( - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Part 1, "The Truth-Free Zone, Part 1: Truth And Lies Switch Places", I laid out a set of three closely-connected ideas, in response to an earlier post by Matt . These were:
- Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
- Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
- Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 explored the first idea. Now it's time to examine the second one:
(2) Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths.
The most obvious, and dominant example of this is the so-called "war on terror," which started off as the "war on terrorism"-a very different concept. Terror is a state of mind. Terrorism is a strategy, though the adjective, terrorist-as in "terrorist attack"-more frequently refers to tactics that are part of a terrorist strategy. Neither is the sort of thing that one can fight a war against. Wars on abstract nouns generally do not turn out well, for the simple reason that abstract nouns can never surrender. The fact that the "war on terrorism" imperceptibly morphed into the "war on terror" is indicative of how vacuous and non-sensical the entire enterprise is.
We are way past Orwell's 1984 here. At least Oceana and Eurasia were the sorts of things that could have always been at war with one another. But neither terror nor terrorism are this sort of thing. Indeed, it's not simply false to say "we are fighting a war on terror" (or "terrorism"). It is worse than false. It is meaningless.
The great 20th Century physicist Wolfgang Pauli coined an expression that is applicable here. Having looked at a paper by a young physicist, he remarked that it "wasn't even wrong," meaning that it didn't even get the problem right, much less the solution. And such is the case with the "war on terror/terrorism," as well-although actions taken in its name, such as the Iraq War, can be much worse than meaningless, by greatly worsening the realworld situtation that "war on terror" so meaninglessly mis-describes.
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| The Meaninglessness of the "War On Terrorism"
In 1917, after having run for re-election on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out Of War," Woodrow Wilson turned around and took the United States into war. He did so under the banner of fighting a "war to end all war." Naturally, it didn't turn out that way. In fact, World War I lead directly to World War II. There were all sorts of similarities between then and now. The efforts to suppress dissent were fierce-socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who won over 900,000 votes (6%) runing for President in 1912 (he even ran ahead of Taft in Arizona), was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech critical of the war. He ran for President again from prison in 1920, and won slightly more votes than in 1912, although a smaller percentage.
Even so, the "war to end all wars" had a certain logic to it, even though it was flawed. If humanity were progressing as a whole, and wars were due to the aggression of certain powers that were not progressing, then it was possible that defeating those powers could provide an opening for the abolition of all wars. Of course, World War I was not due simply to German aggression alone, and the victors in that war seemed to go out of their way to ensure that round two would not be long in coming, while also doing their best to sow future troubles in the Middle East as well.
Still, there was at least a plausible logic to the core notion of a "war to end all wars." The same cannont be said about a "war on terrorism."
First, as historian Howard Zinn has said, "war is terrorism." In the broader sense, this is clearly true. And there is all the difference in the world between a "war to end all wars" and a "war on war." A "war on war" only makes sense if the first "war" is metaphorical, and there is nothing whatsoever metaphorical about the prisoners being held at Guantanamo, and other unknown "black sites" across the globe, or about the casualties-American and Iraqi-that continue pilling up in Iraq day after bloody day.
One can fight fire with fire, by depriving fire in advance of the fuel it needs to grow beyond certain bounds. But the same logic does not apply to war, short of killing all possible combatants in advance-which is hardly a solution. One can, of course, prevent some wars by fighting other ones, but there is no guarantee that one does not cause even more wars in the process, which is why the proposition of fighting a war to end war in general is logically flawed. This puts us back in the Wilsonian mode-one plagued with failure, rather than logical incohence. It presumes that one stands outside of history-the exact same assumption that others will make when they fight their wars to end all war. But when one fights a war on war, one must, quite literally, close ones eyes to what one is doing. It is like fucking for virginity.
Second, in the narrower sense, "terrorism" refers to strategies employed primarily against civilians in a highly assymetrical armed struggle. In this sense, a "war on terrorism" is no longer logically incoherent, it is simply stupid, since it gives terrorists precisely what they want. The very point of terrorism in this narrower sense is to provoke a wanton and disproporationate response-i.e. war. In doing so, the terrorists hope for precisely the result that Zinn points to-the terrorism of war, fought by a vastly superior power, will vastly overshadow the terrorism of the terrorists, and thus draw more people to their side, until they are finally able to fight against a military enemy, rather than only a civilian population.
On 9-11, "terrorism" didn't attack America, any more than "war" or "sneak attacks" attacked us on December 7, 1941. On 9-11, al Qaeda attacked America. But we didn't go to war with al Qaeda, which is why this war has taken so much longer than World War II, with no end remotely in sight.
