What we have in common is the need to protect one another’s inviolability from governmental force. When we understand that the woman being groped by a TSA agent stands in the same shoes as our wife, mother, or grandmother; when the man being beaten by a sadist cop is seen, by us, as our father or grandfather, we become less willing to evade the nature of the wrongdoing by invoking the coward’s plea: “better him than me.”

The state owes its very existence to the success it has had in fostering division among us, a topic I explored in my Calculated Chaos book. Divide-and-conquer has long been the mainstay in political strategy. If blacks and whites; or Christians and Muslims; or employees and employers; or “straights” and “gays”; or men and women; or any of seemingly endless abstractions, learn to identify and separate themselves from one another, the state has established its base of power. From such mutually-exclusive categories do we draw the endless “enemies” (e.g., communists, drug-dealers, terrorists, tobacco companies) we are to fear, and against whom the state promises its protection. By becoming fearful, we become existentially disabled, and readily accept whatever safeguards the institutional fear-mongers impose, . . . all for our “benefit,” of course!

Look at the title of this article: do you find any governmental program or practice therein that is not grounded in state-generated fear? Each one – and the numerous others not mentioned – presumes a threat to your well-being against which the state must take restrictive and intrusive action. Terrorists might threaten the flight you are about to take; terrorist nations might have “weapons of mass destruction” and the intention to use them against you; your children might be at risk from drug dealers or from sex perverts using the Internet; driving without a seat-belt, or eating “junk” foods might endanger you: the list goes on and on, changing as the fear-peddlers dream up another dreaded condition in life.

It is not sufficient to the interests of the state that you fear other groups; it is becoming increasingly evident that you must also fear the state itself! Governments are defined as entities that enjoy a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. Implicit in such a monopoly is the recognition that there be no limitations on its exercise, other than what serve the power interests of the state. In relatively quiet and stable periods (e.g., 1950s) the state can afford to give respect to notions of individual privacy, free speech, and limitations on the powers of the police. In such ways, the state gives the appearance of reasonableness and respect for people. But when times become more tumultuous – as they are now – the very survival of the state depends upon a continuing assertion of the coercive powers that define its very being.

For a number of reasons – some of it technological – our social world is rapidly becoming decentralized. The highly- structured, centrally-directed institutions through which so much of our lives has been organized (e.g., schools, health-care, government, communications, etc.) no longer meet the expectations of many – perhaps most – men and women. Alternative systems, the control of which has become decentralized into individual hands, challenge the traditional institutional order. Private schools and home-schooling; alternative health practices; the Internet, cell-phones, and what is now known as the “social media,” are in the ascendancy. With the state becoming increasingly expensive, destructive, economically disruptive, oppressive, and blatantly anti-life, secession and nullification movements have become quite popular.

Of course, such transformations are contrary to the established institutional interests that have, for many decades, controlled the state – and, with it, the monopoly on violence that is its principal asset. Having long enjoyed the power to advance their interests not through the peaceful, voluntary methods of the marketplace, but through such coercive means as governmental regulation, taxation, wars, and other violent means, the established order is not about to allow the changing preferences of hundreds of millions of individuals to disrupt its traditional cozy racket.

Because the institutional order has become inseparable from the coercive nature of the state, any popular movement toward non-political systems is, in effect, a movement away from the violent structuring of society. The corporate interests that control the machinery of the state may try to convince people that government does protect their interests vis-à-vis the various fear-objects. Failing in this, the statists must resort to the tactic that sustains the playground bully: to reinforce fear of the bully, who controls his victims through a mixture of violence and degradation.

Neither the TSA nor the alleged “war on terror” have anything to do with terrorism. The idea that the TSA came about as a consequence of 9/11 ignores the fact that the state’s practice of prowling through the personal belongings of airline passengers goes back many decades. I recall how upset a friend of mine was – in the early 1970s – when government officials went through his hand-luggage, and ordered him to unwrap a birthday gift he was carrying home to a relative. The purpose of such a search then, as now, was to remind passengers of the bully’s basic premise: “I can do anything I want to you whenever I choose to do so.” It is for the purpose of keeping us docile – an objective furthered by degrading and dehumanizing us – that underlies such state practices.

The groping of people’s genitals and breasts is but an escalation of this premise, and should the TSA later decide that all passengers must strip naked for inspection, such a practice will go unquestioned not only by the courts, but by the mainstream media who will ask ” . . . but if you don’t have anything to hide . . . “ Those who cannot imagine state power going to such extremes to humiliate people into submission, are invited to revisit the many photographs of German army officers at such places as Auschwitz, who watched – as “full body scanners” – as naked women were forced to run by them.

