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When all the talk is said and done, one thing remains perfectly clear: Obama may have changed the name of the war on terrorism, but he hasn't changed anything else. It's still the fundamental framework for US foreign policy, and because it is, it's important for us to understand just how utterly foolish and self-destructive that framework is. Not to mention how that framework is related to the elite plan to destroy America's middle class, and return us to the Dark Ages, when human life for all but the elite was indeed, "nasty, brutish, and short".
Self & Other
To do so, I'd like to start by taking not one, but two steps back to take in the big picture. One of the widespread themes of 20th Century social science is that the self is constituted or created in tandem with the not-self, or the other. In psychology, Freud gave us the Oedipal conflict and Jung gave us the shadow, and every level of analysis up from their-social psychology, small group psychology, small group sociology, mass sociology, cultural anthropology, you name it, has developed its own versions, its own ways of describing and/or analyzing this phenomena. At every level of analysis, the social scientists tell us some version of the same truth: we are who we are at least partially by virtue of who we are not-and this is a process that will magnify small differences or even manufacture them if real ones cannot be found. Because we define ourselves primarily in contrast to others close at hand, we also often blind ourselves to how much we have in common, as well.
So that's the picture two steps back. What does that mean for us? It means we need to look at ourselves as a nation, and realize that the need for self-definition creates the need for others who are "other".
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| The Cold War Other
Taking one step forward, we can see this specifically by looking at how this worked during the Cold War. The official dogma was that the US and USSR were polar opposites, the antithesis of one another. And yet many people around the world had great difficulty in telling us apart. We were both industrialized superpowers that poured enormous resources into the machinery of military dominance. We were both nations originally founded as birthplaces of revolution-the US as the first revolutionary state that broke out of colonial control, the USSR as the first revolutionary state that broke out of capitalist control. And yet both had incredibly bloody histories of mass murder. The Stalinist USSR had its show trials, purges and famines that left tens of millions dead. The "democratic" US had the genocide of hundreds of Native American nations, and millions of individual Native Americans.
Indeed, as I've noted on various different occasions, there were two distinctly different visions offered at the dawn of the Cold War, as were described in the remarkable paper, "Kennan's Long Telegram and NSC-68: A Comparative Analysis," East European Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 4, January 1998, by Efstathios T. Fakiolas. As I in "Where's Obama? Questioning v Reinforcing [Foreign Policy] CW #3 (Political Duality of Rep v Dem 6c)":
Fakiolas used the framework of foreign policy realism for his analysis, but he determined that the two documents employed significantly different models within that tradition. Although they seemed to many people to be kindred documents, Fakiolas uncovers striking differences. I'm going to do a separate diary delving deeper into his argument, but the bottom line for us now is this: Kennan's Long Telegram and Nitze's NSC-68 appear similar, they depend on different models of international relations within the same realist tradition.
Kennan relied on the "tectonic plates" model, in which there many other non-state actors, the world is not "zero-sum," and there is often opportunity for mutual cooperation. Nitze relied on the billiard ball model, which sees the international system as "composed solely of egoistic sovereign states interested in maximizing their relative power capabilities at the expense of others," and sees "world politics is a 'zero-sum' game in which national security conceived of in military and territorial terms is the one and only states' national objective."
As a result, Kennan favored a strategy of containment that emphasized strengthening the West socially, economically and culturally, addressing its flaws which the Soviets exposed. In contrast, Nitze ignored issues of the West's internal flaws, and focused almost exclusively on military force to combat the Soviet Union.
It's my own observation, based on this analysis, that we fought Nitze's Cold War, but we won Kennan's. It was not, in the end, our military strength that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the appeal of our culture of openness and freedom. [Emphasis added.]
Unfortunately, a side-effect of fighting Nitze's Cold War was precisely the convergence of the US and USSR that I describe above. By seeing the Soviet Union through the simplified lens of being our other-rather than seriously concentrating on what we stood for-or at least claimed and ought to stand for--and how to strengthen that, we intensified our similarities, and not at all in a good way.
British scholar-activist Mary Kaldor even went so far as to write an entire book The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict describing this conflict as applied to Europe in which similarities in cutting off alternative paths of more human-oriented development predominate on both sides. A synopsis of her book explains:
The division of Europe has been a dominating feature of the international political order for 40 years. Now all is changing as established political alignments crumble and new social and political movements gain ground and, in some cases, even come to power. This book explains the background to these dramatic changes in the international system. The author presents an alternative account of the Cold War, arguing that what has been experienced in Europe since the war cannot be described as peace, but rather as a state of imaginary war, where "deterrence" is not a mechanism for avoiding war, but a means to sustain the political hegemony of the US and the USSR. The author aims to demonstrate the profound effect the imaginary war has had on patterns of social and economic development in Europe, limiting them to models provided by the two superpowers. She goes on to examine the prospects and choices for the future including the need for demilitarization, East-West cooperation, an increased self-determination, and the important role of social movements on such issues as the environment, peace, women and human rights.
