The Guns of August
When intellectuals and people who have spent their lives in high office or business turn to badness, the result is very often worse than when bad men go about.
It's a human phenomenon one can see everywhere. The is a certain vicious logic to gang behaviour, and organised criminality. Very often, the people involved in it are psychotic sociopaths. Sometimes, however, they are bad people who have made a choice to live by theft, killing, and fear. In order to pursue their vocation, they quickly realise that they must establish and obey order, work with other groups, and that a balance of terror sometimes benefits their chosen group, both in its domestic affairs and in its relationships with others. If they strike at others, they know they must either do so in a very specific way, or all-out--that there can be no 'middle way' of violence.
The sad tale of what happened when 'white-bread' boys, for instance from the CIA, got involved with organised crime types in the mid-twentieth century is illustrative. There are reams of wiretap transcripts and reports of how shocked mafia people were at the psychotic amateurism, self-defeating destructiveness, and sheer lunacy of the plans of people who had never been near a knife fight or who never had their nose broken.
Lunatic assassination schemes, strikes at the heart of governments, and mad plans to carry out coups without thinking of the consequences, characterised a certain strain of macho policymaker. It was accompanied by indifference to the interests of soldiers, and by the creation of state employed killers in special forces some of whom I have met and who have genuinely terrified me.
This behaviour was carried through the twentieth century, and cadres of soldiers and agents were sacrificed, along with moral authority, to the tough-guy schemes of men and women whose mental world was influenced by cheap thrillers and gangster metaphors rather than any sort of worthwhile learning.
The Hobbesian wilderness which those associated with this outlook have created is now upon us. I will not just wave the word 'neoconservative' at you, since neoliberals are of exactly the same cloth, and in many ways there was a great continuity between the Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney years, just as there was between those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
Too much reckless spending and some macho hope that the world would find some undefined way to grow out of it has resulted in a global crisis.
The idea that missiles falling on human beings, and that law should be displaced by violence because the enemy leadership is bad, which properly should have been done away with at Nuremberg, has come back to bite people. It will lead us in the way of Rome, barring a miracle.
The refusal to plan, to adapt, and to challenge great captains of industry and the forces of great wealth and to move away from oil and gas, whilst stepping all over genuinely tough, real men, in the mines and in manufacturing industry because of their habit of defending wages, is going to result in a crisis too.
Preening ourselves that bombing states from fifty thousand feet, choosing one side in a vicious civil war, and carving up countries, is somehow good, has resulted in the Russians and the Chinese going and doing exactly the same thing.
And allowing the professional, managerial and upper clerical classes to run a politics based on finding out what divides them from the vast mass of people and then turning it into some sort of righteous statement of identity has resulted in genuine monetary and social elites co-opting the vast mass of workers with populist nonsense. This is just as Christopher Lasch predicted all those years ago.
I need hardly further add that dressing up some tawdry atheism, mixed with anti-racism, ecologism, and the politics of sexual lifestyle as a fundamental requirement of democratic politics has done three things.
Firstly, it has deprived people of any great reason to restrain themselves or to discipline their children.
Secondly, it has removed resistance to a rapacious culture of consumerism driven by the reckless waste of resources and the atomisation of society.
Thirdly, it has driven people of religion into ghettoes, where people like me will always make a stand if fundamental beliefs are spat at, and prevented alliances of convenience and genuine secular respect, whilst fundamentalist nutters are coddled and allowed to flourish.
So, when the guns of August begin to fire in Georgia, what are we in the West, in our broken, dissolving societies, meant to say?
Don't do as we did in Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Panama, Northern Ireland, or Iraq?
Or adopt our version of society when people are thrown onto railway lines for opposing the breaking of bad laws by thugs produced by an education system that doesn't work?
Or, adopt our trivial silly media values that produce barely restrained racist attacks on Barack Obama, a gleeful celebration of John Edward's personal tragedy, and a craven indifference to the crimes and misdemeanours of the past few years in case bosses, trolls and idiots think you biased?
Or, adopt our economic model and calm down when we are running of an inflated cliff of delusion into an abyss of debt? Oh, and by the way, abandon God, thousand of years of wisdom, and any sense of a distinction between public propriety and private freedom, shout down anyone who disagrees, terminate a third of pregnancies and contemplate killing the old because they cost too much?