The extension of wars – against any enemy that any president chooses as a target – serves the same purpose. It is not necessary that there be any plausible rationale for the bombing and invading of other countries: it is sufficient that Americans and foreigners alike be reminded of the violence principle upon which government rests. “I will go to war against you if it serves my interests to do so, and any resistance on your part will only confirm what a threat you are to America!” The state directs its wars not so much against foreign populations, as against its own. War rallies people into the mindset of unquestioning obedience because, by engaging in such deadly conduct, the state reminds us of its capacities to destroy us at its will.

You can apply this logic to any of the aforementioned government programs. The state – and the corporate order that depends upon the exercise of state power – is fighting for its survival. Rather than treating this as a “war against terrorism,” it is more accurate to consider it as a “war to preserve the hierarchically-structured institutional order.” There are too many trillions of dollars and too much arbitrary power at stake for those who benefit from controlling the state’s instruments of violence to await the outcome of ordinary people’s thinking. If the survival of the corporate-state power structure required the extermination oftwo billion people, such a program would be undertaken with little hesitation. Destructive violence becomes an end-in-itself to an organization that is defined in terms of its monopoly on such means.

On the other hand, I continue to remain optimistic that these institutional wars against life will come to an end. I believe that the United States of America is in a terminal condition; its fate already determined. But America – whose existence predates the United States – may very well survive in a fundamentally changed form. What is helping this transformation process are innovative technological tools for the decentralized exchange of information; mankind is rapidly becoming capable of communicating with one another in the most direct ways, methods that make traditional top-down forms less and less relevant. The Internet is one system that is the tip of an iceberg whose deeper challenges have thus far not captured the attention of crew members of the ship-of-state.Wikileaks is another step in the evolution of decentralized information systems that will bring greater transparency to the activities of the ruling classes. In the process, men and women will discover just how liberating the free flow of information can be. When the rest of the world has access to the same information that political systems try to keep secret, the games played at the expense of people begin to fall apart.

An awareness of the dynamics of change being brought about through decentralizing forces has not, however, managed to inform members of the established order. For all of their pretended knowledge and expertise about the world, they just don’t get it. They seem to imagine that their decline-and-fall can be prevented by keeping the Bradley Mannings and Julian Assanges locked up; and that the political ramifications can be deterred by distracting attention away from a Ron Paul – who does understand the nature and direction of these changes – and toward a comic-opera Sarah Palin.

In the meantime, in an effort to keep Boobus Americanus and other members of the herd within their assigned stalls, the ever-present threat of force and its consequent degradation of the individual will be invoked as the state works feverishly – and futilely – to shore up its collapsing foundations.

Regards,

Butler Shaffer

Butler Shaffer  teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. His latest book is Boundaries of Order.

Why TSA, Wars, State Defined Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War On Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, Are Essential to the State was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

No, I’m not referring to the widespread gun violence in America that liberals point to as part of their gun-control agenda. I’m not even referring to the widespread violence that accompanies the decades-long drug war, especially in Mexico. I’m instead referring to the U.S. government’s regular killing of people thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing that has now gone on regularly for some 10 years and that has become a fairly hum-drum part of our daily lives.

Six people were killed and 14 were injured in the Arizona shootings, including a woman who was shot through the head and a 9-year-old girl whose life was snuffed out. Everyone is shocked over the horror, which is detailed on the front page of every newspaper across the country.

But let’s face it: Such killings go on every week in Afghanistan and Iraq and have for some 10 years. Parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents, friends, brides, grooms, and wedding parties. People are killed in those two countries every week, and the killing has now expanded to people in Pakistan.

We don’t see those deaths on the front pages of American newspapers. They’re buried on page 14 of the papers in small news reports, if at all.

Why don’t those killings get front-page coverage?

One, the killings have become commonplace. They’re now just considered normal. Massive death on a massive scale, but normal. We just put all the deaths at the back of our minds. The football playoffs are this weekend. Got to pay the bills this month. Life demands our attention. Anyway, it’s not as if we, the American citizenry, are doing the killing. It’s the military and the CIA that are doing it.

Two, our public officials say that we’re at war and that people are always killed in war. Never mind that what we have in Afghanistan and Iraq are military occupations, not war. The idea is that a military occupation is a sort of war and, therefore, we shouldn’t let the daily killings affect our consciences. Moreover, since we’ve been told that the war on terrorism is considered permanent, we just have to get used to the fact that the weekly killings will be a normal and regular part of our lives for as long as we live.

