ignoble on the part of people who have "had it too good for too long" and selfishly "forgotten what really matters in life"--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?").

Naturally those in power find much to like about the war economy, whereas the population at large tends to have a rather different experience of the phenomenon. The disparity puts me in mind of George Orwell, an author who got a lot wrong (I have always found his anti-intellectualism lazy and cheap, long wondered if as toward the end he cowered before the irrational he was not losing his grip, and seen it as evidence of his failings that it is the enemies of what he professed to stand for who have been so successful in wielding his name and his writing as a club against what he did stand for) but also got some very important things right, not least that all through history War has been " 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 any intelligent person 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, so much so that many of those who would rush to claim him for their side in political argument ought to be very wary indeed of referring the public to what he actually wrote, rather than what they illiterately fancy he did.