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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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PART II: Scenes from a System That Doesn't Work
7. The Question of Killing Fighting is the most ancient and consistent of the organized arts, unless you accept prostitution as the doyen. While civil society has been subjected to endless radical reforms, warfare has come through the ages with unchanged principles. More precisely, the principles of war have remained the same; the structures of warfare have changed radically. Those structural changes were introduced in the eighteenth century with great hope. It seemed as if the professionalizing of the officer corps would remove warfare from its origins: in the mud, that is, wielding clubs. The new rational officer would, ensure fast, and efficient wars. Great military leaders had always maintained an essential balance between imagination and what might be called professionalism. Here professionalism means, the ability to manage the physical realities of an army and of a situation. Imagination means strategy or the innate flexibility needed to make circumstances work in your favour, to surprise the enemy and, of course, to win. The innovations begun in the eighteenth century were intended to institutionalize the professionalism and the strategic skills of the great generals. The new officer corps would then be able to reduce the levels of death and destruction which were involved. The clarity of the process seemed to promise the disappearance of "unnecessary" wars. A cooler analysis of what warfare entailed was intended to eliminate the multitude of emotive factors -- superstition, personal pride or ambition, social status -- which often seemed to drag us unnecessarily over the line into general violence. Instead that process has led us full circle, right back into the mud with greater frequency and greater violence than ever before. What's more, there are no signs that our disastrous experiences, such as 1914-18, lead to any important reforms. Rational warfare seems to be short on memory, filled with self-confidence and devoid of both purpose and direction. More to the point, the nature of professional armies has led to the permanent maintenance of armed forces at wartime levels with wartime quantities of weaponry. Reality being far more practical than theory, the result of the rational approach has been the institutionalization of a permanent state of war. This century and the nineteenth have sent out paradoxical signals about the power of the military. Our rhetoric and our constitutions declare the supremacy of the civil authorities. Our elections and ministerial systems appear to confirm this. And yet the twentieth century, in particular, is driven by enormous and purely military adventures of a kind and a quantity unknown under the absolute monarchs. This taste for continuous adventure began with Napoleon and shows no signs of going away. And the leading edge of science, administration and industry continues to be dominated by the armies. Rather than allow ourselves to be discouraged by this phenomenon, we have developed an inverse ratio: as the importance of the military has increased, so we have found fresh ways to pretend that nothing is happening. The last two centuries have placed new destructive powers in the hands of commanding officers. The most obvious is modem weaponry. But far more important has been the transformation of military mythology from its traditional base of "glorious victory" into something far more complicated, which twins aimless and stolid technocratic generalship with the elevation of one's own casualties to the status of a sacrificial rite. This warping of war from a tool of last resort, theoretically aimed at improving a state's nonmilitary position, into a twin-headed monster of abstract methodology and cathartic bloodletting, is one of the most unexpected children of reason. In some ways it is linked to the killing of God and his replacement by both the Hero and the modern military planner. Unfortunately, having mentally shoved war aside, civil leaders are now badly prepared for dealing with its very real presence at the centre of our lives. This rational daydreaming has left us mentally disarmed, while the world is physically in battle. Perhaps that is why civil society so rapidly buries or erases completely any accurate memory of past violence, as if to pretend that the past is the past and the present quite different. It is difficult to think of another era in which individuals have so carefully turned their backs upon the evidence of their own continuing violence by treating each dark event as if it were somehow unexpected -- or the last of its kind. And they have done so in the midst of our millennium's most violent century. Never has savagery so dogged Western civilization and yet, at the same time, so actively played the role of, catalyst for civil change. Whatever it is that our mythology of scientific discoveries and philosophical arguments so actively pretend about the evolution of society, it is war which has led the way and which continues to lead the way in the twentieth century. Even our technocratic structures first appeared in the modernization of Europe's armed forces. The first technocrat was not produced by ENA or Sciences Po or Harvard. He marched out of a military school and his profession was that of a staff officer. Man's perpetual optimism, encouraged by the rational amputation of memory, permits him to turn away from the evidence of past chronology in order to act as if the future will be one of civil initiative. Perhaps we need to believe that things will be different. But we also need to act in such a way that change is given a chance. And there our denial of reality does nothing to lessen the very real presence of war and of the military leadership it imposes upon us. ** One of the great pretenses of the last half century is that we have been at