An interesting nomination for Leo Strauss mentioning separation of church and state, part 1

 

         In my first response to Peter Minowitz, I stressed Will Altman’s question: why did a theorist who spent his life unraveling the “theological-political predicament” never discuss the liberal solution: the separation of church and state?”  As my last post on Ross Douthat’s and Pope Benedict’s authoritarian Catholic attack on Islam underlines here, freedom of conscience along with the abolition of slavery are foundation points for well-stated modern liberalism (and modern conservatism and radicalism). This is an intensely practical and important public issue, now and for the foreseeable future.  The issue turns  especially on the anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism accompanying American (and Israeli) belligerence toward Arabs.  Obama has made some start in altering this belligerence.  In a great shift, his foreign policy at least recognizes Palestinians and Iranians as human.  But the pressures to wage war and the ideological atmosphere that supports it are present in the words of the  New York Times this week or in those of the think-tank experts who advise war (see here).  The principle underlying religious toleration – that where these differences do not harm others, each person is deserving of respect for their comprehensive or conscientious views rather than  belittling or oppression – is crucial not just to a decent plural democratic regime, but to human survival.

         In interviewing Peter about his book Straussophobia, Scott Horton reiterated this question: why did Strauss never discuss toleration as a principle of liberalism?  In writing to me, Peter himself emphasized the importance of equal freedom of conscience: “A compelling virtue of liberalism, obviously, is that it protects every ‘orientation’ from totalitarian oppression by other orientations.”   His inability for several weeks even to find a mention in Strauss of this theme is striking. For his interview with Scott, Peter finally  did come up with one from 1924, but, as he did not see, Strauss mentioned toleration only to criticize it (see here).

          In the comments on my response to Peter here, AZ (I don’t know AZ and hope he will contact me directly) cautiously found a point in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern in which Strauss appears to back religious diversity as an antidote to conformity:

           “I'm not sure that its right to say that Strauss never refers to separation of church and state at all. There are a few relevant remarks in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, especially on p. 265 (‘only a qualifiedly secularist, that is, a qualifiedly religious, state which respects equally religious and nonreligious people can be counted upon to contain within itself the remedy against the ill of conformism’). But of course most of the thinkers whom Strauss wrote about did not endorse any such separation.”

            But as I will now demonstrate, unsurprisingly in a practitioner of hidden writing, Liberalism Ancient and Modern is, in fact, anti-liberal and signals at least an openness to and perhaps even a hope in nuclear war.  Parallel Peter’s case for the 1924 essay, AZ’s extraction of this sentence about toleration ensuring diversity ignores the context.

            First, however, Strauss chose to reflect mostly on non-liberal writers because he wasn’t a liberal.  The claim that he was just working on these people on the surface or “exoterically” ignores his insights into such writings – for example into Farabi’s account of Plato in National Right and History, ch. 5, here, on how a commenter on an earlier author conveys a hidden message.  The argument that Strauss was only commenting descriptively and that there was no thought or thematic direction in the commentary, no deliberate shaping to convey an esoteric meaning, needs a livelier defense than it has so far been given.  Someone needs to offer, in particular, a case about Plato’s and Strauss’s barely concealed affirmations of philosopher-tyranny or in today’s idiom, commander in chief power (see Gilbert, Introduction, and “Do Philosophers Counsel Tyrants, Constellations, March 2009 here and here). 

             Second, however,  AZ’s citation is particularly valuable.  To elaborate on its significance,  Liberalism Ancient and Modern is a late work (1968).  It is the one work in which Strauss deals explicitly with the theme of liberalism, though its very long central essay is “Notes on Lucretius” and it offers no definition of modern liberalism.  Further, it is from the period when many of Strauss’s defenders, notably Heinrich Meier and Catherine Zuckert, maintain that he had fully “become Strauss.”  The essential changes, they claim, are that a) as a scholar, that he at last  become a student of the Greeks, particularly Plato, and discovered exoteric writing, and b) politically, that he abandoned his 1933 fascism (or perhaps, as I have maintained, his sympathy for the “national revolution” in Germany here) and become a defender of constitutional democracy.  Thus, if Strauss affirmed toleration even briefly and in a limited context, it would make Altman’s question a little less devastating.  It would undergird what Meier and the Zuckerts think is a decisive change.  One can put the theme of a sophisticated defense of Strauss’s politics this way:  yes, he devoted himself to the theological-political problem; he treated it in an authoritarian or fascist vein through 1933.  Nonetheless, in America, he thought some heavily qualified version of freedom of conscience did at least check the ills of conformity, and was thus, in the words of Steven Smith, “the best friend liberal democracy has ever had.”   

              But look at Strauss’s words themselves; the surface often belies an underlying message.  Note  the care in the formulation which almost takes back the seeming affirmation of separation of church and state even in the very sentence AZ cites: “only a qualifiedly secularist, that is, a qualifiedly religious, state which respects equally religious and nonreligious people can be counted upon to contain within itself the remedy against the ill of conformism."  Worse yet, as AZ does not probe, he offers this point merely as a description of Dore Schary’s view, not as an endorsement of it.  He immediately adds “However this may be [this doesn’t sound like an endorsement even from the point of view of preventing conformism], it is the danger caused by radical secularism in its Communist and non-Communist form which provides the incentive for the undertaking of a Protestant-Jewish Colloquium at the University of Chicago School of Theology.”    The organizers had  asked Strauss to write a  review, the occasion for this essay on “Perspectives on the Good Society” which is the last chapter of Liberalism Ancient and Modern.  In a note cited at the end of this post, Will Altman makes several other good points about how Strauss mocks Schary and indicates disagreement with this first, apparently harmless, liberal claim.*

          At least the first and last chapter of a book (1 and 10) and the middle are sometimes supposed to contain clues to  hidden writing, though I will focus here on the 1, 10 and 7^th with a brief mention of the long middle essay on Lucretius.    Strauss primarily emphasizes the dangers of secularism and is at the least wary about the supposed good of separation of church and state.  Recall that Strauss admires Plato who in the Republic and the Laws celebrates a regime in which all the subjects have the same feelings, the same tastes, the same thoughts, whose eyes and ears should see and hear as one.  The conformism of the last men or mass society is one thing; the conformism to “the god” which Plato’s legislator – the philosopher-tyrant – recommends quite another.  The Action and Argument of Plato’s Laws, Strauss’s last book (1973), embroiders this theme. 

             In the “Preface” to Liberalism Ancient and Modern, Strauss also takes an opportunity to endorse only a diversity of states, which need hardly be liberal, and to sneer at the petty diversities of liberalism and communism.  Note that such an endorsement of  diversity need not be tolerant of “enemy” states (Strauss is not tolerant of the USSR).   Strauss does not even mention toleration of religions here - a matter of diversity far more appealing or essential, than say, being an anti-racist about folk cultures.  Nonetheless, since black culture, for instance in jazz and spirituals and paintings is an enormous part of America and of innovations in international culture, one should praise those who looked into these matters and reject Strauss’s bigotry:

             “Conservatives look with greater sympathy than liberals on the particular or particularist or the heterogeneous; at least, they are more willing than liberals to respect and perpetuate a more fundamental diversity than the one ordinarily respected or taken for granted by liberals and even by Communists, that is the diversity regarding language, folk songs, pottery and the like.” (p. vi)

              One may recall Strauss’s friendly critique of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.  Only states are serious and particular when they have an enemy; only war is serious.   The last men are about “entertainment,” and he and Schmitt reject them.  There is no change in Strauss in this sentence (or in this book) from his philosophical and political endorsement of Schmitt on these central points…

              The book is called Liberalism Ancient and Modern.  Why is there no discussion of what modern liberalism is here?  Why is there only a theme, emphasized in the first chapter,  that ancient liberalism is the study of the “greatest books” and the “greatest minds”?  On the face of it, many of the greatest minds are not liberal. In addition,  great minds are rare, Strauss says; one is lucky to find one even in one’s time, and one will never – perhaps Heidegger for Leo or Leo for others is covertly excepted – in a classroom.  Professors of political science and philosophy are at most under-laborers for the great.  But the great minds, he says, do not agree.  These could represent alternatives, as the first chapter insists. Further, these alternatives are not merely Western.  In India or China, great minds exist though, Strauss regrets, he does not read the languages.  That, too, sounds like a liberal point.   One should study a diversity of positions with an open mind as it were, and criticize them – perhaps even from the standpoint of liberalism though, again, Strauss never says what this is.  Note of course that Heidegger and Nietzsche and Plato are not modern liberals.   Nor are Al-Farabi or Maimonides.  Why does Strauss, so careful a writer, neither define modern liberalism (he addresses it in chapter 10 only to disagree with it) nor defend the good of separation of church and state?

              In chapter 10, Strauss does  brings up a version of the view that I argue is central to modern liberalism but only in order to disagree with it sharply.  On my account, a liberal or decently stated political theory – conservative, liberal or radical – is concerned with those economic, political and social institutions which facilitate or at least do not obstruct the pursuit of individuality by each person.  She can pursue whatever course she sees fit and change that course as long as she does not fundamentally harm others. At a certain level of abstraction, this view is that of the great conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott, Hegel, Marx and anarchists.    In contrast, Strauss never speaks of individuality, except in the tenth chapter where he invokes Schary’s view of it.

              “According to Mr. Schary, democracy is not primarily rule of the majority, but recognition of the dignity of the individual, that is of every individual in his individuality.  Only a society in which everyone can be what he is [sic- the idea of individuality stresses becoming] or can develop his unique potentialities is truly free and truly great or excellent.”  Note: truly great or excellent is different from truly free and suggestive of Strauss’s elitism.  “What is true of the individual is true also of the groups of which society consists, “ Strauss continues, following Schary, but without any clear connection to individuality, “and in particular of the religious groups; the freedom and excellence of this country require above all that its citizenry belong to a variety of faiths.  Why this is so appears from a consideration of the ills American society suffers.  Those ills can be reduced to one head: the tendency toward homogeneity or conformity” (p. 262)

              But where Schary thinks America is basically healthy (p. 262), Strauss thinks it is in  crisis (it suffers a paroxysm of weakness or decadence in relation to the U.S.S.R.). And Strauss, if one listens carefully to his argument, does not even endorse Schary’s opposition to conformity.   This is a very general pattern in Strauss’s later books.  His title suggests – or nearly suggests – a view about which a superficial (to put it in his demeaning terms) reader will have preconceptions.  He then says, a little elliptically, something very different.  As I have suggested, Natural Right and History is a book that seems to be about the natural rights of individuals.   But Strauss takes back a powerful remark about the Declaration of Independence in the first sentence in the second sentence.  Such rights, he says, are instruments of America’s power and prosperity.  By p. 118, he offers an esoteric, elliptical defense of the “classical view”: inequality.  That is, natural right for Strauss is  the rule of the stronger or more powerful over the weak.  See here.   Similarly, Persecution and the Art of Writing draws its persuasiveness  from a reader’s preexisting paradigms of persecution.  The Catholic church burned Tycho Brahe at the stake. John Locke had to flee England for Holland.  Truman-McCarthyism was an emerging horror just at that time  in the United States.  Socrates had been put to death by Athens.  Persecution, one thinks on the surface, must be against the left and more rarely, the right.  Actually, the “Right” is not much persecuted in capitalist societies, but rather protected by the state, like Hitler in Weimar Germany; as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth suggests, recall the Munich putsch and Hitler’s nine month sentence in a villa to write Mein Kampf, compared to the sentencing of workers and other leftists in 1919.  In the early 1930s, Nazi sympathizers among teachers, however, could not espouse their views overtly without being fired, and of course, many differences, including those to the Right, were persecuted in the USSR. 

            In Persecution,  Strauss shows us how some philosophers, notably Platonists like himself,  use such writing to fool ordinary people, while having hidden messages, for instance about the “wise,”  authoritarian rule of a philosopher for their “careful”   sympathizers.  But where does Strauss defend science or democratic  (“leftist”) political philosophies against persecution?  One may read that into the title, just as one may read natural rights into Natural Right and History, or a defense of individuality into Liberalism Ancient and Modern.  But that is surface expectation or preconception or shadow.  There is no such defense. This is in innovative and extremely amusing (though also sinister) method of exoteric writing practiced as far as I know only by Strauss himself (It is not Plato’s nor Hobbes’s nor Nietzsche’s nor Farabi’s).  In Persecution, the hidden message may tolerate or require persecution of radicals and liberals (consider the fascism of Mussolini where Gramsci wrote his prison notebooks, let alone the National Revolution in Germany).  

                 In his 1973 book on The Action and Argument of Plato’s Laws, Plato’s and Strauss’s titles suggest an interest in law and, in some sense, the rule of law.  But Plato does not have such an  interest (though Strauss misses the implied critique of the Athenian Stranger who was, after all a Socrates without the integrity to go to his death, who leads a drinking party of wine rather than hemlock, and warns that such parties reveal those who cannot handle drink and would do great harms as leaders; as the dialogue shows, he is himself often in his arguments about laws and tyranny untrustworthy.  Plato expected his students, in this as in other dialogues, to challenge the arguments, to separate good from bad…).  The surface meaning is, once again,  for the careless or easily deceived reader.  In an October 20, 1938 letter to Jacob Klein, intoxicated with the excitement of scholarly discovery, Strauss writes: “Nomoi [Laws]; a book about laws with the antidote [Gegengift] to Nomoi. – Gesammelte Schriften 3:559)  Contrary to a dull reader’s initial expectation, that is also the theme of Strauss’s Action and Argument. 

