Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

Hanukkah 2015: Afghanistan, Syria, ISIL

            I'm preparing this blog post at the end of Hanukkah 5776, which is in mid-December 2015, Christian style, or near the start of the month of Rabi' al-awal, 1437 A.H., i.e., counting, as Muslims do, from the Hijra of Mohammed.

            I use the different dates not because they're important in themselves, but just to remind Christians that the scientifically-calibrated Gregorian calendar may be the best-est, most accurate, most convenient calendar, but that it's the Gregorian calendar and a calendar, not the calendar and the only one around. All God's children — or at least Abraham's — got calendars and reckon time, but not all in terms of A.D., Anno Domini, "in the year of our" — or the — "Lord."

            I'm also recycling below much of a blog from "a Yule Tide" in 2009, in which additional American troops were "gearing up for the war in Afghanistan," and I asked readers to momentarily contemplate the much discussed "true meaning of Christmas and wonder what The Prince of Peace might think about that move," continuing what we used to call in the Vietnam era, a dirty little war. I noted that, applying What Would Jesus Say?, "hawks can always cite Jesus's saying he came not to bring peace 'but a sword' (Matthew 10.34)" — and noted that "truth be told, we humans have never been keen on 'Blessed be the meek' and 'resist not evil,' or turning the other cheek to be hit, or more generally like the peace-love-dove bits of Jesus's Sermon on the Mountain (Matthew 5.1-7.27). The kick-ass Christ as The Rider on the White Horse of the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse 19.11 f.) is the more relevant figure for most folk, most of the time, but He doesn't have a holiday.

            No, Christmas is the time of the Christ-Child and the paradox of unimaginable power getting itself incarnated in a helpless infant.

            Now in another time of tribulations (and this time with Donald Trump moving US political discussion toward open belligerence), now in a time of civil war in Syria, with the Great Powers and a number of lesser ones joining in — now is a time to again consider, as some might have in 2009, one true meaning of Hanukkah.

            Among other things, Hanukkah celebrates a successful insurrection (167-60 B.C.E.) by a movement led by religious zealots, first for an end to imperial suppression of their religion and then for national liberation and a return to religious purity: a struggle to get the Greeks of the Seleucid Empire out of Judea, and to get the Greekified, elitist Jewish collaborators out of power or dead — and achieve a truly sovereign, fully independent, rigorously Jewish state.

            According to my old history book (Joseph Ward Swain, The Ancient World, volume 2 [© 1950]), if not according to my old rabbis, the struggle in Judea "was first and foremost between Hellenized and non-Hellenized Jews" — richer, better educated city-folk following newfangled Greek ways, versus those supporting the old ways — "with Greek troops supporting the former and the populace following the latter faction" (p. 202).

            It was a struggle that was probably classic back in the time of the Maccabees and certainly to become classic: state terror by the imperial Seleucid authorities alternating with rebel terrorism against collaborators and a "king's officer" here and there, followed by the rebels' fleeing to the hills. Soon, "[A]ll who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them. They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger," i.e., Jews who accepted Greek culture, "and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety …" (1 Maccabees chs. 1-2, esp. 2.23-25, 2.43-44).

            And when the Seleucid Empire ran into difficulties elsewhere and couldn't suppress the rebellion, the traditionalist Jews got religious liberty restored, then the execution of a Hellenized, collaborating high priest, and, fairly soon — if only for a while — "complete national independence" (Swain 203-04).

            There's a moral here for superpowers: Keep your troops out of local conflicts, especially when those conflicts involve religion and nationalism — to say nothing of tribal rivalries; and stay out of wars in localities that may have strategic locations but really aren't worth fighting for. And do not try to impose your modern ways on others, however superior your ways might be or clearly are.

            As was said back in the 1960s, "'To liberate' is a reflexive verb": with a few blatant exceptions, you don't liberate others, people liberate themselves. However much Americans might have wanted to liberate Afghan women from Taliban zealotry, we could at most help those women with their own struggle. However much some worthy rebels might want to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and crush ISIL, there's only a limited amount of help we in the "Zionist-Crusader godless West" can do to help them.

