The World Needs To Go To War Rehab

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace." - Thomas Mann

We are repeatedly told by our leaders that we live in a world at war, and that we must accept it as a fact of 21st century life unquestioningly, along with all the political and social consequences that such a wide-scale war entails. The War on Terror, these leaders say, is meant to be a total, never-ending war, but it represents a permanent and invisible wall against the aspirations for human freedom. These are not our true leaders, and despite what they say, a war footing by our governments can easily be replaced by a peaceful stance, so as long as people get informed about the real facts, and are not afraid to voice their dissent in public.

The shadowy masters of Western countries, and particularly of America, are counting on the fact that the grand lie about the 9/11 attacks is too big to fail. But that is too big of a bet. Less and less people are going with the flow, as they once did in previous eras, and our culture's disdain for all things fake will undoubtedly reach a crescendo in the near future. The momentum towards the real, and towards a responsible and sober look at life and politics, is growing, both in the arts and in regular life. In hip hop, people are clamoring for the real, and dropping sales in record sales among mainstream rappers is one indication of that. Also, films that depict real life are appreciated more than dumbed down stories, and the popularity of The Dark Knight, which was unusually intense and philosophical for a summer superhero blockbuster, is a small sign that regular people are more intelligent than Hollywood producers and executives generally give them credit for.

But what does this all mean for politics and society? Simple. It means the power elite's gig is up. True, it remains to be seen if people cherish "the real" so much that they will demand it from their governmental leaders, but I believe that they will, and it's not wishful thinking to suggest that the collective efforts of individuals will turn the tide against mythic constructions about politics and war. And once that happens, everything about how society is developed could change in the future, and Mankind's real potential will materialize in ways that we can't even imagine.

Here's a brief recap of two of the most popular and destructive myths that have developed in this past decade, and how they are beginning to get deconstructed.

II. The Myth of Modern Warfare and Modern Finance

The neoconservatives, who are the real masters of terror and who still occupy the US empire despite Bush's absence, face a fundamental problem, which is that their mythic narrative surrounding the new government campaign that is called the "War on Terrorism," never had any real credibility to begin with. The origins of terrorism, and the consequences of US foreign policy were never debated in the American public, and the nature of the so-called Islamic threat against Western civilization was overblown. Peter J. Katzenstein, a Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, has said that the thesis of the Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations is wrong, and concretely unsound. Katzenstein delivered a lecture at Sydney Ideas, which you can view by clicking here.

The point is constantly made that the Neocons were influenced by the thinking of the 20th century political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose authoritarian views have been well documented, including by Harper's Scott Horton in his January 2008 article "Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?" and in his July 2006 essay "The Letter." In that essay, Horton lays out the liberal critique of Leo Strauss, as developed by Stephen Holmes:

The key criticisms of Straussian political thought are complex and difficult to summarize. There are a great number of liberal critics, but three seem to take the leading position: Shadia Drury, Stephen Holmes and Anne Norton (though Norton’s work may more accurately be called a criticism of Straussians than of Strauss himself, a point which is true to some extent of all three). Of these, Holmes does the most convincing job of contrasting Strauss with the thinking of the liberal tradition, and his critique can be summarized as follows:

(1) Strauss rejects the fundamental liberal idea that wide-open, uncensored public disagreement is a creative force, mobilizing decentralized knowledge and bringing it to bear on issues of public importance. Liberalism, above all, insists that the factual premises of the use of force must be tested in an open adversarial process, but Strauss’s entire philosophical posture is a sarcastic rejection of this idea. For Strauss, knowledge belongs to a few - we know ahead of time who can and who cannot contribute something serious to a discussion. This “closed club” view of knowledge and debate with its essentially anti-democratic premise contributed to the atmospherics of the Bush drive to war against Iraq.

(2) Strauss believed that the liberal-Enlightenment tradition was naïve, and in particular the notion of Enlightenment thinkers that “revelation” (religious myths and dreams) could be banned from politics (as noted below, this was the crux of Strauss’ dissertation done under the great Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer). For Strauss, this is impossible; the repressed will return; hence it is crucial for the secular few, the men of science, to bring religion into politics on their own terms. The American Neocons' bizarre alliance with America’s Religious Right follows directly from this analysis.