             In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche has an apt psychological eprigram which Strauss’s exotericism invites: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.”   Those like Michael and Catherine  Zuckert who believe Strauss is just the surface might take this as a warning.  There is also something unkind in Strauss’s joking around about bizarre, in the case of authoritarianism and nuclear war, horrifying messages.  Sympathetic readers, even some students of Strauss,  take the surface, add implications which Strauss does not draw, and ignore these judgments – he is a German Jew, an exile from Hitler, he backed Churchill; he can’t be a fascist or nihilist or extreme anti-modern…Strauss tolerated and even sought misunderstanding by some of his students (it is a good cover to have students bravely shout, over and over, “the best friend liberal democracy has ever had”). 

             As Strauss says in his 1932  “Religioese Lage der Gegenwart,” [the religious situation of the present] following Nietzsche, he wished to stamp out liberal or secular culture as a reflection of the revolution in values brought about by the Jewish prophets. (see “Shadings; they consider me a ‘Nazi’ here – Leo Strauss, December 3, 1933,” here and “response  to Charles Butterworth” here).  Here, once again, are  Strauss’s powerful sentences:

           “The end of this struggle is the complete rejection of tradition neither merely of its answers, nor merely of its questions, but of its possibilities: the pillars on which our tradition rested; prophets and Socrates/Plato have been torn down since Nietzsche.  Nietzsche’s partisanship for the kings and against the prophets, for the sophists and against Socrates – Jesus neither merely no God, nor a swindler, nor a genius, but an idiot.  Rejected are the theorein and “Good-Evil” – Nietzsche, as the last enlightener.”

           “Through Nietzsche, tradition has been shaken at its roots.  It has completely lost its self-evident truth.  We are left in this world without any authority, without any direction.” (Gesammelte Schriften 2:389; trans. Michael Zank; h/t William Altman).”

Strauss continues insistently: “and even so, the Bible: we can no longer assume that the Prophets are right; we must earnestly ask whether the kings are not right.” 

           Not one of the post-World War II American books by Strauss , and least of all Liberalism Ancient and Modern rejects or even inadvertently contradicts these thoughts…Except for his critique of value-freedom (a comparatively slight view in terms of the arguments made to sustain it, so that the fact that Strauss takes it slightingly does not get it in the way of his critique) and that of Schmitt whose Reaction he sharpens, Strauss does not argue well with the views of others (he tailors them to his preconceptions, notably Locke (without the toleration of the Letter concerning Toleration), Mill (no comment on the good of freedom of speech, let alone the rooting out of prejudice i.e. The Subjection of Women), Hegel and Marx.

            In chapter 7 of Liberalism Ancient and Modern, Strauss reproduces the epilogue to Herbert Storing, ed,  The Scientific Study of Politics.  At the conclusion of this essay, he mocks from the Right the complacency of political ‘science, while liberal society vanishes, as he sees it, into the last men:

            “The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic.  This almost willful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis.  No wonder then that the new political science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is abandonment of liberal democracy, to war.” (p. 223).

           This context of  crisis does not make a comforting setting for an endorsement of separation of church and state which seems, for Strauss, to be a part of that crisis.  The theme of the chapter is not how political science fails to be liberal.  He actually stresses: it is.   But in contrast, Strauss highlights over and over again the importance of fighting the Soviet enemy.  In addition,  he makes in clear that he prefers war – and the context, as in the “Restatement” in On Tyranny, nuclear war - to “acquiescence.”  What happened to the argument with political science?  Why in this context does he bring up repeatedly the enemy, the desire for “manly” nuclear engagement, no matter how many die?  Strauss may be the only contemporary political theorist  who discusses once, let alone repeatedly, his preference for likely nuclear  destruction to surrender.  He warns of this even in his memo  to Charles Percy here. It is worth absorbing how odd and disturbing this emphasis is.

            In addition, the dark concluding sentences of the Storing book and chapter 7 of Liberalism: Ancient and Modern give a purchase to understand the gradually unfolded theme of enmity:

            “Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic; it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels.  It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle and colorful.  Nor is it Neronian.  Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns.  It is excused by two facts: it does not know that if fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.” (p. 223)

            The chasm that opens here politically and morally (let us run the risk of nuclear cataclysm, Strauss says blithely, sooner than live among the last men) is preceded by a mocking of political science’s study of small groups, particularly he quips infants; in contrast, he brings up nuclear war and Lenin:

             “Just as classical physics had to be superseded by nuclear physics so that the atomic age could come in via the atomic bomb, the old political science has to be superseded by a sort of nuclear political science so that we may be enabled to cope with the extreme dangers threatening atomic man; the equivalent in political science of the nuclei is probably the most minute events in the smallest groups of humans if not in the life of infants; the small groups in question are certainly not of the kind exemplified by the small group Lenin gathered around himself in Switzerland during World War I.  In making this comparison we are not oblivious of the fact that the nuclear physicists show a greater respect for classical physics than the nuclear political scientists show for classical politics.” (pp. 208-09)

             Strauss sensibly contrasts supposedly value-free political science with Aristotle whose views are dramatically better formulated and more attractive.  In this regard, he makes some important points (compare my Democratic Individuality, ch 1).  But he recurs again and again to this theme.  For ostensibly value-free political science, plainly democratic and liberal though both are unspecified by the proponents and Strauss, the distinction of the US and the Soviet Union is somehow on a continuum, merely quantitative.  In contrast, Strauss again espouses the baleful theme of taking that conflict seriously to the point of nuclear war:

                 “The qualitatively different regimes, or kinds of regimes, and the qualitatively different purposes constituting and legitimating them by revealing themselves as the most important political things, supply the key to the understanding of all political things [i.e. for Strauss, how a regime should be organized for war] and the basis for a reasoned distinction between important and unimportant political things.  The  regimes and their principles pervade their societies throughout  in the sense that there are no recesses of privacy which are simply impervious to that perversion, as is indicated by such expressions, coined by the new political science, as ‘the democratic personality’ [the crisis of democracy emerges in the role of mass culture and the last men, weak and unprepared to fight].  Nevertheless, there are political things which are not affected by the difference of regimes.  In a society which cannot survive without an irrigation system, every regime will have to preserve that system intact.  Every regime must try to preserve itself against subversion by means of force.  There are both technical things and politically neutral things (things which are common to all regimes) which necessarily are the concern of political deliberation without ever being as such politically controversial [the example of how to protect against violent subversion is plainly controversial…].  The preceding remarks are a very rough sketch of the view of political things that was characteristic of the old political science.  According to that view, what is most important for political science is identical with what is most important politically.  To illustrate this by the present day, example, for the old–fashioned political scientists today, the most important concern is the Cold War, or the qualitative difference which amounts to a conflict between liberal democracy and communism.” (pp. 214-15)

                    The last sentence is particularly important.  On the surface, Strauss sounds as if he endorses liberal democracy against communism.  But in fact, he sees that regime, through lack of belligerence and the peace-lovingness of the “last men,” as in crisis. That this idea of Strauss’s did not lead to nuclear war or authoritarianism during the Cold War – though he hoped the US would invade Cuba and supported Nixon who strongly moved in an authoritarian direction against McGovern and the Democrats  – did not mean that Strauss’s influence, his political coterie, were not trying.  The move toward imperial Commander in Chief power by the neo-cons, whose ideological impact derives primarily from Straussians, illustrates the baleful working out of this theme.

                Strauss also sensibly argues that political science often loses itself in the study of quantity and thus “irrelevancy.”  Actually, it might be fairer to say that political science often, as in the democratic peace hypothesis, mischaracterizes the quantities and ends up doing some harm politically (it provides a figleaf for American inimicality to nonwhite democracies, for examplem as I argue here and here).  But Strauss draws a belligerent conclusion; with Schmitt’s  The Concept of the Political, his theme is that of enmity:

                “Yet we cannot forever remain blind to the fact that what claims to be a purely scientific or theoretical enterprise has grave political consequences – consequences which are so little accidental that they appeal for their own sake to the new political scientists: everyone knows what follows from the demonstration, which presupposes the begging of all important questions, that there is only a difference of degree between liberal democracy and Communism, in regard to coercion and freedom.  The Is necessarily leads to an Ought, all sincere protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.” (p. 215)

               Strauss’s point is well-taken,  The particular politics, however, which he covertly recommends, preparation for and willingness to undergo nuclear war as well as increased authoritarianism to do this, oppose decent values: for instance, of seeking peace, of preserving the lives of millions of individuals, of upholding civil liberties like freedom of conscience as well as democracy versus Strauss’s religiously-inspired authoritarianism and cataclysm.

              Strauss decries, however,  not just the purported value-freedom, but the linking of  political science to modern liberalism and democracy.

            “Man is tacitly identified with democratic man.  The new political science puts a premium on observations which can be made with the utmost frequency, and therefore by people of the meanest capacities.  It therefore frequently culminates in observations made by people who are not intelligent about people who are not intelligent.” (p. 222)

Democracy and political science, he says, join in worshipping those of the “meanest capacities.”   His scorn for democracy, the poor and the uneducated – veiled for the careless reader by his indictment of political science – is striking.

                “While the new political science becomes ever less able to see democracy or to hold a mirror to democracy, it ever more reflects the most dangerous proclivities of democracy.  It even strengthens those proclivities.  By teaching in effect the quality of literally all desires [recall Plato’s discussion of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic], it teaches in effect that there is nothing of which a man ought to be ashamed; by destroying the possibility of self-contempt, it destroys with the best of intentions the possibility of self-respect.” (p. 222)

                No, Mr. Strauss, democracy is the fight for the self respect of working people, of those oppressed by racism, sexism and homophobia.  It is the fight for mutual respect by all citizens for one another and self-respect.  Strauss’s contempt for those values, without offering any argument – he offers only the “argument” of his sneering, in the name of the “self-respect” of “the great individual,” is repulsive.  Strauss continues:

           “By tracing the equality of all values, by denying that there are things which are intrinsically high and others which are intrinsically low as well as by denying that there is an essential difference between man and brutes, it unwittingly contributes to the victory of the gutter.” (p. 222)

          Here the last men, the poor, the result of the revolt of the prophets sketched by Nietzsche, is the “victory of the gutter.”  Is this different from Strauss’s Nietzschean outburst in his 1932 Religioese Lage der Gegenwart?  Actually, it is the same condescension.    In any case, there is never in Strauss a single word either of appreciation of or answer to the great defenses of the democratic movements, including those that have fought against anti-semitism (for instance, the Bolsheviks in 1912 made a national campaign in defense of Beilis, a Jew accused of “ritual child murder.”).   The appearance of considering differing philosophies, other points of view, is one of Strauss’s clichés (it is more real in his student Herbert Storing); the actual appreciation of any argument that supports modern and decent politics is absent.  Yes, one may agree with much of his criticism of political science. Strauss sneers at but does not answer or even understand any feature of modern democratic practical argument or theory.  He never gets up to making an argument. 

 *Will Altman sent me an interesting note in response to AZ’s example and comment:

       “Strauss is attacking `Mr. Schary’ (LAM, 264-5) by showing that his determination to respect ‘religious diversity’ is shallow, hypocritical, and un-Biblical. The shallowness in question is that Schary presupposes monotheism; what about polytheism? Since Schary refers to some gods of Egypt as ‘monsters,’ he is being hypocritical. By substituting the Biblical ‘abominations’ for Schary's ‘monsters,’ LS is arguing that tolerance of such things is anti-Biblical. This is the key issue: instead of recognizing that the SOCAS [separation of church and state] is Biblical, indeed that the concept “secular” presupposes the prior existence of the unqualifiedly eternal, LS is intent on showing that only by means of a shallow, hypocritical, and un-Biblical notion of ‘religion’ do we erect a ‘qualifiedly religious’ bulwark against the enforcement of either religious or irreligious conformism. By beginning the crucial sentence with ‘it seems,’ LS withholds his support from the chosen means and certainly does not commit himself to unqualified support for the SOCAS. Of course he ostentatiously attacks Communism; this is his usual move, suggesting as it does support for Liberal Democracy. But by describing the absolute separation of the secular from the religious as ‘qualifiedly secularist, that is qualifiedly religious,’ he undermines the separation even in the process of describing it. In fact, the SOCAS is predicated on an unqualified secularism based on insights that are unqualifiedly religious (John 18:36) but keeps the two apart (Matthew 22:21). Every Platonist knows that Being is separate from Becoming and that the Idea of the Good is outside of the Cave; that's why Strauss isn't one. 

         Listen now to Strauss’s own words at p. 264:

         “Recognition of religious diversity as Mr. Schary understood it, is not merely toleration of religions other than one’s own but respect for them.  The question arises as to how far that respect can be extended.  ‘We who are religiously oriented state that there is God, clearer identification than that is denied us.”  Who are the ‘we’?  If the `we’ are Jews or Christians, Mr. Schary admits too little; if they are religious human beings as such, he admits too much.  The singular `God’ would seem to exclude the possibility of respect for Greek polytheism and still more of the polytheism of the Egyptians who had a `bizarre pantheon of their own…they invented monsters to worship.’  Can one respect a religion which worships monsters or, to use the biblical expression, abominations? Mr. Schary concluded the paragraph with the remark that `all men of decency, self-respect and goodwill are joined in a common brotherhood.’  I take it that he does not deny that men who are not ‘religiously oriented’ may be “men of decency, self-respect and good will’ and that men who lack decency, self-respect and good will and therefore refuse to join the common brotherhood do not for this reason cease to be our brothers.  But under no circumstances can we be obliged to respect abominations, although it may be necessary to tolerate them.” (pp. 264-65)

          Altman’s points about this passage are right, except two which are at least too abbreviated.  I don’t see how Strauss fails to be a Platonist in his rejection of toleration or equal freedom of conscience.  Quite the contrary, Strauss invokes the Athenian Stranger (though as Altman argues splendidly in “A Tale of Two Drinking Parties” and I agree, Plato meant his students to be critical of many of the Stranger’s arguments) and the Stranger’s affirmation of the use of a god by the philosopher-tyrant to put across his laws.        

