This is quite an interesting article (August 26, 2002, “Military Analyst's Terror Warning Fell on Deaf Ears”, by Bill Gertz, The Washington Times). The story it tells parallels in considerable measure what happened to POLOB at CICV in Saigon, culminating in the Westmoreland vs. CBS trial -- with Kie Fallis somewhat in the role of Sam Adams. But my interpretation is far more cynical than that of Bill Gertz (not the NYC subway vigilante, I trust). In my view, the only real reason The Washington Times ran a story on this subject is because it constitutes good black propaganda against the conspiracy theories of 9/11. Intelligence failures are actually intelligence failures. Intelligence failures occur because of human fallibility. Intelligent people can sometimes be stupid, you know, hence intelligence failures, uh, intelligence fails. There are no reasons why intelligent people are sometimes stupid, reasons like their natural inclination to ignore phenomenologies that conflict with their fundamental notions about the nature of reality being made oh-so-much easier when there is policy pressure from above to so ignore. But then some analysts simply never learn that “the policy ain't the policy”, that the actual job ain't the real job, and so on. Just as some 60 million people died in WWII because Hitler flunked out of art school (have you noticed that a whole industry of Jewish anti-avant-garde deconstructionist art criticism has developed in the last ten years around this theme: not just the Nazification of art, as before -- the major books on this having been written in the 60s and early 70s -- but now the notion that the whole of avant-garde post-Renaissance plastic art was primarily political in nature, largely anti-Semitic, and that Hitler actually learned his anti-Semitism from the avant-garde artists who ultimately rejected him and his insufficiently avant-garde art! but I will admit that Kandinsky’s interest in synaesthesia could be regarded a Cabalistic attack on the Rabbinate), 3000 people died on 9/11 because of a lovers’ spat between intelligence analysts (good argument against having women in the DIA: just imagine how confusing military terminology would become if you had to share a foxhole with a female grunt and argue over who works the butterfly trigger on the M-60 and who gets to feed in the belt!). Just as it was impossible that the U.S. eagerly awaited the 1968 Viet Cong Tet Offensive and was deeply engaged in clandestine negotiations with the North for coalition government in the South, as some on the GVN Joint General Staff believed (and that the Chinese decision to “stop isolating itself” -- ha!ha!ha! -- was deeply involved with all this), so it is impossible that the U.S. eagerly awaited something like the 9/11 attacks and was… The truth is: the reality is always beyond imagination and utterly impossible: it simply couldn’t happen.
The fact of the matter is that the conscious component of the human psyche is not in control of events -- never has been, never can be. Either humanity works with its own unconscious or it gets crushed. Bare bones of the current global situation -- unconscious and conscious -- evolved in the following fashion (presenting lineally a configuration actually built upon many synchronisities):
- In separating church and state during the Reformation, integration of the Western psyche was decisively severed. Two psychic processes emerged as compensatory mechanisms for the split-off state: Troubadourian romantic love as unrequited simulation of psychic fusion; nation-state as personification of the split-off ego-complex set opposed to the “dark continent” of the unconscious with its anarchic, animistic, tribal principle “each against all”.
- In its split-off state, the Western psyche produced Cartesian-Newtonian science as a strategy for subduing its own unconscious personified and projected as raw, violent, untamable nature. Science would “cook” the unconscious as nature, so that man could realize perfect order through progress in linear-time: soft utopianism.
- Since the unconscious of Western man was not integrated, it was automatically projected. Integration under projection does not take place intrapsychically, but in infantile, regressed form played out in the physical world. Bogus, simulated psychic integration transformed Flatland into Sphereland and the Age of Exploration began: Western man explored his fragmented psyche in projection, all things he encountered there being experienced and treated as autochthonous figures in his own unconscious, dragons to be slain or enslaved -- for if there were no slaying, no enslavement, the wild, untamable, unintegrated unconscious would simply overwhelm the fragile, split-off ego-complex. Hence, genocide in the Americas, enslavement of Africa, subduing of Asia with opiates. West-more-land! for the ego-complex (the West) to conquer in Sphereland (the unconscious).
- Exploration of the unconscious under projection, once elaborated, becomes the psychological transference. Thus, was the paternalism of colonialism born: red man, black man, yellow man as child of white man (who has the burden of paternity -- which, by Christian witness, must be discharged).
- The psychic syzygy of colonial incest went into perilune during the 1850s with completion of the translation into Western languages of The Great Books of the East, products of an integrated psyche, a psyche not characterized by split-off fragments. Contents of these “black books” -- maps of the unknowable unconscious, unknowable because integrated unconscious cannot be explored under projection by split-off fragments like the ego-complex -- were assimilated by creative European minds, who, armed with new perspectives, began making discoveries about the constitution of Sphereland: m-valued functions, non-Euclidian geometry, transfinite numbers, photo-electric effect, quantum of action, spacetime relativity. Wagner's “Tristan chords” were written in the 1850s to signify death of the classical diatonic system and associated “functionality” of unrequited simulation of psychic fusion in an agony of hot-housed romantic chromaticisms, modulation to modernity being accompanied by nostalgic, impressionistic, modal figurations -- the old five-note Greek modal scales being the closest thing in Western experience to pentatonic Asian psychic integration.
- Battles of the Titans began in higher, pure mathematics with the Cantorian transfinites during the 1870s in concert with the Impressionism of “Cantor dust” and culminated with collective hysteria over the Axiom of Choice in the era of Post-Impressionism -- rejection of the Axiom of Choice, rejection of Impressionism, being rejection of Asian identity-transparency rigorously defined in Cantor's “diagonal proof ” (a slant-eyed Asian ignominy itself!) of a denumerable transfinite set: any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets. The hysteria that settled upon the Axiom of Choice had its origins in the “yellow peril” hysteria of the period, yet another projection of the Western ego-complex, as assimilation of contents of The Great Books of the East (contents of integrated unconscious, that is) was experienced as a jaunessement, a yellowing, of the European mind. Collective rejection of the Axiom of Choice, of the impressionistic Greek modes, was declaration of world war between split-off ego-complex and unintegrated unconscious.
- World War One did not purge the Western psyche of its transference dynamics, just carried those dynamics from the anal stage (trench warfare) to the genital stage as physicists became absolutely transfixed by the “slit experiment” and its bewildering illogicality. In 1925, contemplating import of the slit experiment while literally practicing three-way Tantric sexual yoga with two of his paramours, teenaged sisters, Erwin Schrödinger came up with his famous quantum wave equation, the wave-function of which rigorously codified the physics of m-logically-valued Asian identity-transparency: Hananim in Korean. This was even more staggering to the Western ego-complex than was Cantor's “Continuum Hypothesis” (a truly threatening notion of integrated “Unconscious as Infinite Sets” -- the title of a book by neuropsychiatrist Ignacio Matte-Blanco). The only way Asian identity could be removed from Schrödinger's wave-function was by skirting the fundamentals with probability amplitudes, those fundamentals later to be called “hidden variables”, quantum mechanics having then become an enfolded “theater beneath the skirt”. While “The Bride [was] Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”, at intervention of Marcel Duchamp on his “Large Glass”, the physicists gathered in a circle around import of their slit experiment to deny satisfaction of all such voyeuristic tendencies amongst non-physicists. Collective embrace by the physicists of Max Born's probability interpretation was, again, declaration of global war between split-off ego-complex and unintegrated unconscious.
- World War Two did not purge the Western psyche of its transference dynamics, just carried those dynamics from egoic fixation to super-egoic fixation: the subject-(physical)object level of transference. Psychic integration under psychological projection would henceforth be unrequitedly simulated through flight simulators, integrated circuits, multiple-worlds, spontaneous fusion, holographic simulacra, virtual realities, telemarketing, telepresence, internetworking, monetary integration, global economic integration. Under super-egoic fixation, not only does the omniscient Great White Father figure emerge in full radiant glory, with capabilities of remote sensing, but the metapsychological mechanisms of projection, themselves, become transparent and technologically embodied in sociopolitical processes. Such hot-housed virtual integration of Sphereland (Unconscious II, we might call it) denies a fundamental assumption of worldview propoundment embraced by all the world's non-animistic “higher” cultures: nature is self-identical, is the same as itself, is itself and only itself -- which means there can be only one correct description of it. This assumption is the bottom line on origins of clashes between civilizations. Any threat to the “one correct description” propounded by a given culture is experienced as a mortal existential denial which must be vigorously combated. Under super-egoic fixation, imposition of “one correct description” becomes totalistic in the extreme, as the transference dynamic of split-off fragments operating under projection reaches terminal elaboration in its attempt to simulate integration by establishing a state of purified identity. All claims to alternative identity must be crushed and the superego must become the sole arbiter of identity: Master of GMOs, genetically-modified organisms. Identity dyscrasia and immunologic pandemonium prevail. The Puritanism involved in this enterprise of simulated psychic integration guarantees unrelenting compulsive pursuit, leading to circumstances within which the conscious standpoint is utterly crushed in its confrontation with the collective unconscious. Solution to this crisis in Sphereland is not to be found in any particular structure, but in conscious integration through transcendental functions capable of sustaining the particular in face of the general: unconscious as infinite sets.
As you say, people certainly do not understand this sort of thing. They believe that current events just happen, or that they are caused, or they occur by chance, or are the results of actions freely willed by great men and great rogues. They think that the sort of parallels I draw attention to are like literary analysis or art criticism: something the commentator reads into the subject matter that really isn't there. They believe that Brooks Adams was wrong way back then because the West did not decline in a decade, even if they think that Pat Buchanan now might just have something there. They do not understand that events which occur in human systems are thematically orchestrated by the collective unconscious and that this orchestration abides by a form of psychic hygiene based on what Jung and Pauli called synchronisities. There is no marble-knocking-into-marble causal relation between collective rejection of the Axiom of Choice and onset of WWI, between falsification of Schrödinger's wave-function and onset of WWII, but there is a deep thematic connection which reflects on the teleology of how events are pulled into particular configurations: WWI and WWII were both basins of strange attractors where synchronisities mark points on the contour lines thematically delineating these basins. The events on the contour lines do not cause one another, but they do co-occur in such meaningful fashion as to help configure the attractor (another word for archetype-in-itself, i.e., a mathematical relation-structure, a connectivity of psychological complexes in the complex-matrix constituting the psyche). If I were pressed, I would explain that operator-time is the agency responsible for formation of basins of attraction, and that we are not speaking simply of psychophysical parallelism, nor of matter and antimatter, but of psyche and soma mirroring in space and counterspace through temporal operations and counter temporal operations -- the set of such topological operators being identical to the universal (un)conscious which supraordinates both soma and psyche. With Plato, I say what we call consciousness is an-anamnesis. The notion that history is what happened is comic book historiography, a theory of history for those with lateral mental cleavage, history for bureaucrats, for the surface of the extrovert mind.
America's recent declaration of planetary war may be a global crossing, a crossing of a contour line on yet another strange attractor. It may be that the signal event synchronistic with the present teleology, the currently reigning basin of attraction, is the definition of a q-bit (quantum information unit) such that m-valued logics are excluded. It could be that repeated experimental verification that atomic and even molecular entities, not only elementary particles, can be in more than one place at a time, juxtaposed with experimental demonstration that the wave packets in the wave trains of light travel faster than the very wave trains they themselves constitute -- i.e., that light is faster than light, that the itself of light is often ahead of itself, that light is m-valued -- is so deeply a case of thematic evasion as to represent entry upon another loop of the same spiral formed by rejection of the Axiom of Choice and falsification of Schrödinger's wave-function: attractors are frequently nested one inside of the next. Such experimental verifications and demonstrations are so threatening to the metaphysical principles justifying the split-off Cartesian-Newtonian ego-complex and its psychological projection -- the projection being that socio-political entity designated as the constitutionally-democratic nation-state -- that resultant low-grade collective hysteria called into being all sorts of synchronistic echoes. This does not rule out a hierarchy of motives, from that most fully elaborated in the individual awareness to that most fully concealed in the collective unconscious: oil, say, might be the most conscious denied motive, while fear of m-valued states of identity, collective occasions of experience, that is, govern the large patterns of march into the basin of the attractor.
There is no possibility that America will prevail in the war it has declared, because the war it thinks it has declared is not the war it has actually declared, and certainly is not the war it will ultimately find itself fighting. America has a great deal of money and enormous reserves of disposable force. This money, this force, can be spent to buy time and space in insurgency war. Time and space are arrayed against the counter-terrorist who, if he doesn't end it yesterday, will surely become the counter-insurgent, but expenditure of money and disposition of ever increasing quantities of force can certainly hold off the strategic liabilities extension in time and space represent. This money, this force, if intelligently used -- and why suppose it will not be -- can be deployed such that every step along the way into the attractor's basin, with plausible denial, can be declared a victory. It may not happen that the barrier of Islamic extremism is jumped to catalyze a larger recruitment base for global insurgency, though if this becomes the case it will be somewhat miraculous, given the mounting quotient of psychological, economic, epidemiologic, ecological, and impolitic stressors afoot. The war America has declared is the war against the m-logically-valued properties of its own unconscious, a war driven by the fear and loathing of its split-off ego-complex for these properties. The particularity of Islamic fundamentalism is magnified by this fear and loathing, for without m-logically-valued cognition there is no accommodation of the particular except through homogenization. The dog bites when fear is exhibited. To declare war on all possible particularities in a world of particulars is to make a call upon the pack. What started as a war against transnational terrorism likely will become a global counter-insurgency war, where the insurgent fights against the very idea of the nation-state and its supra-national agglomerations. But the strange attractor is stranger than that, in that m-logically-valued states of cognition -- war against, being the real war America has declared -- are animistic in nature. Not only does this go back to America's genocidal and slave-state colonial beginnings, everything that happened to Asia in the 19th century is immediately involved. Islam is just the tip of the sword; the blade up to the hilt lies yet dormant, but is being honed by unconscious vectors. Both Germany and Russia abandoned animism only under the greatest of duress and absolutely against their will formed Cartesian-Newtonian nation-states. It is my guess that this war against m-valued poly-particularity, and for homogenous ISO global monoculture, will come to focus upon the full spectrum of 19th and 20th century grievances.
