On January 17 1961, a few days before leaving office, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address, where he raised the issue of the Military Industrial Complex. Please watch the video and answer the following questions in the comments.
1) How did the Presidency of Eisenhower influence his views on the military?
2) What does Eisenhower mean when he refers to the Military Industrial Complex? What is he saying about it?
3) How can we view the speech differently today than it was viewed in Eisenhower's own time?
2) I consider the Military Industrial Complex to which Eisenhower refers to be a kind of unsaid agreement between the arms industries and the military which might potentially use these weapons. While America had never before such access to weapons, Eisenhower wants to urge extreme caution against their use, because of the fragility of peace.
ReplyDelete3) I find it interesting thinking about the speech in today's political and global climate, and how some of its elements remain fiercely relevant, while the rhetoric used can also be decisively different. Two stand-out moments for me are:
- when he talks about looking into the future, and how we should avoid the impulse to live only for today. His rhetoric of 'plundering...precious resources' for ease and convenience most certainly rings true still today.
- when he talks about global conflict demanding our whole attention, and then states that the current hostile ideology is 'global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method'. I find the rhetoric of the speech to be particularly revealing of its time with the mention of the hostile ideology being 'atheistic' in character. In comparison, tensions and conflict in the 21st century, with the rise of islamophobia after 9/11 (tension that has infiltrated into daily life and increased even further with, for example, France's recent ban of the burkini), are now so widely reiterated as stemming from religion. Atheism, the denial of divine beings, used in Eisenhower's rhetoric to denounce the ideology of the world, I find a really interesting word choice, one that places Eisenhower's speech firmly in the time from which it came.
I'm still not sure about the answer to the first question. I know a bit about Eisenhower's background as a hugely influential military general (not least for 'Operation Overload') and so could it be said that his presidency curbed his approach to military action, favouring caution and seeing more than anything the danger of the military when its power is misplaced? I'm using my instinct here though so please could you explain a little more on the subject?
Yes, very good Lucy! Eisenhower's use of the term the Military Industrial Complex referred to the militaries manufacture of weapons, which Eisenhower did not want to have to be used. He is urging caution, that the creation of so many weapons might lead America on a more bellicose path.
DeleteThe "atheistic" in character comment comes from a contrast between American and Soviet values. Eisenhower himself was a very religious man of a mostly non-denominational Christian background - he was born into a Jehova's Witness family and joined the Presbyterians only after he was first elected in 1953. The Soviets, on the other hand, were Atheists - it was also under Eisenhower that the phrase "under God" was first added to the pledge of allegiance. You make a great point that with the pivot from the Cold War to the War on Terror that we no longer have an anti-atheistic rhetorical trend in our foreign policy - it has been replaced by Islamophobia.
Eisenhower was the head of the combined Allied forces in World War II, and led the Americans and British to victory in North Africa and in the D-Day invasions (which you referred to as Overlord). Eisenhower also came to the presidency while America was fighting a brutal war against Korea - we will be discussing more about this in class and there will be a new blog article soon - and one of his first acts was to end the war. As the military commander who had led the west to victory over fascism, Eisenhower was uniquely qualified to promote peace in the postwar period.