            Most Afghans were happy to see the Taliban removed from power in 2001-02, but they became increasingly unhappy the longer we foreign infidels stuck around. Afghans are as tribal and faction-ridden as the ancient Jews, but the Afghan peoples have always managed to cooperate to expel a truly foreign occupation.

            Ditto in Iraq, at least of late.

            The Seleucids were one of the successor states to the empire of Alexander the Great, with a center of power in what is now Syria; and the Seleucids had their problems in Afghanistan, as did Alexander before them and the Persians before that. Afghanistan is "the place empires go to die" — the British and Russian more recently — and the best rule there is to get in if you must; do what you can to achieve some limited goals; and then get the hell out. If you can help the Afghans from a distance (which you should if you've killed a fair number of their people), do so generously.

            In a nastily ironic variation on a historical theme, the religious zealots of "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" — which includes Syria — are attempting to establish a political entity larger than Judea under the dynasty that arose from the Maccabees, and a state with ambitions that go beyond those of the Seleucids: a Caliphate that could, in theory, reach from Spain to Indonesia, and more immediately would include large hunks of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

            Back in 2009, I repeated the rule that Great Powers like the US as much as possible should keep our troops out of countries where they're not wanted, and should avoid sending troops to fight for one faction or tribal grouping against their rivals. Not unless one has time, resources, money, and troops to spare: lots of all of them. And America is running short.

            For a happy Hanukkah 5776, Lessons in Foreign Policy, aspect, we're should consider the probability that we Americans are like the Seleucid Empire in being over-extended, stressed, and in no position for an invasion of "the Levant" and a protracted war to suppress modern fanatics who make the Maccabees look like a Unitarian-sponsored Scout troop. At the same time, precisely because ISIS is both so vicious and viciously attractive to fanatics, we will need to do something the Seleucids would not do: cooperate with the other established states to contain ISIS and resist it with a light enough touch that it will "burn itself out" in a military/social parallel to the horrific ways highly lethal diseases "burn themselves out."

            Neither we, the British, French, Russians, nor for that matter the Iranians or Saudis (or the Israelis) have much skill with delicate touches, and the phrase is grotesque when it includes air-delivery of high explosives and training teenagers to kill people. Still, President Obama has the right instincts: as much as possible avoid putting military units in places where they'll be targets for fanatics and where they will produce more fanatics by killing fanatics (plus the inevitable deaths, wounding, and maimings summed up in the obscene euphemism, "collateral damage); indeed, avoid putting them in places, e.g., Saudi Arabia with its holy places, where their mere presence is a provocation..

            Like Christmas and other mid-winter holidays, Hanukkah offers hope that once the days get short enough, the sun will return for longer stays and spring will come. The history behind Hanukkah reminds us that figurative winters of warfare can be pretty damn long and deadly.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend ... (3 Nov. 2012)

"Preserve, Protect, and Defend" America, Not Necessarily Americans  

   
               A fair number of Americans, including American Presidents, assert that the first duty of the President of the United States is to protect the American people, to protect Americans.

                  And then a smaller group of us pedantic sorts, especially small-r republicans, assert that no, the key duties of the President are to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, and, as s/he swears or affirms — no American may be required to swear an oath — to "preserve, protect[,] and defend the Constitution of the United States."

                  Now does "Constitution" here mean every clause, phrase, and mark of punctuation in the document? The Constitution in its original form — e.g., with the assumption that slavery legally exists and that new slaves could be imported until 1808? Of course not. "Constitution" in the oath means the written document, as amended, plus something like "Constitution" in the British sense of the term.

                  I'd put it that the primary duty of the President is to defend the Republic, the American Republic as constituted in its essentials by the document, The Constitution of the United States. Let's put it, the primary duty of the President is to protect not Americans, but America.

                  This idea is in useful tension with the commonplace truth from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty to our own Declaration of Independence that the primary duty of any government is to protect its people.

                  Most Americans are either loud about their patriotism or keep their mouths shut; relatively few Americans get arrested any given year — so most Americans, most respectable, voting Americans, would be safer in a police state. Insofar as we have avoided a police state, we put at risk a fair number of decent, innocent Americans.