          More importantly, as I emphasized in the last post here, John Rawls’s notion of a self-standing, overlapping consensus on mutual regard for the comprehensive or conscientious views of others  is the basis for a decent modern regime.  The latter may include religious insights (it may perhaps even flow centrally from decent ones like Martin King’s; Rawls himself had thought of becoming a Protestant minister), but it does not require them.  My argument in Democratic Individuality is that we have learned historically that each of us has an equally sufficient capacity for moral personality to be treated as a free person (to pursue a life which we find fulfilling – one of eudaimonia - or decent or even fail to find happiness or fulfillment, but not harm others).  Slavery, colonialism, the subjection of women, the rule of oligarchs including through parliamentary forms are – and have all historically been shown to be – odious for human beings. This point, too, requires no religious foundation. 

Of Ross Douthat and Amira Hass

 
         The New York Times is auditioning for a “conservative” columnist. It tried William Kristol and recently replaced him with Ross Douthat. Douthat’s October 25 op-ed praises Pope Benedict for militantly striving to unite some Christians – the Episcopalians who he is welcoming and the Catholics – to war against Islam in Europe. This Pope says he is “for Western reason” against this supposedly ignoble group (a billion people or so). When George Bush revived the term “crusade” to explain U.S. war against Afghanistan and soon Iraq (and the yearned for invasion, later reduced to bombing) of Iran, even the Times – a viciously pro-War paper at the time, lying about the size of anti-war demonstrations, moving pro-War advocates like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, given ‘sources” by I. Lewis Libby (Cheney’s assistant) to the front page and pushing sane reporting on Iraq by James Risen and others (competent journalists about the prospect of war) to page A20 – blanched. The Crusades were an ugly period in which the Church of intolerance, burning Jewish teenagers at the stake, sent out the troops to put Muslims and other Christians (the Eastern, non-Roman ones) to the sword and secure wealth. All of this was billed in the Middle Ages as some sort of godly activity. But Muslims (and any one else who knows about the Crusades) might think that President Bush was a crusading bigot. His remark might drive a lot of Arabs and other Muslims to hate the United States and give unnecessary help – through stupidity – to Al-Qaeda. Those who will blow themselves up to harm others are a fairly small number. They are increased, however, if there is a powerful cause with which many sympathize and little is done about it such as the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the Israeli occupation of the territories.  See here.   Knowing facts about either case will make an initially neutral observer weep. Most people however want nothing to do with harming Western innocents by martyring themselves or their children. It is “bad form” for the President to have spoken in this vein, to have aroused justified anger. Even President Bush realized he had been foolish and gave up the term.

           But Pope Benedict has revived Bush’s thought and Douthat praises the Pope. Given the Times’s desire to defend even the irrationality of the government of Israel and thus toleration of Israeli expansion at the expense of Palestinians – the advocacy of greater Israel and the more or less obvious policy of an Israeli government that has illegally “settled” half a million people in the occupied territories – it is what is in common between the Catholic Douthat and the Straussian supporter of Israel, Kristol. But this policy has nothing to do with being a conservative. It is an imperial, authoritarian policy which holds the Palestinians prisoners even during the Gaza attack. It has also has nothing to do with defending the lives and security of ordinary Israelis as American jews increasingly are beginning to see (consider the striking and large J street convention this week).

           Maintream discourse calls reactionaries – authoritarians and imperialists – conservatives. It fails to distinguish between many who opposed Bush-Cheney policies and the leadership of the Republican party and its enablers. Consevatives oppose imperial wars. They are often rightly skeptics about whether any decent values can be enforced at the point of a gun. In the rare case of Nazism and Japanese fascism, the regimes that lost World War II had harmed their own people sufficiently and defeat had been so vast that an occupying America could establish a new democracy in each. For neocon ideologues like Wolfowitz, Kristol, Cheney and Bush, this became a possibility for post-Cold War American policy. They had the big guns. They would bomb others into a new way of life: democracy at gunpoint. They would subdue the Muslims.

            The last Pope John Paul II, to his eternal credit, opposed American aggression in Iraq and spoke of it as representing “a threat to the future of humanity.” He saw that the American way of war was destroying the Middle East.   In our two ways with Iraq, we have poisoned the area with depleted uranium, brought our soldiers back to a future of disease themselves, producing babies without large ears and no arms (similar birth defects occurred in Iraq after the first Gulf War - see John Pilger’s revelatory film “Paying the Price”) and of course, becoming the homeless for the next fifty years. More than in the case of Vietnam where America was still on top economically, the new depression (we still have something near 20% real unemployment) will produce many other homeless people to join them.  Combined with American wars,  global warming and the desertification of land (Steven Chu, Obama’s Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy, warned in his Congressional testimony that California might dry out by 2050, no longer produce agricultural goods) are a threat to the existence of humanity on this planet.  Not to mention the issue of clean water... To mitigate an economic and environmental catastrophe and perhaps to provide an alternative to wars, green jobs, as Obama has begun to enact with  the stimulus, are the future of the American economy and of humanity.  About Iraq and the environment, Pope John Paul was a seer. He was also a conservative.

            In contrast, Pope Benedict seeks to launch a new crusade, to gather up the Catholics and Episcopalians.  Deeply concerned to revive the Church militant, he will even accept married priests as long as they go for a Catholicism of fighting Islam. He is a reactionary. Praising the Pope's racist remark on the “Western way of reason,” Douthat says:

          “But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.”

          “Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.”

          “Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.”

           Note that people being vehemently angry at this Pope’s bigotry coupled with the wars the West (including Israel) is waging in the Middle East, oppressing and murdering Muslims, proves, in Douthat’s mind, that the other is irrational. Try some empathy, Ross. Try remembering – it is a deep point of Jesus’s and the heart of all decency – that every child, Jewish as well as Catholic (there are Palestinian and Lebanese Christians whose children have been sacrificed ) as well as Muslim, is holy. America and Israel and even the U.N. (in the boycott of Iraq which murdered 4500 children a month by U.N. statistics) are willing to sacrifice wantonly large numbers of Arab children compared to Israeli or American or European children.  The calculus of war is not the sacredness of  life.  

          In addition, unsurprisingly in a racist, the Pope’s history is wrong. The supposed reason embodied in Catholicism is belied by the Reconquista (the Catholic reconquest of Southern Europe from the Arabs culminating in 1492). The Arab regime in Cordoba and Granada in Spain had brought civilization to Europe: the number 0 and arabic numerals, the astrolabe with which Columbus sailed the ocean blue (to commit genocide in Hispaniola), tiles, fountains, and romantic poetry. Cordoba had a library of 400,000 books (there were a few hundred in monasteries in Ireland at the time), preserving all the great Greek philosophical and literary works as well as translations of them into Arabic. Thus, the Arabs preserved the heritage of the West (sounds like: "Western reason" but perhaps Douthat is ignorant of this). Science and religion went hand in hand (the discoveries of science revealed the ways of the divine). That, too, is rational compared to, say, the Pope burning Tycho Brahe at the stake or forcing Galileo to recant. Perhaps the greatest innovation of Arab rule was toleration of other "peoples of the Book," Jews and Catholics. Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World beautifully describes that high civilization. In addition, Christian Kings like Alfonso the Wise and Pedro the Cruel copied Arab practices, tolerated Muslims and Jews. But the Pope of the time ruled out such toleration. Columbus was sent from the Alhambra to get gold and murder indigenous people; the Inquisition was launched in Europe. Not Western “reason” but intolerance and the crusades are what came out of the Catholic reconquista. The mirror of words is dangerous. Perhaps the Pope and Mr. Douthat should exhibit more humility.

          Douthat perorates with a denunciation of appeasement (i.e. toleration) and a twisted call with Benedict for war:

          “By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.”

          “There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.”

          “This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.”

          Douthat uses the term liberal mistakenly here. There is nothing liberal or for that matter,  conservative or decent about crusades. They are Western imperialist wars to dominate and plunder. The “appeasers” as he viciously calls them, are those who recognize that most followers of Islam, like those of any other religion, are decent people, who are willing to build a non-aggressive and tolerant society.  Some accomodation of their beliefs - perhaps even some aspects of sharia law, those that do not harm others - might be an aspect.  All hung up on bizarre opposition to contraception and bigotry toward gays and lesbians, this militant Catholic sneers at the harmful religious laws of others.  In the words of a crusader, except perhaps that Douthat deludes himself with the admiring adjective “impressive” – he wants unity for war “against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.” 

          Douthat sets his racism and aggression in the context of European immigration. But Europe, as America, is changing irrevocably. In Europe, however, the immigrants are not Catholics – it is interesting that this Catholic columnist does not notice the cause of Latinos in the U.S. which the Church has often been a leader about – but Muslims. Yet Douthat does not similarly rave about the "dangers" of latin Catholics. He tailors principle to dogma.  

           Douthat gets himself into this reactionary way of thinking by noticing that conscience and spirituality can ground modern decency. It is a way of heading off Satanic secularization (in the words of that Catholic reactionary, Carl Schmitt) or mass society and the last men (Nietzsche, Leo Strauss). Thus, he thinks that Catholicism generates or takes precedence over decency, that decency only comes from his religion and hence what expands his religion must be…

        “Along the way, he’s [the Pope’s] courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.”

          They do not, particularly in this Pope’s version. John Rawls, the great democratic theorist, speaks in Political Liberalism of an “overlapping consensus” on mutual regard among persons which grounds a decent, democratic society. He means that people of comprehensive religious differences must respect others’ views as long as they do not harm others (crusades or aggressions and occupations are intense harms). Such toleration is the center of a meaningful liberal or constitutional-democracy (see Response to Peter Minowitz 1 here). It governs and grounds – and is turn deepened by conscience (consider Martin Luther King or Thich Nat Hanh or the three Dominican nuns, Ardeth Platte, Jackie Hudson, and Carol Gilbert, jailed three years ago for pouring their blood on the cover of a missile silo in Northern Colorado) and faith. Rawls is right.

          Douthat is a Catholic reactionary. It is sort of sublime – or perhaps fitting material for Monty Python - that the Times printed this praise for the Pope’s call for Catholic –  "Western" - imperialism and closing the borders or further oppressing immigrants, even though such belligerence is, for the Times, sometimes, a matter of skepticism. One would have thought David Brooks’ crass belligerence this morning ("The Tenacity Question," October 29) on Afghanistan would be sufficient, that the Times has more than fulfilled its quota of warmongering and lying  (Brooks talks to anonymous sources, and offers hoary Straussian/neocon chestnuts about Churchill and Lincoln and Obama’s allegedly insufficient backbone; one wonders, too, if Brooks, tenacious here only in neo-colonial stupidity  - ever looks in the mirror  – see Glenn Greenwald here), The Times must be searching high and low to find the right reactionary…

        There is a certain style of John Hagee “greater Israel” fanaticism that does not quite meet the Times’s approval. But there is a way of putting these ideas which is within the Times’ op-ed spectrum. William Kristol, whose politics are the same (self-destructive Israeli  conquest coupled with unending American wars), was auditioned for a year as Douthat is now. The commonality is, once again, a leaning toward “greater Israel” and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry. The Times’s spectrum of op-eds ranges from those who rightly worry about escalation of the American occupation in  Afghanistan given its harms to Americans, say Bob Herbert or Nick Kristof, to those who simply crusade against Muslims, like Douthat. See here. Reporting on what really happens to Palestinians is a bridge too far for the Times. No dissident columnist so far can speak in the pages of the Times what appears in, for example, even Haaretz.

           Recently, Amira Hass received a career award for reporting from the International Women’s Media Foundation. An Israeli, Hass has lived for 20 years in Ramallah and Gaza and written accurately (and therefore tragically) about what is happening to Palestinians in the occupied territories. Women op-ed columnists in the Times tend toward the clever like Maureen Dowd or Gail Collins. They often provide a scathing, very funny and apt voice about political matters, but perhaps (the Times still has a lot of patriarchy) not quite a serious one. If the Times were to print some woman or man with the voice and knowledge of Amira Hass, even a few columns would have great force. Just how does one explain 300 children dead in Gaza, 1 Israeli 7 year old murdered by Hamas? Why is it that even the Goldstone report (which does not criticize Israeli occupation of the territories) is not reported on in the Times or taken seriously? Just how does one explain all the Israeli provocations to break the cease fire and when Hamas responds viciously but weakly, how Hamas gets blamed for breaking the cease fire in the American press? Perhaps the explanation is that “Western way of reason” that Pope Benedict refers to, though Catholics historically and even the last Pope, emphasized that self-defense against aggression – and self-defense against murder – are at the core of Catholic and “Western” - a racist term in this context, cf. Edward Said's Orientalism - rationality ( I should note: Michael Walzer was my teacher; inter alia, I write and teach about justice in war; see Democratic Individuality, ch. 1). It is also Gandhi’s view: one resists aggression through nonviolent noncooperation. One must protect the innocent. It seems that by the standards of what is great in Catholicism or just rationality and decency, this Pope and Ross Douthat are reactionaries. They have turned away.