I now notice that “quantum computing” presently is increasingly being referred to as “molecular-scale computing”; that physicists “don't understand” the properties of electron transport and 10,000-fold resistance swings in their electrically-switchable molecules; that the purpose of nano-imprint electron-beam circuit lithography is to create denser arrays of sandwiched digital switches, not to exploit the m-logically-valued quantum properties of such multi-sheet-sandwich universes (VirFut Q-Pro was early on skirted by Hewlett-Packard's so-called Quantum Science Research program). This shift of terminology is exactly what I identify as a synchronisity in the collective psychological transference process earlier described. Synchronized recoil from m-logically-valued quantum processes in materials/computing science and from 2-valued-logic irreconcilables in the realms of global cultural particularities (in preference for forced homogeneities as opposed to spontaneous m-logically-valued relations) is one synchronisity delineating a contour line on the prevailing basin of attraction pulling current events into configuration. In this particular case, however, we can see an element of classical causality involved in establishing the synchronisity (which is nested inside of a related earlier synchronisity): DARPA has intervened into the quantum computing program with a levied research goal and timetable in the same way that Bletchley Park mentally raped Allan Turing by shifting his focus on transfinite processes in relation to Gödel's work to what became the Turing Machine based on ruling out consideration of transfinite processes, thus irrevocably vectoring the field of computer science down a path it otherwise would never have taken. But that is exactly how historical synchronisities work, how they become spiral nestings.
That's right. That's exactly right. That's precisely what I imply. It doesn't make any real difference what Bush decides to do or not to do, the outcome will be the same; the only thing changed will be the path taken to that outcome. I'm not talking tomorrow; I'm talking transit into the basin of attraction. Mere decisions have virtually no impact on hundred-year-long event gradients in the collective unconscious. If one path to the basin of attraction is blocked, events will flow around the obstacle like a rock in the stream. That's what projective identification is all about. The unconscious contents projected call into being configurations of human events mirroring in regressed form the unavailable (to consciousness) functions responsible for the projection. If a given event doesn't precipitate the required movement, then the unconscious will try another and another and another until that movement is made. It's like trying to stop a downhill express train with no brakes. Most people who get so far into the transference as to realize this back off in their understanding at this point; the implications are too scary. They panic. It becomes quite terrifying. To acknowledge what is actually happening means that the whole notion of identity must change. Not only is there involved a loss of the claim to individual volition, but also the loss of the oh-so-sacred right of the ego-complex to control the claimed individuality that claims the volition. Losing all that means that the arrogation of influence over exterior events also must go. There is nothing to hold on to! Everything turns into a phantasmagoria! Into the contagion of animism. Into a denial of everything one believed to be the case about oneself in ones felt-to-be most real occasions of ones past. The very height of existential denial! Why, why… every bit of me is out-there; there's no me in-here. Terrifying! Running through the forest at night not slamming into a tree. Terrifying! That's why the flight from m-logically-valued relations, why the fear of identity-transparency, why the clinging to the security blanket of the ego-complex, why the hundred-year-long event gradient in the collective unconscious, why the prevailing basin of attraction, why the impulse to kill. Kill, kill, kill… kill the specters of “me” out-there in order to keep the me I claim in-here. Without that killing, the whole notion of identity would have to change. Without that killing, my me in-here would be overwhelmed by the tribe, by the “each against all”. The ego-complex cannot understand that the issue of freedom-versus-determinism is no issue whatsoever, except to the ego-complex. Anyone who can get into this will have direct psychological experience of the import of the General Relativity physics notion that there is no such thing as local action, only action of the whole, and this experience will provide insight into the notion that consciousness is a topological operator, which is the royal road to the domain of Tzog-chen, the domain, that is, Schrödinger explored as he wrote his famous wave equation, dissimulation of the wave-function of which created the basin of attraction within which the present basin is nested. History. That's what we call history.
In 1971, Derek Dillon wrote the following into his personal journals (as published in MOON in 1994, Volume II, pp. 348-50):
Industrialized urban civilization has not yet experienced anything remotely resembling the full potential of organized terrorism coupled to organized subversion… The very concept of the target has yet to be explored in depth… Once the forcing functions are catalyzed, self-organization exhibits an extraordinary immunity to suppression… If you want to understand the communicational potential of the terrorist “index”, look at Schrödinger's equation. Ask yourself what the wave function substituted for in Newtonian mechanics. And why! This is, indeed, a pregnant riddle. That message delivery potential of the “index” is tied to self-organization for collective action (a branch of contemporary quantum physics: superconductivity, superfluidity, and so on). If you come to comprehend this, you will surely become a true believer in the proverbial ounce of prevention.
Derek was not here advocating terrorism; he was exhorting removal of the fundamental causes of terrorism, and stating that, otherwise, eventually, processes of self-organization will come into play. The recent (early October, 2002) arrests in Oregon of apparent Al Qaeda wannabes, the Aryan Nation endorsement of the Al Qaeda agenda, and the advent of the sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area are probable instants of nascent, incipient self-organization of a transnational terrorism in process of spontaneous transformation into global insurgency against the very idea of the nation-state and its supranational agglomerations. When every effort on every level is made to prevent resolution of the outstanding fundamental issues in every area of human experience -- from dissimulated intellectual history to ecological malfeasance, from psychological identity states manipulated by dark-gray media propaganda to the actions of covert “rebuttal units” to sustain falsified science, from political paradigms to monetary theory, economic assumptions to issues of global monoculture, bureaucratic algorithms to corporate scale, genetically-modified organisms to higher enculturation, sexual identities to food additives, tribal animism to institutions of religious fundamentalism, oil to water, airspace to air quality, government money laundering of its off-the-books funds to corporate tax havens, remote surveillance to omnipresence of exposure to microwave irradiation -- there is utterly no way to imagine such processes of self-organization will not eventually set in with a vengeance. The current need is not for an ounce of prevention, it is for the full pound.
One must grant it rather tiresome, after all that has been published about the American OSS-MO (Office of Strategic Services-Morale Operations division) and the British PWE (Political Warfare Executive), about how, postwar, their graduates moved into the derivative “information” units in their country's respective intelligence agencies, how personnel have continually moved back and forth between these “culture” units and the so-called private media, how proprietary press agency syndicates, publishing houses, magazines, newsletters, international labor, culture, academic, scientific, and student organizations, private foundations, NGOs, even the founding of whole universities, themselves, have been funded through off-the-books intelligence-agency monies, or have been means of laundering such monies, after all this, to still be met with the charge of conspiracy-theory freak when one makes observations which assume, in this day and age of forced global monoculture, a political, economic, scientific, and social environment riddled by such activities. Indeed, the very notion that American economic success has been due to private enterprise is laughable. Which major American corporation do you imagine is purely private? Which big foundation? Which giant stock fund? Which media conglomerate? I will admit that having had early exposure at Special Operations Research Office, and later at Psychological Operations Group, JFK Center for Special Warfare, has given me an advantage at “reading” the signs of such activities in the present environment, but there is a great deal of material out there with which one could become informed. Leaf through old issues of Ramparts and Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars. Read the memoirs of ex-operatives. Read Peter Coleman's The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (London: Macmillan, 1989). Read Paul Lashmar and James Oliver's Britain's Secret Propaganda War (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1998). Read Frances Saunder's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (London: Granta, 1999). In looking through these items one will find thousands of references to pursue. Proletcult was not the only state-sponsored assault on integrity of the arts. It is no mere co-incidence that the CIA supported the abstract expressionism of the New York School at the same time it was supporting European integration and the movement for world federation: both categories of activity deflected attention from the bogeyman: the psychological, social, political, and economic implications of quantum-relativity theory. Chaos and complexity theory, nonlinear Newtonian dynamics, DARPA-sponsored approaches to so-called quantum computing continue the same tradition.
Let me ask you a question. Do you think the recent failed Bush Administration attempt to create an overtly-funded departmental-level institution to produce black propaganda and disseminate it internationally was a legitimate attempt or a piece of governmental “street theater” black propaganda? If you get everyone in the media to call an overt act of war, such as the mining of a harbor, say in Nicaragua, a “covert operation” discussed in the newspapers and on TV, then the implication is that there are no covert actions which do not rapidly become public knowledge or at least are not known to the Congressional oversight committee. This calling the thing by the name of its opposite -- a tried and true technique of OSS-MO -- calling, that is, the overt “covert”, is dark-gray propaganda. Overtly-produced black propaganda is a contradiction in terms: black propaganda cannot be overt; if it were, it would be white propaganda, or some shade of gray. It was known ahead of time that Congress would not fund a Secretary of Black Propaganda. The “failure” of the ”attempt” implies America does not produce black propaganda -- which is itself black propaganda. I mean, my god!
Yes, I stand by (October 2002) my earlier statements about U.S. actions in Afghanistan. I said the U.S. has gained nothing there, that the Taliban and Al Qaeda performed brilliantly in Afghanistan, and that the organizational transformation they obviously are in process of undergoing will likely take about three years. In their place, what would you be doing while the U.S. postures relative to Iraq? As long as repercussions of 9/11 continue to unfold, what strategic imperative calls them to undertake further concerted efforts? There are about a dozen LEVELS upon which events are taking place, from the deepest levels of the collective unconscious to the most fully-conscious level of tactical improvisation. It is necessary to be clear about which level is being discussed. As America embarks on efforts to reapply, to the whole of the Islamic world, the lessons taught by Douglas MacArthur in defeated Japan and those applied by U.S. Army civil affairs units in postwar Germany, there is gathering evidence that the Japanese and the Germans may be on the verge of rediscovering their cultural roots. Not a good omen relative to the Americanization of Islam. Rediscovery of Japanese and German roots inevitably will involve exploration of the deeper causes of both world wars -- and this is something Americanism cannot well afford. Levels nested inside levels.
I was rolling in the aisles reading the Newsweek propaganda pieces you sent on “The German Problem”, the “German Disease”, and German “unilateralism” (Sept. 30th and Oct. 7th). These were so ineptly done, I was reminded of the worst USIS film sat through during the PsyOps Group intro course. My god, these people are only now beginning to have intimations of the full measure of what they are up against -- and they have absolutely no insight into why. This lack of insight, of course, in no way exonerates them.
The ideas leading to the “Echo of the Mockingbird” article were brainstormed over Western omelets in the MACV-HQ snack bar throughout the spring of 1968. This was during the Winter-Spring Campaign of 1968, mind you, when “big-unit warfare” transited to set-piece and endgame was entered upon. We could see the American “stab in the back” myth emerging before our very eyes in the corridors around the Command Operations Center, and based our debates on future history upon the presumption that this myth would govern American intellectual life in the same way it earlier had in Weimar Germany, preventing any post-Newtonian institutional developments, eventually yielding a collective psychosis like that which overwhelmed the Germans in the 30s. Assuming validity of that assessment, what would be the outcome? was the question we addressed to ourselves. World war, of course, but what configuration would it take?
This future-history subject was discussed virtually every morning over breakfast between Derek and the fellow who had earlier been ordered to argue against his own enemy strength estimate conclusions, and for the official MACV position, in “the tank” before the Joint Chiefs of Staff and against Sam Adams before the National Intelligence Estimates Board. Between Derek and this young briefer, there were long debates about the intellectual history issues going back to the time of Newton, and consensus was never reached on the details. There was complete agreement, however, on the idea that eventually there would develop a global insurgency against the very idea of the Newtonian nation-state and its supra-national agglomerations. Derek further argued that, on cultural terms alone, one must conclude there would emerge in the cusp a Germano-Russian Bloc. Discussion of this centered upon the German officer corps’ deep involvements with the Tzar’s army and later, under Trotsky’s direction, in the Soviet Army’s shift from “red” to “expert”; the black documents planted at Heydrick’s instigation suggesting treasonous collusion between the Soviet and German officer corps, which precipitated the Stalin purges; the fact that Germany clandestinely re-armed post-WWI largely on Soviet soil with Soviet Army cooperation: all this, it was argued by Derek, spoke not to a shared penchant for totalitarianism, but to much deeper cultural affinities that would govern unconscious responses to the whole realm of issues related to the fact that the Americans, the British, and the French would continue to block all attempts to fashion a post-Newtonian institutionalization. No consensus was reached on this endlessly debated thesis. Would the cultural affinity eventually outweigh the 30 million Russian WWII dead?
There was similar lack of consensus concerning another of Derek’s theses: a Greater China would emerge on a cultural-affinity basis, and on the back of Chinese intent to recover all that had been taken from her by the West in the 19th century. This Greater China would incorporate in some fashion -- tightly knit trading bloc and interlocking security treaties, whatever -- Korea, Japan, and the bulk of mainland Southeast Asia. This thesis was very strongly contended, primarily by recourse to the argument that bitter memories of WWII would prevent such a thing from occurring. Derek argued that deep -- primarily unconscious -- factors would eventually cause the Japanese to have a hysterical flip-over, as no people can forever endure what America has done to Japan psychologically and culturally since 1853, most particularly since 1945. He argued, moreover, that the American institutional program, under intellectual governance of the “stab in the back” myth, would become ever more extreme until completely divorced from any kind of sanity. What this would impose on East Asia would be sufficient to overcome whatever bitter memories there were standing in the way of a Greater China.
These arguments about China and Japan never made much headway, and, therefore, neither did Derek’s contention that in the cusp there would be a mutual defense arrangement negotiated between a Greater China and a Germano-Russian Bloc. Derek argued this would be the context within which global insurgency against the very idea of the Newtonian nation-state would transit to big-unit warfare. Needless to say, no consensus was reached on this last idea in the spring of 1968. Nonetheless, these ideas were written into THE MOON OF HOA BINH, where Derek maintained there was no power on Earth capable of reversing the pathogenic process transpiring within the American psyche.
I connect the statement of a Pentagon general prior to Persian Gulf War I, quoted by the Tofflers in War and Anti-War, “…surreptitious acquisition of DNA fingerprints…” to the following words taken from a report made to the Pentagon by the Defense Science Board:
Surreptitious acquisition of DNA fingerprints by satellite requires DNA to be superconductant.It also provides tantalizing glimpses of new capabilities, referring to new high-tech sensors in development that would enable the United States to more closely track the movements of vehicles or even individuals by satellite. (Los Angeles Times, Greg Miller, “Wider Pentagon Spy Role Urged”).
Judging from David Ignatius’ recent (10/12/02) article in the Washington Post, “Less Noise at the CIA”, all these years after the 1968 “intelligence failure” they still believe the problem is in the Intelligence Data Handling System, whereas the IDHS, itself, is the problem preventing qualitative analysis. For better or for worse, they will never move beyond this psychological displacement.
