Kermit Snelson on Sun, 8 Sep 2002 19:41:14 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Call it Empire: An Exercise in Strategic Culture |
As nettime has recently become somewhat of a showcase for the USA's neoconservative commentariat, from Robert Kagan to John Fonte and now Francis Fukuyama, I thought I'd add the following gem from the _New York Times_'s cultural "critic-at-large", Edward Rothstein. Rothstein's intervention in today's NYT is the single most succinct and blunt statement I've ever seen of this group's central goal: the top-down transformation of the USA's traditionally liberal, civil, commercial, democratic culture into a "conservative" one based on a hierarchical, more-than-somewhat Confucian military ethic, all in preparation for stewardship of a first-ever planetary empire. Or "Empire", as Rothstein capitalizes it in his last sentence. And all this at the expense of what they obviously consider to be the most pliant imperial cannon fodder ever created: we, the people of the United States. Rothstein's piece could hardly be more clear. Kipling's poetic musings concerning "the White Man's burden", he writes, were "misunderstood." Imperialism, he writes, "is now being associated with democratic reform, sometimes to the great satisfaction of its subjects." The key to victory in the current war on terrorism, he writes, is an "American neo-imperialism" that overthrows current Arab "tyrannies" and replaces them with new regimes modeled on that one existing paragon of Middle Eastern democracy: Israel. And the theory that explains all of this counter-intuitive stuff is the counter-intuition-in-chief: the US must destroy (or "challenge", if you prefer Rothstein's euphemism) world liberalism in order to save it. Sort of explains why the EU has recently featured so prominently in the US neoconservatives' gunsights, doesn't it? For those who would doubt the organized nature of the movement to which arts and music critic Rothstein belongs, or its ultimately military purpose, here's a hint. Check out Rothstein's presence, along with Francis Fukuyama, Sam Huntington and Robert Kaplan, on the syllabus for the US Naval Postgraduate School's "Seminar in Comparative Strategic Cultures", hosted as part of "Course NS 4036: Special Topics in National Security Policy." [1] For confirmation of Walter Benjamin's rather well-informed observation that "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war", need we look any further than the Pentagon? Notes: [1] http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Syllabi/ns_4036.html Kermit ====== Cherished Ideas Refracted in History's Lens By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The New York Times September 7, 2002; Page A17 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/arts/07CONN.html What ideas have changed since 9/11? One school of thought says not many: the world can be interpreted pretty much as it was before. The attacks, in this view, were different from earlier examples of terror only in degree, not in kind. They were horrific acts perpetrated by a terrorist organization with limited means and a circumscribed membership. In this view, the major international challenge has been to respond with a careful balance of military force and negotiation. The major domestic challenge has been to increase security while restraining temptations to cast the blame too widely or seek villains too crudely. The major psychological challenge has been to manage grief. And the major intellectual challenge has been to make a sober assessment of the "root causes" of the attacks, to prevent them in the future. Over the past year, though, these familiar views have come to seem increasingly inadequate. They present an eminently rational vision, in which nothing need be disrupted too much: warfare, like grief, will be "managed." The only things required in the long run are more generosity of spirit and empathy in American foreign policy. But the world will not long permit such illusions. In fact, 9/11 did not represent a moment of continuity in which ideas remained unchanged, but marked a decisive tear in the interpretive fabric. Reinterpretation and revision are still taking place. Like other wars, this one seems to divide experience into a before and an after, altering both understanding of the past and prospects for the future. The enemy, after all, is not the narrowly defined Qaeda, but a wellspring of Islamic terrorist organizations, sponsored and embraced and sometimes feared by numerous states in the Arab world, many possessing networks in both Europe and the United States. The battle against these organizations is dangerous and precarious. American society, the apotheosis of Western liberalism, is by definition an opponent of fundamentalist and totalitarian terror. But it is also a society reluctant to grasp the nature of the beast. It is most devoted to procedure and reason, to tolerance and egalitarianism, hoping to find similar values even in its enemies, despite the ever-mounting evidence. More troubling is that this battle, even if infallibly waged, requires that liberal society strain against those very values, constricting tolerance and encouraging suspicion. Fundamentalist terror may not be representative of mainstream Islam, but that still doesn't make it any easier to root it out of mainstream Islamic communities in Western nations. Society is forced to challenge liberal values in the act of defending them. Adding to the tensions, this war demands that American citizens trust authorities even though all their impulses have been trained to distrust authorities. And while waging war requires a belief that you are just, these same critical impulses have tended to encourage a skepticism of that justice. This means that self-scrutiny will be an unavoidable part of any war. But under the force of experience and the need for action, these impulses will be modified in as-yet-untold ways. How could they not be when tolerance and American self-criticism reach their limits? That kind of transformation has already taken place with a notion often invoked by international commentators and American intellectuals, explaining the "root causes" of Al Qaeda. In this view, terrorism is caused by social and economic injustice; it is an expression of political frustration and material desperation. The root cause argument invokes the grievance not to dismiss it, but to give it credence — and suggest unacknowledged guilt. But this notion, which has often been selectively applied to serve political purposes, fails to account for the lure of fundamentalist ideology or for the resentment of modernity that permeates Islamic terror. And poverty, the accumulating evidence suggests, far from causing terrorism, barely even correlates with it. So the empathetic invocations of "root causes" — a reflexive part of post-9/11 rhetoric — have become far more rare, particularly as it has become clear just what sorts of societies and values are championed by terrorism's practitioners. Other concepts and explanations are also changing under the pressure of experience. For in fighting this kind of enemy, the United States is also seeking to transform the tyrannies that support it. The establishment of democratic institutions in the Middle East has become a preoccupation. In Afghanistan, the hope for a Western-style parliament in a country that has never known one seems undiminished. After a decade of dictatorial governance and financial corruption, the Palestinian Authority is being pressured to enact democratic reforms, and internal dissent is becoming more evident. The successful prosecution of America's war may well be inseparable from the attempt to encourage the development of modern democratic societies in a region that has only one. This form of nation building once had another name: imperialism. The word still jangles with jingoistic echoes. And American neo-imperialism may yet turn tragic with frustrations, as Kipling long ago predicted in his misunderstood paean to "the White Man's burden." Yet this idea is bound to change character. After all, instead of exploitation, imperialism is now being associated with democratic reform, sometimes to the great satisfaction of its subjects. Maybe even 19th-century imperialism will be reinterpreted and invoked by example since many non-Western nations developed democratic institutions solely because of imperialist influence. Imperialism's exploitation often had a virtuous flip side; perhaps there is a way, despite Kipling's skepticism, to separate the two? The exercise of this kind of power and influence in this war though, will require not single acts but continuous and continuing decisions, active involvement in the destiny of nations. The United States already possesses political, cultural, economic and military power on a scale unknown in the history of humankind. What will happen if this war is waged successfully and such power grows? America will inspire unjustified hatreds and justified enmity, gratitude and allegiance, disgust and envy; it will need to use the power unilaterally but will also need to forge alliances and defer its use; it will demand obligations but also incur them. Sounds familiar, yet strange. An old idea transformed. Call it Empire. © 2002 The New York Times Company # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net