            Hass is an Israeli journalist. She writes in Haaretz. She is the author of a fine book Drinking the Sea at Gaza (Metropolitan Books, 1999). She has suffered for the truth with and among the Palestinians.  It would be nice if all the news “fit to print” could include, once in a while, the words of a reporter (or op-ed columnist) like her. Here are the words of an editorial in the Guardian, October 24, 2009:

                                                 In praise of… Amira Hass

             Only Amira Hass could have received the International Women's Media Foundation lifetime achievement award by saying her life as a journalist had been a failure. By her standards maybe, but then she sets them high. If her aim is to stop successive Israeli governments lying about what they do in the occupied territories, then it is true that the language laundromat, as she once put it, keeps on turning. But make no mistake, the Haaretz columnist fully deserves this award. She is the only Israeli journalist to have lived in and reported from Gaza and Ramallah for much of the last two decades. In describing the effects of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians, she has been pilloried by Israelis and fallen foul of Hamas. Her moral anchor is firmly rooted in painful collective memories. Her mother survived a concentration camp and her father the ghettos of Romania and Ukraine. "What luck my parents are dead," Hass wrote at the height of the Gaza operation in January. Her parents could not stand the noise of Israeli jet fighters flying over the Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, and nor could they have tolerated going about their daily chores in Tel Aviv with the knowledge of what was going on in their name in Gaza: "They knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area." Only a Jew can invert the "never again" logic of the Holocaust that is used to justify Israel's least justifiable actions. It is that very experience, Hass argues, that should teach Israel to behave differently.

Poem: three

                                1

                               

every child ofOran

           and Arlington

 

under satincaps    under shawls and vanished

 

          ashes of an ice

                             bluesky

 

every child of Oran

            and the gray stacks of Mauthausen

 

                     is a gift among strangers

 

for a sister or brother

       breathes back against the cold

                        under the fingers on the pane

 

or turns as the heat vibrates

     vertebrae of the dust

 

                        to walk a path no

 

                        god

                             revokes

  

                               2

 

patro

 

       conason, son of cohen, kahn

       gaylbart, gailbord, gilbert

       epstein, easton

 

                                 (and now) epstein

 

daughters translate beards

                  of shtetls

 

mimic

 

garment

             rings the thin hands of the twofingered

 

             wounded in 1905

 

Nora seller of fancy hats

          leafletsredsubways

 

                       underground of

 

Emanuel

               in the longuniform of New Guinea

                    wraps tiger

                             snakes

 

                                             names

 

the song of Solomon

      over the Vitepsk of Central

 

                                3

 

hear

     in the shadows

         the loquacious

 

candlesflickerthemenorah

             ashless

 

             Yah weh

                      demand proofs

 

                         to emptiness

 

                                    to slit a son’s throat

                                         for a sudden

 

                                    or turn a woman

                                         to pillared

 

I honor slave emancipation

   but no longer worship warrior

                                            salt

 

yet of quiet December evenings

     watch the shadows play along the wall

 

                 and the sway of pine branches

                       under cold wind

 

                                 as the breath of darkness

                                      wounds the warrior

                                                                       light

                                                                     

Political "Science" and American aggressions, part 2

                           

       Ido Oren has written a striking book on the history of political science, Our Enemies and US: America’s Enemies and the Making of Poltical Science (h/t Amentahru Wahlrab for bringing it to my attention and to Jim Farr and Terry Ball whose advice and work play an important role in Oren’s account).   As a serious mathematical political scientist, Oren became troubled by the closeness of political science to empire, or at least to being defined by shifting American enemies.  Not making this distinction sharply – between things that are really objectionable as opposed to remarkable and inconsistent ideological shifts in the light of what might be thought to be dangerous enemies – is a weakness of his book.  Nonetheless, as Oren himself exemplifies,  political scientists from below often resist the bellicose tendencies among the powerful and “privileged” (those at leading universities; funded for group projects by the defense and intelligence establishment, often covertly; cycling  in and out of government as advisors or thinktank “experts”) in the field.  The paradigm of the “democratic peace” and “powerful pacifists” argument is World War I and World War II in which the democracies line up against absolutist Germany (see the previous post here).  The Kaiser in World War I, Hitler in World War II.  Of course the Soviet Union won World War II against Germany (the US and Britain neither took the brunt of Nazi ferocity nor showed up in Europe until the Nazis were fleeing back to Germany and they could race Russia for post-war control there).  See Josef Korbel, Stalin and the defense of Czech democracy here.  But at least these examples make the assertion seem to most readers initially plausible.  

        Oren emphasizes, however, that for prominent pre-World War I political scientists like John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, Germany was, in their racist idiom, a “Teutonic” or “Aryan” democracy. I will give some of his evidence below.  But first,  anyone who knows any German history before World War I will see that R.J. Rummel’s quantification of it as an autocracy is, on his own premises, mistaken.  For instance, the Prussian state had elections for the Reichstag (parliament) in which a Social Democratic party grew rapidly between 1890 and 1914.  Before World War I, Germany was the great test case for worker or socialist influence through parliament and many Marxists like Karl Kautsky came to hope ultimately for the victory of a solely electoral socialism (during World War I, except for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the SPD’s internationalism was temporarily vanquished by obsequiousness in Prussian militarism – comparable to the militarism of leading Democrats in our time).  That the political “science” of the inter-democratic peace hypothesis and David Lake’s “powerful pacifism”  writes off this decisive (for the whole fate of socialism, the Russian Revolution, and the world) experience by giving Prussia a number – the number one autocracy – is ideological rigidity or ignorance.  Second, more than 10% of the German population voted - the criterion for a democracy along with at least two party competition is the Rummel/Dimension of Nations operationalization which generates David Lake’s table (see here).  By Rummel’s and Lake’s standard,  Germany is not only a constitutional monarchy; it is a democracy as much as the United Kingdom (also, famously a monarchy with parliamentary elections).

         Third, as Oren stresses, John W. Burgess, the founder of the first graduate political science program in the United States at Columbia, and Woodrow Wilson particularly admired “Teutonic” or “Aryan” constitutionalism and democracy. Ironically, Wilson shifted as President of the United States to “making the world safe for democracy” against “the Hun.”  But on their thoughts (as opposed to Wilson’s World War I propaganda), World War I pitted democracy against democracy.  

         Burgess studied at Amherst and went to Germany for a Ph.D.  (American universities copied German education as much as English). In his first text book, he defined a nation on a racial basis.   “A population of an ethnic unity, inhabiting a territory of a a geographic unity, is a nation.” (Oren, p. 28).  He spoke of the superiority of the Teutonic peoples, the “Anglo Americans , the Germans and Scandinavians [who] do not yet mingle their blood completely.” (28).  He found American and Germany the most advanced  “Teutonic popular democratic states.” (29).   

       Woodrow Wilson was a political scientist and became the sixth President of the American Political Science Association.  “One should not study," he argued “the ‘savage’ traditions of defeated ‘primitive’ groups, but rather the contributions of the ‘survived fittest,’ primarily the groups comprising the Aryan race.” (Oren, p.  35).  Wilson hated the French Revolution, popular movements and France (he bellowed that the French were not ready for democracy).  All of this anti-democratic hatred stemmed from his disdain for and fear of blacks and other nonwhite peoples.  His evaluation of polities, including France, was racial (he celebrated the “Aryans” at the expense of the “Latins”).  Like later political science, he wanted a safe regime – in the hands of “responsible” experts and bureaucracy – one for which elections are not so important (in the more modern anti-democratic, political “science” refrain, “working class authoritarians” including black folks should be excluded from influencing policy).  

        Wilson had noble ideas about collective security.  Yet he also affirmed the Ku Klux Klan. He wrote against Reconstruction, the one period of poor black and white representation in the South and decent educational policies there until after the Civil Rights movement; in 1919, he showed D.W. Griffiths’ “Birth of a Nation” at the White House after it had been shut down in anti-racist Boston.  In Griffiths' film, the "Christian" Klan,  their white sheets flowing in the breeze,  come riding to the rescue, cut back and forth in montage, a film technique Griffiths invented,  with the panic of the Northern carpetbaggers’ daughter, the blacks about to commit an act of Rassenschaende…only the Nazi film “Jude suess” has a like depravity.  Wilson was also an aggressor in many Caribbean and Central American countries, overthrowing the democracy in Haiti in 1916 and installing a clerk in an American mining company to run Nicaragua in 1913  (the predecessor to the American-sponsored Somoza dictatorship). Wilson was very interested in the German bureaucracy (what he regarded as the central ingredient in acceptable “democracy”) and extolled its “Aryan” character.”  Ignoring for a moment their  grotesque racism, however, Wilson and Burgess had a  more intelligent and knowledgeable view of World War I Germany than its current stereotype in the “democratic peace” or “powerful pacifists” literature.  Germany then was a stable and constitutional democracy (if one with a strong executive in foreign policy). 

          Once one sees this reality, even beyond the enormous weaknesses in David Lake’s list of “democratic” wars, the inter-democratic peace hypothesis is dramatically weakened.  Arguably after World War II, there was a zone of peace encompassing economically advanced oligarchies with parliamentary forms (there are odd cases like American-sponsored oligarchic Greek repression of a Communist led resistance movement from below).  Non-white democracies, however, are often attacked by the United States and America is also the great sustainer of  reactionary dictatorships against their own people (the opposite of a common good or a democracy or Kant’s vision).  Democracy and international law and the rule of law have also been dramatically undermined, throughout Europe, by the Bush-Cheney administration’s torture and kidnapping policies (along with covert cooperation by local intelligence services).  It remains to be seen whether, in the Obama era, the damage done to the rule of law – to democracy as regimes which affirm basic individual rights like habeas corpus – can be repaired (James Bohman rightly stresses this point, see here).   What is decent in democracy and peace arising between democracies is frail.   Thus, a serious democratic peace thesis would need to be qualified sharply – as an aspiration for change, not a fact about existing oligarchies with parliamentary forms, particularly the American.

            In addition, as Oren reveals,  the surprises in the history of  political “science” are greater than this.  No one can intelligibly call the Nazis a democratic regime.  Nonetheless, initially, political scientists were highly favorable to it.  The American Political Science Review, edited by Frederic Ogg of the University of Wisconsin from 1926-49, published a 1931 article by Kate Pinsdorf – a rare article at the time for a woman given the sexism of the profession.  Ogg was quite determined to salvage the Nazis’ reputation even before the Machtergreifung (the Nazi seizure of power).  One wonders how such unique partisanship for a dissident movement from below – did the APSR run an article on the German communist and social-democratic opposition to Hitler at the time? Or (after Ogg's tenure), on SNCC canvassing in the South?, etc. – comports with grave pronouncements about “value-freedom” (Perhaps Ogg did not know about "value-neutrality,"  though what “science” means in any of this might escape a student of the natural sciences or philosophy of science or any one who tries to follow argument…).  Pinsdorf sought, according to Oren,

           “to dispel the ‘contradictory and confused ideas that are current’ about the Nazi Party.  Hitler’s ‘extreme dislike of all Jews’ could be ‘explained’ by the fact that ‘in Vienna he came in contact with the worst representatives of the Jewish race, i.e., Eastern Galician Jews.’  Indeed, “during the past winter the National Socialist writings were directed rather against the Eastern Galician Jews who had entered Germany since 1914 than against the Jews generally.  In this fact, we may detect a tendency toward a revision of the sweeping indictment of all Jews as such.’ Pinsdorf thus indirectly condoned the persecution of Jews, so long as it was limited to the ‘worst’ element among them.” [Oren p. 51]

        As we have seen with Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein (see “They consider me a ‘Nazi’ here – Leo Strauss, December 3, 1933”  here), the stigmatization of Eastern Jews and the hope to assimilate into Germany was characteristic of many middle class Ashkenazi – even though to support a National Revolution was a rarer feature of a small group of  reactionary – Nietzschean - Jewish intellectuals.  Of German origin, Pinsdorf was Brazilian (or upper class, racist Brazilian).

         Oren adds: “Pinsdorf relied exclusively on Nazi sources and dwelled repeatedly on the Nazi movements ‘idealistic enthusiasm and spirit of sacrifice.’”  Oh, that beating up of opponents, oh, those dreams of world conquest, oh, those (still only yearned for) gas chambers…Only Mel Brooks could deal adequately with “science” in relation to such material.

        As I have emphasized, Max Weber was a heroic opponent of anti-semitism here.  But a political “science” influenced by Weber is a post World War II phenomenon.  In addition, Oren makes out Weber to be too much of an opponent of bureaucratic-rational authority.  The latter is but a means. Substantive rationality would have to account for the ends (Weber does not speak explicitly to this), and these may be in fact genocidal rather than in any sense rational (Herbert Marcuse developed this as a theme in "Industrialization and Capitalism" in the New Left Review, March-April 1965).  If one wants to see why some find the claim of a "value free" social science (with regard to ends or what social science research discovers) facile and false, consider the genocide.  Yes, one must eschew prejudice in examining it, but what one discovers is still horror.  Bertolt Brecht once made a joke about a post-World War I mass murderer who stewed his corpses and turned them into fancy potted meat for sale on the black market (it was the inflation, after all).  He had, Brecht said, “German conscientiousness, far-sightedness, efficiency and industry.”  Brecht wondered that Germany did not give him a prize instead of a death sentence.  