The October 28th Newsweek gives an interesting portrait of the U.S. discovery of the exponential growth curve in resource commitment required to maintain public safety in insurgency war as the geographical extent of the conflict expands. And the terrorists have not even begun to explore the nature of the target. There are also ever expanding costs to the counterinsurgent of extension of insurgency war in time: protracted war. Very little expenditure on part of the insurgent can tie up staggering resources on part of the counterinsurgent. The Vietnam war decimated the Ft. Knox gold reserves and ended Bretton Woods. The U.S. declaration of global war was an irreversible blunder of virtually unimaginable proportions. The U.S. probably couldn’t pay for a global counterinsurgency war without complete control of Middle Eastern oil. But it appears to be far more complicated than that. North Korea’s recent nuclear confession lends considerable weight to contentions of the Russian counterterror consultant Bodansky, who has written several books on Al Qaeda. He maintains that the chief scientist who developed Pakistan’s nukes transferred the required knowledge (which he acquired at the EU enrichment facility while he worked there) to North Korea, which in turn transferred it to Iran, Iraq, and Syria. He further maintains that Iran had nuclear capability by 1992. I have no way of evaluating these contentions of Bodansky, but, if true, things are moving very fast. I still do not believe the consensus account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and sense there will be many unanticipated developments derivative of the actualities of that collapse, which I think was intimately involved with onset of the First Persian Gulf War (deep Soviet and German involvement with Iraq). And the U.S. is not changing its pressure tactics in regards to involved fundamental issues. For instance, the recent petitions to the South Korean government by ex-ROK soldiers for unpaid salary while they engaged in operations against North Korea conducted inside North Korea prior to outbreak of the Korean War is further evidence that the North’s attack on the South was provoked by sabotage and assassination. If that was, indeed, the case, North Korea and China will behave far differently than if it were not the case. And the continued enormous U.S. pressure and berating of Japan over the banking situation there may well produce unanticipated results, as knowledgeable Japanese understand that the revaluation of the yen against the dollar (dollar devaluation) forced on Japan by the U.S. in the Plaza Accords created the bubble economy with overwhelming inevitability. There was so much money in the economy the banks had to do something with it. Much was exported to Southeast Asia, creating the bubble there. And, again inevitably, both bubbles burst. Current U.S. demands for Japanese banking reform require a fundamental cultural transformation on a scale similar to the 221 demands of the Structural Impediments Initiative. When cusp point is reached, Japan will finally see the light of Mahikari and voluntarily enter a Greater China.
Thank you very much for the reference to the two articles on Sun Tzu published in the same issue of Comparative Strategy (10:1, January-March 1991). I must, however, point out that Laure Paquette in “Strategy and Time in Clausewitz’s On War and in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War” gives no evidence of having read either of the books mentioned in the title of the article. There are dozens of places in On War where Clausewitz has something direct to say about time. Laure Paquette quotes none of these; instead, a long third-party quote on the “features of time in the West” is provided, along with assurances that Clausewitz was a quintessential product of his times. Relative to Sun Tzu, the author is more forthcoming, but still offers no direct quotes, only a list of references to passages, a few summarizing points, and some comments on the debate between Needham and Granet about time concept in ancient China. In THE MOON OF HOA BINH, on the other hand, we directly quote Clausewitz to illustrate that he was far from a mere product of his times, and that he anticipated a concept of time that first appeared in quantum-relativity physics only 100 years later. Quoting Clausewitz: “…time by a dynamic analogy as a factor of forces.” This is no ordinary Western idea of time. Clausewitz struggled with this radically unorthodox notion throughout his book. Implications of this quotation are the focus of one of the discourses on Clausewitz, Mao, and Sun Tzu given in MOON (Vol. II, pp. 495-505).
“Sun Tzu for Strategists” by Edward O’Dowd and Arthur Waldron is abysmally conventional: other than suggesting that Sun Tzu has a psychosocial focus, the reader is given no suggestion that Sun Tzu thought in anything but familiar categories of existence. The reader learns that ch’i is “life energy” and the basis of li or “force”, that hsing signifies “dispositions” of force structures and that shin is “potential power” or capability. The reader does not learn that ch’i is “operator-time”, the active sort of time underlying the non-probabilistic operations of chronomancy in the I-Ching, not time as measure, as something that comes in units, large or small, as Laure Paquette would have it, but, to again quote Clausewitz, “…time by a dynamic analogy as a factor of forces”, a factor of li that is, of the ability to topologically operate on the spiritual space, the hyperspace or configuration space, that is the “environment” of the combat, operate in order to transform the dispositions of that space, not in that space, so as to set up event gradients, shin -- “potential power”, perhaps, or better, teleological attractors -- in the environment of the combat to which the enemy must conform as a planet’s motion must conform to spacetime curvature.
A third article in the same issue of Comparative Strategy, “A Theory of Strategic Culture” by Yitzhak Klein, has a certain relevance to attempts to compare Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. In offering a theory of strategic culture or national style in strategy, Klein has quite a bit to say about Clausewitz, but does not bring Sun Tzu into the discussion. He does, however, make a comment in his notes that indicates he has not understood Mao’s adaptations of Sun Tzu: “…guerilla strategies are dictated by the operational limitations of the forces that carry them out.” This is patently not correct; such limitations are one consideration only in formulation of such strategies. What Klein calls “meta-strategic concepts: purpose and utility of war” dictate guerrilla strategies, not operational considerations. The fundamental purpose of such a war is psychosocial transformation of the indigenous polity in process of defeating the adversary; to defeat the adversary without bringing about the psychosocial transformation is to corrupt and betray utility of the war. This is why so much emphasis is placed upon controlling configuration of the psychosocial components of the hyperspace, the “environment” of the combat, the currents of the water within which Mao’s fish swim. America’s strategic culture prevents its leadership elite from understanding that application of its superboomer military technologies in counter-global-insurgency against the Newtonian nation-state system -- which no longer has viable metaphysical foundations -- will make it look good in the beginning, but will insure its utter collapse at endgame. What starts off looking like applications of guerrilla strategy will end up in another realm altogether, because of the psychosocial transformation the process will entail, and which use of superboomer tech will facilitate.
One of the more interesting things about Daniel Ellsberg’s book Secrets (N.Y.: Penguin, 2002) is how it is the same book they have all written, so much so, Derek finds after several days have passed he can hardly distinguish in memory one book from the next -- particularly relative to Sheehan’s, which just fuzzes into all of them with his oh-so-transparent ever since Chrysanthemum-and-the-Sword American-assessment-of-Asian-men characterization of the ARVN, inherited from hillbilly Vann, and his refusal to acknowledge that it was America-via-Lansdale that slew the ARVN by railroading Diem into office, thus making coup protection the necessary highest priority and insuring in perpetuity that the ARVN would be a counterintelligence nightmare and a chain-of-command corpus of missing links of the first order -- something Derek Dillon came to learn a great deal about. Americans under Ike and JFK caused the ineffectiveness of the ARVN, not the Vietnamese. Gillingham, a Landsdale aide from Huk days through Vietnam, and later of "Small is Beautiful" and "Good Work" fame, had a similar myopia about true origins of the ARVN effectiveness problem, a Landsdale-transmitted disease of the eyes that sometimes spread to the brain: lacuna-on-the-brain. The section on John Paul Vann was the hardest to get through. Did Vann’s cowboying achieve one-tenth of what he could have achieved had he actually done the jobs he was being paid to do over the years? Vann was being paid hundreds of times what the corrupt ARVN, who according to Vann’s account lost the war, were being paid -- and how many times more than the average U.S. soldier like Derek? Who were the war profiteers? U.S. civilian contractuals or the ARVN? Ellsberg was no wimp at contract negotiations: GS18 is not a bad pay scale, Derek has heard. When an attempt was made by Derek and some folks at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ, to get rallier Lt. Col. Tran Van Dac to the P.I. for a year of debriefing in safety, as a rider on a Human Sciences Research Institute project, that effort was stonewalled by a HSRI team-leader as he sat in the Bahamas for a month before re-entering the U.S., so as not to scotch his tax-free status.
When Ellsberg is instructed to respond to a presidential request to research and report on the political aspect of the war, he drives the back roads like Vann and produces a report filled with all the obvious banalities everyone had long known. But he had guts; he spoke up and told everybody what they already knew, as no one else could say such things with authority for they were not macho enough to drive the roads (which isn’t exactly like running a CIDG unit, doing bomb damage assessment, running a Mike Force, being a Ruff-Puff advisor 24 hours a day, or doing night ops in the Delta as the token American like Derek did a few months after Ellsberg left Vietnam saying no ARVN had the balls to do night ops, and dozens of other things people had been doing in one form or another for a long time). The ARVN in STRATDET and its precursors who were running ops into the North long before the Tonkin Gulf incident probably ran those ops in daylight, Derek imagines. Derek could draw up a very long list of what Ellsberg should have done to find out about the political aspects of the war -- which he never learned anything about worth mentioning, or else somewhere in the book something would have been said indicating that he attained to such knowledge. As if the color-coded HES rating system was a god’s-eye-view entry into POLOB. My god! Short-timer in SRA, daytripper at a DIOCC or PIOCC, and you knew the HES was based on data fabricated to support the “MACV position” on various debating points, and nothing more: simple bureaucratic in-fighting. And his report to the president was focused on proving how misleading the HES was!
Derek also liked the part where Ellsberg described the algorithm he arrived at to reduce the 12-foot high pile of distribution that daily appeared at his desk in McNaughton’s office: the highest classification levels (thus insuring he never had any contact with raw data or those who did). Had he known what he was doing, he would have analyzed the paper flow patterns in the bureaucracy around him, identified its nodal points, and established unfiltered contact with persons at those points. His answer was elementary school level stuff: Ph.D. in decision theory from Harvard! Anyone who developed any real insight into the communist VCI at SRA spent a great deal of time analyzing the non-communist MACV, ARVN, and GVN bureaucracy around them, studying the paper flow patterns, identifying persons at nodal points, and servicing unfiltered relationships with persons at those points. Who chose what to translate was a very critical point -- obviously. Certain desks in CDEC, for instance, were such critical points in Saigon, and anyone who learned much was a frequent visitor to those oh-so-important desks -- which changed over time. The official intelligence bureaucracy shunned the sort of documents that had to be analyzed QUALITATIVELY in bulk, in large numbers, via various forms of traffic analysis -- and that is why the official officials learned so little. And they didn't even learn it later. Read McNamara's testimony in the Westmoreland versus CBS trial if you want a good laugh.
And why the Bushies are making the same mistakes today, day after day after day.
And Ellsberg never looked closely enough at why it was that everybody in the U.S. Government was against the war and those same everybodies always made decisions to expand the war and intensify the bombing. He never came up with interesting thoughts on this subject: the usual homilies. Whereas those at CICV-TARGETS had very interesting thoughts on the matter. See the article entitled "Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?"
This book, by perpetuating the idea that Ellsberg’s act with the “Pentagon Papers” was instrumental in ending the war by bringing down a president, rather than the actual fact that the U.S. was militarily beaten on the ground -- as if Ellsberg's act, itself, was not a result of the U.S. being beaten on the ground; as if Ellsberg would have undertaken that act if the U.S. hadn't been beaten on the ground! -- contributes to the assumptions and the collective psychological state (instigated in part by the stab-in-back myth) which has produced Bushism and all that will go down as a result of it. Yet Ellsberg is a leading opposer of Bushism. As history teaches us, when a country’s military is beaten in the field there are defections in the ranks and presidents fall. If outcome of the war has significance for the national interest beyond mere collective self-image then the consequences are greater than mere defectors and lost presidents. And if the real, if subliminal, motivations for one war feed into the next and the next and the next… Derek remembers standing in his office at Special Warfare Center toward the end of the Six Day War in front of the OB maps he had created and maintained for months, scratching his head while wandering what the end point would involve when the Arabs finally stopped falling for the divide-and-rule strategy U.S. Middle East oil policy had entailed since the end of World War II, which had required and clearly would continue to require for its maintenance greater and ever greater infusions of violence. Maybe we are now approaching that end point, maybe not -- but one thing is certain: if the Arabs ever get to that point, they are unlikely to tell everybody ahead of time.
The most interesting paragraph in Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets is the following (page 182):
The day before I had talked about negotiations with Chet Cooper, a CIA intelligence officer on the NSC staff who was now working as an aide to Ambassador Averell Harriman. Cooper had for some time been trying to set up negotiations with North Vietnam, and Harriman later served as the U.S. negotiator in the Paris talks. I was frank with Cooper, and he knew my views when he urged me to talk with Harriman the next day. That seemed to confirm my guess that Harriman, like Cooper, was on my wavelength. I was after all proposing a negotiation and an interim settlement much like that for Laos in 1962, and it had been Harriman who had conducted that negotiation for Kennedy and been a strong advocate of the coalition arrangement against Defense Department and CIA skeptics. So I was as frank with Harriman as with Cooper.
The subsequent taped telephone conversation between Cooper and Harriman, described in Secrets, cited from a document later given to Ellsberg, where Harriman dumps on Ellsberg, sounds like it was for the record. Ellsberg was getting close to something he was not to know about. Such is the reliability of documentary archives.
These discussions appear to have taken place about April or May of 1967, maybe a little later from context of the book. This is the first time Derek has heard of Chet Cooper. It is extremely likely that Cooper was the liaison between Harriman in Middleburg and William Sullivan in Vientiane -- Harriman reporting personally to the President and only the President. As described in MOON, Derek reached the conclusion on the basis of captured enemy documents in the Spring of 1968 that negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam at a secret site in Laos had been taking place for some months by April of 1967. (Derek could think like this in 1968 because not long after the JFK assassination, he was living in the Georgetown household -- and being paid an overly generous amount of money for his household duties -- of a personal friend of JFK and an ex-OSS officer who became at that time Johnson’s primary speech writer, and Derek, being a student at SIS, a bright fellow, and prospective recruit into the plutocracy was often given the draft to read for comment and discussion.) Sullivan was probably sent from Iran to Laos -- a strange move at that point in his career -- specifically because of the prospect of such negotiations. Sullivan served under Harriman in Moscow during WWII. The negotiations had to have begun in late 1966 (by which time the enemy strength estimates controversy was growing to critical mass and all the principles were informed as to how severely mistaken the estimates had been: Michael Conley left Vietnam in late 1965 for SORO saying enemy strength was “well in excess of a million” and his DOA/SORO book on the VCI with this figure was published the following year) because by January of 1967 the NVNese Politburo decision for the ’68 Tet offensive, and associated purge of the Southern VCI, had been taken, lower-than-COSVN level planning sessions were in full swing by April, and implementation of the required VCI transformation was in motion by that summer -- particularly around Saigon, the critical area for what appeared to lay ahead. The purge was the real purpose of the offensive, and of U.S. complicity with that offensive, because the North had to have the Southern VCI out of the picture if they were to pull off the later phases of what was being secretly discussed in Laos. The Southern VCI would have opposed, and been in a position to effectively oppose, what the North intended to impose on the South. Had the whole thing worked, there would NOT have been a recognizable coalition government in the South; there would have been a covert coalition government, headed by the U.S.-instigated “election” of a civilian like Trang Minh who had no identifiable ties to the communists, a North-initiated cease fire, a progressive U.S. pullout, and so on. Johnson would have been off the hook and his Great Society back on track. The North-initiated cease fire would have come just before the 1968 presidential election. Or so Derek believed, and thus was the story told in MOON.
