WORDS MEAN (damn it): "Existential Threat"/"The United States"

A Congressional talking head on CNN or MSNBC this morning talked about a nuclear-armed North Korea as an existential threat to the United States. He needed to specify what he meant by "the United States." 

If he meant the American Republic, he definitely had a point: one enemy bomb going off in an American city — hell, one "friendly-fire" nuclear explosion — and many Americans and most of the US government would totally panic, and we'd be under some variety of martial law for the foreseeable future.

So, yeah, a North Korean nuclear capability and their willingness to use it against the US and what is in some ways admirable — an American horror of very large numbers of dead Americans: that combination is a threat to the existence of the American Republic.

North Korean military assets taken all together, including a fair number of nuclear warheads, is not, however, a threat to the United States in the sense of the American state or the American nation — not even if you define the American nation as only real Americans as in White, conservative, Christians (preferably Protestants in the Knox/Calvin/Puritan/Fundamentalist tradition). 

During World War II, the Germans under Hitler and Russians under Stalin did a fair job destroying states — Poland for a key example — but that was done as conscious policy and with a few lawyers and many serial killers on the ground, not by bombing cities. When the British and Americans air forces showed what aerial bombing can do and wiped cities off the Earth, that still in itself did not destroy the German state nor the Japanese. And for nations, World War II and its run-up was the time of large purges, massive manufactured starvation, and attempted genocide, but no nation — i.e., a cultural/ethnic people — was destroyed in spite of very ... let's say energetic attempts to do so: not the Jews, not the Roma, nor the Poles.

In a course I finally named just "Massacres," my students reported the disturbing fact that in spite of the casualties of World War II — Matthew White counts some 66 million dead — the human population rose during the period, including in every theater of war except Germany's Eastern Front, what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. The human population of the United States is over 325 million, and even with the most bigoted, racist, exclusionary definition of "the American nation," we have enough people to survive a million casualties in a limited atomic attack and its deadly aftermath (disease, hunger, survivor violence).

General "Buck" Turgidson in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE (1964) is a sociopath in suggesting a massive, first-strike attack on the USSR, but he has a point on American casualties : "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." 

What is an existential threat to the United States as Republic, State, or nation; what is an existential threat to human civilization and perhaps the human species is full-scale thermonuclear war. And with full-scale (thermo)nuclear war we're not talking directly about North Korea but first and definitely foremost about the arsenals of Russia and the USA, plus France, China, and the United Kingdom.

To remove the existential threat to the United States et al. we need reductions down to the minimum for deterrence by the major nuclear powers.

Having said that, however, I'll add that I live next door to a deep-water port on the US Pacific coast, and I get to walk past very large container ships and don't have to wait for the North Koreans to develop full ICBM capacity to be concerned about delivery into my neighborhood of a nuclear warhead. That's not an existential threat or an immediate one or a likely one, but it bloody well is a threat, and it needs to be dealt with, as do the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India, and Israel. 

It's long past time for negotiations of a peace treaty ending the Korean War, one that prohibits nuclear weapons on or near the Korean Peninsula. It is also time for ensuring a nonnuclear Arabian Peninsula with cutbacks on Israeli bombs, and scaling back of nukes on the Indian subcontinent — and a renewed dedication to nuclear nonproliferation planet-wide so that the increased safety of scale-backs isn't negated. 

Here's a couple Old Rules! for you. (1) From writing courses: Cut modifiers as much as possible; let nouns and verbs do the work. (2) Mass murder doesn't have to be genocide to be a horrible act; threats don't have to be existential to be serious. So let's say, North Korean development of nuclear warheads and missiles to deliver them is a threat to their neighbors and to the United State; the American government should lead the way dealing with that threat, and use it as an occasion to work on even more horrific threats.

Address to the Nation: Terrorism

         It's not going to happen, but if we could mix together a "gaffe" by John Kerry — a politician's slipping and telling an unpleasant truth — with the knowledge and intelligence of Barack Obama and the intemperance of Donald Trump, we might get a useful talk to Americans on terrorism.

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            As Democratic candidate for President, John Kerry was impolitic but right in his assertion that for the foreseeable future, the best we can hope for with terrorism is to reduce it to the point where, in terms of America, it is a nuisance, even as it is deadly for some Americans.

            There's a distinction there we need to get. Terrorists threaten American interests and the lives of Americans and, more so, non-Americans in war zones; terrorists are not a threat to the American State, what we have of an American nation, nor, unless we panic, to the American Republic. One of the horrible lessons of World War II is how many people can be killed, wounded, and maimed, how much property and infrastructure and cultural products can be destroyed, without even bringing down a regime, let alone destroying a State or a people.