Third, we are told that the people being killed are terrorists, enemy combatants, or unfortunate collateral damage. Never mind that our public officials have had 10 years to kill terrorists and enemy combatants to their hearts’ content but apparently still haven’t gotten them all. Never mind that the terrorists and enemy combatants might well now consist primarily of people who are simply trying to oust their country of a foreign occupier, like people did when it was the Soviet Union that was doing the occupying. Never mind that the number of terrorists and enemy combatants continues to rise with each new killing. It’s all just part and parcel of the new normality for American society.

In the process, life is cheapened — well, the lives of Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. The weekly killings of adults and children from those three countries are relegated to page 14 of the newspaper because they’re just Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. It’s not as if they’re Americans, after all, people who place a much higher value on human life than others.

We mustn’t forget how, for the last 10 years, the lives of Afghans and Iraqis have been expendable for the greater good of their society. How many times have we been reminded, for example, that the deaths of countless Iraqis have been worth the effort to bring democracy to Iraq? In fact, one of the most fascinating phenomena about the Iraq War, an illegal and unconstitutional undeclared war of aggression that the U.S. government waged against a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so, is that there has never been an upper limit on the number of Iraqi deaths that would justify the achievement of democracy in Iraq. Any number of Iraqi deaths, no matter how high, has been considered worth it.

We saw this same reasoning through 11 years of brutal sanctions on Iraq, which were imposed for the purpose of achieving regime change — the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power and his replacement by a pro-U.S. regime. When Bill Clinton’s U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was asked by 60 Minutes whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been worth it, her answer perfectly reflected the mindset of Washington officials for the past two decades: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

How much value is placed on the life of people, including children, who are sacrificed for the greater good of society? Not much value at all. Life is supposed to be sacrosanct. But then again, those are Iraqi people we’re talking about.

How can all this massive, regular, permanent death and destruction not affect and infect a society? Sure, it all takes place thousands of miles away. Sure, it’s buried on page 14 of the newspaper. We don’t see the caskets or the burials. We don’t see the crying, the anguish, or the anger of the survivors. We just go about our daily business, deferring to authority. Our public officials know what is best. That is their job. We have to trust their judgment. If they say that American soldiers and CIA officials have to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq permanently and just go on killing people forever, then we, the citizenry, just have to accept that. If they say they have to expand the killing to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or wherever, then that is just the way things are. They are the experts. They are in charge.

In the process, everyone convinces himself that the people who are being killed are “bad guys” or people who just happened to be too close to the bad guys, including their wives, children, other family members, or friends.

Of course, the possibility that the U.S. government — the invader, the occupier, the interloper — is the “bad guy” doesn’t even enter into most people’s minds. The thought is too horrible, too terrifying. It might cause citizens to have to search their consciences. Easier to simply continue “supporting the troops” who are “defending our freedoms” by killing all those people on a regular, weekly basis.

The news media are reporting that the accused Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner, tried to join the U.S. military but was unsuccessful. The irony is that if he had been successful, he would have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan and participated in the weekly death-fest and, upon his return, public officials, pundits, media personalities, and even some church ministers would be hailing his heroism and thanking him for serving his country by killing Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the “defense of our freedoms” here at home.

Did the normalization and trivialization of killing and the denigration and devaluation of life in Afghanistan and Iraq trigger something inside the apparently disturbed mind of the accused Arizona killer? I don’t know. But how can such actions not have a horrible long-term adverse effect on people whose government is permanently engaged in such evil.

Regards,
Jacob G. Hornberger
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 14, 2011

Afghanistan, Iraq, Collateral Damage and the Banality of Killing was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Like so many other government programs, wars in which a stronger army invades a weaker country bring the “good effects” first, and only later do we see the “bad effects.” One recalls the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi express on the Western Front in the spring of 1940, and the early successes of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941. One does not have to search far to see what was happening to the Wehrmacht in 1945 to gauge the “success” of the German retreat.

(Not-so-ironically, “Wehrmacht” originally meant “home defense” forces, just as it is ironic that the U.S. Department of War became the U.S. Department of Defense after World War II, and the number of U.S. “defense” excursions overseas, not to mention military bases overseas, has multiplied into something perverse that cannot economically be sustained.)