Upon setting aside Ellsberg's memoir, Derek finds himself believing the details but not the broad brushstrokes of the story told: naive, young American boy slowly discovers the real world, finally decides to act on basis of moral injunction. This archetypal American story of Ellsberg's generation and Derek's simply never is a true account of particular events; it is an elaborate selective memory rewrite as self-justification -- and a substitute memory way of avoiding following out implications of the discovery to its logical conclusions. There is no significant psychological component to the story: no commentary on observations concerning the psychological states experienced by the people Ellsberg was dealing with, and no real account of introspective activities on his own part. If, as he says, he was so concerned from childhood onward with the bombing of women and children, there would have been a great deal of inner conflict, even dissociative experience, as he entered upon his chosen career. Such childhood concern, particularly as he had had in his youth no direct exposure beyond radio reports and newsreels, is the mark of not only a highly intelligent child, but a very sensitive one. That sensitivity would have shown itself in psychologically marked fashion as his subsequent professional involvements unfolded -- yet, there is little in his memoir to suggest elaborations of this sort. Had he had much in the way of such experience, it is very unlikely he would have chosen the style he chose in which to write his memoir.
Derek Dillon can speak here with quite a bit of authority. In 1954, his career USAF bomber pilot father took him to the Japanese atomic bombing sites, which were not yet fully restored. No lessons were given other than to brood on the sites. Whatever the lesson intended to be transmitted from father to son -- which the father probably could not have clearly resolved even in his own mind after several thousand air combat hours, the involved issues of which were spoken of only with other bomber pilots of similar experience, and then only over Manhattans made with that generation’s preference: Canadian Club -- the impact on the son was profound disquietude and psychological distancing from his immediate social environment. The nine-year-old child had only arrived in Japan a few months before, but had in such a short period witnessed numerous disturbing instances of racism, arrogance, cultural insensitivity, and displays of negative emotion on part of many adult Americans, which even a boy, or perhaps especially an eldest son military brat, had little trouble recognizing as such. There was no way to make a real separation between the bombing sites and the hysterical emotional displays: the two clearly were part of the same thing.
These bombing site visits came at about the same time this boy had his first experience of the Vietnam War. The C-123s and C-119s that re-supplied the beleaguered troops at Dien Bien Phu departed Ashiya AFB, Kyushu, Japan, loaded with cargo, changed their American insignia to French in Hanoi, and proceeded on with French crews to make their drops. The insignia and crews were changed back to American in Hanoi for the return flight to Japan, the American pilots carrying with them gifts from Tonkin for the wives and kids, along with stories about the diminutive Tonks and the great French food in the Pearl of the Orient. The involved squadrons continued their heavily laden flights long after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, as Derek frequently observed by climbing up to the wartime caves burrowed by Japanese troops into the cliffs of the flattened mount forming the Ashiya AFB flight line, which projected toward the Sea of Japan. Derek got his first long-range recon experience at this time carrying out surveillance on the Japanese and American military police patrols guarding the base, for these caves were off limits and he had to infiltrate and exfiltrate without being observed -- an activity that was a psychological projection, an exteriorization of his prevailing inner state during this period: his rising disquietude and psychological distancing led to his doubting everything he was told, without quite realizing that this was the case; hence, the living out of this unacceptable behavior in projection. This psychological burden rode heavily on the shoulders of this boy, making the climb up to the caves all that much more difficult.
Only a few years after leaving Japan, while at Eielson AFB, Alaska, scrimmaging basketball with SAC and U-2 pilots, did Derek learn that SAC was formed long before the Soviets had the A-bomb. Eielson was the other end of the Gary Powers over-flights and it was a matter of laughter on the court that the President had lied. If a fourteen-year-old could focus in on the date of the formation of SAC and pose to himself a question as to what that date implied about the early mission of SAC, why not Ellsberg with all his exposure to the issues involved? What did that date imply for the purpose of the atomic bombings of Japan and the origins of the cold war in Europe, so much a part of life at Eielson? I believe Ellsberg did register how early SAC was formed, that there was a little electrical surge upon noting the date, and that significance of that surge was pushed away -- because to acknowledge it, to focus upon it, would mean to pursue its implications into regions which even now to him are unpalatable.
Derek believes there is something else Ellsberg noted, but immediately suppressed having had awareness of: a probable correspondence between the Tonkin Gulf Incident and causes of the Korean War. Remember the old Yul Brenner film “Flight from Ashiya”? During that war, air-sea rescue over the Sea of Japan was flown from Ashiya. Yul sacrifices himself to the sharks, in much the same manner Ellsberg, in another war, was later willing to sacrifice himself. And the correspondences may have been greater than that. Sitting at his desk at the Pentagon contemplating traffic from the Maddox in relation to information he was privy to regarding the 34A operations, there likely was a fleeting instance of pattern recognition: just as the 34A operations were attributed to the South Vietnamese, so the intensive operations against North Korea prior to the June invasion were attributed to the South Koreans. The recognition Ellsberg almost surely had lasted only a second, and then was blanked out. The North viewed itself, after having consulted with its backers, as having initiated a pre-emptive war, a war in which weapons of mass destruction were likely to be used against it. As Ellsberg certainly knew far better than Derek, post-WWII counterintelligence documentary archives (the bulk of OSS X-2 documents were destroyed within months of V-J Day) were very loosely vetted through the Sixties. There was a pretty good documentary history of special ops in, for instance, the JFK Special Warfare Center Library at that time. Correspondence between the 34A ops and those against North Korea would have been relatively easy to look into. But this would have taken Ellsberg onto another and deeper path.
Derek knows that the people Ellsberg was dealing with in relation to the bombing behaviors in Indochina experienced psychological states in his presence. He knows this because he witnessed those states at CICV-Targets. Derek weaseled his way out of there in short order, but passed through on a daily basis throughout the first half of 1968, and frequently shot the bull with Targets’ analysts during that period. Those analysts were scathing in their derision of the psychological states displayed by the high muck-a-mucks who came to Targets demanding this or that box be put down. Those psychological states revealed a great deal about the real motivations of persons who were so intensely and personally identified (a psychological state) with the bombing. Those motivations clearly had little to do with eradicating communism and much to do with the psychiatric profile of those suffering American Manifest Destiny Syndrome. But Ellsberg was on another path and did not pursue implications of the psychological states displayed in his presence.
Derek Dillon pursued that other path in explicit earnest from the time he began studying American intellectual history under Elspeth Rostow, from the time he began researching, from a cultural anthropology perspective, at Special Operations Research Office, a comparative study of the Malaya Briggs Plan with the Strategic Hamlets Program for George Harris, the anthropologist on the team that had just completed writing the U.S. Army Handbook for Vietnam. Putting Ted and Joan’s kids on the bus to National Cathedral School and St. Albans most mornings, Derek was rubbing shoulders with enough of the right sort of people to be in a position to assess psychological stability of Washington decision makers. He found that these Americans were not much different from the Americans he had witnessed in Japan a decade earlier. Later, he worked at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ, the sequestered and re-named POLOB, which Sam Adams had tangled with. Later yet, there were long strolls through Sam’s Leesburg cow pastures debating implications of findings made along this other path, implications absorbed by Sam which never became part of his public persona.
If Al Qaeda is “financially robust” and has been so for neigh unto twenty years, as the CIA is reported to have reported, that means one of two things: [1] either the CIA is wrong, or [2] Al Qaeda thinks in terms of very protracted war, is deeply conservative when it comes to initiating actions, has placed most of its efforts over the years into clandestine global organizing, and has not yet begun to act in a fashion commensurate with its resources. Robust funding in this context, over the better part of two decades, amounts to far more than mere hundreds of millions of dollars. Just as the official MACV strength figure of 300,000 in 1967 was far and away below the actual figure (which Sam Adams himself underestimated, given that Conley, the real expert early on, felt in 1965 that it was well in excess of a million), so one can be quite certain that the official definition of relevant categories of monies constituting the “financially robust” are designed to make the estimates far less than the actual case.
And Kissinger, we now know, is to be in charge of investigating 9/11 and arriving at the lessons to be learned by the U.S. Government. Given the enormous range of expertise he brought to his assigned tasks in the past -- ascertaining the need for, probable effectiveness of, and strategic benefits to the U.S. of massive B-52 bombing raids on COSVN, for example -- we should all rest in peace and in full knowledge that the U.S. Government will most certainly learn everything it needs to learn as a result of Kissinger’s great intellect being brought to bear upon the problems 9/11 has posed.
Frances FitzGerald's “George Bush and the World” (New York Review of Books, September 26, 2002) certainly is very useful for gaining insight into the thinking of the Bush administration's inner core. The quotes from the earlier Defense Planning Guidance and the relatively current Nuclear Review Posture documents produced by his current advisors are particularly useful. Strangely, Pat Buchanan over the last year has written a number of shorter pieces that provide similar insights. Derek has written to Buchanan several times to see if there might be some way to deepen his insight, but no indication of success has appeared.
This may at first seem a bizarre notion, but, in truth, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, et al are simply reiterating Derek Dillon's long-running thesis as argued in MOON. Their assessment of the world situation is, he believes, accurate, but they simply have no idea why it has come to be what it is. The quotation from the 2001 nuclear planning and arms control document is most revealing: “Washington cannot know today whether Russia, or for that matter China, will be neutral, friend, foe, or part of a hostile alliance in the future.” The New York Times summary (March, 1992) of the leaked 1992 Defense Planning Guidance produced by Wolfowitz and Khalilzad (current NSC staffer), according to Fitzgerald, “described Russia and China as potential threats and warned that Germany, Japan and other industrial powers might be tempted to rearm and acquire nuclear weapons”. The January 2002 Nuclear Posture Review argues the possibility of a “sudden emergence of a hostile peer competitor on a par with the old Soviet Union”. This is the bulk of Derek's thesis about a Greater China (including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam) forming a mutual defense pact with a Germano-Russian Bloc. Derek agrees with you that this is “a surefire recipe for world war” and that is why he has been arguing, ever since standing in the office at JFK Special Warfare Center contemplating the OB maps at the end of the Six Day War, pondering their implications for the future of the Middle East and sustainability of U.S. post-WWII oil policy, that a third world war was a virtual certainty. Bush administration or no Bush administration, none of this would in any significant measure be different. Current U.S. Middle East policy is about confronting this larger threat ten years from now by, through the next few years, gaining complete control over the world's primary strategic resource. Islamic fundamentalism has been stoked in order to develop a means to oppose this U.S. intent, an intent which has been readable for well over a decade, as the 1992 New York Times summary clearly indicates.
There are stacked LEVELS of causation for why the world situation is the way it currently is. On one level, a relatively surface level, Derek argued that just as the Versailles Treaty made WWII inevitable, so the atomic bombings of Japan made WWIII inevitable. From growing up around bomber pilots, being taken to the atomic bomb sites as a child, listening to the idle chatter of SAC and U-2 pilots at Eielson AFB, knowing from teenage years that SAC was formed six months after V-J Day (way before the Soviets got the bomb: hence, the initial purpose of SAC was intimidation, not deterrence), Derek knew that the bombs were not dropped on Japan to end WWII in the pacific. Derek could only make assertions regarding this thesis; he had no way to prove it. But now there is absolutely no possibility of authoritatively denying that the primary purpose of dropping the bombs on Japan was to threaten the Soviets, not end the war in the pacific. Moreover, no significant American military field commander, Pacific or European Theater, advocated using the bombs on Japan, including even the likes of strategic bombing obsessive Curtis LeMay, then in the Pacific Theater at Chungking. Eisenhower was adamantly opposed, forcefully voiced his opposition, and, when informed that Japan had been atomic bombed, wrote into his diary that the consequences of this act for U.S.-Soviet relations were incalculable. Eisenhower then went into a prolonged state of deep depression.
In the past decade, there have been many books written about this on the basis of declassified documents. The best is by Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (N.Y.: Random House, 1995), which, over a twenty year period, grew out of his Ph.D. dissertation. He details the declassified documentation on the decision to drop the bomb and then shows how the American public was systematically misinformed about the decision. One of the early players in this decades-long black propaganda effort was McGeorge Bundy. Bundy's father was an old friend of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The younger Bundy, just out of Harvard, was recruited to edit/write Secretary Stimson's memoirs in which the decision to drop the atomic bombs figured greatly. Younger Bundy was given high-level guidance as to how this part of the story was to be handled, and he carried out the assignment brilliantly, after the requisite memo queries -- just as he later successfully misrepresented facts of the Diem brothers assassinations (which Derek in 1963, at an SIS dinner, publicly confronted Bundy about, much to everyone's stunned silence and utter dismay -- almost getting Derek thrown out of SIS as a first semester freshman; when Derek later had regular Sunday brunch at the Bundy's just off campus at the top end of Foxhall Road, Mac did not recognize him: small town, D.C., eh what!).