peace. This vision of the world is not so much false as falsely focused. The West has been locked in the grip of a nuclear peace, the only alternative to which was massive, if not total, self- destruction. But the creation of nuclear weapons produced two separate levels of peace and war. For almost fifty years we have had nuclear peace, while gradually slipping into a new sort of conventional world war. However, by limiting our focus to the developed world, we have been able to pretend that there has also been a conventional peace. The result is a perfectly artificial view of what constitutes war. In the nineteenth century, war was something which involved white people on both sides. If only one side involved whites, then this was picturesque adventure. As for nonwhites fighting each other, that was hardly real. Rather, it was tribal conflict and thought of as a curiosity, of interest principally to eccentrics. Even conflicts between colonial powers were felt to be marginal, unless they threatened to spread to home territory. Thus an incident between Austria and Prussia involving a thousand or so dead was a war: The fight in the Sudan between the British and the Mahdi, involving far greater losses, was only an expedition. This approach allowed us to think of the last half of the nineteenth century as a period of enduring peace. The same sort of thinking still serves us well in our determination to ignore the violence which surrounds the West. The eighteen developed nations are indeed at peace with one another. They even managed for almost half a century not to go to war with their principal rival, the Soviet Union. And now the collapse of first the Soviet bloc and then the Union itself has encouraged us to proclaim successive short-lived new dawns and new world orders. It is popularly assumed that the Cold War is over and that even the risk of a nuclear war lies behind us. Nothing, however, proves that either assumption is correct. We have no idea into what form -- geographic, political or ideological -- the Soviet Union will finally settle. The civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and several of the former Soviet republics may be temporary aberrations or the beginning of widespread disorder. The nuclear and conventional forces remain intact on both sides. The nations of Central Europe mayor may not successfully adopt democratic systems and/or liberal economies. Perhaps in a decade all these things will be clear. Meanwhile, unstable times heighten the risks of war and encourage military adventures. The West is now caught up with the rest of the world in a state of general Instability worse than any since World War II. As a direct result military violence. which has been growing steadily outside the West over the last forty years, has accelerated like a malignant cancer. In other words, recent event, have encouraged warfare without changing the contradiction of continuing nuclear peace accompanied by an ever-wider and less controllable conventional war. There was a period in the 1950s and early 1960s when the breakup of the European colonial empires seemed to threaten our illusion of calm. But then a series of solutions was found to. still the waters. Countries were created throughout the world on the eighteenth- entury European model of the nation-state. United Nations peacekeeping forces were invented -- not to solve conflicts but to freeze them in place as unending half conflicts. from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. At that time the intervention of the UN secretary-general and of a peacekeeping force at least implied that the situation could be handled. Now there are so many wars that it would be physically impossible for the United Nations to intervene in more than a few which become fashionable in the West., The use of peacekeeping forces b rarely considered. In fact, there are so many conflicts today that even international political mediation is a luxury in short supply. This toleration of high levels of violence in the world at large as a normal part of Western "peace" is not only to be found at the United Nations. Most world, Western, and regional organizations, such as the Organization of African Unity. accept that this is the way the world works. Not with a bang, but with a seething mass of whimpers. When the current economic crisis began in 1973, there were a handful of conflicts spread around the globe. By 1980 there were thirty or so, and today there are more than forty. Most statistics agree that an average of one thousand soldiers are killed every day throughout the world. I If anything, this is a conservative figure. kept down by the impossibility of collecting statistics from many of the ongoing wars, What are the casualties in the Cambodian countryside? In Eritrea? In the Shan States of Burma? No one really knows. A thousand casualties a day is approximately the same as the average number of French soldiers killed daily during World War I. [2] That conflict lasted only five years. Our current levels of violence have been with us for more than a decade. Some five thousand civilians also die every day as a direct or indirect result of war. Three and a half million dead soldiers over the last decade and twenty million dead civilians. And these figures do not include periodic massive massacres, such as in Cambodia. In other words, most of the world is at war. Only we, a small minority, are exempted. We are the exception, not the rule. And yet we are directly and indirectly involved in this violence, even if the deaths within our own borders are limited to those produced by a few terrorist attacks, some regional revolts such as Ireland and Corsica, and growing levels of organized civil violence. Forty murders a month from gang wars in Washington and another forty in Los Angeles cannot be dismissed as unrelated crimes of passion or of greed. But they pale beside numbers such as one thousand and five thousand dead daily. These cause our minds to disconnect. The