Thus, it was in that heady, self-congratulatory atmosphere in which the Neoconservatives were claiming “victory,” and they greatly applauded Krauthammer’s speech. Instead of offering critiques, I will include portions of that speech and let Krauthammer’s words speak for him:

At the end of the Cold War, the conventional wisdom was that with the demise of the Soviet Empire, the bipolarity of the second half of the 20th century would yield to a multi-polar world. You might recall the school of thought led by historian Paul Kennedy, who said that America was already in decline, suffering from imperial overstretch. There was also the Asian enthusiasm, popularized by James Fallows and others, whose thinking was best captured by the late-1980s witticism: “The United States and Russia decided to hold a Cold War. Who won? Japan.”

Well, they were wrong, and ironically no one has put it better than Paul Kennedy himself, in a classic recantation emphasizing America’s power: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power, nothing. Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in its reach. The Roman Empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”

He continues:

We tend not to see or understand the historical uniqueness of this situation. Even at its height, Britain could always be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. It had a smaller army than the land powers of Europe, and its navy was equaled by the next two navies combined. Today, the American military exceeds in spending the next twenty countries combined. Its Navy, Air Force and space power are unrivaled. Its dominance extends as well to every other aspect of international life―not only military, but economic, technological, diplomatic, cultural, even linguistic, with a myriad of countries trying to fend off the inexorable march of MTV English.

And continues:

…September 11 demonstrated a new kind of American strength. The center of our economy was struck, aviation was shut down, the government was sent underground and the country was rendered paralyzed and fearful. Yet within days, the markets reopened, the economy began its recovery, the president mobilized the nation and a unified Congress immediately underwrote a huge worldwide war on terror. The Pentagon, with its demolished western facade still smoldering, began planning the war. The illusion of America’s invulnerability was shattered, but with the demonstration of its recuperative powers, that sense of invulnerability assumed a new character. It was transmuted from impermeability to resilience―the product of unrivaled human, technological and political reserves.

But, he saves the best for later: “So we bestride the world like a colossus.”

And so it is that more than seven years later, the U.S. economy is in freefall, and the current government – elected in large part because of the recklessness of the Bush administration that Krauthammer so praises – is placing huge financial burdens upon the economy that it cannot support. The wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq, except they no longer are wars of invasion but, instead, are wars of occupation, and no matter how ruthless the occupier might be, in the long run a war of occupation cannot be victorious for those people who don’t belong there.

Krauthammer’s praise of U.S. “unilateralism,” which is a nice term for “bullying,” was popular that night with his audience. It was full of people who believed that “American exceptionalism” means the use of military power wherever the government damn well believes it can – and should – be used. It means floating bonds around the world and expecting the rest of the world to pick up our spending tab.

Ultimately, it means bankruptcy and humiliating defeat. True, publications like The Nation can claim that as long as our government printing presses remain operational, the USA never will go bankrupt because it can pay its creditors with paper – if it chooses to pay them at all. Paul Krugman claims that we can play “beggar-they-neighbor” against China and the only consequences will be felt by the Chinese. (As usual, Peter Schiff sees things more clearly.)

In other words, it no longer is just the Neocons being arrogant and aggressive. The “torch” of political power has passed from the Republicans to the Democrats, but the arrogance and delusion of Washington, D.C., continues. Perhaps it is fitting that Krauthammer gave his speech to a Hillsdale College gathering, but the meeting was held in D.C.

Krauthammer declared that all the USA had to do was to demonstrate its “power” and the rest of the world would quake and humbly follow in obedience. Republicans – and later Democrats – have followed his not-so-sage advice and we see what lies before us: financial ruin and poverty. Just as there really was no “Argentine exceptionalism” of the 20th Century, as that once-great country inflated itself into poverty and ruin, so will be the reality of the Neocons’ “American exceptionalism” unless Americans come to realize that our present path of war abroad and reckless spending at home will destroy all of us.

Regards,
William Anderson, LewRockwell.com
Whiskey & Gunpowder

March 29, 2010

It’s Not Just Neocon Stupidity Anymore was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

There are so many questions. There are so many ways to explain things. And lately I’ve been looking at our modern world by focusing on the remarkable life of a relatively unknown man — unknown to most people of recent vintage, at least. Indeed, he’s been dead for 19 years, and he died at a ripe old age. Yet his legacy is still with us. I refer, of course, to General Curtis Lemay of the U.S. Air Force.

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” I noted in the previous articles. And the U.S. endured many hard hours during the Second World War and the Cold War. In the worst hours of the most troubled times, Mars, the god of war, gave the U.S. Lemay, a knight of the sky. But knights need swords and steeds. In Roman mythology, Jupiter had Vulcan to forge mighty weapons. In mid-20th Century America, Lemay had a U.S. industrial base that could crank out big bombers.