        Brecht’s retelling of this dark story prefigures the horrors of the camps for Jews, Slavs, communists, union leaders, Roma, “defective Aryan children,” mental patients and others.  Oren somehow misses this point.  But the practice of formally calculated genocide and the manic cleansing of clothes and stripping the gold from the teeth and recycling every usable object from the corpses to be provided to German civilians during the war captures the ghoulish madness of Nazism, which haunts German to this day, will take ages to heal.  See Poem: Carmelites  here.   (I think America which had slavery and genocide toward indigenous people, inter alia, is at least as troubled).   As Oren does not recognize, the reason that public administration fell into discredit after World War II is not political taboos at looking at Germany; it is a sense by most of us – only a faint sense I am afraid – of the “rational” horror of the genocides.

       Up to 1939,  as Oren relates, praise for Adolf Hitler and more than a whiff of anti-semitism emanates from political science.  In 1934, The American Political Science Review under Ogg celebrated an abridged version of  Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  FDR had read it and saw immediately through the abridgment; privileged Americans - "the malefactors of great wealth" and their abettors hated FDR and admired fascism (the Fox News, Rush Limbaughs and tea-baggers of their day). The APSR leaned toward the latter.  Thus, the review by Karl F. Geiser, a member and for many years chair of the political science at Oberlin, gave little sense of Hitler’s lethal anti-semitism or of his world-conquering aims (a repeat of world war with a different outcome). Geiser wrote that the translator:

         has given a very fair picture of Hitler in all of his ranges; he has included his worst characteristics, among them his inordinate intolerance of the Jews, and also his most enlightened comments on the theory of the state and the nature of government, such as ‘human rights are above state rights’ and ‘the best form of state is that which, with natural sureness of hand, raises the best brains of the community to a position of leadership and predominant influence.’ (Oren, p. 85)

       In the same review, Geiser praised another book which celebrated the Nazis as “’idealists’ engaged in ‘an experiment in national planning’ and which suggested that if ‘Germany should succeed in establishing a new type of social and economic order which may help to overcome the present state of poverty in the midst of plenty, the end might justify the means.’” As Oren has also discovered, Geiser sent Rolf Hochmann, deputy foreign press director of the Nazi Party a letter signed with the Nazi salute – “German greetings” – which Hochmann  forwarded to Rudolf Hess’s office as testimony to the success of Nazi propaganda in America.  Of course, if one writes the regime’s press flak a politically friendly letter, this by itself is suggestive, even if Geiser had warbled “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as a parting flourish  As reported by the APSR in notes on the profession, Geiser retired in Berlin, lecturing at the Hochschule fuer Politik. It did not note the rare distinction Geiser had achieved since Jews and “moderates” were long gone from these centers of "learning" (in 1904 Prussia fired a Social Democratic physics professor; the "rational" bureaucracy had long attempted to enforce a political range from extreme right - though not able to avow Nazis until the Machtergreifung - to middle right.  The Nazis just further developed that “rationality.” (Oren, p. 85)

       Even the famous Carl Friedrich, later author of the post-War Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy condemning Fascisms and Communisms as an ostensibly unique, expansionary phenomenon (and omitting American segregation which was far nearer kin to the Nazis) was once favorable to fascist imperialisms.  In 1928, he sympathized with Mussolini’s desire “to conquer the place which is due her in view of her culture and intellectual attainment.”  Mare Nostrum, including Ethiopia – Carl had at least the normal racism for a rising star in the political “science” of that time.  In the February 1933 issue of the APSR, Oren adds, Friedrich sought to moderated an author's "harsh" verdict on Hitler: “’The book produces a decidedly real impression of the man’s character and personality, although a comparison with other popular leaders would perhaps have led the author to a kinder judgment.’” Just which popular leaders (the newly elected FDR?) does Friedrich have in mind? (Oren, p. 83)

         To his credit, Friedrich recanted about Nazism in 1937.  Unlike Leo Strauss who practiced hidden writing - and whose surface views, by his own account of such writing, are thus not to be taken seriously if repeated 10 times while his esoteric affections are hinted at but once or twice – h/t Will Altman -  and whose political views, except for external public consumption or appearance, may not have changed fundamentally,  Friedrich’s politics in the United States clearly shifted.  Of course, the odd thing about Leo’s affections is that he was a Jew.     

         Oren also specifies the funding of quantitative political studies, which underpin David Lake’s table and “Powerful Pacifists” thesis (see here), by ARPA -  the Advanced Research Projects Agency - in  the Pentagon  and the CIA.  The Pentagon, for example, paid for Rummel’s Dimensionality of Nations Study which contains the “data” on which the democratic peace hypothesis and the tale of “powerful pacifists” are built (see Rummel’s elliptical report of the project at pp. 116-17 of Richard Merritt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Comparing Nations: the Use of Quantitative Data in Cross-National Research).  As Oren puts it, behavioral social science did not intend to seek the truth; it aimed instead to “contribute to winning the Cold War””

         “Launched in 1962 by Harold Guetzkow at Northwestern University (later directed by Rudolph Rummel), the Dimensionality of Nations (DON) project was funded to the tune of $1.2 million, largely from the NSF and ARPA.  The Yale political scientist Bruce Russett received $330,000 from the NSF in 1964 and $353,0000 from ARPA in 1967.”  Though in self-conception “value-free” and under no obligation to spell out the implications of his project for democracy or the common good of citizens, Russett was under contractual obligation (not to say hope for future funding) to spell out its benefits to the Pentagon (Political “science” and leading Democrats have comparable foibles).   But Russett does strive for the most “value free” or obsequious language: “In his reports to ARPA, under the heading DOD [Department of “Defense”] implications, Russett wrote that the program’s aims were to `investigate and test quantitative techniques which can be employed to assess the problem forms of conflict and cooperation among nations.’”    As we can see from Lake’s “powerful pacifist” argument, the “problem forms” do not include aggressions, occupations or torture launched by the United States or its allies.  Self-contradictory protests about value-freedom, however,  do not conceal the advocacy under the bizarre name of “pacifism” of repulsively immoral and illegal projects.

          After the Cold War, Russett has become a leading exponent of the “democratic peace” hypothesis. (Michael Doyle once courageously defended a Kantian thesis during the Cold War in Philosophy and Public Affairs when other international relations specialists would not go near it.)  When realists pointed to 6 American coups against elected governments, however, Russett commendably talked about this in Governing the Sword .  Yet as I note in Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?,

       “Though [Russett’s] criteria for democracy do not require maintenance of a ‘free market,’ he implausibly suggests that, say, an elected Guatemalan regime’s nationalization of the United Fruit Company disqualifies it: ‘The target governments could plausibly be seen [by U.S. policymakers] as unstably democratic with a leader either unwilling or unable to resist radical pressures for reform employing authoritarian methods.’  Now Russett celebrates the American public’s resistance to ‘overt’ wars.  Yet ‘covert’ overturning of parliamentary regimes apparently does not qualify the U.S. government as ‘unstably democratic’ nor does this pattern of belligerence present, for Russett, an anomaly for ‘democratic peace.’  Since even he concludes on a critical note, however, it may simply not have occurred to him to apply his criteria to the American executive:"

       "‘Whatever legal and moral responsibility the U.S. government bears for these acts [covert overthrows of democratically elected regimes] must not obscure the fact that American military units did not fight in an organized fashion in any of these cases.  These were covert and American participation could be denied with varying degrees of plausibility.  The Nicaraguan operation – the most protracted, expensive and bloody [sic –the coup against Sukarno in Indonesia resulted in the slaughter of at least half a million people] of the group – illustrates the point most closely.  These operations were covert, and denied, because as overt activities, support for them in the US political system would have been dubious at best…The constraints could and did prevent an interstate war, but could  not preserve the United States from deep culpability in initiating and sustaining one side in a formally ‘civil war.’'"

          "Like other proponents of ‘democratic peace’ Russett also disregards the deeper pattern of US aggression against ordinary people in the less developed countries.  For example, he might have considered the correlations suggested by Chomsky and Hermann’s table presenting post-World War II US military and police aid to regimes that practice torture.  This evidence would have strengthened his point about democratic peace as a concern of most citizens rather than an often bellicose elite.” (Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy, pp. 10-11).

          Kant’s initial thesis emphasizes the frivolous waste by kings of the lives and subsistence of subjects in the “pleasure party of war.“  It suggests that modern republics would enfranchise and empower citizens and limit such wars.  (Kant’s thesis relies on the sadly erroneous view that modern commerce would provide sufficiently egalitarian conditions to underpin equal liberty - that the rich could not dominate the government and make it an oligarchy with parliamentary forms rather than a common good sustaining democracy).   A Kantian thesis is probably right if there are conditions for genuine democracy.  In Law of Peoples (pp. 46-50), John Rawls gives several conditions for such an ideal democracy, one which would prevent oligarchy, facilitate the influence of ordinary people, and check aggressive American wars.  I offer other such  conditions in Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy, ch. 5, “New Institutions for Peace and Democracy” in Sir Nicholas Kittrie, Sir James R. Mancham and H.E. Rodrigo Carazo Odio, eds., The Future of Peace in the Twenty-First Century, 2002, and “What’s wrong with the democratic peace hypothesis?” here).  When not operationalized to eliminate post-World War II American overthrows of a dozen or so democratically elected nonwhite regimes – all counted as interventions, and hence magically America is somehow not bellicose toward other democracies - there are some important merits in a cautious, well-stated democratic peace hypothesis.   

         In contrast, the political “science” version of this hypothesis found its way into the mouths of Presidents Clinton and Bush.  The latter overthrew the elected government in Haiti (Aristide’s regime had no army; that must be proof of its potential bellicosity…) and supported the unsuccessful 2002 coup against President Chavez of Venezuela.  In not supporting the American influenced coup in Honduras (for instance, the officers were all trained by the School of the Americas, see here), the Obama administration has thus taken a modest step in the direction of honoring nonwhite elected governments.

       As Oren also relates, calling upon the military and academic elite to maintain secretive ties, Russett  enunciates a vision of cooperative war-making at the expense of truth.  The Pentagon and certain prestigious professors should

        “maintain and strengthen our links with the broader society.  One small instance of these links is the contact between scholars and soldiers both at military institutions and at civilian universities. Neither those who expelled ROTC from the universities nor those who in pique, then forbade military officers to attend those universities served their society well. “ (Oren, 170).

Note that the issues are not the same.  Military officers attending serious universities is  a good thing.  It may further thinking – exposure to facts and clashing theories – and is democratic or at least potentially advances democracy.  Knowing the costs, lower officers, ones not consumed with promotion that occurs only through wars and “body-counts,” are often more skeptical than policy-influential academics of military adventures.  See Andrew Bacevich's striking Frontline interview here.   In contrast, training officers for imperial wars (or apologizing for American aggressions and occupations abroad, as ROTC curricula standardly do) is not a good thing.

         Oren also invokes Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard political scientist and Democrat (Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and author of Carter’s 1976 campaign speech on human rights).  As a political “scientist,” Huntington is a less data-constrained reactionary than Russett or Lake, however. Protest against him occurred, among other times, in 1985-86 when “newspaper reports revealed that the CIA had secretly financed two scholarly publications by Harvard political scientists: an article on ‘Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs” – the hatred of democracy from below as in the “democratic distemper” is Huntington’s idée fixe – co-authored by Huntington, and a book on Saudi Arabia authored by Nadav Safran…A resolution condemning Safran’s actions was passed by a vote of 193 to 8 at the 1985 conference of the Middle East Studies Association.”  (Oren, pp. 168-70)  That the American Political Science Association said nothing is notable. 

          Safran had convened a conference at Harvard with many Middle East academics.  When his covert CIA status came out, many were outraged since attending a conference with him might suggest that they, too, were actual or potential CIA recruits.  American secrecy poisons everything it touches.  During the Vietnam War, Hans Morganthau wrote powerfully of the CIA’s secret employment of the Presidents of the National Student Association.  He suggested that Lyndon Johnson’s “pseudo-totalitarianism” drew down on the United States all the opprobrium of totalitarianism, but without any of the benefits – to the leader - of the real thing.  Morganthau stood up for democracy (see Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, ch. 2).

          Huntington  became President of the American Political Science Association at that very time (1986-87).   Given that working for the CIA covertly and being President of the Association did not disturb its executive, no resolution was submitted condemning the government’s or Huntington’s deceit.  Writing in 2003, Oren comments “the norm [against secretly being on the payroll of the U.S. government, an agent not an intellectual], often observed in the breach appears to have evaporated since the end of the Cold War.”  Oren speaks of the caucus for a new political science and movements from below in the association, during the Cold War and after, which are troubled by scientific pretensions linked to apologies for the worst in the American government (Dr. Strangelove seems to generate ever new avatars among policy-experts...).  But Oren could not yet realize that sanity and use of their eyes among CIA people would be heavily penalized during the Bush administration;  to tell the truth about facts on the ground was to make the CIA for Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s Pentagon, “dangerous enemy territory.”  One mercy of the election of Barack Obama is that we have now returned to a more normal CIA-academic- think-tank “expert” corruption.

