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June
10, 2003
Whining, Whimpering
Leftists Confront the Impeccable Logic of American World Domination
A
Talking Points Memo from Herman Neutics and Associates
By RICHARD LICHTMAN
It comes as no surprise that the present era has
witnessed a resurgence of virulent complaint and outrage from
the so called "left community." Not that the tendency
has ever been absent in recent history; but from the time of
the 2000 election and the claim that President Bush "stole"
the prize of state power through nefarious means, the chorus
of complaints has risen to a fever pitch. With the Bush Administration's
response to the September 11th catastrophe--the Patriot Act I
and impending II, the attack on Afghanistan, imprisonment of
foreign nationals and American citizens, patriotic defense of
American prerogative in the world, the Iraqi War and the assertion
of the right to preemptive attack and total domination of other
nations, the government has come under mounting denunciation
and even acts of civil disobedience from those who still cling
to the touching notion of respect for the right to life, the
autonomy of nations, and the quaint principle of world justice.
Rather than unmask this fervid and largely
irrational assault of empty claims and groundless declamations
piece by piece, I will simply present an overview of the situation
that will establish the inherent logic, the brilliant argument,
that is to say, simply put, the wisdom of the Administration's
policy. In order to embark on this pursuit it is necessary to
set out a framework, a meta-political position from which the
present situation can be evaluated and its justification established
through logical deduction. Of course, as in any deductive scheme,
definitions, postulates and assumptions are required but rather
than tax the lay reader with technical pronouncements and theoretical
elaborations, I will simply lay out a general framework from
which the argument can be seen to follow apace. And for this
purpose, nothing could better serve than the logic of neo-liberal
economic theory, a doctrine so inherently plausible that even
its ideological opponents are powerless against its deductive
power.
There are two basic points to be established
from which everything else will follow with the necessity of
Euclidean rigor.
1. The first thing to understand is
the simple and unassailable contention that if each country contributes
to the world what it is best suited to produce, without interference,
the result cannot be anything other than the most perfect allocation
of resources and the greatest well-being for the largest number
of human beings. Lay people need only imagine the point by reflecting
on Darwinian theory. It has been established, even to the acknowledgment
of the liberal academics, that in the competition of animals
and animal species the "fittest" will succeed. And
in the struggle for scarce resources ("food" in theory
of Malthus, from whom Darwin took his fundamental conception)
each species will dominate by utilizing its particular survival
skill to establish its position: the speed of the jaguar, the
strength of the elephant, the instinctual reproductive brilliance
of the ant and bee, these are specialized characteristics that
afford each of these species a unique advantage in its distinctive
environment. And hasn't the great economist P. Samuelson informed
us that "Again and again we have seen how specialization
increases productivity and standards of living?" Certainly
the point is obvious? For as he has rightly noted, specialization
rests on "interpersonal differences in ability." Of
course, beyond the natural differences of human beings there
are those that are further developed by the process of specialization
itself.
Of course, all of this follows logically
from the principle of comparative advantage. Once again, to
employ one of Samuelson's brilliant derivative examples (elucidating
the model proposed so artfully by Ricardo) if the best lawyer
in town is also the best typist, it "pays" him to permit
his typist to go on typing while he concentrates on his more
productive and unique capacity to lawyer. One may quibble that
not everyone is socially empowered to become a lawyer and that
the position in return confers special privilege, particularly
in comparison to that of secretary, but that is a minor consideration
that need not concern us at the moment. Nor need we worry
ourselves with the fact that the wages of the secretary are sufficiently
low to obviate the rationale for the lawyer doing his own typing.
For notice that not only is the typist free to concentrate
on typing, and thereby enhance her typing skill, but the division
of labor makes it possible for this secretary to work content
in the knowledge that a superior intellect is making the crucial
decisions that will provide security for her existence. Of course,
how people come to their particular social positions in the division
of labor is an interesting question but it is best to consider
it at another time.
The basic argument, fundamental to bourgeois
economics and neo-liberal exchange and trade theory is quite
simple, is it not? If everyone, and by logical extension every
country, does what it is uniquely constituted to do, the result
will be the greatest efficiency of the entire system, that is,
the greatest efficiency of the global economic system. Since
human beings, and by extension nations, are fundamentally rational,
(and as great thinkers like Tarde, Burke and Durkheim have noted,
nations would not exist over long periods of time if they did
not embody some profound "logic," though not of course
enlightenment "reason,") the very fact that trade among
nations has come to establish a particular pattern of exchange
must mean that this is the best possible exchange arrangement.
