So Critical Thinking is OK After All, As Long as You Live in Iran
Posted by Kevin Carson on Oct 8, 2009 in Commentary • 5 commentsOn Sunday’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria, neoconservative guest Reuel Marc Gerecht responded to arguments that an attack on Iran would rally the Iranian people behind their government:
“But I think within a… fairly short period of time in Iran, what you would have happen is that all the Iranians would probably say, you know, down with the attack. I mean, that’s just going to be the instinctive reaction. But within a very short period of time—Iranians aren’t simple folk. They’re very sophisticated, and their complaints and criticisms and hostility toward the regime is longstanding, that you’ll start to see in fact questioning of the competence of this regime. Why did it lead to, in fact, a military strike by either the United States or, much more probable, Israel?”
Either Gerecht thinks the Iranian people are a hell of a lot more sophisticated than the American people, or he just doesn’t “get” the patriotism thing.
I mean, it took a majority of the American people several years to decide the Iraq war had been a “mistake,” even when the U.S. government had flat out lied its way into war. On the other hand, Iran is not in fact in violation of the IAEA regime, and public impressions to the contrary stem mainly from the American cable news networks repeating the American government line as straight news.
What do you suppose the odds are that the Iranian people, when their country is suffering the results of military attack, will start blaming the Iranian government for not being subservient enough or showing its belly fast enough to the same global superpower that installed the Shah in power?
Did the American people ever reach a point, when the damage from 9-11 really sunk in, where they blamed the attack on blowback from fifty years of postwar national security policy? Hell, even suggesting such a thing, in the ideological schema of Gerecht and his ilk, would amount to “blaming America first.”
That’s the interesting thing about the neoconservative view of the world, though. The U.S. is the one country that can never be deterred, and can never be allowed to learn from its own experience. The U.S. must never realistically assess the consequences of its own actions and adjust its future course of action accordingly. In the neoconservatives’ little Munich 1938 script, official enemy states are presumed to be self-consciously evil, twirling their moustasches like Snidely Whiplash, and rationally forbearing to commit aggression (albeit with a muttered “Curses! Foiled again!”) in the face of American deterrent power. And when an official enemy’s aggression provokes fully justified American retaliation, they are expected to learn the lesson: “Ah! That happened to me when I committed aggression; I must not do it again.” But to even suggest that American policy elites should be similarly deterred by the possible negative consequences of their actions, or refrain from the aggressive actions that got their tit in the wringer, is “defeatist” if not treasonous. The U.S. must be operationally insane, or our enemies have won.
The idea that Acton’s dictum might apply to the U.S. government, or that it might be a good thing for rival powers to possess a deterrent capability, is outside the realm of acceptable discourse.
The American people rally around their “Commander-in-Chief” in wartime, even—or especially—when the war results from the Commander-in-Chief’s fuckup. To point it out—to say “you fucked up”—would be un-American. Being a real American means never seeing, let alone saying, that the Emperor is naked.
True Americanism, like Orwell’s doublethink, requires deliberate obtuseness—a carefully cultivated inability to draw the most obvious conclusions from self-evident facts. Unfortunately, people like Gerecht never seem to consider the possibility that Iranians might be as stupid—as “patriotic”—as Americans. Ultimately, such insanity is the basis of all government authority, securing the acquiescence of its victims, the people.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
The neo-conservative morons want to have wars with everyone. I think they should be individually encouraged to go to war with Iran, by themselves. It seems idiotic to continue funding undeclared wars against undefined enemies for the apparent purpose of enriching military contractor companies, also known as death merchants. That General Electric and Westinghouse have their talking heads promote war and death is unsurprising. I'm not sure what the rest of these talking heads get out of it.
If I might speculate a bit, I think what they get out of it is an iron-clad sense of being in the right. The neo-con logic boils down to “might makes right,” which is an irresistible viewpoint to those who have the might. Whatever our interests might be, we have the moral obligation to achieve them. Anyone who might disagree will be crushed. And they will deserve it, as any media outlet would be happy to explain. They hate us because of our freedom, which only goes to prove how free we are, and only really evil people hate freedom, which leaves us no choice but to bomb them.
To put it another way, when you’re on the winning team, it sure is easy to think that you earned it (and that those on the losing team likewise earned it). There’s a strong psychological need to feel that something as drastic as military action against another country is justified. So, if the neo-cons can get their agenda (war and more war) enacted, they are guaranteed instant public support for it, and their positions retroactively become far-seeing and wise. The neo-cons suddenly look like people we would like to be our leaders.
The neocons look like leaders to those steeped in the exclusivist and pathological theology/ideology of Christian Zionism, Christian nihilism, and American exceptionalism, and that group includes most Americans, unfortunately.
“An eye for an eye” and related in-group/out group theories and practices may have worked well in primitivce eras when societies were organized at the tribal level. In an age of WMD and world-wide instanteneous communication, such notions are racially suicidal.
The ethic of reciprocity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is the preferred alternative.
A lasting social system without a morality predicated on spiritual realities can no more be maintained than could the solar system without gravity.
Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time’s enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root.
–Edward Young
The irony of it is that so many people in this country with authoritarian personalities and in-group/out-group fixations ("Let's teach 'em a lesson!") had those traits beaten into them as children, and they never stop to consider that their enemies respond to brutalization by becoming similarly authoritarian and xenophobic.
I remember hearing on NPR about some study of the Palestinian suicide bombers on the West Bank, and it turns out they almost universally experienced seeing their fathers humiliated during IDF house-to-house searches. And they were humiliated, coincidentally, in the same way American troops humiliated Iraqis during house-to-house searches in Baghdad. Let's see…. Go into a conservative, patriarchal culture, rope entire neighborhoods off for house-to-house searches, invade a home without warning and scream at women and children as fathers are forced to stand by helplessly and watch. The little boys who witness such things store up those memories for later, you'd better believe.
The Iranian people ARE a hell of a lot more sophisticated than the American people.