       In contrast to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association leadership willingly associated itself with torture.  Behavioral psychologists were part of the CIA teams of torturers  and committed war crimes. But torture does not get useful information; it gets only what the torturer wants to hear – see here.   The “psychology” of these “professionals” (professional torturers might be an appropriate term although torture is in fact, the opposite of intelligence gathering) thus differs from the FBI agent Ali Soufan who got important information from Abu Zubaydah – identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -without employing torture (see here).  Only an admirable  revolt from below in the American Psychological Association has limited this degradation.  One might say to oneself as a political scientist: surely we are better than that.  We can feel proud of our discipline’s “healthy mien” (in "Political Theory as a Vocation," Sheldon Wolin once cited this phrase from a  well-known political scientist).

       Recalling the last post here however, the recent aggression of America and Great Britain in Iraq would be listed in David Lake’s chart as the war of two democracies against an autocracy.  Never mind that the US and Britain armed Saddam to the teeth, before the falling out in 1989.  Torture by the United States  – that, too, vanishes in this quantitative table of wars just  as in the Spanish-American War of 1898 where the  US  seized the Philippines and slaughtered large numbers of innocents.  Fortunately, political scientists are more useful for voting studies historically or in becoming pollsters for politicians than in overseeing torture.  We have so far been spared the degradation of the American Psychological Association. And yet some political “scientists” have also made themselves useful in advising counterinsurgency. “Democratic Peace,” “Powerful Pacifists” -  political "science" is not only not value-free, but in questions of ethics, has sometimes provided a cover for government crimes of war and crimes against democracy.

 

A tale of "powerful pacifists": empire and "political science" part 1

        As an offshoot of the “inter-democratic peace hypothesis,” David Lake, a well known political scientist at UCLA and UC San Diego, published “Powerful Pacifists” in the American Political Science Review in March, 1992 here. Lake offers  a “microeconomic” account of the wars waged between absolutist regimes and a putative contrast to the assertion that democracies must be mutually peace seeking.  Following neoclassical economics as a talisman for political “science,” states are re-conceived as “firms” in which absolutists can secure imperial rents to the state itself by attacking other states.  Democracies supposedly receive no such rents.  For this political science, the “military industrial” complex warned of by President Eisenhower coupled with Morgenthau’s  “academic-political complex” to which I have added media and reactionary think tank experts, however behemoth-like in American life,  or “militarism” as Martin King simply and rightly named it as an evil of “my government, the most violent in the world” in his speech breaking with the Vietnam war at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967  - has magically disappeared.

         Democracies, Lake says,  at least do not go to war with one another.  But according to Lake, democracies are also suddenly like the 95 pound weakling who with lifting weights (producing most of the world’s weapons, marketing them to many governments to stir war or occupy others or oppress their own people) becomes muscular on the beach, beats up bullies and wins “the girl.”  Democracies take out absolutists in wars.   In an oxymoronic vein, they are “powerful pacifists.”*  All those weapons in World War II and Vietnam and now are really just directed against bad guys (our leaders could not sometimes be mere voices of the weapons, bad guys ourselves, looking for endless wars to engage in or escalate for the sake of producing – more weapons, more war; consider Condi Rice’s National Security Strategy of the United States in 2003 which asserts that the US will allow no power to gain weapons to rival us as the USSR did  – how exactly are we going to do that? – or the Bush-Cheney claim that outer space is for American to point weapons at others).  Though Lake’s  political science, as he conceives it, purports to be  value-free, he really means: democratic states do not commit aggression against other democracies.  They fight only aggressors.  Democracies are good.  And they don’t seek rents at the expense of their people to boot. 

         In contrast, absolutists – arch-criminal rent-seekers one might say (one has to master the pseudo-economic jargon here) do rob their own people.  Yet Lake thinks he  is being “scientific” and “value-free” even though he thus contradicts the government values enshrined on the surface of his article, the strident advocacy of our regime against theirs.  A neocon speechwriter for Bush like Michael Gerson might be thrilled at the pseudoscientific shine a Lake gives to his words.  Gerson wrote a speech for Bush in India about King and Gandhi, one sadly connected to facilitating India’s production of nuclear weapons vis-à-vis Pakistan (deeds that were the opposite of Bush’s words). Perhaps Obama, who knows about Gandhi and King, might actually like such words; he is thoughtful and moves in a different direction, but even a President who can recognize “dumb wars” like Iraq and worry about Afghanistan may need a rationale for the Imperial way of war  (Of course, no mainstream politician can use the word pacifist even with a muscular adjective without being crucified by the opposition and the media; the Democrats are sometimes critical of the war in Iraq – though prominent ones like Hillary Clinton urged that war when it counted – but they must be “real men,” prepared to escalate the war in Afghanistan.  At least and I must say uniquely,  Obama is worrying about it – see here). 

          Lake’s article provides new clothes to the empire via supposedly value-neutral political science.  But if this is neutrality, what is cheerleading?  If this is not political “science” as the advocacy of American wars, what would be?  This article has since been taken up in several other political science studies, for instance,  Dan Reiter and Alan Stam, “Understanding Victory: Why Political Institutions Matters,” International Security, summer, 2003.  Combined with the democratic peace hypothesis, there  is almost what Imre Lakatos calls a research program here (a follower of Karl Popper who argues, however,  that such programs are very hard to falsify).  Within the discipline, Lake’s thesis  has apparently received little criticism and that mainly on technical grounds.  But aside from political corruption, this is a research program whose implausibilities are on the surface.

        Lake takes political science seriously enough to provide a revealing table at the end of his article about the wars of democracies against absolutism.  The table revealingly puts the democracies in bold letters, the absolutists in lower case.  There are only 30 cases.  But an historian might have trouble with the list.

          The first entry is the “US v.  Mexico in 1846-1848.”  “Remember the Alamo,” burble the powerful pacifists.  But President Polk provoked the conflict and seized a very large part of Mexico.  I am in a part of Colorado that the US did not take, although it seized Southern Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California….It is good to know that this war of aggression and conquest is really somehow the triumph of democracy against absolutism.  Even for a theory of the absence of democratic “rents,” it does seem like quite a lot - the two largest states in the U.S. and several others.   (One might also think of the later interventions in Mexico of that other powerful ‘pacifist’ Woodrow Wilson though of course they did not produce quite as much “rents” for America and the US did not lose a thousand troops.  To be viewed as a war on this "operationalism," a thousand soldiers must die on each side;  the 12 to 15 Ameican overthrows of nonwhite elected governments during and after the Cold War vanish, by unseemly methodological sleight of hand. The US isn’t bellicose toward democracy except Arbenz, Mossadegh, Goulart, Allende, Jagan, Sukarno, Aristide twice, Ortega, Chavez, Lumumba - an assassination in the Congo, etc., etc.).

       As a Congressman, Abraham Lincoln of lllinois nobly opposed aggression against Mexico.  In opening his famous essay on “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau speaks of how a standing government will war unjust wars like the seizure of a large part of Mexico. Thoreau was on to machine-like American expansion and war-making 150 years ago.  It is not a mystery.   A standing government he names it  – that sounds like a “rent-seeking” government.  But Lake’s political science knows nothing of American political discourse or the history of these events.  He relies on some graduate student to have given numbers to “democracies” and “absolutisms” engaged in wars in a study paid for by the Pentagon (more on this in the next post)…

       Defending spying on Americans and torture (worse than rent-seeking, though Cheney is also known for that), Harvey Mansfield, the  reactionary follower at Harvard of Leo Strauss, advocated tyranny or commander in chief power in emergencies on the Wall Street Journal Opinion page in 2006 here.  All manly (no 95 pound weakling), Harvey sniffed: to take the opponents of commander-in-chief power seriously – those who believe in the separation of powers and the separation of church and state (once again never mentioned by Strauss despite his preoccupation with “the theological-political predicament” see here), Mansfield would have to reconsider carefully and “prayerfully” about giving at least some of  that territory back to Mexico (perhaps Harvey forgets the historical details):  "As to the contention that a strong executive prompts a policy of imperialism, I would admit the possibility, and I promise to think carefully and prayerfully about returning Texas to Mexico."  And who could think something like that?  Well, Lincoln (the hero of some of Strauss’s followers but mainly for abolishing habeas corpus in wartime – advancing tyrannical “commander-in- chief power” as Bush and Chency would call it) or Thoreau.  Or someone who worries that the US may destroy itself and the planet through mad wars (we have poisoned Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with depleted uranium in the two Gulf Wars;  many of our soldiers come back with illness from these wars or produce children with unique birth defects; others  go to live on our streets for the next say 50 years; the U.S. trashed international and domestic law (torturing and spying) as Mansfield commends; and we nearly just became - and still run the danger if Obama fails - of becoming a tyranny.  But Harvey says, there is no need  prayerfully to reconsider our imperialism… Manliness (the title of Harvey’s recent book) and thinking sometimes go separate ways. 

           It is startling that an ostensibly  value-free political “science” at least in Lake’s seemingly uncontroversial thesis actually aligns itself sharply with Mansfield and speaks stridently though without self-awareness against Lincoln and Thoreau.

           A second war: the US is a democracy fighting the Communists in Vietnam.  “22.  North Vietnam [the winner] v.  Thailand, South Vietnam, United States,  Kampuchea/Cambodia, Republic of Korea, Australia and Phillipines.”

Many of us in the United States, and the whole world, sympathized with the peasant Vietnamese movement fighting to drive out the enormously armed American aggressor which dropped napalm – the one side that did – on helpless villagers.  In addition, the United States was party to the 1954 Geneva Accords which then became the highest law of the land according to Article 6 section 2 of the American Constitution (“the Supremacy Clause”).  But Eisenhower said: we cannot allow the elections of 1956 to go forward – though they were mandated by those Accords and America is supposedly for democracy – because Ho Chi Minh, leader of the movement against brutal French colonialism (the George Washington of Vietnam) would win. 

           Eisenhower was busy setting up our puppet Ngo Dinh Diem, a  Catholic (the Catholics are a minority in Vietnam) and a tyrant  who had been living in the United States in “South Vietnam.”  But was South Vietnam a legitimate state, Lake might have asked?  Look at  Lake’s phrasing: South Vietnam is a regime made by American imperialism; the Geneva Accords and Eisenhower’s telling phrase vanish.  Is this perhaps a value-free judgment? In Lake’s version, political “science” is but an ornament of American government at its most aggressive, destructive (and increasingly self-destructive) moments. 

      Worse yet, this kind of quantitative political “science” – enchanted with graphs and numbers - also contributes to and provides a fig-leaf for policy advice.  If democracies are strong in conflicts with dictatorships, surely the Vietnam war was not a bad venture.  Surely, the war advice from advisors, Democrat and Republican, from reactionary think-tanks is “scientifically grounded” for Iraq –  though the emptiness and lying are now exposed – and right now in Afghanistan.   See here.  This sort of political “science” does not just follow American politics (though one whistles the themes of American Presidencies here); it reinforces aimless American belligerence.  In such wars, every day of American occupation breeds new enemies.   A large military footprint – “powerful pacifists” – has already led to American economic collapse and will lead, if Obama follows General McChrystal,  to defeat in Afghanistan, strengthening the Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaida, and making ordinary Americans both less safe (or “secure” in the idiom of political science)  and destitute.  To their credit, most political scientists in international relations (sadly, Robert Keohane aside) rightly opposed the Iraq war.  But government funded political "science," entering the policy process through think tank experts, egged it on in the media, reiterating more war, more…This is the dead machine of reactionary policy advice.  This is policy-influential political “science.”

       Yesterday Glenn Greenwald cited a 2004 Rumsfeld report on terrorism done by non-neo-con, non- Straussian officials here.  It made the obvious  point that the American occupation of Afghanistan breeds resistance to us. Recall the American officer in Afghanistan who could speak the local language and asked a farmer if he had seen any foreign troops.  “Yes, you” the farmer replied.  Lake’s political science echoes the ideological confusion of the American soldier (whatever else the Taliban are in Afghanistan, they are the home team).  One doesn’t need rocket science to get this, but only a pseudo-science can perpetuate the soldier’s silly question and deep-six the answer.  In any case, Rumsfeld buried the study.  In reprinting it, Greenwald underlined the reactionary policy claque that Lake’s political “science” at a slightly higher level, reflects and “justifies”:

           “The debate over Afghanistan -- or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating -- is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the "debate" over Iraq.  The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates.  Permanent war-justifier Michael O'Hanlon is regularly featured in ‘news accounts’ as he all but blames Obama for increasing combat deaths due to his failure to escalate the moment the military demanded it.  The New Republic is churning out pro-war screeds.  Every option is on the proverbial table except one:  not fighting the war.  And there's a widening gap between (a) public opinion (which sees Afghanistan as "turning into another Vietnam" and which opposes more troops, with 49% favoring a full or partial withdrawal) and (b) the virtual unanimity of establishment punditry which, as always, is cheerleading for the war.  The only difference is that, with a Democratic President, there seems to be more Democratic and progressive support for this war (though there was, of course, plenty of that for Iraq, too).”

       “The primary rationale for remaining -- and escalating -- in Afghanistan is the same all-purpose justification offered for virtually everything the U.S. has done since 2001:   Terrorism.  Apparently, the way to solve the Terrorist threat is by sending 60,000 more American troops into a Muslim country and committing to at least five more years of war there.  That, so the pro-escalation reasoning goes, will make us safer.”