figures are too high. The dead in question ·are from other civilizations. They are not us. Periodically we manage to focus on one of these disasters for a short time. To manage this we usually need some Western angle -- hostages, for example, or the involvement of a Western humanitarian group. From the fervent Christian antislaver, Gordon at Khartoum, to the modern crusading-journalist behind the lines with the Mujaheddin or the young doctors of Medecins Sans Frontieres, there is an unbroken line. We did manage to focus, very late in the day and for a brief period of time, on the mass murder of the Cambodians and, for several blinks of the eye, on the war-related starvation of millions of Ethiopians. Of course, we did so as if these people themselves lived on two islands. Nowhere was there a hint of the surrounding peoples also caught up in the disaster -- the Akkas, the Karens, the Thai border people or the Sudanese and the Somalis. These. people were not seen to be at war or to be dying, both of which they were. Only the starving Ethiopians and the martyred Cambodians caught our eye. In 1991 the unsuccessful uprising of Iraqi Kurds dominated our imagination for a short time thanks to the presence of Western troops and journalists. Tragic photos were published along with figures of between five hundred and two thousand civilian deaths per day. But war-related civilian deaths have been at that level for a long time in Somalia and the Sudan without Western interest moving beyond occasional serious articles. This ability to focus on one fashionable war at a time allows us to pretend, when the conflict ends, that the world is again at peace. For example, in August 1988 the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan and a cease-fire was announced between Iran and Iraq. Afghanistan had been a popular war because it showed the Soviets to be in trouble. The Iran-Iraq mutual massacre had been going on for years before Western naval intervention in the Gulf won it some general news coverage. By then the casualty levels had already fallen from their worst levels. Both wars ended and Western leaders and journalists proclaimed that the world was moving back from the brink of violence. This, they said, was the summer of peace. Within a week three to five thousand people had been shot dead in Burma, followed by a fresh army coup; at least five thousand were massacred in Burundi; a series of bombs exploded in Ireland, killing civilians and military, after which IRA activists were shot dead in an ambush; the President of Pakistan was blown up along with a planeload of officials and generals, including the American ambassador; riots in Chile lead to a handful of deaths; there was a violent coup in Haiti; a major battle between the Moroccans and the Polisario guerrillas who are fighting for the independence of the most desolate part of the Sahara, the Rio d'Oro; and the Iraqi army, freed by the Iran-Iraq truce, turned its attention to the Kurdish province, where there was an active rebellion. One hundred thousand Kurdish refugees fled into Turkey. The rebel force was surrounded and eliminated. In the absence of a large Western presence, this earlier Kurdish massacre received little attention, despite the use of chemical weapons on civilians. Even in Afghanistan, theoretically basking in a new peace, a series of rebel attacks killed dozens of people, which led to a renewal of the war. What we called the Afghani peace was no more than the removal of white soldiers from that war. This list accounts only for violence fashionable enough to be reported. It leaves out the daily casualty levels in a series of ongoing wars from Cambodia and the Philippines to Lebanon, other Kurdish districts, Namibia, Angola, most Central American countries, Colombia, and so on. Curiously enough, no politician or journalist announced at the end of the week that the summer of 1988 had not, after all, been that of peace. Even the nuclear bomb has been subjected to this division of war into the "real" Western version versus the "imaginary" sort elsewhere, For decades now we have been obsessed -- and rightly -- by the nuclear race and the ever-more-complex generations of missiles, antimissile missiles and multiple warheads, to the point where we are now dealing with the nuclearization of outer space. The gradual easing of tensions between the East and the West over the last few years has therefore been greeted with enormous relief. But there has never been a very high risk that the Soviets or the Americans, French and British would actually use their weapons. The practical wild cards are the other nuclear forces proliferating around the world -- India, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt, China, South Africa, perhaps Libya. Even Iraq may still be within reach of producing nuclear weaponry. None of these forces will have very sophisticated delivery systems. They don't need them since their, targets are neither Washington nor Moscow. Nor, unlike the nuclear forces of the West, are they locked into overmuscled, intricately interwoven balances with their enemies. They could, therefore, actually be used successfully -- that is, without necessarily provoking a mutually suicidal exchange. In other words, the immense nuclear forces of the West are almost imaginary, while the real nuclear weapons lie beyond our control in an invisible world of perpetual war and heavy daily casualties. *** Our myopia provides us with an artificial peace of mind. It also deprives us of the means needed for dealing with these forces struggling close all around, unless we are prepared to unleash the full force of our military machine. In' other words our only strategy for winning is to raise the ante so dramatically that the aftereffects will be beyond evaluation. But wars which are so profoundly destabilizing that they result in more rather than less disorder cannot be considered victories. Our all-or-nothing methodology also obscures the fact that, whether we