Alperovitz (who runs a think tank and is an international consultant: community economics, not unrelated to my present task of studying in depth Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital) does not publicly pursue the implications of the facts of the atomic bombing decision relative to the origins of the Cold War and the Soviet rape of Eastern Europe. Derek wrote him and argued that the clear indication of the reality of the U.S. decision on atomic bombing is that the Soviet decision to indefinitely occupy Eastern Europe was virtually inevitable from Potsdam (as this was when Stalin first began to learn of the atomic bomb effort) and was absolutely sealed by the atomic bombings of Japan. Alperovitz never replied. The other premiere factor was how thoroughly the Soviets were sacrificed by the Allies, who postponed significant engagement on the Western Front until well after the back of the Nazi army had been broken by the Soviet army, most decisively at the Battle of the Kurst Salient -- long before Allied strategic bombing began really to impact the Nazi war machine. The period of great impact of the bombing came only after the Nazi army was irreparably broken, and was largely in the form of retribution inflicted upon the German civil population. The Soviets lost some 30 million dead in the war, the U.S. some 300,000. In face of generalized atomic intimidation and direct threat of initiatory first strike, with a devastated industrial base and 20 million dead young men, the Soviets had only one credible possible deterrence of threatened U.S. actions: massively garrison Eastern Europe and threaten to overrun Western Europe. This was certain to be a tremendous drain on the Soviet economy, something Stalin most assuredly did not wish to do. He had no real choice. And after this garrisoning had been in place for 40 years, dismantling it was an extremely difficult undertaking, something virtually impossible to control and delimit.
Derek does not believe, however, that the top-down decision to dismantle the occupation of Eastern Europe, which got completely out of hand and lead to dismemberment of the Soviet Union, was due to economic collapse of the Soviet state: the economic demise came in the chaos after implementation of the decision began, not before the decision was made. Derek believes something altogether different happened to motivate the decision to jettison Eastern Europe, something involving evolution of strategic weapons systems on spaceship Earth, something that nullified the necessity of continued Soviet garrisoning of Eastern Europe. Whatever that something was, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld are informed about it.
When populations are successfully subjected to black propaganda, and thereby remain uninformed as to the actual history of events, this does not mean that that actual history has no effect on future events; it means that it has a “regressive” influence on events. It is only the surface of the mind that is successfully indoctrinated, successfully brainwashed. On the unconscious level, substance and import of the facts are known and the resultant cognitive dissonance vectors psychological experience into patterns of inter-subjective conflict that yield collective hysteria, collective hysteria like that presently sweeping the planet. The Cold War, by directing social attention for half a century away from real problems which needed immediate resolution, produced the present syndrome of unresolved and now largely irresolvable problems responsible for the gathering spiral of violence.
Other LEVELS of causation, subterranean levels, relative to the current world situation, Derek discusses under the rubric of the “deeper causes of the two world wars” going back in European and American intellectual history to the early 19th century.
For thirty-five years Derek has been reading people like FitzGerald. They write in bon ton journalistese and have access to leaked documents, but they are as identified with the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization as are the Bush's of this world -- and, therefore, are just as much a part of the problem and just as little a part of potential solutions as are the Bush's. Moreover, Derek has yet to read an accurate projection from any of them, and their concept of probable solutions is pure Lalaland. The persons Derek personally has met who have real grasp of the actualities of the present situation are Vietnam War combat veterans, not Vietnam War journalists.
There are many interesting aspects of Christopher Hitchens' book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso, 2001). Derek can comment only on details of the Vietnam War discussion. Derek certainly does not contest any of the actual facts Hitchens marshals, and Derek in MOON, printed in 1994, states that he feels Kissinger was more responsible for the Cambodian holocaust than was Pol Pot, but it is hard to have much sympathy with the arguments Hitchens makes. The most overwhelming aspect of his book is how well it demonstrates his complete incomprehension of the present state of human affairs on this planet, and what that incomprehension, on the part of someone as informed as is Hitchens, implies about what the future surely holds for us all. He argues by direct implication that the Vietnam War could have been fought morally -- otherwise, there could be no purported war criminals, such as Kissinger, associated with that war for Hitchens to single out for prosecution as distinct from those not war criminals -- and by less direct implication that war, as a type of human activity, can be a moral type of activity, otherwise all participants in war would be war criminals (and, Derek would argue, all members of populations of nation-states which engage in war). The other sections of his book argue, by direct implication, that the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state serves the human interest, is a force for good on this planet, that it, as a norm, does not engage in “assassination, abduction, torture, and intimidation”, otherwise there would, again, be no justification to single out this or that individual to be prosecuted for engaging in these activities in the name of this or that specific Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state. Derek finds no reality orientation whatsoever in such arguments and maintains that wishful thinking perpetuates the condition being decried in Hitchens' book by dissipating energy in fanciful activities that otherwise could be usefully employed.
To start out with something most obvious: Relative to the Vietnam War, Hitchens keeps quoting and using the term “civilian casualties”. But the fact is that there were no civilian casualties in Vietnam because there were no civilians in Vietnam. People, of course, like to maintain the fiction of civilians as opposed to military, or non-combatants as opposed to combatants, for moral, emotional, propaganda, or other reasons; but, in point of fact, these distinctions were not an actual reality of the war. The behaviors of what Hitchens calls “non-combatant civilians” determined the outcome of the war. The strategy employed to win the war was based primarily on employment of “non-combatant civilians” and only secondarily, even tertiarily, on use of combatants, military or non-military. He quotes Buckley of Newsweek stating “that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed.” (page 31) This is absolutely incorrect. I would be surprised if Trang Bach Dang (who finished his career as Saigon Party Committee Chairman) carried a weapon for 10-percent of his 30 years of warfare. Most members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure had no reason to carry a weapon, and to have done so would have put them at great risk and would have served no purpose. Hitchens does not understand the actual determinants of what transpired in the war or how the outcome was achieved. Activities he would deem political, economic, or social were primary and the most efficacious forms of combat; those who engaged in them were, therefore, combatants. He may not like the fact that this was the case, but that does not in any way change the fact that that was in fact the case. As Derek says, If you don't like reality of the war, don't get into the war in the first damn place. Hitchens' argument implies that moral war is possible, that there is a right way to kill and a wrong way to kill, and that when people kill the wrong way they should be prosecuted as war criminals. People are war criminals, as opposed to war itself being criminal. This is the best argument there is for continued utility of war. War crimes trials exonerate the population corpus of collective guilt and thus prepare the way to the next war. But, in point of fact, wars are not caused by acts of individuals, they are caused by the collective will to war of populations. A vortex tunnel forms in social attention cathexsis, from which collective attention cannot escape: one side of the vortex wall is formed by those demanding the war, the other side of the wall by those opposed. This wall is the vortex leading directly to war, and it could not have formed without both sides, that for and that against: the two sides bring each other into being, and their combined emotivity, their affect charge, prepares the unconscious determinants of subsequent action. The same is true of the adversaries. There is no such thing as “clearly the aggressor” or a “reluctant belligerent”. When the whole equation -- historical, military, political, economic, social, and the various psychological dimensions -- are considered, the involved adversaries co-create the war, each with the assistance of the others. There are no innocent civilians.
Hitchens' discussion of the bombing of Cambodia and Laos indicates that he does not at all understand what transpired. Hitchens says, by paraphrasing Fred Branfman who paraphrased Jerome Brown, “The speed and height of the planes, he said, meant that targets were virtually indistinguishable from the air. Pilots would often decide to drop bombs where craters already existed, and chose villages as targets because they could be more readily identified than alleged Pathet Lao guerrillas hiding in the jungle.” (page 39) This statement makes no coherent sense: if the pilots were intent on killing villagers, why would they often bomb bombing craters? It makes even less sense then nonsense when it is recognized that the statement comes in a discussion of B-52 bombing. These pilots never saw what they were bombing; in most cases they likely never knew what they were bombing. Such knowing was not the job of the pilots -- nor did they want to know. They were bombing a coordinate box, that and nothing else. They “put boxes down”. Period. The navigator received a set of coordinates and with the bombardier saw to it that the bombs went into the coordinate box. The people bombed never saw the aircraft bombing them, and if they were killed, in many cases they never even knew they were bombed. Target analysts frequently chose sites where craters already existed. There they fixed a coordinate box. And those coordinates went to the crew of the aircraft. Choosing to bomb a crater site was done for many reasons: because there was a tonnage quota; because the communists often relocated tunnel complexes under crater sites thinking they would be safer there (this is specifically discussed in the interrogation scene in MOON); because activity was picked up at a crater site on aerial photographs; because of humint; and on and on. Hitchens attributes to Kissinger an utter impossibility: choosing bombing sites personally, using raw intelligence. (page 38) No single human brain was capable of processing all the information involved in doing this, and the electronic computing capabilities available then were nothing compared to those today. Hundreds and hundreds of people at multiple locations in several countries were involved in this effort, with the information coming from thousands of sources in many dozens of distinct categories. Kissinger may have expressed arbitrary preferences on a few specific runs, but no single human being, even with no other responsibilities, could have micro-managed such a bombing campaign, or made a pretense of exercising informed decision making had he tried. Hitchens quotes a JCS memorandum that gives “oddly exact figures” (page 35) on the number of Cambodian civilian inhabitants of areas bombed. Almost certainly these figures were calculations performed with prescribed formulas based on “people sniffer” data (infrared detectors peppered into an area which send detection data via RF up to intelsats) which no one gave much credence. Moreover, Cambodia and Laos were receiving B-52 strikes long before Nixon came into office, which was routinely concealed by fabricated and falsified documents (involving coordinates other than those actually bombed: the name of the country within which a chosen bombing site existed never appeared on a targeting document, only the coordinates), just as there was cross-border stuff on the ground into Cambodia all the way back to the early 60s, maybe even before. This early bombing will be no more documented or admitted to than will be the secret negotiations in Laos in 1967 associated with the 1968 Tet offensive, or how standard was the practice where people were lined up and shot in the back of the head by Americans, or that file cabinet after file cabinet after file cabinet of documents were completely fabricated on an ongoing basis, and that people received ARCOMs for carrying out such fabrication. Such events occur in all wars and are undertaken by all contenders. War is what it is.
Derek actually read the Geneva Conventions at Georgetown University Law Library in course of researching MOON. Derek, in MOON, has a lot to say about war crimes trials and the origins of warfare. These statements were written in a ranting conversational fashion, but they were well considered before the writing. Every one of the rules stated in the Conventions are based upon categorical distinctions (2-valued-logic type either/or categories, permitting no shades of gray) that simply have no factual correspondence to the realities of contemporary warfare (with its omnipresent m-logically-valued fuzzy identities) -- if such rules ever had factual correspondence, for they certainly don't apply well even to the American Revolutionary War. They apply only to certain circumstances of warfare. In fact, even relative to WWII, there is only partial correspondence of reality to these categorical distinctions.
Hitchens' arguments about relevance of the tribunal findings at Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Manila to the Vietnam War actually demonstrate how illegitimate their application was in context of the realities of WWII. On one level, legitimacy of these trials presupposes that the side conducting the trial did not engage in the categories of behavior engaged in by those on trial. But this simply was not the case. Even all the planning and technological assemblage involved in the holocaust of the Jews, so often said to be a unique event in human history, was engaged in by the Allies: there was an enormous amount of planning and technology involved in preparing the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan to kill “non-combatant civilian” Japanese so as to threaten the Soviet Union. The race hate which made that act possible was no less intense race hate than that of the Nazi's for the Jews. Derek directly witnessed this race hate by Americans in Japan ten years later, and even then it was sufficiently intense to be extremely disturbing to a nine-year-old child. Moreover, there is a well documented element of complicity by the prewar and even wartime Allies regarding persecution of the Jews and the later holocaust. In the Pacific Theater, American troops engaged in every kind of atrocity, and mutilation behaviors were rampant: ears, private parts, flat noses were mailed home to girl friends and wives in great number. John Dower's book War Without Mercy documents this very well. And Derek learned a lot about it in Special Forces: one of the medic training cadre he went through dog lab under was a member of Merrill's Marauders and another of Darby's Rangers. Make the right comments in the right circumstances and people with this background will tell the truth to someone else in their line of business. Chemical and biological warfare was used by the Allies in that war. Dioxin was developed and used in the Pacific Theater. And on and on. War crimes trials are a way of clearing psychological decks so that the next war can be entered upon in the proper moral fashion. If international law is ever created that is enforceable under circumstances other than those deemed proper by victors in war or by those with overwhelming military force, it will be through establishment of an agglomerated transnational nation-state possessing police powers, surveillance and strike technology far beyond that possessed by any national nation-state today. Just as there was never any real communism, only national communism, so there has never been any real democracy, only national democracy.
Hitchens is an extremely talented propagandist. Like all good propaganda, most of what he says is probably true, but Derek thinks the actualities of the cases he describes are in all likelihood far worse than Hitchens is even capable of imagining. As a tiny, not so shocking, example: Remember the scene in the film The Dogs of War where the American merc enters the room, sees only a woman and some children, turns to leave, and is shot by the woman? He was the only merc killed in the assault. Imagine the shock of the mujahadeen, now Al Qaeda, upon being instructed by their sponsors to kill the women and children first, as the ones who appear most benign are the ones who always get you. Such instructors were the ones not shot in the back, or who did not die when so shot. Experience in war makes the next war more brutal than the one before. Hitchens, in arguing by implication that moral war is possible, that the nation-state is in the human interest, that laws of nation-states and laws of agglomerations of nation-states can prevent bad ways of killing and insure that only good ways of killing transpire in moral wars, probably does more to prevent the human species from overcoming its compulsive need for war than does even a Kissinger. Why? Because Hitchens’ arguments, by implication, direct all well meaning people to put their efforts at ending war into areas that have no possibility of ending war. Anything that prevents the human species from consciously and maturely coming fully to terms with the reality of the nation-state and the fact that its metaphysical underpinnings were irrevocably sundered by discovery of Abelian functions, Cantorian sets, and the quantum of action, encourages regressive responses such as those currently sweeping the planet.
Hitchens does not mention the Cambodian holocaust in his book. This is almost certainly because he did very well at Psychology 101. Kissinger is treated as being motivated by all the standard human vises: lust for power, greed, desire for sexual conquest, and so on. There is no understanding of the fact that when a private person becomes public by slipping on a collectively conferred role attribution -- e.g., Mr. Secretary or Mr. President -- the person ceases to be an individual and becomes a mouthpiece of the collective unconscious. The degree to which the person identifies him- or herself with the role attribution is a measure of the degree to which individual autonomy is lost to possession by an autonomous complex of the collective unconsciousness. This applies to any and every circumstance of socially conferred identity. When Hitchens summarizes international human rights law with the statement that "human rights law holds that political associations are legitimate only in so far as they preserve the dignity and well-being of individuals", he promotes yet one more legalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian falsehoods responsible for the present human disaster called modern civilization. To the degree that political associations confer legitimacy, they establish socially conferred identities which deny the dignity and well-being of individuals. There are no exceptions. Kissinger's bombing behaviors in Indochina were the collective will of the American people, the will to yet one more holocaust in “Indian country”, the will to destroy all factors reminding of the continued presence of animism, a presence to this day railed against by American missionaries in white shirts riding bicycles all over Southeast Asia, a presence that evokes the nonlocality and non-simple-identity of quantum mechanics, both being physical principles of nature which deny validity to the 17th and 18th century metaphysical assumptions underlying the constitutionally democratic nation-state and the capitalism it employs.
