This article was written as a companion piece to an article by Mike Morgan under the shared title of “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.“
In 1980, the great English punk band, The Clash, recorded a powerful anti-war song titled “The Call-up.” While the call-up initially refers to the drafting of soldiers into the armed forces, over the course of the song, it becomes a metaphor for all the efforts of the powerful to maintain support for their more or less endless wars. Here are the lyrics:
It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
‘N’ you must not act the way you were brought up
Who knows the reasons why you have grown up?
Who knows the plans or why they were drawn up?
It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
I don’t want to die!
It’s up to you not to hear the call-up
I don’t want to kill!
For he who will die
Is he who will kill
Maybe I want to see the wheat fields
Over Kiev and down to the sea
All the young people down the ages
They gladly marched off to die
Proud city fathers used to watch them
Tears in their eyes
There is a rose that I want to live for
Although, God knows, I may not have met her
There is a dance an’ I should be with her
There is a town – unlike any other
It’s up to you not to hear the call-up
‘N’ you must not act the way you were brought up
Who give you work an’ why should you do it?
At fifty five minutes past eleven
There is a rose…
Yeah!
It’s even more powerful when you watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ScaGjwkg2Y
The charge “not to heed the call-up” at first is an expression of the need to resist the draft but it develops into an expression of the need to resist all the dehumanizing aspects of modern life.
I was reminded of the song as I watched some of our “liberal” leaders express their support for a ban on assault weapons, specifically “AR 15 style rifles, in the days after the killing of ten people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket. What was striking about their arguments was the way in which they took an endorsement of the need to kill as many enemies as quickly as possible, in contrast to doing the same thing in a market, as completely commonsensical and unobjectionable.
First up is Vice President Kamala Harris. In an interview with CBS’s Gayle King, she called on Congress to ban assault rifles: “It is time for Congress to act, and stop with the false choices. This is not about getting rid of the Second Amendment. It’s simply about saying we need reasonable gun safety laws. There is no reason why we have assault weapons on the streets of a civil society. They are weapons of war. They are designed to kill a lot of people quickly.” A civil society?
And then we have Ari Melber, of MSNBC, doing one of his all too familiar special reports—this one on why assault weapons should be restricted to members of the armed forces. During the report, he replayed a 2019 interview with Anthony Brown, a congressman from Maryland and a thirty-year military vet, after two mass shootings with assault rifles. Brown said: “These are the very types of weapons that were issued to me when I went to Iraq, when my colleagues went to Afghanistan. They were issued to us so that we could do a very important mission, if called to do, and that’s kill people. They are designed to inflict as much harm and casualty and death as is humanly possible.” Humanly possible?
The most common military version of the AR15 is the M16 and the numerous varieties of AR15s now available for purchase are knock-offs of the M16. Both are lethal; the only significant difference is that the ones for sale on the consumer market are not fully automatic. The M16 was developed by a number of competing firearms manufacturers in response to requests from different branches of the armed forces. As was true for a lot of dreadful weapons, the prototypes were first tested in Vietnam. The development of the weapons, including the specifications for its function and effectiveness was under the supervision of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a Pentagon outfit that explores new technologies for war and other government priorities.
The early versions of the weapon proved to terrifyingly effective at inflicting death on the forces of the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army, as well as presumably any other individuals who happened to be in the line of fire. But there were many problems with it. For example, it needed frequent cleaning but soldiers were neither trained in the proper procedures or provided the necessary supplies. Infantry troops spent so much time cleaning the rifles that it was often reported that the most common moment when a soldier was killed occurred while he was cleaning his rifle.
Over the years, numerous modifications were made to the design of the rifles and to the materials used in its manufacture to improve their reliability and endurance. It was a classic instance of the incorporation of the most advanced scientific and technical knowledge for improved capitalist production. And it worked—the M16 remains the go to weapon for the armed forces decades after it was introduced.
The sheer blindness of liberals like Harris and Melber is manifested in their pronouncements. Enemies who get killed “quickly” and “horribly” in war are not seen as real people. Those who died in Boulder matter but dead Iraqis and Afghanis don’t. I’m not trying to argue that there is never a reason for war. I actually think that the somewhat traditional Christian “just war” theory has a lot to recommend it. According to that theory, war is justified if it meets six conditions—having a just cause, being a last resort, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means. If that’s a sound theory, it’s likely that no war that the US has waged in the last 75 years (since the end of World War II) was a just war.
During the fight against the war in Vietnam, many people came to see something of the horrors of war and to understand that the opposition to war was an indispensable foundation of the fight for a new society. In 1980, when the Clash recorded “The Call-up, those sentiments were still pretty popular. But today’s liberals want us to forget all about that stuff and to take it for granted that the US needs to be able to kill lots of enemies quickly whenever it’s decided to do so. They want to draw an iron curtain of sorts between what’s OK in war and what’s OK in a supermarket in Colorado.
But the curtain isn’t made of iron. In 2019, Colt Firearms discontinued production of its AR-15 for consumers because the automatic rifle market had “excess manufacturing capacity” (meaning there were too many companies making the damn things) and it needed to devote its own capacity to meeting its obligations to the military and police departments. Remember that these weapons are designed to go on offense and not for self-defense. When members of police forces and other law enforcement agencies are armed with semi-automatics, as they were during many of the anti-police protests of last summer, they’re on offense. They don’t actually have to pull the trigger. Even the un-fired weapon sends a message. It’s often been said that the police act like an occupying army in many black neighborhoods. It may be that it’s not as much of an exaggeration as some might have thought.
At times, the efforts of politicians to drum up support for war are shrill and obvious. At other times, they are understated and not so blatant. Either way, they’re trying to get away with murder. Right now, they’re able to get away with it because there is little of an effective anti-war movement. It’s up to us to change that.
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