In Lemay’s case, he had some very big bombers. With the big bombers of World War II, Lemay blasted Germany and burned Japan. With the bigger bombers of the Cold War, Lemay encircled the Soviet Union and kept the Red Army behind its own lines. Lemay’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) was critical to the Western doctrine of “containing” the Soviets. In the annals of American arms, Lemay was a mighty eagle with talons of hardened steel.

Pres. Johnson Chooses His Advice

But times change, and times changed in a big way after the death of Pres. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Vice Pres. Lyndon Johnson moved into the Oval Office.

One can ably argue that Johnson put his broad, Texas shoulders to history’s wheel, and set events in motion that created the modern world. Yet one can also capably argue that Johnson was rolled by history, like a drunk in the hands of a seasoned mugger.

One thing you cannot argue is that Johnson lacked choices and options. Because one of the privileges of the office of U.S. President was (and remains, of course) that the National Executive may choose his advisers. And when you choose your advisers, often as not you choose your advice.

Tough Advice from Lemay

From the Kennedy administration, Johnson inherited Lemay as Air Force Chief of Staff. As far as Johnson was concerned, the military man, Lemay, did not offer the kind of advice that the politician from Texas wanted to hear. In particular, Gen. Lemay gave Pres. Johnson politically tough advice about waging war in far distant Vietnam. Johnson, to be sure, needed a lot of advice on that subject.

That is, Vietnam was a complex place. Leaving aside most of the last thousand years of history, there was plenty of modern mischief in play. In the late 19th Century the French colonized Indochina and ran it until 1942. Then in World War II the Japanese Empire conquered the region and spoiled the party for the colonists. “Asia for the Asians,” said Japanese propaganda, expressing an idea — if not an ideal — that took deep roots despite the irony of Japanese lording it over Vietnamese.

Post-war, the French returned to rule. “Not so fast,” said many locals. Within a decade the French were defeated and driven out by Vietnamese nationalists and Communists. It was tough going. The main road through Vietnam was, in the words of professor Bernard Fall, a Street Without Joy.

The French defeat in 1953-1954 (or Hell in a Very Small Place, also by Bernard Fall) was followed by a north-south division and a festering civil war. The Communist North was slowly, but effectively, invading the South. There was much meddling by outside powers, to include the U.S. Indeed, the CIA — under orders from Pres. Kennedy — sponsored the murder of the president of South Vietnam. And that was just the start.

Lemay understood military power, but he also understood limits to power. Lemay told Johnson that it would be difficult and expensive to wage a defensive war in South Vietnam against Communist-armed insurgents, and regular troops from the North. Vietnam was at the tail end of U.S. logistical lines. It would take years for counter-insurgency operations to work – if they worked, and there was no assurance of that. Would the American people accept years of warfare in a distant land? Especially a land to which the U.S. had no longstanding historical attachments or vital national interests?

Bomb ‘Em? Well…

Sure, Lemay told Johnson – after Johnson asked – the U.S. could bomb Vietnam. But to be effective, the U.S. would have to “carry the war to the north, and really carry it there” (Lemay’s emphasis).

The way Lemay phrased it, if the U.S. decided to bomb Vietnam, “We must throw a punch that really hurts.” To Lemay’s way of thinking, this meant “Knock out all their (North Vietnamese) oil. … This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt.” This from the man whose bombers wrecked Germany’s liquid fuel production in World War II, thus grounding the Luftwaffe and stopping German tanks in their tracks.

Lemay also counseled Johnson to “(knock) out the harbor at Haiphong,” and mine the seacoast to halt weapons imports from the Soviet Union. This too was sound military advice from an experienced military man. Lemay’s historical parallel was what his B-29s had accomplished — and what had worked so well — in World War II against Japan.

Time Is No Ally in War

For all his gruff exterior, Lemay was an intelligent and serious man. He was a keen student of technology, and an even better judge of human ability. Lemay could (in fact, he did) hold his own in a discussion of the principles of radar with engineers from MIT. And the fact is that Lemay ensured the success of his own career, over 25 years in senior command positions, by selecting thousands of the right people and placing them into the toughest jobs in wars hot and cold.