(3) One of the pillars of liberal democracy is the embrace of the Rule of Law, and the notion that no one, even the king or Executive, stands above the law. For Strauss this idea was foolishness. Strauss’ critique can be seen in his writings on Plato and Xenophon, but their origin clearly lies with the Nietzschean criticism of Christianity as a slave morality designed to trick and “tie down” the natural geniuses. Strauss applies this criticism to law; law spells weakness; law is a trick of the weak to tie down the strong. Hence, Strauss applauds the decisive leader who acts outside of the law to achieve his goals. Nevertheless, the consequences of Strauss’ dismissive attitude towards the Rule of Law can be seen today in the Neocon advocacy of jettisoning traditional norms of the law of armed conflict and in allowing the president to operate outside of clear criminal statutes (like FISA) as an aspect of his war-making powers.

(4) Strauss always said that liberalism was unable to defend itself; that it must be defended, if at all, by non-liberals, willing to go outside the rules. This argument again has a firmly Nietzschean aspect. While Strauss seeks to cast it in terms of writers of classical antiquity, it is hard to read much of his writings without having an image of Carl Schmitt come to mind. Strauss would present himself as a “savior” of liberalism, but in the end, like Schmitt, one must fear that he would “save” liberal democracy by putting it to death.

See Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993).

The "closed club" debate that Horton referred to in point number one is also a feature of Alan Greenspan's thinking, and the culture surrounding the Federal Reserve Bank. Back in 2004, Fed Chairman Greenspan said:

"We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand," Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting. (Source: The Huffington Post, Ryan Grim)

As more and more people were duped into thinking that the housing market was a safe and lucrative investment in the period between 2004-2008, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and other institutions had different ideas. Instead of informing the public about the pitfalls of another bubble, the corrupt banksters at Goldman Sachs pushed forward the myth of the "American dream" and "Wall St. financial innovations," only to then make hefty profits by betting that the bubble will collapse. Both the narrative about the financial crisis and the war on terrorism rely on a set of false premises, and ill-conceived myths.

Brian Ross, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, says that such myths have always governed human societies. In an interview with Calvin Sloan, Ross said:

1) What aspects of the official story of 9/11 do you most take issue with?

I’m not sure what you mean by “take issue with”, so I’ll just say this; I like evidence, and regarding 9/11 what has been provided by the mainstream media seems to be questionable, doubtful, difficult to believe, highly suspect, clearly invented, or contrary to physical laws. The lack of transparency in the presumed investigation, the many aspects of an obvious official cover up and the way in which 9/11 was used as an excuse, contrary to the rule of national and international law, to invade Afghanistan, and then Iraq; all of these lead me to question official stories in general, and stories concerning 9/11 in particular.

2) As a professor of Anthropology, do you feel that the public rejection of any alternative theory is symptomatic of human nature?

I don’t know what the public believes, so I don’t know if indeed the public rejects any alternative theories of what happened. I can say this, however. I’ve noticed that regarding what I believe to be human nature, humans are pretty much “herd animals” for the most part, and they have a tendency to want to believe what their neighbors–or members of their reference group, be it peers or others–believe whenever possible, and they are also usually relatively easy to manipulate through advertising techniques (appealing to unconscious desires relating to sex, status, and survival) as well as by the big lie, frequent reinforcement of a message, muddying the waters, etc.

3) What does the existence and propagation of the 9/11 myth demonstrate about American society? Is adhering to myths a reoccurring theme for us?

I think that much of “history” is composed of just such constructed narratives as the “official” 9/11 myth, and adhering to myths has been a recurring theme for many in the US, but also all over the world. People generally tend to accept what they hear the most, and what they get from the mainstream media, and what members of their reference group accept.

This is how humans are socialized to be humans and how they are enculturated to the cultural norms of their societies. (Source: Calvin Sloan, Con Carlitos Blog)

III. AI: Artificial Intelligence for Afghanistan and Iraq Wars

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the neoconservatives, and their parrots in the press, casually asserted false claims throughout their public campaign to launch invasions against Afghanistan and Iraq. First, they lied about the danger of terrorism within Afghanistan, then they exaggerated the reach of Al Qaeda in the Muslim World, and then they went totally off the map, and made up the threat posed by Saddam Hossein, and the existence of WMDs in Iraq. The public caught on to the Bush Administration's fictional narrative about Iraq, but they have not yet completely peeled the full terror onion, so many individuals are still unaware of the depth of the deception. Maybe they unconsciously believe that they can't handle the truth, and if that's the case, then it's a real shame, because people can handle the truth, and perpetual war can only exist if people allow it, whether consciously or unconsciously.