Derek Dillon remains fascinated by the spectacle of 260-million people intent on committing collective suicide. He has lived for significant periods in Japan every decade from 1954 onwards, and when he reads articles like that by Jim Frederick “Going Nowhere Fast” (Time, December 9, 2002) he can't help cringing. Another nail in America's coffin! This article continues the 221 demands of the Structural Impediments Initiative to impose on Japan every last detail of The American Way of Life. As any eldest-son military brat growing up in Japan in the 50s knew, MacArthur was a mama's boy, a mama's boy for whom boy-woman(mother) stuff was never really dealt with well. How did the military brat know this? One military brat to another is how! -- and because MacArthur made the Japanese build a wall down the center of every public bath in the country: mixed public bathing grated against the mama-boy's sensibilities. It is true that at various times in the past mixed public bathing had briefly been forbidden, but, in the main, public nudity in certain settings was a mainstay of Japanese life and in significant measure responsible for its low crime rates. The public bath gave village intimacy to the city quarter. Submitting to a foreigner building in the bath a wall separating the sexes was to obsequiously allow a severance of the Japanese psyche which caused enormous masochistic damage to the quality of male-female relations in Japan. A population corpus has not much in the way of conscious intergenerational memory. Women under thirty don't believe it when told their village grandmothers didn't wear underwear. Be that as it may, the collective unconscious of that very same population corpus never forgets. Look at the content of Japanese pornographic comic books and what you will see is all that MacArthur denied, what was commonplace before his edicts -- except that in these comic books it is overlaid with the heavy gloss of violence that regression exacts. When a wall severs the psyche of a people, that wall becomes a repressor, and all psychological repression leads to infantile regression. This, man-woman-level of the transference, as expressed in the group mind, the collective unconscious never forgets, never.
America has been unrelenting for sixty years in these intrusions, in continuing the puppy-dog training program of the Occupation Authorities: rubbing the pup's nose in the pee on the floor, swatting its tail, booting it off to the corner of the room. Mama's boys never escape the transference; they play either one side of the dyadic psychological complex or the other: on the knees or holding the whip. There is no possibility of being a whole person, only a personality fragment bouncing back and forth between mirroring transference figures. And there is, by definition, a collective unconsciousness of the whole psychodynamic. America's obsession with the details of Japanese potty training is a read on America's psychological constitution, and the degree to which it has been all these decades unhinged. Village intimacy in the urban quarter is particularly an affront to the transference-ridden American psyche. It's either sensitivity training workshops or Annie Get the Gun. America has one of the worst psycho-social environments on planet Earth; perhaps even one of the worst in the whole history of planet Earth. The Good Life was in far too many respects horrid, insufferable, barely livable -- even before 9/11. Since then, it has clearly gone into abeyance, where it will remain. America's urban quarter may be part of a global village, but that village has no psychological quality. On the internet, America dishes out to the world the unadorned female genital which it deems free speech: this clearly is the worldview of a mama's boy on his knees. (In pre-Brahmanic tribal India such animistic images codified reality, constellated the world, ordered society: in stooping, she has always conquered. See, for instance, Pupul Jayakar's The Earth Mother [N.Y.: Penguin, 1989] for an account of the cosmogenetic meanings of this Indic iconography. Such animism has always been the bane of, and greatest threat to, the American power elite -- ever since the first village massacre of 1635.) And after a session watching the lips move, the fundamentalist alter ego lashes out with the whip of talk radio. Boy-woman(mother) transference stuff! Japan's no pansu (without panties) bars have been known to hand out magnifying glasses to the occasional American visitor. (When Derek was a freshman, he hung out with a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology. This candidate was highly critical of Derek's personal library: It contains no pornography! If you want to understand yourself, human behavior, national character, the historical process, you must study pornography. Derek took this proffered advise to heart and such study has contributed immensely to his understanding of present-day world affairs. Absent knowledge of prevailing thematics in pornography, fashion, and film, there is no possibility of reading the collective unconscious, and hence no insight into the role of pattern in historiography. Derek Dillon's extremely accurate, down to details, thirty-year-old predictions concerning patterns of present day political affairs were not based primarily on politico-military analysis, but on identification of cultural predispositions and collective psychological gradients: such cannot be done absent studies in pornography.)
The contemporary U.S. attack on Japanese ma-and-pa merchandizing is just one more stage in its assault on village intimacy in the urban quarter: boy-woman(mother) transference stuff. It makes your skin crawl. The dreadnaught of 1853 projected its big gun into Japan's Edo Bay to open her up, open the cuntry up to public view, to force her to sell her wares. Boy-woman(mother) transference stuff. And what this imposed on the succeeding generation was an assault on the intimacy of the maternal village: the rural economy was monetized and the little rice paddy was forced out of the big rice paddy into constraints of the Western-style factory assembly line, man-u-facturing by recursive extension (rather than organic growth fertilized by involutory decomposition). The psychological violence involved in this uprooting, this disjointing, the Japanese collective unconscious never forgot, never.
Present American policy toward Japan -- after putting the sting on its economy with the Plaza Accords and the Louvre Agreement -- is to force it to get rid of what little village intimacy remains to its urban quarters by removing all the human touches that make the Japanese psycho-social environment still so very superior to that of America, even after sixty years of unrelenting assault, while at the same time demanding that it stop being the wimpy little puppy dog MacArthur demanded it become: absolutely pristine transference dynamics, straight off the couch. But when has any transference figure stayed lashed to the transferee after the relationship went on the rocks? Never. The unconscious never forgets, never. There is no way, when the big stuff starts going down, that Japan, with the military prowess America currently demands she develop, will be on the side of America, never.
And the American transference psychosis has now grown to such enormous proportions that the attempt will be made, explicitly or implicitly, to apply MacArthur's mama's boy civil affairs dynamic to the whole of the Islamic world. This will certainly be quite a spectacle, and Derek Dillon, undoubtedly, will be fascinated watching that stage of collective suicide unfold. A Greater China aligned to a Germano-Russian Bloc and the Latin American Trojan horse: the U.S. will keep on with the full-court press until this state of affairs is achieved. This collective existential condition is the governing attractor in the suicidal self-meta-program.
Thank you for drawing my attention to this Harper's Magazine sequel (“Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a plan for global dominance”, by David Armstrong, October 2002) to Frances FitzGerald's earlier The New York Review of Books “George Bush and the World” (September 26, 2002). Again, as you said about the FitzGerald article, there is no real analysis: the value in the Armstrong article is primarily in providing an account of the leaked documents. Derek Dillon, in MOON, however, does have an analysis of this development, and, indeed, had an analysis of it twenty-and-more years before it transpired. Therefore, the analysis was also a prediction. This analysis-prediction began in Washington, D.C., in the early 60s, started to crystallize at MACV Headquarters in 1968, and became elaborated -- again in Washington, D. C. -- in the 1970s.
As described in detail at multiple locations in MOON via dialogue, journal entries, and non-syllogistic discursive prose, this analysis-prediction saw four levels of determination and/or operative teleological strange attractor: [1] the level of collective unconscious psychology involving group-mediated transference phenomenologies; [2] the level involving collective subliminal reaction to collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm underlying the present day institutional base; [3] the level involving the fully conscious “stab in the back” myth relative to loss of the Vietnam War; [4] the level involving the probable actual factors behind the top-down Soviet decision to jettison Eastern Europe, which got out of control leading to collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Collective aspects of the transference are essayed in “Roof-brain Chatter” and “More Roof-brain Chatter”, as well as immediately above in relation to MacArthur's Japan. This behavioral syndrome has riddled the West ever since demise of the medieval mind, when rise of romantic love and separation of church and state structuralized displacement of the spirit from the center of the incarnate world, as Copernican heliocentrism replaced Ptolemaic terracentrism. All contemporary religious fundamentalisms are, at base, group-mediated transference-related phenomena -- even if having origins in Asian cultures, because of the degree to which science and its uniformizing technologies have displaced culturally-specific perspectives, and thus have inculcated collective “clinging behaviors”.
Nested inside of the collective transference dynamic has been the enormous Anglo-American and French mass hysteria in back-reaction against collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, beginning in the 1820s with discovery of m-valued Abelian functions. This is essayed in “Echo of the Mockingbird: Why Postwar Historiography is Anti-Historiographic” and “This Age of Ironies”. The first wave of hysteria began to cusp in the 1870s with publication of Cantor's work on transfinite sets (in many ways an exploration of implications of Abel's basic insight) and culminated in the turn-of-the-19th-to-20th-century civilizational crisis associated with formulation of the Axiom of Choice. The American pragmatic, British utilitarian, and French formalist back-reaction was the deep structure of the origins of World War One.
The second wave of mass hysteria overlapped the first, began with publication of Planck's paper on the quantum of action, and culminated with dissimulation of the m-logically-valued variables in Schrödinger's wave equation, which were falsely treated as probability amplitudes. The Anglo-American and French refusal to psychologically enter the new world prepared for by Husserlian “reductive phenomenology” and Gestalt psychology -- this refusal being embodied in the falsification of quantum mechanics -- was the deep structure of the origins of World War Two. The physicists characterize this refusal to themselves in the manner described by David Ehrenfeld in his lecture “Unethical Contexts for Ethical Questions” (see: “The Cow Tipping Point”, Harpers Magazine, October 2002, page 13) when he says: “As the physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson wrote in 1972, the more we learn 'about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less those of society'”. The subliminal motivation for choosing the probability amplitude interpretation was specifically to prevent applications in the rest of science and particularly in the social sciences. The quantum mechanics of self-organizing processes in collective and cooperative behaviors of physical systems at critical states is precisely an account of the animistic forms of order which governed human affairs for thousands and thousands of years prior to inculcation of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm (and its distorted characterization of those thousands of years of human history). Indeed, the quantum mechanics of collective behavior is particularly relevant to a description of the physicists' collective behavior at critical states in protecting the social sciences from contamination with the quantum mechanics of collective behavior!
The third wave of mass hysteria overlapped the second, began with applications of quantum mechanics in technology development, and culminated when quantum-based information technologies seriously undermined institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm as nation-state, as political-economy, as single-logically-valued monetary units, and as property systems based on the single-logically-valued pre-quantum notion of simple-identity. The French and Anglo-American postmodernist insistence on de-centering the enfolded, centered Hegelian structures explicit (as “domain structures” or laminated “limited spacetime domains”) in any non-dissimulating account of quantum mechanics was the deep structure of the origins of World War Three, which is very nearly full upon us. The immediate most dire threats and synchronistic events associated with decisive impulse to a third global war were the repeated experimental demonstrations that molecular-scale entities can be at more than one place at a time (hair-raising demonstrations of quantal non-simple identity which have been heralded as the paradigm cracking experiments for an era of post-digital quantum computing) and demonstrations that the speed of light -- a relativistic absolute limiting velocity -- is m-logically-valued, implying that Special Relativity applies to all scale levels, even those apropos of the social sciences. For an early discussion, prediction, and demonstration of both of these dire threats to the institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, see the latter sections of "Toward a General Theory of Process".
Nested inside this hundred-year-long Anglo-American and French mass hysteria, relative to “Dick Cheney's Song”, has been the American imitation of the post-WWI German “Dolchstosslegende”: the mass psychopathological induction induced in the American people by the “stab in the back” myth as to why America lost the Vietnam war, and what America would have to do to recover her fantasized self-image and globalized post-WWII persona. The anti-communist aspect of the Vietnam war was a cloak dissembling the real impulse motivating characterization of Vietnamese communism as a mortal threat to American national security. The actual impulse was a continuation of an American impulse which had been consistent in fundamental civil and religious behaviors from the first village massacre of 1635: destroy animism's threat to integrity of Judeo-Christian views and the post-Renaissance world construct.
As Derek Dillon discusses throughout MOON, Vietnamese peasant animistic states of consciousness, ancestral and nature spiritism, and the organizational formats and processes employed by the underground Vietcong political apparat, its “terrorist infrastructure”, exemplified the notions of non-simple identity, collective and cooperative behaviors, critical state processes, notions of boundary fluctuations, and so on typically seen in the quantum mechanics of collective, cooperative, and critical behaviors in physical systems. This theme is also detailed in “Yo-yo on a String: Globalization as 'Walkin' the Dog'”, “Hedgehog Eating the Fox: Losses from Historical Falsification of the Vietnam War”, “Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?” and “This Age of Ironies”. The German notion of “Auftragstaktic” -- which the U.S. Army (with the exception of pre-1965 Special Forces) treated as mere “small unit cohesion” -- was a very, very soft form of the Vietcong's animistic “identity transparency”, a state of consciousness cultivated by cellular kiem thao and phe binh criticism/self-criticism sessions, and a state most accurately described by the quantum theory term “relative-state”. Given how experimental support mounted from the 1950s for accuracy of the “bizarre” aspects of quantum mechanics, thus undermining validity of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, any reminding factor, such as these above-mentioned properties of Vietnamese communism, became an extraordinary focus of subliminal mass obsession and violent collective compulsion.
Military defeat in Vietnam was, subliminally, defeat of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm by the bizarre features of quantum mechanics, daily being evermore experimentally verified (experimental verification of a falsified theory is not necessarily a contradiction in terms, but this is not the place to go into that). This circumstance could not be allowed to reach consciousness, as the whole foundation of American civilization was at issue and under mortal threat: David's stone had hit Goliath directly on the temple of greatest faith. Hence, the “stab in the back” myth was required as a way of hiding from the reality of this mortal threat. Moreover, that stone had brought down the Anglo-American-designed Bretton Woods global monetary system: no small feat. If the mortal threat to the metaphysical foundations of American Civilization -- which ever increasing experimental verification of quantum mechanics constituted -- was to be indefinitely countered, then America would have to reign supreme, would have to control absolutely everything, would have to have no rivals, would have to dominate human aspirations globally, would have to achieve infallible threat identification and analysis, would have to obtain total information omniscience and omnipotence, would have to embrace brutality, would have to cast aside any intermediary and become, not only Secretary Powell's “the bully on the block” (Armstrong, page 78), but God of this planet. It would be hard to find a more pristine example of mass “projective identification” in collective psychological transference among a population corpus -- since Germany in the 1930s, that is.