intervene militarily or not, these are our wars in the practical sense that they are being fought with our economies and our weapons in the context of the Western- inspired nation-state. In our imaginations we cannot see them, but they are there and no real barriers exist to isolate us from their violence. Only the occasional terrorist attack on our own citizens seems brutal enough to force us to look about. But those rare moments of narrowly focussed consciousness last rarely more than a week. That terrorist attacks have grown in a decade from 175 a year to 1,000 does show that the waves of violence in the world outside the West are breaking ever higher upon our shores. Yet what are a thousand attacks or a thousand deaths a year but a piddling figure when compared with the six thousand soldiers and civilians killed elsewhere every day? Were it not for television, we would be denied even the forty-eight hours of bathos produced by a bomb in Paris or London. When seven kilos of dynamite kill twenty people in an urban centre, the sound of the explosion cannot be heard two blocks away. When this happened in 1986 in the Quartier Latin in Paris, an area dense with cinemas, bars and restaurants, tens of thousands of people went on happily eating, drinking and queuing up for romantic or political films, perfectly unaware that a few metres away 150 people were sprawled dead, bleeding and contorted on the pavement. And since few of those out entertaining themselves would get home in time for the evening news, only people who were not there were made aware before the next morning that anything had happened. Except for a few victims, modern terrorism is mainly a media event. People are not killed to set an example. They are killed in order to provide film footage and newspaper copy which will generalize the specific and thus have political impact. And yet these little spurts of blood do remind us of the unacceptable style of violence implicit in modem wars. Our perspective is therefore quite different from that of the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth. Mirabeau, speaking in Avignon in the early days of the French Revolution, warned that the nature of "national wars" would change war itself." Our age will be that of wars far more ambitious, far more barbarous than in the past." [3] Today we tend to explain this barbarism by Clausewitz's dictum: "To introduce into the philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity -- war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." But Clausewitz was an innocent bystander. Violence had broken out of its traditional grounds well before he began writing. If anything he was arguing in reaction to the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars, which he had witnessed for twenty years. His idea of absolute war had to be ripped out of context by others in order for it to be presented as a recommendation. What he had actually written surrounded his absolute statement with other equally strong and contradictory declarations. It was a complicated argument designed to eliminate the original apparently unquestionable truth. Clausewitz's theory, as the British strategist Basil Liddell Hart pointed out, was "too abstract and involved for concrete-minded soldiers to follow." [4] And so they simplified him. And used him to justify their already advanced desire to engage in absolute war. Mirabeau had fully understood what was about to happen as the forces of reason seized hold of state power. The old mercenary wars had been followed by the aristocratic wars, all of them fought in ignorance of and indifference to the state of the population in general. And to the extent that war had gone beyond professional bounds to touch the civilian population, it rarely did so for any reason other than to satisfy the individual soldier's personal desires, which would be summarized as sex, food and money. These remained wars between elites. The national wars -- those Mirabeau warned of -- were meant to be struggles between populations. His error, and indeed ours, has been to focus on the rise of the citizen-based nation-state as the primary reason for the rise of absolute war. The nation-state has prayed a role, but primarily in the context of the new professional officer class, which saw strategy as an abstraction and war as an increasingly blunt instrument. This officer class was created to do away with the arbitrary power -- and amateurism -- of the aristocratic soldier. The professional soldier was to be an employee of the state, thus ending the tradition in which the state was regularly the hostage of successful generals. An obedient professional officer would be the willing executor of the state's wars. Unfortunately, given the new definition of unlimited wars, this also meant that the military leadership would go on, obediently fighting, so long as there were weapons and live recruits. The officer was theoretically no longer an initiator of war, but that meant he was also no longer a restraining factor. He followed orders, while the key powers were passed to the political authority. The experience of the last century, however, has shown the civil authorities consistently unable to assume that responsibility with any greater success than the soldiers and monarchs who preceded them. The gratuitous military and civil massacres which have appeared in the twentieth century for the first time are part of this failure. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu began his theory on warfare as follows: "War is a matter of vital importance to the state. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied." [5] And yet outside today's professional military circles and in the absence of a fashionable crisis, the subject is either unmentionable, evoked in a nostalgic, personality-oriented way or highly politicized into black and white positions. It is not something to be carefully considered by citizens as part of their lives. C. Wright Mills was perhaps the first to recognize the growing dichotomy between violence out of control and a public refusal to pay attention. In the mid-1950s, he wrote: "All over the world, the warlord is returning. All over the world, reality is defined in his terms." [6] Mills's ideological bias on the edge of Marxism caused him to misunderstand why this was happening, but he had correctly identified the trend. Today, when public figures evoke the world's violence, they do so merely to serve immediate purposes. The Reagan administration, for example, used to repeat endlessly that there were forty-two wars in the world. all of them provoked by Soviet ambition. This violence became an argument for increased defence spending. But the reality is that most of these conflicts have never had anything to do with Capitalism or Communism or any other Western ideology. How Saharan nomads, for example, could be devoted to the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been clear, any more than how Buddhist peasant rice farmers could be attached to competitive individualism and the marketplace. This view of the world is so artificial that when our theoretically ideological partners in the Third World become inconvenient, we painlessly change sides, the way we have several times with China. With Ethiopia-Somalia. With Iraq. With Egypt. Even with Cambodia. Our fairy-tale approach to international conflicts has convinced Westerners that neither they nor their political leaders have the understanding of the mechanisms of war necessary to control it. The result has been a curious low-grade, generalized hysteria. Some thinkers refer to this as a sublimated fear of imminent disaster. On the Right they blame it for the appearance of idealistic movements which offer simple sweeping solutions to complex problems -- the Greens, for example, or the· movement in favour of unilateral disarmament. [7] There have actually been limited outbreaks of apolitical hysteria. The bomb shelter craze in the United States was an early example. More recently the West exploded into cheerleader enthusiasm when first Burma, then China, showed signs of change. Here was proof that democracy and capitalism could win without having to go to war. The neurotic nature of this joy could be seen in the sullen confusion which came over us when government troops moved in and opened lire. Rather than pause and attempt to deal with our confusion, we simply rushed on to a new set of emotional superlatives aimed at liberalization in Central' Europe. And when that liberalization began to produce nationalist violence and economic collapse, we dashed off to save an absolute monarchy in Kuwait at a cost which might have solved Central Europe's immediate problems. Then we rushed back to give the Soviets voluminous, self- serving and empty-handed advice. The Iraq incident -- whatever the merits of the specific issue -- unfolded throughout the West to the sound of easy patriotism and hysterical hyperbole from the mouths of government leaders and generals. In this way public debate was effectively reduced to good versus evil and men versus boys. In other words, the level of sensible debate was held down at the level of nineteenth-century jingoism. The citizenry either remained passive or actually cooperated when faced by this approach, which demonstrated the level of confusion inside our complex system. For example, on a completely separate matter, more than 70 percent of French citizens, when asked, reply that they are for the maintenance of their own nuclear force -- the force de frappe. More than 70 percent also reply that they are against its use, even in extremis. [8] They seem to be hoping that the crises can be managed one by one. But this belief in management is precisely where the danger lies. With the sole exception of avoiding an actual nuclear war, we have been remarkably incompetent at managing modern military crises. Not only have we made little sense out of nuclear development, but our conventional armies seem constantly to be preparing for wars that they will never light, while losing most of those they are actually sent to win. If the Iraq incident is temporarily set aside, the American army hasn't won a war since 1945. With the exception of MacArthur's Inchon leap in Korea, it hasn't even won an important incident. The other two Western interventionist forces -- the British and the French -- have done little better. The British can claim one important success -- Malaya in the 1950s -- and the French a few African incidents. Even the chosen strategy of the professional armies - trying to overwhelm all enemies with sheer mass - has failed more often than it has succeeded. And the successes have been so messy that they have created as many problems as they have solved. This failure of the largest, most extensively trained and best-armed military forces in the history of the world should cause the citizenry to pause to reconsider its assumptions about organized violence. For example, it isn't surprising in this context that modern state structures discourage voting citizens from developing a sense that their political responsibilities include a close and dispassionate control of military affairs. The vast majority of citizens, as well as most of their civil servants and cabinet ministers, do not believe that their own armies are relevant to their lives or to the life of their society. They neither feel responsible for the armies their taxes support nor do they hate them. Most people are simply indifferent. But no civilization can afford to turn its back upon the mechanisms of violence. The failure of our armies to deal with the modern wars of small guerrilla forces doesn't mean that military organization in general is outdated. It means that our military organization is inappropriate. The refusal to address the question of force because we don't wish to use it merely leaves us naked before those who may wish to use it against us.
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