IV. The Tree of Terror

"We're so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that's just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is." - Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on CBS' Evening News, October 9, 2001

Rather than living in a world at war, as both President Bush and Obama tell us, as well as every other leader of the Western world, we live in a world under war, as if under waters, wherein nobody can think thoughts of future peace. Or perhaps, we are all being choked inside of a prisoner's hood, and consequently, we're being deprived of air, causing us to submit to those who desire to take away our liberties in the name of "security." And our inability to think outside of the "War on Terrorism" framework is tragically prolonging the suffering of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

We're programmed and propagandized to think that the roots of terrorism in the Middle East began in Bin Laden's head. But if we want to really solve the problems of real terrorism, we must dismiss such stupid explanations, and approach terrorism as a tree with deep roots in the ground of politics, and history. Politicians show the people a twig, or a branch of this tree, like an Osama Bin Laden, and say that he represents the whole tree, which has to be cut in order to save the entire forest. But targeting and killing individual terrorist does not cause any serious damage to the tree. What we need to do instead is address are the roots, and pull them out. And the roots of terrorism are not in Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Middle East, but in Washington D.C. William Blum, author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" writes in an article called "Why Terrorists Hate America":

Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows? Of course it's not America the terrorists hate; it's American foreign policy. It's what the United States has done to the world in the past half century -- all the violence, the bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of governments, and more. The terrorists -- whatever else they might be -- are also rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.

Robert A. Pape, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," argues that foreign occupation is the prime motivator for terrorist to suit up the vest, and blow themselves up. In a 2006 article called "The growth of suicide terrorism" Pape said:

We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism and conduct the war on terrorism accordingly.

Pape's conclusions mirrors the criticism of the Iraq war by some Iraq War veterans, who gathered in March 2008 at a Winter Soldier conference to voice their rage against the war and US military policy. Kelly Dougherty, a director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said the American people have never gotten the complete picture, and it is the job of Veterans to give it to them:

“We’ve heard from the politicians, from the generals, from the media—now it’s our turn,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Dougherty, who served in Iraq in 2003 as a military police officer, said, “It’s not going to be easy to hear what we have to say. It’s not going to be easy for us to tell it. But we believe that the only way this war is going to end is if the American people truly understand what we have done in their name.” (Source: The Progressive, article by Dahr Jamail, April 2008)

Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, and a professor at the University of Ottawa, has been by far one of the most critical voices of the War on Terror. He calls it a War on Truth. In his article "Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth," Chossudovsky says:

This is a war against the truth. When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer possible. An inquisitorial social system emerges.

An understanding of fundamental social and political events is replaced by a World of sheer fantasy, where "evil folks" are lurking. The objective of the "Global War on Terrorism" which has been fully endorsed by Obama administration, has been to galvanize public support for a Worldwide campaign against heresy.

It is indeed a War on Truth. And it is a war conducted by traitors, tyrants, privateers, freeloaders, bandits, political front men, and charlatans, upon the vast majority of mankind, including innocent citizens. Though the war is presumed to be fought against international "terrorism", there are few rebels, and even fewer ideological terrorists in the world who mean America or the West harm, and certainly not enough for them to be declared a meaningful threat to human existence. If addressed properly, the problem of terrorism would be largely non-existent, and where it would exist, police and honest intelligence officers would find them, and they would be given a fair trial in court, and if found guilty, thrown into prison.

If you think what I've just said is ludicrous then you haven't heard that in Afghanistan, which remains the central theater in the War on Terror, and has a population of roughly 28 million people, only 100 individuals were deemed members of Al Qaeda by the US intelligence community. So the big bad terrorist conspiracy is not as big as people are taught to believe. Last December, US intelligence officials told ABC News about their estimation:

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama's description Tuesday of the al Qaeda "cancer" in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

V. The War Bubble

The boom and bust cycle in monetary affairs is well known, and economists like Hayek and Mises have written about their origins, which is caused by the infusion of easy credit by central banks. But what is less well known is the boom and bust cycle of modern war. Like economics, wars can be greatly manipulated by devious characters for their own private gains. But wars can't happen out of the blue because the vast majority of people desire to lead a peaceful life, and not cause any trouble. No leader has ever been elected for starting a war. George Bush ran on the non-interventionism platform in 2000, and said he was against nation building. Of course that wasn't true, but enough dumb people believed he was telling the truth. And in 2008, there was still enough dumb people around in America to believe Obama's declarations of peace, and his promises to bring a definitive end to the Iraq War.

Due to people's natural anti-war sentiments, governments have to glorify a foreign threat, an enemy has to be created, and once that is established in public consciousness, a wide-scale propaganda campaign is started. And when all that fails, governments finally resort to false flag operations as a pretext for war. A false flag operation is to the lifeblood of a national security state, and to war-corrupted governments, what an intrusion of credit is to a bubble economy. It is the greatest public stimulus of all. Nothing compares to it.