Powell's personal history in Vietnam did not place him well to assimilate much about strategic aspects of that war -- and he took away all the infra-lessons of the field commander who never learned much about salient aspects of what transpired there. The insistence, in the Defense Planning Guidance documents reviewed by Armstrong, on use of overwhelming force, dubbed the “Powell Doctrine”, is a Vietnam War infra-lesson -- as it has to do with the “stab in the back” myth, not actual strategic realities of that war. Derek essays this issue in great detail in MOON, and takes to task point by point Col. Harry Summer's On Strategy (Novato: Presidio, 1982), which became holy writ at the Command and General Staff College in the days Powell was coming of age as a potential supreme leader. Indeed, the thesis that America's general officer corps has never quite comprehended the difference between power analysis (which is tied to modes of thought apropos of Newtonian differential and integral calculus) and capability analysis (which is tied to modes of thought apropos of post-Newtonian tensor calculus and quantal m-valued logics) is distinctly illustrated by Armstrong's comments (page 78):
With the Soviets rapidly becoming irrelevant, Powell argued, the United States could no longer assess its military needs on the basis of known threats. Instead, the Pentagon should focus on maintaining the ability to address a wide variety of new and unknown challenges. This shift from a “threat based” assessment of military requirements to a “capability based” assessment would become a key theme of the Plan.
One of the real lessons of the Vietnam War, no mere infra-lesson, is that capability is context dependent. There is no such thing as assessing capability relative to “unknown challenges”. Power analysis engages in context independent assessments, but, as the Vietnam War so clearly illustrated, such assessments shed little light on capabilities in real wars with all their political, social, economic, and psychological variables. Use of unwarranted force may not come back on you the next day, but it will come back on you -- and the longer it takes, and the more decontextualized it is, the higher the price paid. Power analysis and associated threat-based assessments are characteristic of Cartesian-Newtonian modes of thought, while capability analysis is characteristic of relativistic and quantum modes of thought, and the thinking of Sun Tzu. This is discussed at considerable length in MOON and in “VirFut Q-Pro: Public Policy Implications of Quantum Computing”.
Indeed, Cartesian-Newtonian power, force-structural, spatial, geo-potential, bounded, binary war/no-war, four-color map-type modes of thought dominate the Defense Policy Guidance documents reviewed by Armstrong, while the “new and unknown challenges” facing America clearly are, for the most part, non-Newtonian in nature. Quoting Armstrong (page 78):
U.S. defense strategy was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” Achieving this objective required that the United States “prevent any hostile power from dominating a region” of strategic significance.
Thinking in terms of powers, regions, and regional dominance is quintessentially Cartesian-Newtonian thinking. Again quoting Armstrong (page 82): “… a more complex approach aimed at dominating air and space on several fronts”. Here, in this age of internetworked telepresence and non-place communities, we have more Cartesian-Newtonian spatial thinking, as opposed to protracted-war-type temporal/quantum thinking, quantum mechanics being about, to quote physicist David Bohm, “clocks within clocks within clocks”.
Nested inside the “stab in the back” myth level of determination, and repeatedly discussed in MOON, has been the confluence of effects stemming from the actual factors behind collapse of the U.S.S.R. Five actual factors appear to have been involved: [1] the cumulative effects upon Soviet intellectual life of the work of Vernadsky and others in generalizing quantum-relativity theory into Soviet approaches to the earth and biological sciences (something yet to be done in the West), such that belief in the fundamental propositions of Cartesian-Newtonian Marxism amongst the Soviet elite could not be sustained (see: “Yo-yo on a String”); [2] a growing intellectual rapprochement and coziness between the German and Soviet intellectual elites, both of which remain uncomfortable with the falsification of quantum mechanics that transpired in the 1920s; [3] the winding down of Sino-Soviet conflict; [4] probable quantum-based technological innovations setting in motion obsolescence of ICBM deliverable nuclear weapons, such that there was no longer a necessity for the Soviet Union to garrison Eastern Europe in order to deter initiatory nuclear strike by the U.S.A.; [5] German and Russian Iraqi involvements relative to Middle East oil positioning. In this context, a top-down Soviet decision was taken to jettison Eastern Europe. This process was poorly managed and got out of hand, leading to economic collapse. Economic collapse came after the decision, not before -- which does not mean the Soviet Union was not under economic stress, as garrisoning Eastern Europe had always been an enormous cost, something undertaken only under great duress, something to be abandoned as soon as possible.
Given that Nato Advanced Study Institutes were holding meetings in Moscow as early as the late-Brezhnev era (on quantum-gravity, for instance, an area of considerable Soviet interest where quantum-relativity perspectives have been superceding those Newtonian), it is reasonable to suspect that the U.S. was well appraised before hand of the Soviet decision to release the Eastern European states. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that, according to Armstrong (page 77):
Powell's work on the subject [the new U.S. strategic doctrine of “base force” and “forward presence”] proved timely. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, and five days later Powell had his new strategy ready to present to Cheney.
Or, again, relative to the Iraqi situation, which was evolving in tandem with events in Eastern Europe, as Armstrong says (page 78):
The Plan's debut was well timed. By a remarkable coincidence, Bush revealed it the very day Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.
More timely, however, were conversations held at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV Headquarters, in the Spring of 1968, the substance of which were later written into MOON, which was published in 1994. Below, Derek Dillon responds to questioning in 1968 concerning conclusions he personally reached while an intelligence analyst at JFK Special Warfare Center working on the Middle East at the time the 1967 Six Day War broke out (MOON, Vol. II, page 68):
“Israel survives only because of Arab oil… Y'know, after World War II the Iranian people received about ten percent of the royalties generated from their vast oil sales, the rest going predominantly to those Brits who, due to British colonialism, owned interest in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. So, it wasn't any surprise that when the Prime Minister of Iran, Muhammed Mossadegh, nationalized Iranian oil that the plebiscite on the issue was overwhelmingly supported by the Iranian people, nor that those same people -- to this very day -- harbor deep resentments, hatred even, against the U.S. for its embargo of this nationalized oil, for having the CIA organize a coup against Mossadegh, and then seeing to it that the U.S. received a massive increase in its access to Iranian oil in the coup's aftermath… Ten percent. Shit! They shoulda, AT LEAST, got twelve-and-a-half percent.” Derek laughed in one big burst like a wallet-pod of shepherd's-purse showering seeds. “The levels of violence required to keep this Middle East policy in place will jump by huge leaps over the decades until the time comes when no amount of violence will keep the horrendous consequences at bay. Before it's over, American air strikes will have destroyed half the major cities of the Middle East, so as to keep the price down at the pump and avoid building adequate mass transit systems.”
“Hmmmm.” Talks like an astrologer, doesn't he.
“For the sake of oil, America, the other industrialized nations, and the compromised indigenous elites are raping those cultures. No matter what agreements the power brokers might make -- including those regarding the Palestinian issue -- to legitimize that rape, the long-term consequences will be extraordinary. America will become as embattled as Israel. If the policy continues unabated, fortress America will burn to the ground.”
“What would you suggest?”
“The chain of events leading to the inevitable began in the early 18th century; far be it from me to stand in the way of Newton, Locke, Smith and Associates. Our great leaders are bent on national suicide, even species suicide. They are likely to achieve their goal. What they don't understand is this: massed force is powerless in face of intelligent use of decentralized and self-organized interdiction. But they're gunna learn.”
“That's hardly a productive response to the question.” Hmmmm. Major problems with reality orientation.
“New concepts are needed across the full spectrum of human activities. The first step would be to stop doing everything possible to block the emergence of these concepts.”
And thirty-five years later, everything possible is still being done to block emergence of the required concepts: m-logically-valued monetary units, to mention only one. The human interest is in the American interest, but the American interest is not in the human interest.
From the e-mail addresses, it appears this article by Paul W. Schroeder, “Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War”, was published in Foreign Affairs, but there is no way to be certain of that. Derek Dillon surely is no advocate of preemptive war; however, he can only regard Schroeder's perspectives on this matter as 21st century realities viewed through the mind of 18th century rationalism. This paper is exemplary of how little people actually understand of what is going on in the world around them. In arguing against preemptive war on Iraq, Schroeder argues for the very framework making preemptive wars all the more likely.
In the first instance, every aspect of his discourse on the involved issues is based upon the assumption that wars in general transpire for rational reasons. Irrational, collective, compulsive factors are not discussed, and thus, by implication of his argument, do not play a significant role in causing wars. By the powers legitimately or illegitimately vested in them, leaders of nation-states choose to have wars, and such choices are based upon considerations that lend themselves to rational exploration, rational justification, or rational opposition. Relative to the nation-state system, this is the Cartesian aspect of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. A distinction between rationalization of war and actual cause of war is not made. The conscious excuse for war is taken to be the actual cause of war. War can be discoursed about objectively, logically, dispassionately. Schroeder tells us that “Americans ought to heed the advice of logician Morris Cohen: 'First, if you can, refute my arguments. Then, if you must, impugn my motives.'” Cohen and Schroeder assume that the rules of logic Cohen embraces are the only rules of logic. Clearly, this is not correct: Chinese Taoist logicians and 20th century European practitioners of m-valued logics, for instance, do not embrace Cohen's rules. And it is a totally unwarranted 18th century imposition -- largely rejected in the West by the mind of 19th century romanticism -- to maintain that existential issues can be resolved by recourse to logic. Indeed, in the 20th century, Gödel demonstrated that even in mathematics, itself, existential issues -- such as those concerned with existence proofs and related to questions of completeness and consistency -- cannot be resolved by recourse to logic. We have learned that the rules of the logic chosen are an expression of the class of arguments being made: something like how the shape of the negotiating table reflects the relationship of the parties sitting at it.
In presenting an 18th century view of 21st century realities, Schroeder conflates the two in a way typical of confused contemporary modes of thought. He presents the 18th century model of the nation-state system from the point of view of 19th century historicism (the origins of which were in Marxism) argued with a 20th century postmodernist slant (the origins of which were in Marxism), while declaring himself a conservative opposed to leftist interpretations of history. Indeed, postmodernism attacks 18th century modes of thought and institutions, which it has designated as modernism, in just such a way as to sustain those modes of thought and institutions in face of the challenge from quantum, relativistic, and m-logically-valued perspectives. Non-linear [Newtonian] dynamics (they always leave out the word “Newtonian”!) is a way of protecting dynamics from post-Newtonian challenge. Schroeder attempts to protect the Newtonian dynamics of the nation-state system from post-Newtonian challenge. His position is one sort of “clinging behavior”.
The Founding Fathers did not, as Schroeder does, treat the conventions of the international system as being justified, as having de jure status, by virtue of historical evolution. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these conventions were argued (Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, for instance) by analogy to Natural Law, the natural laws themselves being regarded by some as having Deist origins, therefore having universal and unchanging validity. Schroeder, however, in 19th century historicist and 20th century postmodernist fashion, argues that:
These norms, rules, and standards are vital not because they are immutable, unchallengeable, and enduring, but precisely because they are not. They are changeable, fragile, gained only by great effort and through bitter lessons of history… The actions of great powers above all shape norms, mold expectations, provoke reactions, invite imitation and emulation, uphold or destroy or change the prevailing rules.
The natural laws, as understood in the 17th and 18th centuries, are not the natural laws as they are understood today in the post-Newtonian world. Postmodernism adopted 19th century Marxist historicism because postmodernism does not like the social science and political-economy that would be argued by analogy to post-Newtonian Natural Law. By adopting historicism, postmodernism denies applicability of natural laws to the domains of human activity, thus preventing application of quantum, relativistic, and m-logically-valued perspectives outside their original areas of discovery. By this means postmodernism protects the modernism it claims to be attacking. Schroeder agrees with this postmodernist orientation when he says that “If new, more effective means to check new dangers are needed, this system [the Newtonian nation-state system] is the way to develop them.”
Schroeder provides a quintessentially Newtonian description of “this system”:
… two basic principles… have enabled the international system to work and peace to grow in our time… the idea that the system must consist of independent units… of equal juridical status and rights, as opposed to the medieval hierarchical system… [and] the movement toward the association of independent units in international relations into unions… and institutions to enforce jointly accepted rules.
Relative to the nation-state system, this is the Newtonian aspect of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm: Newton's rule-regulated billiard-ball universe in political miniature. Absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct entities articulated into unions by rules governing the forces immanent between them: summation of forces (majority rule); force divided against itself (bicameral federative institutionalization and its multilateral correlates). Schroeder makes the argument that “this system” has “been brought under the governance of international treaties, conventions, common practices, and institutions to enforce jointly accepted rules” (hence allowing “peace to grow in our time”).
“Enforce jointly accepted”? Take away the guns held at everyone's heads by the not-so-thin blue line and the olive-drab formations and see how much acceptance there is of the “jointly accepted rules”. By enforcing on the consciousness of everyone the atomistic assumption of absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct entities acting by virtue of the forces immanent between them, the nation-state insures that peace is just another form of war, that peace can only be force divided against itself, that great power actors by their actions will shape the norms. “Accepted jointly enforced” is the actual reality dictated by the assumptions of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm -- an action-based paradigm, not a participatory paradigm. This 18th century paradigm was based on a conception of Natural Law which Schroeder obviously still believes has validity, for he forcefully argues that things cannot work well in any other way, that without “this system” all would be chaotic -- which is to say that post-Newtonian natural laws cannot be applied to human systems, that is, the rhyme and reason of argument by historicism.
But by arguing for clinging to “this system”, as only historically justified, and not justified by recourse to Natural Law, when Fukuyama's “The End of History” has already fallen upon us, Schroeder supports the very conditions upon which the preemptive war he argues against is being justified. The only real solution to the long-term consequences he fears from preemptive war is the very solution he surely would not accept: analogical application of post-Newtonian natural laws to domains of human activity.
The truth is: there is absolutely no individual component to the causality of genocidal events. None. This is true even of atrocity events -- even if the atrocity is committed by a single person. The collective unconscious is so much in control of such events that it does not require the presence of a crowd, a mob. But you, in your identification with a god of retribution, speak of the controversy over collective and individual responsibility in genocide. This is a legalistic rabbinism, a lawyerism, an artifact having nothing whatsoever to do with actual properties of the case, an artifact supported by a medical rabbinical denial, a psychiatrism. The psychiatrists agree with the physicists: there is no such thing as a collective occasion of experience (Ain't never seen none).