      Note the role of O’Hanlon of Brookings, the New Republic and many Democrats (even Hillary Clinton) who are, once again and without self insight or self-criticism pro-war.  As Jack Balkin points out for crimes of war including torture, the Democrats confirm and make into a regime.  The bipartisanship of war crimes, one might say.  By extension,  an ever more crazy war making regime, where even borrowing more money from China as a way to make more war, feeding the banks and providing no relief on foreclosures for ordinary people is still the basic course even under Obama.  This  defines American policy as  a slightly more cautious version of the   neoconservatives (Obama does not speak of a “war on terror,” has treated Iran with respect and helped generate protest from below there, etc.; yet he has so far escalated in Afghanistan and stands on a precipice).  This is and has been the American way of war.  This is why all the rest of the world gapes at American militarism in horror, and treats Obama's return to respect for other nations and negotiations, especially his recongition of Palestine and Iran, as a sign of peace. Yet even Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose self-criticism about Iraq I cited here, does not “understand” Obama’s thinking. 

          Obama, however, isn’t foolishly and reflexively pro-escalation given especially the fraud of the Karzai government.  Since  Bush created Karzai's presidency and our guns and Blackwater (now Xe) corporation sustain it, Obama is forcing Karzai into power-sharing with the opposition – a second election - and at least a fig-leaf of legitimacy.   Still Obama goes his own way.  What other President in American history has taken a time out from a self-destructive war – a neo-colonial occupation - for 5 or 6 weeks to consider whether there is a “partner for peace” and some other way to proceed?  He is thinking about whether escalation will doom him as Johnson also doomed himself in Vietnam, destroy his domestic program which is compared to others decent, and cripple his Presidency.  Some Democratic  politicians like Russ Feingold  and mainstream columnists like Bob Herbert are rightly  skeptical.  But the machine is there - the non-cooperating Republicans and the bellicose Lieberman – the neo-con authoritarians - step right up to support him.  This is the bipartisanship of belligerence which will sound the death-knell of his Presidency.  Obama is wary.  The pause in escalated occupation is unique in modern American history.  Not going along with the standard warmongering is even better. But in this context, Lake’s and the “democratic peace hypothesis’s political “science,”  it should be underlined, gives pseudoscientific legitimacy to  that warmongering.  It is a fig-leaf for aggression.

         Lake’s table cites five other wars in which  Israel, a democracy, defeats the ignoble Arab tyrannies. This is one side of the story (a distorted version in various ways), but there is another, motr glaring one which Lake simply avoids.   The first war is “15 Palestine 1948.   Israel v. Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, UAR and Lebanon [despite the name, note the lack of mention of Palestinians].”     “ 22.   The six day war of 1967     Israel v.  Egypt/UAR and Syria.”  25.  “Israeli-Egyptian 1968   Israel v. Egypt.”   “29.  The Yom Kippur War 1973.  Israel v. Egypt/UAR, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.” “30. Israel-Syria (Lebanon) 1982   Israel v. Syria.  “ 

         If we look at the Palestianians dispossessed in the original setting up of Israel – once again, it was the one place where Europe and America would allow the victims of the holocaust to settle - and occupied once again, after the 1967 war, we will feel – I feel as a Jew – very queasy.  What about the recent War in Gaza?  Is that another democratic war on this accounting?  How may one consider the occupier democratic?  Certainly not in terms of its rule in the territories (Gaza has no airport and individuals cannot flee from being shot up without Israeli permission )?   There is now an elected Hamas regime in Gaza divided from the West Bank (expansionists in the government of Israel can play divide and rule between Gaza and the West Bank).  Would Lake call  this a war between democracies (or of a democracy with a transitional democracy as the political science idiom of Snyder and Mansfield, Electing to Fight now is)?   Didn’t Israel, alone among occupiers, prevent civilians from leaving?  The Goldstone Report, based on hearings led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who helped to end apartheid peacefully and is a Zionist (he is on the board of Hebrew University), names Israeli government and Hamas war crimes.  1300 dead, 300 children, the place ravaged, on one side; one seven year old Israeli child and 12 others murdered by Hamas rockets on the other. (See the fear and anger of Michael Oren  here)  The disproportional crimes of Gaza have forced a shift of perspective among many.  

         A largely helpless people has been occupied, driven out, then after 1967 re-colonized  and brutalized.  Thinking of Jews in Europe; I sometimes refer to the Palestinians as the Jews of the occupied territories (some 68 Israeli high school graduates have recently refused to serve in an occupying army and  face jail.).  Unwittingly, Lake sides easily – without noticing the Palestinians – with the reactionary and self-destructive (for ordinary Israelis) state of Israel. 

        Could not political science or at least sound political knowledge motivated by decency help produce some reasonable settlement between Palestine and Israel?  But facing down Israeli reaction – the de facto attempt to create a “greater Israel” and expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories – is a prerequisite of any decent settlement.  See A darkness unto the nations here.   But Obama is a long way ahead of political “science,” even if his efforts have been frustrated (it seems), on this. American Jews wisely overwhelmingly support Obama’s initiative; sadly, in Israel, racism toward Obama is now high among politicians and in the press and approval of Obama stood recently at 4%.   Lake’s political “science” in this respect does not  echo  Imperial politics; given the initiatives of new regime, it trails obsoletely and harmfully behind it.  Better to  read the mainstream newspapers…

       These are 7  doubtful cases out of 30, where the ethics alleged by Lake are the opposite of the truth.  But there are others.  “21.  Second Kashmir war  India  v. Pakistan.”  India occupies mainly Muslim Kashmir (it was supposed to have been the K in  Pakistan) and rules it with great brutality (see here).  Why the first Kashmir war or the three other wars between India and Pakistan are not on the list (it would at least make Lake’s number of cases 33 – and by now it should be clear that he needs every single one…).  There are three more (neo)colonial wars “4.  Anglo-Persian 1856-57  United Kingdom v. Persia” “5. Sino-French    France v. China” and “8. Boxer Rebellion     Japan, United Kingdom, USSR[sic]/Russia, France v. China.”  That the USSR appears on this list 19 years before the Russian Revolution that created it must rely on a method of reporting facts – an emphasis in “empirical” political science – known only to Professor Lake.  

         There are now 11 -  more than one third of his total number of cases.  We might also examine his “number 7,”  the war of 1898 between the United States and Spain. There, the United States aggressed – “Remember the Maine!” was another phony story about the alleged Spanish sinking of an American ship in Havana harbor – and then seized two colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, committing wanton and genocidal slaughter in the last case.  But as we will see in the next post, even World War I proves to be an elusive case on close examination (see also What’s wrong with the democratic-peace hypothesis here). The others are just less obvious.   That Lake has a group of cases that gives any support to a social science of his sort remains to be shown. 

       Now there is an important  truth in Kant’s basic distinction (and in Michael Doyle’s original version during the Cold War of this hypothesis).   Kant aptly contrasted monarchs who frivolously waste the lives of their subjects in “the pleasure party” of war (one might think of “chicken hawks” like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld here) with republics in which citizens can limit such abuse.  Kant mistakenly imagined that commerce would provide a new and peaceful way of ordering the world (one might consider the slave trade, for example, or the American arms trade to wonder about this thesis).  But the core idea is that a republic or a democracy does not require protest from below as in the case of Vietnam or before the Iraq war to attenuate imperial elite purposes.  But without large changes to limit oligarchy  (for instance, those suggested in John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 46-50, or my Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, ch. 5), parliamentary forms do not equate to citizen influence on war.  It would take serious argument about the cases - a long, difficult and doubtful course - rather than the list that for Lake, without discussion, constitutes “empirical” substantiation, to show that American parliamentary regime is closer to a Kantian republic – deterring imperial wars by something other than mass protest from below – rather than a near cousin to the monarchs who engaged, just as frivolously but perhaps less addictively, in “the pleasure party of war."

*Gandhi speaks rightly of the nonviolence of the strong.  He means that one must be prepared to suffer for civil disobedience.  And though one could fight, one must be a soldier like Badshah Khan:  prepared to resist to the death by personal and collective noncooperation, but not to kill. See Badshah Khan: the Martin Luther King of the Pathans here.  Lake and the endorsers of “powerful pacificism” nostrum do not know of this.

Poem: for Andrew Goodman

 

autumnslap

                of leather on the

ran

    off tackle

 

     bur 

         ied

             slashedlipstoCentral

 

                            granite

 

atethrougha 

      you ran

 

andItochestertown

     Home Of Cherryblossoms

                

               SHERIFF

               HURLS AGITATOR 

               thru Woolworth’s

                                          glass

 

                snagsinthehands

 

you went                

did they make you 

       down

                        

      run, Andy

              to mississippi

 

              under flashing lights

                        air buzzed

 

              before they hid you

                             bloss om

 

                         sod den

                                    in the dam?

 

 

 

Must Obama find the "right war"?

 

        Barack Obama has a serious problem. He is not a warmongering person. He opposed the Iraq war. As he said amusingly on Gandhi’s birthday, he would most like to have dinner with Gandhi – though perhaps Gandhi might not eat very much. Because of the limited changes he has so far made away from the darkness of yesterday, he just received the Nobel Peace Prize. As the head of the empire, he has a chance to mark out a different course. But he is the head of a warmongering elite. Worse yet, this elite always gets the war wrong. First, the U.S. plunged into Afghanistan (we are still escalating, even under Obama, after 9 years). Then the U.S. launched the pre-planned, neoconservative enterprise to seize Iraq’s oil and military resources as a way station to conquering Iran. As Frank Rich’s column emphasizes this past Sunday, John McCain was the wrongful cheerleader of this war and other so-called foreign policy “experts” (the think-tank belligerents) pretty much universally joined him. To be an “expert” for the media means to be "tough."  To advocate war. Now he (and Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, joined by the usual suspects like the Kagans and Andrew Cordesmann at Brookings) agitate for more troops in Afghanistan and ever extended war. They cannot quite, with Cheney, get to Iran yet. But Obama must be made to “put up” on war. They are clear that war, or rather many wars or perhaps unending war is the answer...

         Obama campaigned on the issue that Afghanistan was the right war or in his words, not a dumb war. To seem serious on national security – given the military-industrial-media-political-reactionary think tank “expert’ complex - the Democrats had to be tough. They had to substitute the real war –Afghanistan - from which Bush-Cheney had run away from in 2003 and thus produced a weak and failing regime and a quick reemergence of the Taliban – for the phony war in Iraq (from the point of view of its ostensible purposes, particularly disrupting Al-Qaida; the aggression created Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia). The Democrats could call for stopping torture, though not trials to restore the rule of law. They could name the dumbness of the Iraq war – without legally or morally questioning the U.S.’s right to aggress against other countries – so long as they were tough or warmongering enough. Obama is not a warmongering person – the Nobel Peace Prize honors this and he deserves our hope – and yet he is also bound by the enormous and constricting American apparatus of war.

        A month ago, Glenn Greenwald wrote an insightful column on how many politicians and experts agitate for war. He cited Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations and irrational (they all were) advocate of the Iraq War:

        “My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We 'experts' have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we 'perfect' the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”

       Advocacy of war among these people is not so much a tendency as an interest. If you wish to make a hit in the media or be invited to consult for General McChrystal, speak for war. – the military leadership, the war industries, the reactionary corporate mass media sometimes even owned by weapons manufacturers like General Electric all reinforce it. Jimmy Carter, a decent former President and Al Gore and some others like Senator Russ Feingold or representatives Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee are outside this circle, but theirs are, on war, not the standard or loud or “responsible” voices on say CNN or Fox. In addition, any “responsible” President – Obama inherited two wars - needs to spend his time figuring how many wars to pursue at once. If we are broke, we can borrow the money from China. The slightly repentant Leslie Gelb perhaps has an inkling that he has long made Dr. Strangelove look like a sophisticate. More…More war…

          One would think that the Vietnam war, and the reluctance of the American people to engage in similar imperial enterprises at enormous cost to us, in lives and wellbeing, would have taught the elite something. Warmongering politicians and pundits used to indict the democratic intelligence of the people as “the Vietnam syndrome.” Nonetheless, perhaps they could experiment in less nefarious ways of pursuing their own economic interests (as with the bail out of banks and the suffering of people over foreclosures or denial of medical care, it is clear that clashing interests determine government policy and that the majority of ordinary people have little say). Instead, these “experts” have fixated on the talisman of war. They perfumed Iraq. But as Gelb says, they didn’t learn from that. They are still perfuming Afghanistan. 

           But the costs are too great. There is now discontent in the elite – among some leading columnists (Bob Herbert, Frank Rich), Democrats and intellectuals (see Andrew Bacevich here  ). Escalation or more aptly, deeper military involvement in Afghanistan promises no positive results and a lot of harm. America is in financial collapse (official unemployment has just increased to nearly 10%; real unemployment - those who have given up looking for work or are working part time but would take up a fulltime job if offered - is probably around 18 or 19%; in the Great Depression, it was 30%). The Middle East, the Asian economies and Europe are all thinking of moving oil exchange off the dollar and to other currencies. The end of the era of American economic dominance in the world is visible. In the throes of collapse, the military and think tanks foreign policy “experts” trumpet war to Obama. But Afghanistan is not a smart war.