                  If the tree of liberty is fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots, it is also fertilized with the blood of men, women, and children who die, or are wounded or maimed, because we make the State prove people guilty and grant bail and allow free speech to those who will insult God and the Prophet Mohammed. Well, and so forth through the Bill of Rights and traditional ideals of liberty.

                  At various times, however, and the years following 11 September 2001 have made up one of those times, there has been consistent over-emphasis on the part of US Presidents and the Congress and other leaders to protect Americans and consistent reluctance to tell the American people to toughen up and be willing to take casualties — civilian casualties — to preserve traditional rights.

                  There has been a failure to explain that even furthering US interests can have its costs, and a balancing favor to continue whether perceived interests are US interests and just what we mean be the interests of America.

                  We cannot have US ambassadors walled up in fortress embassies; we cannot have US Special Forces holed up in secure areas: to do their jobs they must get out among the people, including among people who want to kill them and sometimes succeed.

                  Ambassador Chris Stevens died doing his job, as did two of the CIA security officers who died responding to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, along with at least one other American.
                  To protect America, in some cases even to just achieve US policy goals, some Americans have to risk death or horrible injury, and sometimes they suffer.

                  The first duty of the President is to protect America and further its interests, and to do so s/he may have to get some Americans killed. Each President need to explain this nasty fact to each generation of the American public, and each generation has to debate where to strike a balance.

                  On 22 April 1971, speaking for Vietnam Veterans Against the War — against what we Americans call the Vietnam War — John Kerry asked rhetorically, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Or, arguably, worse than a mistake: we continue to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. What isn't debatable is that the President and government of the United States can err, horribly, and order Americans to kill and die in conflicts that are not necessary to preserve America, wars that hurt America.
                  This idea, too, needs to enter the debate.

                  A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown, and one-liners on "the first duty of the President" aren't serious consideration of difficult issues.

                  We Americans need to toughen up and be willing to take risks necessary to preserve our freedoms (and our dignity). For example, making US airports less secure but freer puts lives at risk. So be it, I say: I sometimes take planes, and I'm for loosening up security. Let's debate that.

                  We Americans need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and much of the rest of the world and shift money from "kinetic" military operations into the civilian economy. Such pulling back will save military lives and may put at risk civilians. So be that as well — and let us debate that also. 

Military Options in North Korea (7 March 2013)

      According to an opinion piece by Henry M. Seggerman in The Korea Times back in December of 2010, "North Korea has 11,000 heavy artillery pieces pointed at Seoul and could kill one million Seoul residents in a few hours. North Korea can continue with provocations without any fear of heavy South Korean retaliation." This is a bit hyped. Although estimates go up to 13,000 artillery pieces, the formulation I recall for effective fire was "5,000 artillery tubes," and, as Popular Mechanics — of all publications! — points out, North Korea is incapable of rendering Seoul "flattened," nor would Seoul be consumed in, in one translation, "a sea of flames" in a North Korean attack.

            However, Seoul is only 35 miles from the border with North Korea; North Korea has mobile artillery and rockets; North Korea does have an air force and a large army; and North Korea has had time to infiltrate the Demilitarized Zone with the South with, well, God knows what weapons. After noting serious problems for the North Koreans with their military, a subdued report by The International Institute for Strategic Studies states that"In any conflict, North Korean artillery, firing from fortified positions near the DMZ, could initially deliver a heavy bombardment on the South Korean capital. Allied counter-battery fire and air strikes would eventually reduce North Korea’s artillery capability, but not before significant damage and high casualties had been inflicted on Seoul. Similarly, the North Korean air force could launch surprise attacks against military and civilian targets throughout South Korea before allied air superiority was established. The potential delivery of chemical or biological weapons by artillery, short-range missiles and aerial bombs is an additional threat – especially to unprotected civilians."

            At any given time, the US has some 30,000 troops in South Korea as what even respectable sorts used to call "trip-wires," and my friends and I more cynically called "hostages": A North Korean attack would bring in the US, and we do have the firepower to reduce North Korea to a wasteland.
            But not without a lot of fallout — starting with nuclear fallout — on South Korea, and problems with the Chinese, North Korea's neighbors, and the main US creditor.