When America was attacked by al Qaeda on 9-11, we had a specific, relatively small and weak enemy. Moreover, they had just committed an unspeakable atrocity, one which so horrified many in the Moslem world that they could not believe it was done by fellow Moslems. At this point, a disciplined, restrained response, focused on bringing the perpetrators to justice could have thoroughly discredited them. Whatever injustices the United States might have been responsible for, directly or indirectly, virtually no one felt that the innocent victims in the World Trade Center or the hijacked airplanes should have terrorized and killed in response. At that moment, before the United States took one drop of blood in response, we were in a position of tremendous moral authority-authority that would only have been enhanced had we acted with restraint.
This is the risk that terrorists always take-what if they strike, and authorities do not take the bait? Ordinarily, the strikes are small, so that if one strike does not provoke an over-reaction, then maybe the next one, or the one after that will do the trick. The calculation is always that once the bait is taken, the target recruiting pool-both for terrorist recruitment and for political sympathy-will forget about the early acts of terrorist provocaiton. But 9-11 was different. It was wildly disproportionate. If the United States did not take the bait, the game was over. No child born for a hundred years would be given the name of "Osama." Fortunately for bin Laden, Bush took bait. After all, he had been waiting for just such an opportunity.
The Meaninglessness of the "War On Terror"
Merriam-Webster:
terror
Main Entry:
ter·ror Listen to the pronunciation of terror
Pronunciation:
\'ter-?r, 'te-r?r\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French terrour, from Latin terror, from terr?re to frighten; akin to Greek trein to be afraid, flee, tremein to tremble - more at tremble
Date:
14th century
1: a state of intense fear
2 a: one that inspires fear : scourge b: a frightening aspect c: a cause of anxiety : worry d: an appalling person or thing; especially : brat
3: reign of terror
4: violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
synonyms see fear
- ter·ror·less Listen to the pronunciation of terrorless \-l?s\ adjective
Given that wars generally cause "a state of intense fear" in thousands, if not millions of people, the self-contradictory nature of a "war on terror" should be immediately obvious. The fact that it is not may simply indicate how terrified we already are: we can no longer think straight.
It the "war on terrorism" was either a meaningless, or self-defeating construct of precisely the sort that the terrorists might wish for, the gradual morphing into the "war on terror" bespeaks an even deeper confusion, for-as just pointed out-"terror" is a condition of extreme fear, and that is precisely what the Bush Administration has repeatedly sought to spead among the American people. Indeed, the Democrats' recent capitulations over gutting FISA were specifically motivated, at least in part, by the Bush Administration scaring the Democrats with the threat of a terrorist attack, which it in turn would blame a terrorized nation on them.
It is, indeed, true that the only card Bush has left to play is fear itself. He is the ultimate terrorist. And this hooks us back into the subject of the previous diary-it is a truth that cannot be spoken, and thus, in Versailles, it functions as if it were a lie.
This forbidden truth is only a strating point, however, for what intelligent national policy would look like. If, as FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," there is still much that needs to be understood and responded to. A pre-requisite, of course, is belief in the full range of our Enlightenment heritage that today's GOP is resolutely opposed to at virtually every level. Properly assessing a full range of risks and how to respond to them in an integrated fashion requires Enlightenment reason for the analysis itself, and Enlightenment political values in order to turn analysis into action.
But a modest starting point is simply sorting out the relative significance of various different risks, a subject tacked by Barry Glassner in his 1999 book, Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. It's not a perfect book, and one can rationally disagree with different aspects of his argument, as noted below. But the overall thrust is a beam of clarity compared to our current wallowing in darkness and denial.
Publishers Weekly wrote:
In a provocative report, Glassner (Career Crash, etc.) contends that Americans' worries about crime, drugs, child abuse and other issues have been blown out of proportion by a mass media that thrives on scares. Exposing fear-mongering in many quarters, this University of Southern California sociology professor argues that trendy issues like road rage, workplace violence, teenage suicide, "granny dumping" (abandonment of the elderly by callous relatives) and sex crimes via the Internet are "false crises" manufactured by inflated statistics and hype. Lambasting liberals as well as conservatives who allegedly blame teen moms for the nation's social ills, Glassner contends that teenage pregnancy is largely a response to the nation's economic and educational decline. He also believes that America's expensive campaign against illegal drugs like cocaine, heroin and marijuana diverts attention from the far more serious problem of deaths from the abuse of legal drugs and physicians' gross negligence in prescribing them. The good news, he reports, is that airplane travel is safer than ever and that the incidence of child kidnapping has been wildly exaggerated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has his own axes to grind: he calls Gulf War Syndrome a "metaphoric illness," tweaks the hypocrisy of "those who single out rap singers as specially sexist or violent" and labels the FDA's 1992 ban on silicone breast implants "a grand victory of anecdote over science." Some of his arguments are fresher than others; in any case, this antidote to paranoia is a guaranteed argument-starter.
That's what we need: a reality-based approach to understanding the risks we face. But we can't really have that when the greatest risk we face is a President in league with al Qaeada, terrorizing our entire populace and our entire political system as well. And, of course, we can't deal with that as long as this fundamental truth is universally regarded as a lie in Versailles. |
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