Sure, Lemay had the outward, aggressive spirit of a bomber pilot. Heck, he WAS a bomber pilot. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” Lemay once said to Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb. “You’ve got to kill people. And when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

But as a military planner Lemay was deliberate. When it came to the business of fighting, Lemay the warrior believed in scrupulous training and exacting preparation, followed by speed and lethality in the execution.

It’s not just that Lemay was a zoom-zoom, go-fast airplane pilot. Silk scarf or no, in Lemay’s comments, writings and actions, he echoed military scholars from Sun Tzu to Carl von Clausewitz. Lemay understood that the essence of war was to prepare carefully and then act quickly and decisively to defeat an adversary. In warfare, time is no ally.

Clausewitz on War

Consider what Clausewitz wrote on the subject of war, for example. “In war more than anywhere else,” wrote the Prussian, “things do not turn out as we expect. Nearby they do not appear as they did from a distance.” Thus, per Clausewitz, it’s imperative to adapt to the enemy, hit hard, do your business and finish things rapidly. If not, then time degrades one’s ability to reach objectives. Don’t drag things out. “Everything in war is very simple,” said Clausewitz, “but the simplest thing is difficult.”

Damn right. Lemay could have told stories of how “simple” things become immensely complex in wartime. Like getting 500 bombers off the ground from multiple bases in England. Then rallying them over the North Sea. Then driving them in formation across hundreds of miles of defended airspace to bomb a target that’s obscured by clouds and smoke. Then bringing the aircraft home, through more flak and fighters, to land in a night-time fog. And accomplish it all within a drop-dead time-frame (literally) constrained by onboard fuel supplies. Simple, right?

Or if a skeptic fails to appreciate Clausewitz, perhaps the words of Clausewitz’s better-known opponent will work. “Ask me for anything,” Napoleon said to his subordinates during the Russian campaign. “Anything but time.” As he crossed the plains of Russia, Napoleon knew that there were time-imposed limits to weather, supplies, manpower and political will at home to support the expedition.

Thus it’s not difficult to understand the advice that Lemay offered to Johnson when the man in the Oval Office asked the Air Force chief for options. Lemay was blunt, as befits a scholar of warfare. “Apply whatever force it is necessary to employ,” he stated, “to stop things quickly. The main thing is to stop it (i.e., the North Vietnamese-backed insurgency). The quicker you stop it (Lemay’s emphasis), the more lives you save. … The quicker you complete the military action, the better for all concerned.”

Stating the Military Truth

Distilled to its essence, Lemay presented Johnson with a military campaign plan that also served as a strategy for confronting and defeating the North Vietnamese Communists. Lemay counseled that if the U.S. committed its armed forces to war — a presidential and Congressional decision, to be sure — then the troops should be authorized to move quickly and hit North Vietnam with everything, up front.

Lemay knew that the threat to South Vietnam was not a bunch of philosopher-farmers toiling out in the rice paddies, spouting Marxist drivel. The threat was not “agrarian reformers” who wore black pajamas.

No, the threat to South Vietnam was Soviet weaponry funneled into North Vietnam, and then shipped south to supply a well-trained invasion force. Thus Lemay’s war plan was to use U.S. air power to smash and strangle the logistical underpinnings of the slow Communist takeover of South Vietnam. Would it make the Soviets mad? Sure, but that was another issue — and it was what SAC was for.

In Lemay’s opinion, an air campaign against North Vietnamese harbors, and related mining campaign against the seacoast, would strike the North Vietnamese center of gravity.

Center of Gravity? Lemay offered Johnson a practical tutorial on pure Clausewitz, via overwhelming air power dropping steel rain on an adversary. It was the military truth, according to Lemay, and in this world very few people have the ability to state the military truth.

Looking for Different Advice

Unfortunately in this world, a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth, military or otherwise. Johnson was one of them. Johnson saw things differently. The U.S., of course, had immense military power at its disposal. But Johnson lacked the will to use it.

Johnson didn’t want to go all out against North Vietnam, and then have to explain to the voters why he was committing the nation to a large conventional war in a far off place. “I’m not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home,” said Johnson, “to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” No. Of course not.

Johnson saw his presidential legacy in a domestic political agenda. He was going to enact Medicare for senior citizens. He was going to build a “Great Society” at home. He was going to push for civil rights, and rebuild America’s cities from the inside out.

Johnson didn’t want to spend political capital waging a costly war in Asia. Sure, he was obliged to suck it up and confront Communism on the foreign front. There are some things that American presidents HAVE to do. But deep down, Johnson just wanted to cut a political deal with the North Vietnamese, not bomb them.

So Johnson needed different advice than what he was getting from Lemay. Johnson looked around and — it being Washington, D.C. — he found other advisers more to his liking.

Telling Johnson What He Wanted to Hear

The new counselors were no fools. Working for a U.S. President would be good for their careers. So they told Johnson that the U.S. didn’t have to make a rapid, costly, all-out bombing effort against North Vietnam. No need to bomb Haiphong, or mine the harbors, or seed the coastline with mines. Nope, not at all. Forget that center of gravity crap from Clausewitz. What the hell did Clausewitz know, anyhow?

No, said the new advisers to Johnson. There was another way. If Johnson would only pursue a strategy of turning the heat up gradually on North Vietnam, the Communists would change their ways. After all, weren’t the North Vietnamese rational people?

Moving step by step, said the new consiglieri, Johnson could escalate on the cheap until he found just the right level of force at which the Vietnamese opponent would bend to his Texas-sized will. Now THAT was the kind of advice Johnson wanted to hear.

In short, Johnson looked at the complexity of Vietnam. He had a difficult set of choices, and wanted to make it all easy. Johnson wanted to “do Vietnam,” but on the cheap. In one memorable use of his astonishing powers of rhetoric, Johnson referred to Vietnam as a “coonskin.” And he wanted to “nail it to the wall.”

Lemay, the old World War II bomber-general, just didn’t fit into Johnson’s inspired vision for confronting and defeating the North Vietnamese. Hit them hard, up front? Not when you could hit them less hard, and escalate gradually. To Johnson, at least, it made sense. Johnson heard what he wanted to hear. Johnson saw what he wanted to see. Thus in the ancient ways of Washington, Lemay’s clock ran out.

Ushered into Retirement

Johnson kept Lemay on the Air Force payroll through 1964, always with an eye on the upcoming election in November. Even before the nominating conventions, Johnson had a hunch that he would be running against Barry Goldwater. Johnson used the FBI and CIA to dig up dirt to use against Goldwater. Basically, Johnson was paranoid about the election, and he didn’t want Lemay to retire and campaign alongside the old Army pilot from Arizona.

But after the election, in early 1965, Johnson was long past listening to Lemay talk about massive bombing of North Vietnam. So Johnson told his war-bird to retire as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force.

Oh sure, it was Lemay’s time to go, everyone agreed. He’d had a long career. It was time for Lemay to hang up the uniform and, as the saying goes, “spend more time with his family.” Yes. Sure.

In true Washington fashion, there was a splendid farewell ceremony. Everyone smiled. The troops paraded. The brass shone. There were fine speeches. The Air Force Band played ruffles and flourishes. Thundering jets roared overhead. Pres. Johnson pinned a medal on Lemay’s chest – as if Lemay needed any more medals. Lemay’s “faithful, zealous and obedient service to America” was “gratefully acknowledged and deeply appreciated.”

And then Lemay passed to others the baton of war and peace. Lemay didn’t mind, or so he said. He had groomed many a capable successor within the ranks of the Air Force. It was time for Lemay to pack up and get out of Washington.

Lemay left town. He went west and took a job in Los Angeles. He settled into private life. Indeed, Gen. and Mrs. Lemay even bought a lovely home in upscale Bel Aire. (Bel Aire? An eyebrow rises at that one.) Things were going well, except for that issue about “gradual escalation” over in Vietnam.

We’ll never know about the advice “not taken.” But we can ponder the “what ifs.” In another article, I’ll discuss Lemay’s post-retirement life, including his 30-day candidacy for U.S. Vice President in 1968. Thanks for reading.

Until we meet again,
Byron King

October 12, 2009

The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay, Part IV: Vietnam and President Johnson was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“Progress” is no sure thing. Beyond the cycles of greed and fear, confidence and desperation, are other episodes that surpass human desires and capacity. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in AD 476, people in Europe did not wish to become poorer. They underwent no genetic change that made them less intelligent or less suited to material comfort or less adept at technological progress. Yet, technological innovation and material progress went into a slump for nearly 1,000 years. According to historians, the order that had allowed trade and prosperity gave way to disorder and poverty. Who wanted such a change? Why would people permit it? Seeing their standard of living threatened, why did they not do something to counteract it? Surely government officials could simply have come up with new policies that would set things right again?

Likewise, in 1914, although lessons had supposedly been learned from the wars of the nineteenth century, the world once again found itself on a road to disaster, with the outbreak of World War I. From a military point of view, the war had effectively been “won” by France at the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914. France had defeated the German army and forced it back to a line situated not too far from where it had begun. Like many of the other battles fought, the battle of the Marne, with an estimated 512,733 killed, only served to underline the futility of a war. Little was gained at the cost of enormous human sacrifices.

