The
Ism Schism
by
American foreign policy, and even
what it means to be an American to some, has recently been redefined in terms
of the War on Terror. The rhetoric of Good and Evil, the tendency toward concrete dichotomy in
discourse and action, and the politicization of culture at large suggest that
the War on Terror may in some ways resemble the Cold War.
The central lesson of the Cold War
was learned by those on all sides: to not give in to the promise of deliverance
by ideology. Indeed, one could easily
posit that it was the excessive glorification of and to commitment to the
Communist ideal—at the expense of
institutions and processes—that most poignantly characterized the descent of
much of the world into authoritarianism.
Immediately following the fall of the Eastern Bloc Communism, it seemed
self-evident that those who stood to benefit the most from this lesson were
those who had been the “losers” of the Cold War.
But as Soviet tyranny becomes a
thing of the past, and Russia and Eastern Europe ostensibly embark on their own
bumpy paths to capitalism and democracy, history is threatening to repeat
itself—in the United States, of all places.
The nascent War on Terrorism reveals an American failure to assimilate much
of that which could have been gleaned from our common Cold-War history.
When viewing the Cold War as a
perfectly binary competition between two entities,
it is easy to retrospectively (and accurately, one would presume) identify a
winner and a loser. But this literal,
tangible outlook belies a stickier, more contentious fact: that as ideologies, Capitalism and Communism
were not alone as players in the Cold War, especially on the American
front. Anticommunism—quit separate from
Capitalism itself—was a political and ideological force in its own right,
playing a role in policy in culture that transcended any abstract or concrete commitment
to the simple sanctity of markets.
The scope and power of
Anticommunism grew to incredible breadth in its impact, not only in terms of
foreign and domestic policy, but also on American culture at large. Often it
was this unacknowledged cultural mandate that drove regrettable and
counterproductive outgrowths of American actions during the Cold War. McCarthyism can be linked to no material
gains in the real long-term campaign against the Soviet Union; Vietnam was
lost, and without grave consequences for the democratic world; the US’ Central
American proxy wars of the 1980’s were justifiable to a public—even after the
eruption of a major scandal surrounding their illegal means of execution—that
saw foreign policy through a framework tempered in its very essence by
Anticommunism.
As Anticommunism imbued the Cold War
with certain fallacious pre-destiny, so too does an emerging Antiterrorism
threaten to permeate and distort the War on Terror.
Ideology, Myth, Monolith
The late Harry Rositzke,
a scholar and a spy, described the Cold-War mindset as being driven by the “Myth
of the Communist Monolith.” Abstractly,
this myth led to assumptions about a broad international conspiracy which oversimplified
things on one hand while creating false dilemmas on the other; it was also a
large component of the aforementioned overzealous Anticommunist mindset.
In more practical terms, the Myth
generated a framework through which poor decisions were made. Essentially, the Communist monolith was one
in which Communism superceded nationalism.
This aspect of the Myth did not bear out. The kernel of falseness may have lain in the
fact that Communism, being a system of government, is always tied to
nationality (and, empirically, usually followed a nationalist revolution). In this way, Communism, as it exists in the
concrete world, is necessarily and in essence tempered by nationalism. This is not in the spirit of the Marxist ideal
or Soviet rhetoric which were seen to underlie Communism, but it was nonetheless
demonstrably true throughout the Communist world.
In simple terms, Communism was necessarily
a nationalist enterprise, but in he eyes of Anticommunism it was transformed in
to something supranational. This created
the platform for American engagement and political violence in dubiously-justified
conflicts in
This myth is being turned on its
head in regards to terrorism, and it is still fallacious. The myths of Anticommunism purported that
somehow the distinctly nationalist could become supranational. The current means of prosecution of The War
on Terrorism presume that the distinctly transnational, or supranational,
phenomenon of terrorism can somehow be herded and trapped into the confines of
a given state or group of states, a reductively monolithic “Terrorism.”
The American response to the
events of
The War on Rational Policymaking
The most essential and most
alarming aspect of the new War on Terrorism is the utter refusal by those
perpetrating it to define "Terrorism" itself. The dismantling of the “Communist
monolith," the fallacious notion that ideology could supercede all else,
was indeed abstracted and applied to the ways of life of entire populations,
most heartwarmingly in America's collective acknowledgement that the Russkies really did love their children too.
But the problem with such rational and populist lessons is they are only
learned by those who were not benefiting from the flawed old order. Thus, transfusing
what may really be common cultural “knowledge” into the discourse of the
politicos—who always have such a tremendous continuity, even when their
cultural or social bedrocks may not—is like having the Flat Earth Society give
out the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Enter the War on Terrorism. A war on a word sounds so brilliant and absolute:
Drugs, Poverty, Evil, Communism, Infidels.
Indeed, a war against Evil itself.
I certainly can’t see the point in sitting down for talks with a
representative from Evil. Such base
declarations of our shared intent to set ablaze the vast armies of straw men
allied against us are ultimately counterproductive. Each of these Wars is either a component or a
function of the larger, long-seeded War on Rational Policymaking.
I understand the political necessity of
John Ashcroft never telling me what "terrorism" means, lest he lose
his ability to expand his powers every day, but before 2001 it was generally
thought to mean something along the lines of "using violence against civillians to further political goals." But it instead
gets applied to everyone we don't like.
When a war against a word becomes a de facto national religion, we as a people
approve of or overlook foreign policy actions and frameworks for action that
are counterproductive to our real security and quality of life needs, as well
as wholly incompatible with our shared principles. The Contras are may be the
most bizarrely sinister example. Suharto in
Anticommunism justified the overthrow
of democratically elected governments in our own hemisphere, funded by our own
CIA, and aided by our own Army Rangers. The people chose to look the other way
en masse, that being a preferable alternative to risking a regional outbreak of
the great ism disease of the day. Anticommunism was the disease, not
tiny Central American countries that wanted to mix state planning into their
nascent economies (as we still do today, in the form of tariffs and subsidies
that would be unthinkable in the developing world).
The
This new ism is all the more powerful, because we in effect created it.
The word gets to mean whatever is politically expedient. Already, special legislation and task forces
in
There will be mistakes. There will be over-exertions of vigilance and
politicization of process. There will be
victims. And this time around, they can
be rounded up secretly and executed in