Outside of Europe, the consequences were considerably more dire. One such example was our support for the mujahadeen in order to give the USSR their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. Locked into fighting the Soviets-so much like ourselves that it's downright eerie-we never imagined that the mujahadeen would ever amount to anything beyond the borders of Afghanistan. And, indeed, both we and our Israeli allies followed a similar logic in promoting religious extremists as rivals of the secular PLO. So long as we had a secular military superpower as our other, we were blind to virtually everything else. Heck, throughout the Reagan era, there was a constant drum-beat echoed throughout Versailles, of the rightwing fantasy that the Soviets were behind all the significant terrorism in the world. All terrorism was "state-sponsored terrorism", according to this view, and state behind it all was the USSR, sometimes with cut-outs (Bulgaria was a real favorite), sometimes without.
A New Other/World War Order
But now we have a new world war order-the war on terror order, regardless of how Obama chooses to change the rhetoric. And with the new world war order comes a new other-the jihadist other.
This is a more nuanced situation, since, of course, we are neck deep in our own Christian jihadists. Furthermore, as Benjamin Barber explained so perceptively in Jihad vs. McWorld, global neoliberalism and ethno-religious jihadism are symbiotic enemies, feeding on one another's voids, and synergizing in eroding the power of civic republicanism/social democracy to actually meet real human needs and thereby marginalize and/or constrain them both.
In a sense, both Jihad and McWorld can be understood as each other's Jungian shadow, both incapable of recognizing the fact. On the extreme, neoliberalism is a religious doctrine that ignores the empirical evidence of it's own limitation and failures-so vividly illustrated in the financial crises which precipitated the Great Recession, but also evident in the stagnation of global development, as well as the looming catastrophe of global warming. At the same time, Jihadism is very much a this-worldly political/economic endeavor which routinely violates core religious precepts (common to all Axial-age religions) of inner-direction, respect for the life and personhood of others, and concern for the eternal as opposed to the temporal.
If we understand the war on terror in these terms, then it is obvious why we should see militarism advanced under Obama with only modestly more nuance than under Bush post-2006 midterms, as well as why it should entirely overshadow any serious effort to redress America's domestic problems, which continue to be entirely subsumed to perpetuating the profitability of neoliberal corporate interests. Obama is, quite literally, the continuing of Bush, after Bush's mid-course correction to shed the more immediately disastrous aspects of his policy.
Domestically, it becomes all the more evident that neoliberal Dems and wingnut GOP jihadists are but a domestic analogue of the global self/other pairing of the War on Terror World Order. Neither is concerned with meeting human needs, precisely because both of them depend upon providing ersatz substitutes, as the source of their power over the people that they keep deprived and thereby dependent opon them.
Of course there is a genuine asymmetry between the two. The jihadists really are batshit crazy. But their core constituency is also fundamentally far more deprived. The McWorlders are superficially more rational-they make a show of rational processes. But on even the most casual inspection, that show falls apart into the most ludicrous of Marx Brothers farces. And so it is that the most heinous criminals in world history are bailed out by America's taxpayers while millions of ordinary Americans are driven from their homes, because they need to be taught lessons about "personal responsibility" and in order to not set a bad example for others.
The REAL Road To Serfdom, Designed By Hayek's Followers, No Less
Up next: the wholesale looting of America's already-undersized welfare state. Why? Because, as small-time bank robber Willie Sutton would say, "That's where the money is," as Ryan Grim points out at HuffPo--"Bernanke Channels Willie Sutton In Assault On Social Security: 'That's Where The Money Is'":
Ben Bernanke has overseen the greatest expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet in its history, pouring trillions of dollars into Wall Street firms at roughly zero interest rates.
His generosity, however, has a limit.
In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he's seeking re-appointment as the Fed's chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.
Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: "That's where the money is."
Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) sympathized with Bernanke, saying that, because of entitlement spending, "you're going to be looking at a situation where the Congress will be unable to provide any kind of fiscal discipline because of the mandatory spending. That puts an enormous burden on your plate."
"Well, Senator, I was about to address entitlements," Bernanke replied. "I think you can't tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care."
Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.
"It's only mandatory until Congress says it's not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation," said Bernanke.
And so it is that the two great Satans conspire together to return us to the long Dark Ages in which the great masses of humanity lived in squalor, barely above the level of comfort enjoyed by animals. That is the future that both Jihadists (Christian as well as Muslim, domestic as well as foreign) and McWorlders (Democratic as well as Republica) are working towards. That is their version of the earthly paradise.
No wonder they hate us DFHs so much. We want lives worth living. How dare we?
How dare we? |