VI. Going to War Rehab and Facing War Withdrawal Symptoms

Peacefully transforming a war-based economy to a peace-based economy in the United States will require the greatest leadership the country has ever seen. By simply ending the wars in the Middle East, however, will not fix the problem. Quelling he appetites of the Military Industrial Complex, and the national security state, may be considered the hardest challenge for the American people in the country's history. It will probably take enlightened military leadership to transition the United States from an empire back to a republic because the Great Military Beast cannot be denied through the Congress, so it must bow down gracefully by itself, or watch as it gets put to rest haphazardly by the citizens of the country. If such a course is not taken, if the Military Industrial Complex is not broken up or transformed, then chances are that it could completely devour the American people, its sacred liberties, and whatever is left of the American dream.

German historian Arthur Rosenberg made the point that dictatorships usually follows large modern wars in his article "War and Modern Dictatorship," which was published in the book "War As A Social Institution," edited by Jesse D. Clarkson and Thomas C. Cochran. Rosenberg:

The establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship means that a nation surrenders its right of self-government and abdicates in favor of a group of totalitarian bureaucrats. In modern war, as long as the fighting continues, everybody is a soldier on the military, naval, or air front. As long as everybody is fighting and bears his arms or wields his tools, he refuses to be changed into a sheep without any will. A citizen of a nation at war will accept certain emergency powers of his government of a technical character, but he will not accept a fundamental change of government which takes away his freedom. Only later, if the war is lost, or over, and the dreadful social and economic results of war undermine the free will of the citizen, it may be possible that he will be ready to surrender his former political rights in exchange for the social security promised by the preachers of the totalitarian gospel. 1

Chris Hedges has warned that such a scenario that Rosenberg described can take place in America if the American people are not vigilant. In his Feb 2009 article "It’s Not Going to Be OK" Hedges writes:

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Of course, a dictatorship in the United States does not bode very well for my country, Canada. Andrew Gavin Marshall wrote an article last month called "The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy," about the inevitability of all Western nations to respond to various crises, whether real or imagined, by concentrating their resources against the people, and setting up what he calls "transnational totalitarianism." Marshall says:

In November of 2008, the National Intelligence Council (which oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies) released a major report analyzing global trends until 2025. It explained that many governments in the west will be “expanding domestic security forces, surveillance capabilities, and the employment of special operations-type forces.” Counterterrorism measures will increasingly “involve urban operations as a result of greater urbanization,” and governments “may increasingly erect barricades and fences around their territories to inhibit access. Gated communities will continue to spring up within many societies as elites seek to insulate themselves from domestic threats.”[89]

Totalitarianism is, “by nature (or rather by definition), a global project that cannot be fully accomplished in just one community or one country. Being fuelled by the need to suppress any alternative orders and ideas, it has no natural limits and is bound to aim at totally dominating everything and everyone.” Further:

The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization... Is abolition of borders intrinsically (morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance, refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss? [Further,] if globalization undermines the tested, state-based models of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian [centralization].[90]

The totalitarian project is truly a transnational project; it is not merely confined to one or a few nations, but is a project of western society. So while the west rapidly expands their imperial adventures in the ‘global south’ – Africa, Latin America, South and Central Asia – at home the governments of the established western democracies are throwing the notion of democracy overboard and are constructing powerful and pervasive ‘Homeland Security States’. The construction of a ‘Homeland Security State’ is no more about the protection of its citizens than the Gestapo was; it is about the control of their citizens.

The only true and non-violent method we have to save our countries from totalitarian bondage, and restore the political liberties of the people, is education. "Social education," said the philosopher Martin Buber, "is the exact reverse of political propaganda," (2). We must teach our neighbors and fellow citizens both of their misfortunes, and of their responsibilities. It is a doubly rotten deal, but we have no other choice but to face the problems of our age or else be consumed by them. We don't live in a game show, Howie Mandel is not offering us a multiple of suit cases, and asking us "deal or no deal." We must deal with the facts of life, confront the ugly reality that our current oligarchical governments do not have the best interests of the people in mind, and then act as conscious citizens to push our various governments towards a more just, and freer direction. If we don't, then shame on us.


Notes:

1. Rosenberg, Arthur. "War and Modern Dictatorship," from War As A Social Institution: The Historian's Perspective, edited by Jesse D. Clarkson and Thomas C. Cochran. Pg. 196

2. Buber, Martin. Pointing The Way: Collected Essays. Pg. 176