            So get that straight: terrorists are a variety of "existential threat" to Americans — they can kill (etc.) a fair number of us — but not to America.

            That, relatively speaking, is the good news.

            The bad news is that you will die. More or less unpleasantly, you will die; your children will die; and every human, animal, and plant you know and love (or hate or have never heard of) will die. As Hamlet's mom reminds him, "You know it's common: all that lives must die, / Passing through life to eternity," or passing on to just to being dead (1.2.73-74). You will die; unless we screw up badly, human life and civilization will carry on.

            Even if you are one of America's fairly numerous homicides, however — 13,716 in 2013 — it is highly unlikely you'll be a victim of terrorism or some other exotic crime where you'll be killed by a stranger. To repeat again a repeated statistic, "between 2001 and 2013, there were 3,030 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism" in the USA, plus 350 in that period killed abroad. "This brings the total to 3,380," as opposed to more mundane "American Deaths by Firearms on U.S. soil" during that period of 406,496, although many of those deaths were suicides — 41,149 in 2013 — which you may count as you like.

            Heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, or just some dumb-ass accident: those are the "leading causes of death" for Americans, saith the Centers for Disease Control; terrorism is nowhere near the top ten.

            So, first thing to do, fellow Americans, is to get your figurative spines stiffened and "grow a pair": increase the size of the part of the frontal lobes that does math and risk assessment, locate your gonads, and get those adrenal glands going at a good level for courage but not panic.

            Because we are threatened.

            President Obama was correct in 2014 in saying that ISIS (ISIL, Daesh) was a junior varsity team. The varsity would be a "kinder, gentler" successor group to ISIS, one that can hold territory without extreme brutality and for long enough time to prepare for the professionals. The true threat would be a territorial entity that is the origin of a mass movement with a charismatic leader, an expanding army, and, eventually, access to air and naval power.

            Think of Muhammad, Umar, and Abu Bakr (the first caliph), but with heavier weapons and a variety of fundamentalism necessarily absent when the fundamentals of a religion are in development. Speaking of initial expansion of Islam within and then out of the Arabian Peninsula, my 1937 Thompson and Johnson History of Medieval Europe notes that it is "impossible" in the early years of the Faith "to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism, characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance" (164; ch. 7, "The Empire of the Arabs").

            Such tolerance is not a characteristic of ISIS, and they threaten wars of Reformation plus a Sunni vs. Shia civil war, combined with warfare against more obvious infidels.

            The serious danger is not the relative "nuisance" of terrorism nor even guerilla warfare, but full-scale war that parallels the European Wars of Religion following the Protestant Reformation in the Early Modern period, combined with the Medieval Crusades, in turn combined with the earlier expansion of Islam that marked the end of the Ancient World.

            Except that the Modern and postmodern world has a plentiful supply of nuclear weapons, including in places in reach of an ISIS successor, like Pakistan and Israel.

            The 16^th- and 17^th-centuryWars of Religion between Catholic and Protestant Christians killed over seven million people; if we are not careful, we in our times — with more lethal weapons and far larger populations — can make such numbers look trivial.

            And such a war would be fine with the members of ISIS with apocalyptic aspirations, and with potential opponents with similar hopes: "Onward Christian soldiers," marching into literal war, maybe joined by extremist Jews and Hindus, "depending on the breaks," all in a world awash with heavy weaponry.

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            All of which is why we must "Be of good courage" in the face of terrorism and not panic. Our fears have led to enough damage already in Afghanistan and, far more so, Iraq. Getting sucked into Syria would compound the damage. We must indeed fight ISIS to prevent wars of religion that would be an existential threat not just to the United States but to the human world as we know it; but we must fight ISIS in cautious alliances that will not start the wars we wish to prevent.

            For Americans, terrorism is a deadly but unliely danger; for America, it is, in itself, a nuisance. A real clash of civilizations — fights to the death among the armed forces of States and a caliphate — would be massive slaughter.