Otherwise, reasonable persons and heads of state would have altered
the arrangement long ago.
2. Now it only remains to turn to the
second basic issue to be decided: what exactly is it that the
United States produces more efficiently, more effusively, more
copiously, than any other nation on earth and can be relied upon
to continue in a similar manner? And the answer, I believe,
is unavoidably obvious. The United States is presently the prime
producer of military threat and assault, world intimidation,
global violence, ideological mystification, international corruption,
and material threat, bribery and extortion; in short, "patriotic
gore." Now it may be maintained that other countries possess
many of these characteristics, for none of the major powers and
not even many of the world's smaller nations are without a similar
capacity, honed and exercised over the course of their histories,
to perpetuate extraordinary violence, brutality and human and
ecological despoliation of quite extraordinary barbarity. One
need only refer to Israel, Russia, Ireland, the Congo, Chile,
India and on and seemingly on ad infinitum, to recognize that
the United States is certainly not alone in its capacity for
extreme destructiveness.
And if we look back to the beginning
of the century and include Germany, The Soviet Union, China,
Japan and Turkey, the list becomes longer and more impressive
still. In fact, for short periods of time, it would have to be
acknowledged that other nations have actually exceeded the United
States in their barbarity. Probably no country can equal the
horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime in a scant twelve years
of its total existence. And beyond Nazi Germany, one country
or another can certainly match or even exceed the United States
in sheer barbaric cruelty in one aspect of social life or another.
In fact, when it comes to domestic slaughter, as in the case
of Rawanda, where it is estimated that over 1,000,000 Tutsi died
before the catastrophe evidenced itself in Zaire with the sustained
death of an enormous number of Hutu refugees, or in the case
of the Pol Pot slaughter in Cambodia, or in Indonesia where in
1965 the State eliminated the Communist Party and murdered some
600,000 persons in the process, to be followed in 1975 the invasion
of East Timor and mass murder on a proportional scale roughly
equivalent to the Cambodian example, it is clear that the United
States cannot equal these figures among its own populace (excepting
of course, such moments as the Civil War.) For the nature of
American democracy entails that internal order be maintained
largely (though with significant exception) through ideological
means, whereas foreign domination is essentially to be maintained,
not only by the threat of force, but by its regular perpetuation.
There is a point here, no doubt. But for the totality of power,
domestic and international, for its capacity to destroy not only
countries and their peoples but environment conditions and resources,
cultures and identities, dignity and hope, and for the length
and breadth of its tenure and the scope of its systematic world
engagement, certainly no other country can rival the unique ability
of the United States at murderous mayhem.
It is to its considerable accomplishment,
its particular "comparative advantage," that from its
inception America was violent and expansive. In 1585, before
the English established permanent villages in Virginia, Richard
Granville "sacked and burned" an entire Indian village.
Nor were things substantially different in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. Soon we would be witnessing the importation of Black
slaves. It is important to keep this point in mind when assessing
America's "comparative advantage." For no other country
in the modern era can claim so expansive and deeply rooted a
tendency to imperial domination; and so, when one considers which
contemporary nation has the ""comparative" advantage"
in matters of this sort, one has to conclude that not only by
simple behavioral evidence, but by socially constructed character,
the United States is singularly prepared to adopt the role of
world Leviathan. American roots in grandiose, fundamental evangelicalism
and technological, enlightenment rationality combined to place
instrumental reason in the service of a sense of world superiority.
In summary, the American tendency to global domination is not
only extensive, but so deeply rooted in the American system that
we have good reason to believe that it can be trusted to persist
in the face of world opposition.