         John Kerry’s Senate Committee held revealing hearings last week (publicized only by Greg Kaufman in the Nation here, not in the mainstream press). Robert Grenier and Dr. Marc Sageman--both of whom served in the CIA, as station chief in Pakistan and on the Afghan Task Force - testified against escalation. They pointed out that the disparate and warring tribes of Afghanistan are united against the occupation.  This truth has long available.  When asked by an American soldier who happened to speak the local language whether he had seen any foreign soldiers, an Afghani farmer looked at him and replied: "Yes, you." 

          “[Senator Russ] Feingold said that polls now show the majority of Afghans want all foreign troops to leave within two years, and only 18 percent support an increase in foreign troops. He wanted to know ‘what impact these public attitudes [are] likely to have on the viability of any plan that involves a massive, open-ended foreign military presence.’"

          ‘There is a high degree of xenophobia that is endemic among the Afghans,’ Grenier said, ‘and they do tend to coalesce against what is perceived as an outsider. The best that we can hope for is not a permanent elimination of safe haven, or the opportunity for safe haven for Al Qaeda, but rather the elimination of uncontested safe haven.... That needs to be a sustainable effort. What we are currently doing, I believe, is not sustainable either by us or by the Afghans.’"

Afghanis famously have but tribal loyalties.  It must be rare for an official representing American belligerence to find an opporunity to denounce the "xenophobia" of others (h/t Amartya Sen). Otherwise, he has an excellent point.  Continuing occupation by the US and NATO will strengthen the Taliban.  If the US seeks to produce increased revolt and instability in Afghanistan, Obama will increase the number of troops.

       In contrast, the U.S. could make an effort to provide economic opportunities for ordinary     Afghani citizens and break off elements from the Taliban – say, those opposed to American occupation but uncommitted to Taliban violence against women - and potential recruits:
"’I think many of them are young men who could be won over,’" said Grenier, "’and who would just as soon take a paycheck from the local governor and serve in his militia as they would serve with the Taliban. Or if you had more constructive engagements that benefited them, they would pursue those instead.’"

           "’We make a mistake labeling everyone that is not for us with the same name,’ said Sageman. ’On the ground what you have is a collection of a lot of young people who resist central government. Those [people] really are not ideologically motivated. I don't think we can cut a deal with Mullah Omar, but we certainly can take most of his followers away from him.’"

           This seems a sensible idea. Such a policy would go far to develop conditions for a comparatively decent, if not democratic regime (the Karzai regime is illegitimate and even fraudulent, as the recent "elections" show, a mere creature of American and allied NATO and war lord guns). As the example of Sageman and Grenier (not covered in the mainstream press) reveals, there are many intelligent people in the US apparatus. The problem is that the military-indsturial-media-think tank “expert –reactionary politician complex usually overwhelms them, even in the absence of the madness of Cheney. But the US has now reached a desperate pass. There is no money for more war. Both current aggressions and occupations are losing steam within the country and support among the American people. All the expert and media noise cannot prevent the ultimate collapse of these policies. Obama is a smart and decent man. He would like to do something  more intelligent. There is a review of the policy. Some voices, including these two American experts are being allowed to speak up publically (at least to the Senate).

         Further, as Sageman and Grenier warn, if the U.S. escalates in Afghanistan, it will persuade millions in Pakistan – more accurately, confirm the conviction of many in Pakistan - that the U.S. is at war with Muslims. Even the genuine steps that Obama has taken – to recognize the dignity and interests of the Iranians and the Palestinians – will be eroded and washed away. This is not a path to tread.

          Yet even if Obama deescalates – reverses course - in Afghanistan, there are two deeper questions in assessing the bizarre warmongering in the American elite and of the American Presidency as an institution. They underline the difficulties Obama faces in living up to his promise, a promise honored by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. First, how can the threat of war between Pakistan and India – both nuclear powers – be diminished? How can Pakistan become less an ally, at least through the ISI (the intelligence services) of Al-Qaida? As Vice President Biden and others are realizing, in the current White House debate, Pakistan is a far deeper danger to the United States than Afghanistan. (Since Biden talks almost daily with Obama about foreign policy, it is likely that some of his reservations express Obama’s). The Pakistani Taliban, with links in ihe intelligence service (the ISI) has become a strong political force. Our military presence in Afghanistan nurtures and escalates its influence. Worse yet, the CIA’s new toy, the drone missile controlled from Langley, West Viginia, has been used by Obama to kill Al-Qaida "suspects" in Pakistan – so we are told by an “intelligence” apparatus far distant and with few sources - and their families and civilians. Murder a mother or a child and see how many enemies you can produce. The words “collateral damage” are a threadbare ideological veil. Further, these enemies have justification in striking at the United States (not at innocents, but at the American government). Everyone who hears the story – and is not under the influence of anti-Arab racism - will be appalled by the United States, whose policy combines murder and cowardice (striking at long distance at those who cannot defend themselves). Yet murderous and counterproductive technology whispers into the ear of Presidents…Reliance on drones may be the worst – and morally hardest to understand - single policy measure so far adopted by Obama.

         But the second issue is still more disquieting, one not even discussed yet seriously in the American media or perhaps even the Obama war cabinet. What is the pivot of the hostility between Pakistan and India that might lead to war and even possibly nuclear war? Kashmir.

           Moazzem Begg, an Englishman from Pakistan who had gone to fight in Kashmir and ended up in Bagram and Guantanamo – he was released in 2005 and is under no restrictions, even with regard to travel in England - wrote a very good account of being tortured by the United States called Enemy Combatant.  Perhaps those who tortured him could pay attention to his story.    Since Begg speaks English, the American intelligence took his testimony on the murder by American soldiers – kicking him 150 times in the legs till his legs were destroyed and he had a heart attack - of Mr. Dilawar, the Afghani 22 year old taxi-driver picked up near Bagram. One has just to listen to Begg who got involved in Al-Qaida training to fight in Kashmir to realize that this issue – and not the US occupation of Afghanistan – is the one that the US will have to mitigate (along with Palestine) in order to avoid nuclear confrontations or extinction in this century, to diminish Al-Qaida, and to achieve a decent peace in the Middle East.

        But the U.S. had no vehicle to make war over Kashmir, no pretext to go to war with the world’s largest democracy, India, or with Pakistan. The U.S. of course provide military aid to both.  Pakistan is one of the biggest purchasers of American weapons (the US dominates world research and production of big weapons, and it is the main productive – if one can refer to destruction as production as our conventional economics does – activity left more or less inside the United States). But since partition in 1947, 4 wars have occurred between India and Pakistan (see here for the story of nonviolent efforts by Badshah Khan and Gandhi to preserve India against partition). The threat of renewed war between these powers is, for anyone who knows about the situation, always a potential. But American foreign policy “experts” and mainstream pundits are silent about it (can the Kagans spell Kashmir?). It takes Arundhati Roy, the visionary Indian writer, to drive home the seriousness of this issue – as potentially deadly as Palestine and the Israel-Iran conflict – as a threat of war (see below).

          Kashmir is the Muslim province with the initial K in the idea of Pakistan. India seized it in 1947 and holds it by force. Since an uprising in 1990, the Indian government has murdered some 70,000 Kashmiris. In addition, India has the biggest in the world and most brutal occupying army in Kashmir, half a million soldiers (one for every 20 civilians). This year the people rose up nonviolently. Street sellers chanted “Azadi! Azadi!” – freedom! freedom! It was as big and important a democratic uprising as in Iran. Yet while Andrew Sullivan determinedly made available the voices of the Green Revolution and the mainstream press covered it, there has been a sad and uniform silence, in America, about Kashmir.

           India carried out a campaign of arrests and detentions, including for two days Arundhati Roy who was then vacationing in Sriganar. Jailed for speaking against the harms of a large government sponsored dam in India and being an international leader of the movement for democracy and against American wars, Roy is obviously, though not Muslim, a “danger.” Dissent – a majority of one, as Thoreau said, who casts her whole weight against a grave injustice – is indeed a threat to the Indian government.

          How much anger does the brutality of this regime in Kashmir generate? How many are the stories of street sellers, who chanted “Azadi” or were thought to have chanted  “Azadi!” or their families killed by the soldiers exist? How many knew them,  knew of them?  Careless of nonwhite and particularly Muslim lives, the American establishment has barely a glimmer of the danger. The President’s war cabinet is having 5 meetings. The Times ran a big story yesterday about the agreement of Hilary Clinton and Robert Gates (they are comparatively sober “moderate” escalators, between McChrystal and Biden). The “right” war? They aren’t even focused on the right place.

           Obama could deescalate in Afghantistan, call off the drones, give civilian and not so much military aid in Pakistan. Yet angry and disaffected Muslims would still want to fight oppression in Kashmir and join with Pakistani intelligence, and even Al-Qaida to do it. Unattended internationally, Kashmir could lead not only to war but to nuclear war between Pakistan and India – probably the most likely scenario for such a war in the next quarter-century if America does not launch one itself (as Bush and Cheney thought of doing with nuclear “bunker busters” in Iran; listen to Rush Limbaugh, think of the racist "tea-bagger" demonstration in Washington,  conjure a future Romney or a refurbished Palin or the next military-industrial-fundamentalist creation….). Or it could lead to the renewal of Al-Qaida. 

          Pakistanis who want to fight Indian aggression and occupation in Kashmir do so in a just cause. Why does the United States, out of its great power interests with India, zeal for other wars and ignorance, give the whole territory of self-defense about Kashmir morally to Al-Qaida? Does this not fundamentally bolster this organization which  Obama seeks to disrupt? Al-Qaida murders innocents. It is as casual about Arab civilians in Iraq as about Americans. Without American belligerence and in this case, war-inspired ignorance, it would lose any following among Muslims. America has cause to become aware of and alter – at least, to make tolerant and decent- the regime in Kashmir.

         The United States (and the world) also have interests in strengthening Indian democracy. The Indian government, as Tom Hartmann pointed out last week, has given an electrical grid and miles of paved highways to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Indian democracy and not America has some plausible approach to diminishing the threat of the Taliban and – what is not the same thing – Al-Qaida (intelligence suggests that there remain 100 members of Al-Qaida in Afghanistan – Bin Laden has long been in Pakistan…). But India in Kashmir is a different story. As with Israel, strengthening Indian democracy means ending the respective occupations. International efforts are crucial. Producing a decent solution in Kashmir (something far removed, as in the case of the Palestinians from justice, but a long way up from here) is an unobserved key to the security of ordinary Americans in the 21st century.

         Kashmir is thus the right war. But America cannot fight it. Instead, Obama needs to have a strategy over a long period to end India’s oppressiveness, to produce a solution Kashmiris can live with. Some Americans like Steve Coll are concerned and knowledgeable about this issue. But think tank foreign policy “experts” are still attached to throwing bombs and soldiers at the last war, some other war, any war... 

        These “experts” are, as they have always been, followers of a policy made by someone else – they are the camp-followers of the powerful - and under the illusion that an American President can, through violent interventions, solve political problems. But as is observable in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, American Presidents cannot, by war, solve the problem. In fact, in those three cases, American leaders have created and exacerbated the problem. An American President pursuing policies of aid to civilians and deescalating war might help the people of Iraq or Afghanistan begin to solve their problems. Like the Nobel Peace Prize committee, we might wish Obama to be Obama. Perhaps only a strong anti-war movement, which grasps the difficulty of the Pakistan/India conflict and the centrality of Kashmir, can make a difference. But even the anti-war movement is now focused on Afghanistan (it is hard to take on even current American madness, let alone think out how to make American leadership sane). Tragically, in their bellowing for any war, in their failure even to take in so dangerous a center for conflict as Kashmir, the disconnection of our foreign policy “experts” and establishment stands out.

        Below is Arundhati’s Roy’s article wondering about the fate of ordinary parliamentary democracies, given the rule of money – she speaks as an Indian democrat - and what has happened in Kashmir.  As a writer, she explores what words can convey the truth about the India. For us, her article holds up the mirror of Indian democracy to America. The issue I raise in this post about the belligerence and frailty of the American foreign policy establishment- that there is "no right war"  even under Obama - has similar concerns.

        If ordinary Muslim and decent Hindus act against Indian occupation along the lines of the recent resistance, this and only this will lead to fundamental change. In this context, the example of Badshah Khan, the nonviolent Afghani ally of Gandhi, comes to mind. See Badshah Khan: the Martin Luther King of the Pathans here. Renewed Pakistani war with India carries the threat of mutual destruction. The best way to resist Indian occupation is not war or terror. For ordinary people, for democracy and for the world, the best way is mass civil disobedience.

                                           What Have We Done to Democracy?

Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir

                                                                                                            by Arundhati Roy
 

        While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are. So, is there life after democracy?

         Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"  Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

           The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?

        Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

                                                          A Clerk of Resistance

        As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

       Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression "through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

        Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and "privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").

         This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.

       Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, "Don't you believe in progress?" To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, "Do you have an alternative development model?" To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, "You're against the market." And who except a cretin could be against markets?

        To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.
Two decades of "Progress" in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

         The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

                                                      A New Cold War in Kashmir

       Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.
The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared," women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?

          How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

        In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of "Azadi! Azadi!" (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting "Azadi! Azadi!" Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted "Azadi! Azadi!" The protests went on for several days.

         The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

         Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

         Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.

         None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

         No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

        Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

        The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri," several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

         The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

            In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

            There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."
Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

                                                            Is Democracy Melting?

        Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.
The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

        While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan... it's a long list.)

         The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor, and screenplay writer in India. Her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Fields Notes on Democracy, is a collection of recent essays. A tenth anniversary edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, was recently released. She is also the author of numerous nonfiction titles, including An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.