Look on at what is happening and reflect. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
When intellectuals and people who have spent their lives in high office or business turn to badness, the result is very often worse than when bad men go about.
It's a human phenomenon one can see everywhere. The is a certain vicious logic to gang behaviour, and organised criminality. Very often, the people involved in it are psychotic sociopaths. Sometimes, however, they are bad people who have made a choice to live by theft, killing, and fear. In order to pursue their vocation, they quickly realise that they must establish and obey order, work with other groups, and that a balance of terror sometimes benefits their chosen group, both in its domestic affairs and in its relationships with others. If they strike at others, they know they must either do so in a very specific way, or all-out--that there can be no 'middle way' of violence.
The sad tale of what happened when 'white-bread' boys, for instance from the CIA, got involved with organised crime types in the mid-twentieth century is illustrative. There are reams of wiretap transcripts and reports of how shocked mafia people were at the psychotic amateurism, self-defeating destructiveness, and sheer lunacy of the plans of people who had never been near a knife fight or who never had their nose broken.
Lunatic assassination schemes, strikes at the heart of governments, and mad plans to carry out coups without thinking of the consequences, characterised a certain strain of macho policymaker. It was accompanied by indifference to the interests of soldiers, and by the creation of state employed killers in special forces some of whom I have met and who have genuinely terrified me.
This behaviour was carried through the twentieth century, and cadres of soldiers and agents were sacrificed, along with moral authority, to the tough-guy schemes of men and women whose mental world was influenced by cheap thrillers and gangster metaphors rather than any sort of worthwhile learning.
The Hobbesian wilderness which those associated with this outlook have created is now upon us. I will not just wave the word 'neoconservative' at you, since neoliberals are of exactly the same cloth, and in many ways there was a great continuity between the Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney years, just as there was between those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
Too much reckless spending and some macho hope that the world would find some undefined way to grow out of it has resulted in a global crisis.
The idea that missiles falling on human beings, and that law should be displaced by violence because the enemy leadership is bad, which properly should have been done away with at Nuremberg, has come back to bite people. It will lead us in the way of Rome, barring a miracle.
The refusal to plan, to adapt, and to challenge great captains of industry and the forces of great wealth and to move away from oil and gas, whilst stepping all over genuinely tough, real men, in the mines and in manufacturing industry because of their habit of defending wages, is going to result in a crisis too.
Preening ourselves that bombing states from fifty thousand feet, choosing one side in a vicious civil war, and carving up countries, is somehow good, has resulted in the Russians and the Chinese going and doing exactly the same thing.
And allowing the professional, managerial and upper clerical classes to run a politics based on finding out what divides them from the vast mass of people and then turning it into some sort of righteous statement of identity has resulted in genuine monetary and social elites co-opting the vast mass of workers with populist nonsense. This is just as Christopher Lasch predicted all those years ago.
I need hardly further add that dressing up some tawdry atheism, mixed with anti-racism, ecologism, and the politics of sexual lifestyle as a fundamental requirement of democratic politics has done three things.
Firstly, it has deprived people of any great reason to restrain themselves or to discipline their children.
Secondly, it has removed resistance to a rapacious culture of consumerism driven by the reckless waste of resources and the atomisation of society.
Thirdly, it has driven people of religion into ghettoes, where people like me will always make a stand if fundamental beliefs are spat at, and prevented alliances of convenience and genuine secular respect, whilst fundamentalist nutters are coddled and allowed to flourish.
So, when the guns of August begin to fire in Georgia, what are we in the West, in our broken, dissolving societies, meant to say?
Don't do as we did in Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Panama, Northern Ireland, or Iraq?
Or adopt our version of society when people are thrown onto railway lines for opposing the breaking of bad laws by thugs produced by an education system that doesn't work?
Or, adopt our trivial silly media values that produce barely restrained racist attacks on Barack Obama, a gleeful celebration of John Edward's personal tragedy, and a craven indifference to the crimes and misdemeanours of the past few years in case bosses, trolls and idiots think you biased?
Or, adopt our economic model and calm down when we are running of an inflated cliff of delusion into an abyss of debt? Oh, and by the way, abandon God, thousand of years of wisdom, and any sense of a distinction between public propriety and private freedom, shout down anyone who disagrees, terminate a third of pregnancies and contemplate killing the old because they cost too much?
Look on at what is happening and reflect. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
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