Déjà Vu 2: Jihads and Crusades, 1095, 2003, 2015 (24 Feb. 2015)

As long as the old war hawks are recycling arguments from earlier eras, I'm going to recycle a counter-argument I made toward the end of January 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War of March 2003 to 2011 (and counting). It's still relevant, unfortunately, for the "and counting" part: arguably, and even more unfortunately, more relevant given the rise of ISIS and the threat nor so much from ISIS but from a successor movement that's equally savvy in its organizing but a "kinder, gentler version" — which would still be vicious — and better organized.
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              In commentary on "The 21st-Century Crusade" appearing in The Washington Post Weekly Edition for January 13-19 [2003], Dennis Mullin usefully analyzes the threat to world peace of militant Islam; his enthusiasm for a crusade to match the jihad, however, is at best badly timed.
              Eric Hoffer's 1951 book The True Believer makes some points Mullin and everyone else should keep in mind. If Hoffer is right, the undermining of traditional societies frees up large numbers of people to lead unsatisfying lives and is a major source of potential converts to mass movements. Also available for mass movements are people recently unemployed and people with education and no suitable jobs.
              Globalization and recession have produced a large number of potential True Believers, and there are religious and nationalistic mass movements actively recruiting or just waiting to happen not only among Muslims but also Jews, Hindus, Christians, and maybe Korean Communists.
              All that is missing is charismatic leadership, and there is a fair chance a crusade against Iraq will generate that leadership for many Muslims, possibly by making Saddam Hussein a hero (or martyr) of Islam.
              When fanatics march, things get deadly: estimates for deaths in World War II range between 40 and 61 million. Significantly, those deaths were barely a pause in the increase of Earth's human population. Since World War II, we have seen the proliferation of atomic weapons, and the desire Mullin cites for an "Islamic Bomb," to match what can be perceived as Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and godless Communist or secular Capitalist bombs.
              Everything did not change 11 September 2001; to re-date Albert Einstein's assessment, everything changed for humans some time in the 1960s, when the USA, USSR, and other nuclear powers accumulated enough weapons to destroy much of human civilization directly and perhaps all of human civilization, and the human species, through nuclear winter.
              One generation does not have the right to preclude or even endanger the existence of succeeding generations. Total nuclear disarmament is not currently possible, but before we Americans start crusading, we and the other nuclear powers need to destroy—not store, destroy—a large number of nuclear weapons. And then we need serious nonproliferation treaties.
              When Earth is safe again for war, we can start thinking about risking another forty to sixty million deaths and develop serious ways to resolve disputes that do not involve mass killing—and ways to capture, try, and put away for life fanatics who murder.
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         Well, Saddam Hussein failed in his attempt to present himself as a defender of Islam — the attempt was a hell of a stretch on his part — and he never became a martyr of the faith, nor its leader; and more recent estimates on the body count for World War II, worldwide and from 1939-45, are up to 65 million, although people in Manchuria and Nanking people might assert that World War II began earlier than 1939, and, certainly, the dying continued after 1945.
         I'll stick with the point on nuclear and thermonuclear bombs as the truest weapons of mass destruction and the only weapons posing a literal existential threat to human civilization and the human species. Still, in 2015 — when Jihad is more likely than ever to provoke a crusade — a few words are needed on old-fashioned massacres and what can be done with merely Medieval technology of destruction and death.
         The words here aren't mine but one major and some minor witnesses to a literal Crusade, one of the crusades President Obama was chided for being "artless" and insensitive enough to throw into a conversation on fanaticism, suggesting that Christianity, too, has done some very bad thing because, some important people thought, "God wills it" (Deus vult!).

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From Raymond d'Aguiliers: Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem ["The History of the Franks who Captured Jerusalem"]

But now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood. Some of the enemy took refuge in the Tower of David, and, petitioning Count Raymond for protection, surrendered the Tower into his hands.

WIKIPEDIA NOTE: However, this imagery should not be taken literally; it was taken directly from [the New Testament, Christian God-of-Wrath (RDE)] biblical passage Revelation 14:20. Writing about the Temple Mount area alone[,] Fulcher of Chartres […] says: "In this temple 10,000 were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared."  ^¶ The eyewitness Gesta Francorum states that some people were spared. Its anonymous author wrote, "When the pagans had been overcome, our men seized great numbers, both men and women, either killing them or keeping them captive, as they wished." Later the same source writes, "[Our leaders] also ordered all the Saracen dead to be cast outside because of the great stench, since the whole city was filled with their corpses; and so the living Saracens dragged the dead before the exits of the gates and arranged them in heaps, as if they were houses. No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids, and no one knows their number except God alone.

Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all our previous labors and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre. How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord! For their hearts offered prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, which cannot be told in words. A new day, new joy, new and perpetual gladness, the consummation of our labor and devotion, drew forth from all new words and new songs. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith.

Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York, "Medieval Source Book: Raymond d'Aguiliers Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem represents the experiences of chaplain of Raymond de Saint Gilles, Count of Toulouse, who lead the Southern French army of the First Crusade. Here. Selection 12, 'The Frankish Victory,' capturing Jerusalem, 15 July 1099. "

         Non-nuclear Wars of Religion would not threaten human survival; they would, however, produce horrible suffering and loss of life and, necessarily, at least a variety of new Dark Age.