If we merely consider the American record
since the end of the Second World War, we cannot help but be
enormously impressed. A brief, and by no means complete, survey
of the recent historical record will provide us with an admirable
record of American intervention in the world (military and non-military:
China, 1945-1960; Italy, 1947-1948; Greece,1947-1950; The Philippines,
1940's-1950's; Korea, 1945-1953; Albania, 1049-1953; Eastern
Europe, 1948; 1956; Germany, 1950's; Iran; 1953; Guatamala, 1953-1954;
Costa Rica, mid 1950's, 1970-1971; Syria, 1956-1957; the Middle
East, 1957-1958; Indonesia, 1957-1958; Vietnam, 1950-1973; Cambodia,
1955-1973; Laos, 1957-1973; Haiti, 1959-1963, 1986-present; Guatamala,
1960; Ecuador, 1960-1963; the Congo, 1960-1964; Brazil, 1961-1964;
Peru, 1960-1965; Dominican Republic, 1960-1966; Cuba, 1959-1980's;
Indonesia, 1965-2000; Ghana, 1966; Uruguay, 1964-1970; Chile,
1964-1973; Greece, 1964-1974; Bolivia, 1964-1975; Guatamla, 1962-1980's;
Iraq, 1972-1975, 1990; Angola, 1975-1980's; Zaire, 1975-1978;
Jamaica, 1976-1980; Seychelles, 1979-1981; Grenada, 1979-1984;
Morocco, 1983; Surinane, 1982-l984; Libya, 1981-1989; Nicaragua,
1981-1990; Panama, 1969-1991; Bulgaria, 1990; Afghanistan, 1979-1982,
2000-present; El Salvador, 1980-1994; Yugoslavia, 1999-2001;
and of course, Iraq, 2003. What an extraordinary achievement,
and this record covers only the fifty eight years. Were we to
go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, to the devastating slaughter
in the Philippines and the war against Mexico, for example,
the accomplishment of American domination would be even more
noteworthy.
Two additional points are worthy of consideration:
First, I have noted instances of American intervention in
the affairs of other countries, both through military and no-military
means. But we should also note those instances in which the
United States was not the primary aggressor, but established
the context and offered support for those countries that carried
out the main violence. The situation in the Congo which led
to the murder of Lumumba is a case in point; Belgium was certainly
the direct murderer of Lumumba, but the United States provided
more than ideological support. CIA Director Allen Dulles warned
of "a communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences.....for
the interests of the free world, " and supported his position
with the creation of a fund of $100,000 to replace Lumumba with
a "pro-Western group." True to its position, the Eisenhower
administration "supported the Belgian military intervention
on behalf of Katanga..." In short, the United States not
only carried out violent intervention throughout the world, but
conspired with other nations to facilitate their aggression.
But any reader can supply a large number of such instances.
There are few places in the world in the past century in which
American support has not been relevant to local slaughters.
Second in developing an argument grounded
in neo-liberal notions of rational efficiency it must not be
thought that any particular judgments of value are involved.
As any academic well knows, the first principle of theoretical
study is the notion of value neutrality, objectivity, of impartiality
as bequeathed us by such towering figures as Max Weber in his
classic statement of the separation of fact and value.
Though such terms as "aggression,"
"violence," "destruction," "terror,"
"intimidation," "barbarism," and "murder"
have been freely used in this brief essay, it should not be concluded
that they represent any statement of moral judgment. One must
eschew all tendency to assume that a judgment of value is being
exercised in this account. Murder, villainy, torture, violence,
intimidation and slaughter are facts of the world. Whether one
approves of them or not is a completely separate issue. Nothing
could be more factual than the cessation of life following the
bombing of Hiroshima or Dresden. At one moment of space-time
there were live human beings; at another, there were previously
live human beings, now dead. That is how the world is to be
described. That is, of course, not how contemporary governments
describe such situations and the United States is no exception.
But the terms used by nations are merely attempts by emotional
means to move large number of the ignorant and uninformed.
The only relevant criteria actually applied by modern states
are political power and economic expansion, and, once again it
must be insisted that these are facts; hard, quantitative, inexpugnable
facts.
It is not for the present author to determine
whether mass murder is good or bad, for example; reasonable people
will disagree about the value of such states of affairs, as they
have in the past and are likely to continue in the future. This
may suggest that moral judgments are less matters of reason than
pure emotion or social conditioning, but this is a subject for
another discussion.
What has been argued here is relatively
simple and purely what we might sutably call, logico-empirical:
first, that the most rational allocation of capacities is enhanced
by each nation providing that practice that distinguishes it
from the rest; and second, that the obvious advantage of the
United States in this consideration is its clear monopoly over
the practices, motives, resources, psychological imagination
and single minded commitment to world domination, oppression,
military intimidation and superordinate arrogance. However one
judges these characteristics, they seem to the present writer
to be simple facts of the world that serve to mark the United
States as the country uniquely qualified to serve as the vanguard
of world tyranny.
Signed,
Herman Neutics and Associates
Richard Lichtman
is the author of "The
Production of Desire," "Essays
in Critical Social Theory," and most recently, "Dying
in America," which among other aspects, includes
a memoir of the death of his father. He can be reached at: rlichtman@earthlink.net
Weekend
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Adam
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