            Short-form: There really are no military options on the Korean Peninsula. Not sane ones, not for the US of A.

            The non-military option I suggest is to give the North Koreans what, for the last couple decades or so, they've said they've wanted: direct negotiations with the United States and a peace treaty ending the Korean War (or "Police Action" for the pedants who note that the US Congress never declared war).

            But, you might well say, the North Koreans have developed and are deploying nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

            Okay, I respond, that is a dangerous thing for them to do but understandable.

            Consider this. China invaded Tibet and remains in Tibet, and the United States and "the International Community" viewed that aggression with alarm and sent strong notes of protest … and that was that. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and got hit with the Gulf War (Iraq War 1.0) and what we call "The Iraq War" (Gulf 2.0 and following), upon the tenth anniversary of which I am writing this essay. What were the differences between Iraq and China prompting different responses to aggression?

                        (1) There are reasons to believe that Kuwait actually is a country with historical existence. Still, its most immediate existence comes from the drawing of lines on imperial maps. Many of those lines don’t make sense in terms of tribal geography, ethnic and linguistic groups' territories, and other matters of practical concern (like a port for Iraq) — and in a rational world such political lines would've been drawn differently to start with and, again, in a rational world, be peaceably readjusted today. But trying to redraw lines in our world leads to trouble, and it is an important rule among the countries that emerged from the old European empires, "Successor states to the European empires shall not attempt to change their borders by force." Saddam broke that rule.

                        (2) There are a whole lot more Chinese than Iraqis.

                        (3) Iraq and Kuwait have a lot of oil, with them and their oil near Europe and not all that far from the USA; China has coal and is close to the US only by container ship.

                        (4) China has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

            George H. W. Bush pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait; George W. Bush defeated Iraq in war and overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein. And George W. Bush included in "an Axis of Evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

            Iran and, relevantly here, North Korea, can't change much about their differences with China — they're not going to change geography or geology —with one exception: they can get atomic bombs.

            And North Korea is getting a deliverable bomb, and, however loony much of the North Korean leadership might be, that is a rational decision.

            Fortunately, the North Koreans don't have much capacity to deliver nuclear bombs, plural, and we have over-kill. North Korea can cause a whole lot of damage in its region now, with conventional weapons, and may be able eventually to nuke a USA city or two, which would probably end republican government in the USA but otherwise not represent "an existential threat": as World War II and its aftermath demonstrated convincingly, countries can lose a number of cities and survive.

            However, as World War II demonstrated even more convincingly, destroying cities is very unpleasant for the former inhabitants thereof, and, if les so, for their surviving families, friends, and many fellow citizens.

            So we have a stand-off with North Korea, and a very dangerous one, and not one that won't be resolved just with sanctions: the minute North Korean elite will not be hurt much by the sanctions, and they don't have to worry about being turned out of power by their suffering subjects in a 2014 (or 2016) election.

            So let's do what we have to do: cut a deal.

            The North Koreans want a peace treaty; let's negotiate one and as much as possible get the hell out of Korean politics. South Korea is a major economic power, and China is a major power every which way. Let us be an honest broker and good Pacific-rim neighbor — but let the Koreans deal with Korean problems, with quiet help from the Chinese.

            And we can continue quiet efforts to encourage the Chinese to be a bit more decent to the people of Tibet. 

Divide, Distract, and Rule (7 March 2014 [20 March 2015])

           The current crisis when I first wrote this blog in in early March 2014 was Russian troops pretty well taking over Crimea and threats and posturing over the fate of Ukraine. A year and a bit later, the crisis continues. 

            This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.

            The first bigger context is nuclear.

            The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."

            Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).

            To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.

            On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.

            The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.

            The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.

            This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.

            There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.

            We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.

            So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.

            We do tend to get distracted.

            I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.

            Things haven't changed much.

            There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.

            The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.

            But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)

            The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.

            So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.

            Focus, people, focus:
                        * Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
                        * Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20^th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17^th century.
                        * Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.


            Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

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“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness.