Floor statement of Senator Hatfield discussing vote against military procurement bill
We are asked to vote for this bill, and have been urged by many not to cut any money from that requested, in order to protect our “security.”
I would like to ask just what the true sources of our security are.
There is no doubt that people feel threatened and feel insecure.
But the threats they feel are not those that are supposedly met by our military power.
People feel that their liberty is threatened, but not from any invading foreign army. Rather, that liberty is seen threatened by our own domestic institutions, and even by our government.
I can think of no more fundamental threat to our security today than the cumulative loss of confidence in our government felt by the people. The truth is that our citizens are no longer believing that our government and its representatives actually function as their servants. Government has become an institution of domination, losing the trust of those who are to be governed. There is nothing more fundamental to our “security” than that. Yet we continue to believe that the most fundamental threats to that security come somehow from the outside.
We are misled, we are deluded to believe so.
To spend billions for external defense while the internal fabric of the nation, and confidence and spirit of our people erode, is folly. The insecurity of our people is only perpetrated.
In a more practical vein, we know from the Administration’s Budget presentation, 68°/o of all controllable government expenditures are projected to go for military purposes. (Page 333 —
A nation’s security can only be defined as the full well-being of its citizens and its resources. And when we see funds for one program after another designed to service human needs—programs for enhancing small business, for health care training, for the wages of the working man, for the utilization of our nation’s natural resources—when these are vetoed or impounded on the grounds they are inflationary but billions for the military are aggressively urged upon us by the same Administration, on the grounds of protecting our “security”, then I conclude we have lost all rational understanding of what our security really is.
When people’s confidence in their government is lost, when people’s human needs are going unmet, and when the nation’s life-supporting environment is in deterioration, then our nation is utterly insecure and will remain so regardless of how many billions we may spend elsewhere. The place to start in building a true security is with these internal needs, not with a continued obsession about the readiness to fight any foe any place around the globe.
Yet the concern over the relative amount we spend for military purposes does not go to the root of the problem.
We must recognize how victimized we are by our whole national psychology about power.
We believe first of all that our power is always good and only used for righteous purposes. The belief is that if the good guys have the power, then that power is justifiable. And of course, we inevitably look at ourselves as the good guys in virtually any situation.
We should wonder whether our experience in
Power tends to make individuals, or a nation, self-righteous. That is an axiom that holds true as much for us as for any other people.
We should all realize that by voting for this measure, we are approving of a psychology that holds a majority of mankind as hostages in a mad balance of terror.
We stand ready to destroy a major portion of the world’s population in a few moments once we believe that our opponents are commencing to destroy us. And that is to make no mention of the technological or emotional accidents which can propel mankind to destruction.
There is something misguided about this whole psychology. We are told that the reason we build up our arsenals of power, and our deterrent force, is in order to do what is necessary until some process of disarmament can begin. We are told that these measures are only temporary compromises necessary to live in a world where mistrust and enmity still reign. But who honestly supposed that our military arsenals are “temporary” in any meaningful sense? Where is the serious progress to move all this power in the opposite direction? For every one step that moves toward that direction, we take two rapid steps toward building up more of our power.
While doing so, we deny the oneness of man. We declare that human life is expendable, and rationalize this axiom on the sole basis that this is what our enemy believes, so this is then what we must believe.
The following words express this attitude best:
“Already the apologists of ‘realism’ are busy exhorting us to accept the realities of life in the atomic age, and learn to live with the Bomb. According to these theorists — and they are to be found high in the councils of Church and State — we have never been so secure as we are today under the umbrella of the Bomb. The terror inspired by the equilibrium of fear is such that we can rely on the Bomb as an effective deterrent, a super-policeman guaranteeing the peace of mankind. In other words, the peace which man has been unable to gain through two millennia of the advocacy of brotherly love will now be secured through fear. What we failed to win under the symbol of the mushroom cloud. Men will not act rationally from love, but they will learn to do so from fear. In fact, the atomic age has at last ‘proved’ what so many men have always wanted to believe in their hearts: that the doctrine of the carpenter of
Finally, there is a moral and spiritual dimension to the issue of this nation’s security. Our nation has sought to place the hopes for its ultimate security in the wrong gods, in the idols of its own making.
We think that our security comes through our military power. So we build that power to the brink of militarism, and then become ensnarled by the ever-increasing demands for more and more of our money.
We believe our security comes through our materialism, our wealth, our Gross National Product. So we despoil our environment and neglect the quality of man’s spirit in order to expand our materialistic self-indulgence.
We suppose that our security comes through an inherent belief in our nation’s self- righteousness. So we create a civil religion that baptizes our established powers of government and creates an idolatry of the Presidency, and forget the truth that power corrupts.
In a very real way, restoring the strength of our people can only begin with a spirit of repentance. It is only by recognizing our errors, our wrongs, and our false gods that we can come to a proper understanding of ourselves. That is the beginning of any true security.
In the end, it will not be the power of our military might that will usher in greater reconciliation between the people of the world. Rather, that will only come from the power of spiritual love.
Such spiritual love must take root first in each one of us — and then extend out to our neighbor, to our communities, through our nation, and to the world — even to our enemies.
That is our only hope for security.
As the words of the prophet say.
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.”
For all these reasons, I shall vote against final passage of the Military Procurement Authorization Bill.
Mark Hatfield was United States Senator from
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