The lawyerism is an expression of the psychological state of identification. The law brought down from the mount: the law of a vindictive god, a god of retribution, a god that exterminates whole towns when someone pisses on a sacred wall, even if only half the population can so piss, as Mark Twain noted, law of the one and only mesomorphic god whose ectomorphic son is destroyed, crucified, this destruction becoming the signal act of reformation, the original genocide -- Christianity being Evangelical Grace Reformed Judaism. Doubt this was genocide to the rabbinical mind? Look at Raphael Lemkin's definition of genocide as he gave it in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (as quoted in A Problem From Hell, Samantha Powers, Basic Books, 2002, p. 43), a definition which was modified in being adopted by the United Nations:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.
This definition was independent of whether or not physical extermination was part of the genocide, as Lemkin was most generally interested in prevention of destruction of national and ethnic identities. Genocide thereby had the properties of forced assimilation, forced acculturation, and one is forced to wonder as to the genocidal status of ISO-9002, the Structural Impediments Initiative, the current American ideology of economically-forced global monoculture, and the programs of the American Occupation Authorities in postwar Germany and Japan.
This genocidal historical funnel is re-enacted everyday in the nuclear family with its one-and-only mesomorphic father, therefore no alternative role models, and with its ectomorphic son: the exemplary prerequisite transference-inducing condition in society necessary for onset of genocidal behaviors. Though there be the claim to existence of an individual god, a one-and-only-one god, an I-am-me-and-only-me/I-am-that-I-am-type god, there is in actuality no individual component of causality in this day-in-day-out intrafamilial genocide, much less the sort that is normally associated with the collective human behavior called war. What specific killing of a father was not the killing of the father? There never has been such a case -- even in fragging the surrogate father in Vietnam (actuality of which must be denied by all one-and-only fathers). But because the vindictive mesomorphic father identifies with the vindictive mesomorphic god with his Ten Commandments (“As long as you live in my house and I pay the bills, you will act according to the rules I establish. When you finish high school, become a responsible age, and leave, then you are on your own”), he must see patricidal-fratricidal genocide as individual act, as raising a responsibility issue, not as raising a causality issue -- as cause is irrelevant when the will of the father has been transgressed. All that matters is vindictive retribution and justification of that retribution by attribution of individual responsibility -- and if the whole town is to be destroyed in punishment, then the town is to be regarded not as a collectivity but as a collection of responsible individuals. Indeed, it is a transgression against the father even to allow existence of a town that is an integrated collectivity, rather than a collection of responsible individuals. My will will be done; questions of causality be damned. Punishment is the efficient means of prevention regardless of cause. Why it was done doesn't matter. Why? Because I said so.
The idea that law and punishment can prevent genocide is ludicrous: it assumes the perpetrators act on a rational basis of egoic psychology and that they fear death. These assumptions are no more true of genocidal actors than they are of suicide bombers. Anyone guilty of genocide, in the definition given in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (given in Power, p. 62) was first guilty of murder. Is the threat of being executed a second time going to deter genocide, prevent genocide, even if the genocidal actor were acting on a rational basis? Law and punishment in no way address, let alone remove, the causes of genocide. Indeed, they reinforce those causes.
Some years ago, Derek Dillon told Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996) that he completely agreed with Goldhagen's main thesis that complicity of the general German population was the reality of perpetration of the World War Two holocaust, but that in treating the general German population as a collection of responsible individuals, rather than an integrated collectivity, thereby demanding and permitting individual accounting, he was perpetuating the cause of genocide at a time when such perpetuation would have major consequences: facilitation of general war and more genocide. Derek was not here saying that Goldhagen had become responsible for a future holocaust, he was saying that Goldhagen had become a cause of a future holocaust. This observation was, of course, completely outside of Goldhagen's mental box and Derek received no reply.
It doesn't legally matter, for instance, that America caused the Cambodian holocaust; it only legally matters that the Khmer Rouge were its perpetrators. Because I (an inflated I) said so, is “why it was done” doesn't matter. Because the cause doesn't matter, it is an uncaused cause, which makes psychological sense at least, as the inflated I takes on the properties of an Uncaused Cause. But by preventively punishing individual members of the Khmer Rouge in legal acts of vindictive retribution, not only is the cause of the Cambodian holocaust free to find perpetrators of other yet to come holocausts, but the collective virulence of the genocidal impulse is greatly magnified. The cause of the Cambodian holocaust was later the cause of the Kurdish holocaust, while the perpetrators were Saddam's military forces. Would punishing the Khmer Rouge according to the United Nations convention on genocide have prevented the Kurdish holocaust? An Uncaused Cause can always find another surrogate perpetrator.
In the spring and summer of 1968, while at Strategic Research and Analysis (SRA), MACV Headquarters, Derek vociferously, loudly, argumentatively, aggressively, offensively predicted a great tragedy if the U.S. expanded the physical boundaries of the Vietnam War. This was a number of years before onset of the Cambodian holocaust. The involved argumentation was associated with production of a strategic assessment of impact of the 1968 Tet offensive on the balance of capabilities in that war. Write up of this assessment was suppressed. Just as this process of assessment and suppression was reaching a climax, Derek received word that his mother had had a stroke. Immediately before leaving Vietnam on an emergency leave basis, Derek scribbled an agonized note to his SRA co-analysts, a note left in the vacated desk drawer, a note focused on presentiments of megadeath in the wings, a note born of the recognition of meaningful co-incidence resident in death of the mother at that particular moment. This was all the more meaningful and heart-rending in that the mother had several years earlier become hysterical and sobbed out that she would never see the son again, when being told that the son had chosen to go to Vietnam so as “to find some way to understand the sickness in the American soul” -- something never said to the father. The son, of course, thought the mother felt the son would be killed in the war. But none of this had to do with individuals, not in a family for hundreds of years made of yeomen farmers, evangelical ministers, and military men, not in a family where the father takes the only son for the first time to the family farm immediately after the mother's funeral, where the only question asked of the father by each of his dozen siblings upon return from the farm lost 35 years earlier in the Great Depression was: what is the condition of the artesian well where the milk cans were kept? Death of the mother was subliminally death of the well spring. Animism is animism; tie to the land is tie to the land; integrated collectivity is integrated collectivity -- be it that of the Khmer Rouge or that of yeomen in pre-depression era, German-Dutch, south-central Pennsylvania. There is absolutely no individual component in the causality, none.
Resort to the rigid rabbinical rule regulation introjected of a vindictive god, a god whose laws are etched in flame, quite obviously has something to do with why there is no interest in causes of genocide, only in responsibility for genocide and responses to genocide. Samantha Power's focus in A Problem From Hell is on the crucial question of why we have all been bystanders to genocide, not on the even more crucial question: why genocide? She does not ask why the impulse to exile the Jews became over some 20 centuries the impulse to exterminate the Jews. And she does not ask why such an effort of extermination transpired in the 20th century, not the 10th, the 7th, or the 5th. She states the conventional view that merely war is not genocide, that genocide is more heinous than is merely war. Yet, she, along with the United Nations, provides no plausible account of how genocide is different from merely war in a time of total war involving machine-gunning, bombing, nuking, gassing civilians. The idea is that the distinguishing property of genocide is the intent “to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they are” (Power, p. 58). What kind of anthropology is this? There's a whole lot of definin' goin' on here. Is an ethnic group an ethnic group because of what does or because of what it is? In the concrete case, what distinguishes between is-ness and does-ness? “Did” as distinct from “is”, in fact, is a matter of who holds the gun when the definition is laid down.
America in Vietnam killed more non-communists than communists. America killed these non-communists for what they were: animists. Not for what they did. Doubt this, do you? Well, why then did America kill all these non-communists? Collateral damage? If so, why was the free-fire-zone policy under which this killing took place -- given a name by Samuel Huntington at Harvard, i.e., “forced-draft urbanization” -- so ineffective at killing communists and so effective at killing animists? Collateral means accompanying, secondary. The killing of communists was collateral in this case, not the killing of animists. America had no intent to kill animists, you believe, and therefore is not legally culpable for genocide of animists? Why is it that in most every capitalist account of economic development such development is positively correlated on a virtually one-to-one basis with urbanization? Is forced assimilation to capitalism an attempt to destroy animistic groups, animistic identity (is-ness), and the involved covalent non-Judeo-Christian spirit belief (does-ness)? Study the G.I. language of the Vietnam war and you will have a difficult time ruling out the explicit intent to exterminate this particular group, the animists: “Injun cuntry”, “Kit Carson scouts”, “hatchet forces”, and so on. The American collective mind could not make a radical separation between the genocide perpetrated by its Founding Fathers and the genocide committed by the troops commanded by the impulses of West-more-land. There has been no more consistent theme in American history -- from the first village massacre in 1635, accomplished by ancestors of those Puritans (purified identity) who founded Harvard, to Samuel Huntington's proclamation of the present “clash of civilizations” -- than the will to exterminate groups of animists. “Did” as distinct from “is”, in fact, is a matter of who holds the gun when the definition is laid down.
Okay, we all know that why genocide is undertaken doesn't legally matter and, therefore, is irrelevant in a court of law: what matters is the act, not the why of the act. Nonetheless, one finds oneself wondering whether or not there was a meaningful coincidence involved in why this “why” was written out of the law in the way it was. Christ, the errant reformist Jewish son, did, long ago, turn over the moneychanger's tables. If Jewish money behaviors were singularly involved in genesis of the collective impulse to put the Jews into exile, what was the does-ness/is-ness factor singularly involved in genesis of the collective impulse to exterminate the Jews in the 20th century? Could it in anyway have been related to “resort to the rigid rabbinical rule regulation introjected of a vindictive god”? And if so, why “the 20th century, not the 10th, the 7th, or the 5th”? This is impossible! you say. Nazi Germany certainly was not opposed to enforcement of rigid rules. Besides, there are no causes of genocide. Causes would be justifications. There are no causes; genocide is totally irrational. Better watch yourself: if it is totally irrational, then punishment cannot prevent it, and the main reason for having a law against it has been removed. Better think again.
Consider that even though Luther reformed reformed Judaism, the Nazis may have been on the same side as the Jews (secularized or not) when it came to application of rigid rule regulation. Why, then, the Nazi impulse to exterminate the Jews? Does “why the 20th century, not the 10th, the 7th, or the 5th” help us answer that question? Only a matter of technological feasibility? Were this the case, that would mean that a will to exterminate the Jews had existed for more than 2000 years amongst many peoples. This would be a truly amazing piece of history, a piece that certainly would itself require explanation. But the collective unconscious is not particularly known for its adherence to the rules of binary logic. Indeed, Ignacio Matte Blanco (The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Duckworth, 1975) has gone some considerable distance toward demonstrating that the unconscious adheres to the rules of multivalued logics, not binary logic, and that synchronisties, not simple antecedent-consequent relations, constitute the causality of the psyche, no matter how acausal this causality may appear to a binary mind. Imposition of prescriptive law (law written by application of the rules of binary logic) means the end of animistic spontaneous social order, which end involves defining such social order out of existence, defining it as not having ever existed. At many times in the past, this legalistic imposition perpetrated genocide on pagan peoples -- genocide as broadly defined by Raphael Lemkin, and even as more restrictively defined by the United Nations convention. Here we have another case of a will to exterminate a social corpus with a common defining characteristic: animism. And this will has apparently existed over approximately the same period as that which may have existed relative to the Jewish people. Meaningful coincidence or not?
Einstein's god was not a god who could embrace quantum mechanics. At the very beginning of the 20th century, Max Planck published his famous paper on the quantum of action: 1900. Thus, was the century of genocide ushered in. What is quantum mechanics if not an account of how spontaneous order emerges in material systems? Quantum mechanics is the theory of collective and cooperative behavior in nature. Spontaneous order is seen to emerge at critical states when the correlation length between parts of a material system goes to infinity. The name for this condition at infinite correlation length is “Bose-Einstein condensation”. The consensus treatment of this spontaneous critical-state transition between incoherency and coherency is a matter of probabilities. But Einstein's god would not play dice with the universe. So Einstein rejected this notion of how spontaneous order emerged. Was this rejection because of the dice issue or was it because of the issue hiding behind the dice? If quantum mechanics is a theory of the emergence of spontaneous order in material systems, then the same theory would have implications for the emergence of spontaneous order in human systems. But Einstein's god, the Old One, the vengeful god, the god of retribution, the god whose Ten Commandments were brought down from the mount, could not only not embrace an account of nature where the laws are not commandments, but mere dice rolls, he could not possibly embrace a theory which implies the existence of spontaneous order in human systems, for such lawless order is pagan animism. Bose-Einstein condensation is animistic identity transparency: no matter how far removed in space elements of a system are, their behaviors remain perfectly correlated, correlated to such a degree that the elements cannot be distinguished from one another: their identity is transparent because their does-ness/is-ness factor, their covalence, has transited to unity. A collective pagan sexual rite. There is absolutely no individual component in the acausal causality, none.
But this quantum notion of transparent identity resonated strongly with the Germanic soul (which is by definition unconscious), with its Heimat sensibility -- that collective psychological residue, that folk-borne feudal participation mystique, that imprinting with the metabolism of the Erdgeist, the soil spirit -- resonated to such an extent that that Germanic soul set about preparing fertile ground for the new paradigm in all aspects of its cultural life. But not only was Einstein's god not willing to go along with this, neither was the reformed god of Einstein or the reformed reformed god of Einstein embraced by the French, the British, and the Americans, and the conscious minds of middle class Germans. A back-reaction set in. The Germanic soul was stopped dead in its tracks; its project to prepare an integrated context fit for the new discoveries about the nature of nature was iced in its infancy. The new physics would not be allowed to inform the patterns of human life. A classical limit would be established: one of those sacred walls Einstein's god does not like people to piss on. Human life would no longer be allowed to be part of nature as nature was known to be; human life would have to become artificial, eugenic, cloned eventually; human intelligence would have to become artificial intelligence. Well, how do the archetypal processes of the human collective unconscious deal with such a case of soul subversion? They constellate all the historical material related to the thematic evasion from back across the great sweep of human history and then play it out as regressed synchronistic events organized like a huge cataclysmic nightmare. And there is absolutely no individual component in the acausal causality, none.
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