Yet, what came to be known as “The Great War” continued for another four years. By 1916, it had become such a folly of senseless slaughter that the French were on the edge of mutiny. Troops on both sides, seeing no point to the continued bloodshed, often agreed on informal cease — fires. Senior officers repeatedly had to intervene to make sure their soldiers continued to kill each other. Hopelessly bogged down in trench warfare where neither side had a decisive advantage or even a reasonable war aim, sensible men might have decided that enough was enough. Even now, few people can come up with a good explanation for why the nations involved went to war, what they hoped to gain from it, and why they did not stop fighting after it became clear that the war was a losing proposition. It was the costliest war in human history, with an additional 31 million men dead, missing, or wounded.

Moreover, it was no real war in a conventional sense, as neither side had anything to gain, and indeed did not gain anything.

Prior to the French Revolution and industrialization, wars were much more limited. Armies would take the field for short periods of time — usually in the summer, when roads were passable and before the harvests. They would do their mischief and then go home. There were few popular wars. Instead, conflicts were between groups of people whose lands and lives were immediately threatene — by an invasion of barbarians from the East, for example. More often, they were localized rivalries — one monarch against another, duking it out with a relatively small number of paid mercenaries. In 1066, William the Conqueror (formerly known as William the Bastard) took all of England with a force of only about 5,000 men.

In the twentieth century, by contrast, wars involved huge numbers of combatants. Even noncombatants were called on to play support roles. In World War II, American women were called out of the home to work in aircraft plants and take up jobs formerly done by men. Whole populations were mobilized and enlisted in the war efforts, which were far more costly in lives and money than any wars in history, despite the fact that these wars often seemed to serve no other domestic purpose than to lead the way to ruin.

Why did such wars occur in the last century and not before? We have two answers. The first is the standard one: Never before was savagery on such a scale possible. It took industrial economies, abetted by ever-innovative technology, to produce industrial — scale wars. The second: Never before was it possible for so many people to share so many bad ideas all at once. Thanks to progress in communications, men and women were drawn to group thinking like moths to a flame. Soon, they were talking all sorts of nonsense and making their own lives miserable with wars and upheavals that contributed nothing to their well-being, other than being a distraction from their personal problems.

The Internet was not such a revolution as the New Era dreamers had come to believe. The price of communications had been dropping for the past 200 years — from the telegraph, to telephone and radio, to television, to CB radio. These, coupled with cheap newsprint, increased the availability of information to nearly everyone, but they also made much bigger mobs possible, and bigger bubbles, too. Instead of reducing violence in international politics, cheaper communications increased it. At the beginning of the century, railroads, telegraph, and popular newspapers made possible the biggest, most costly war in all human history — with far more people involved than ever before. By the century’s end, the Internet and television made possible the biggest bubble ever — with much greater public participation than at any time in history.

Millennial Optimists

At the end of the nineteenth century, it had also seemed — as it did at the end of the 20th — that progress was inevitable. People expected progress in every aspect of life. The world’ s economies were booming. The industrial revolution was in full throttle and spreading its smoky aroma throughout the world. A person could already hop on a train in Paris and ride in luxury all the way to Moscow. A man in London could order his spiced tea from the Orient and his carpets from Istanbul. Was there any reason to believe that this bounty — products of new technology, free markets, and enlightened political stewardship — would not continue?

By the end of the nineteenth century, the overt use of torture had disappeared in the Western world and slavery had been completely abolished in civilized countries. It seemed — at the height of the Belle É poque — that manners, art, and personal security were improving. Moreover, as Europe had enjoyed nearly three decades without a major war, there was a widespread belief that war was a thing of the past, not of the future.

Yet, only a few years later, the world began walking backward, and the most costly and barbarous wars in history began. Between 1914 and 1919, France lost 20 percent of her young men of military age — and the century had scarcely begun! With hardly a pause for breath, from 1914 to 1945, people shot, tortured, murdered, blew up, poisoned, and starved each other on a scale the world had never seen.

The twentieth century turned out to be a period of what Brzezinski called “megadeath,” with an estimated 187 million victims. By 1945, all of the world’s major economies — save one, that of the United States — were in ruins. Japan, the Soviet Union, and Germany were little more than heaps of ash and twisted metal. France and Britain were mostly intact, but geared up for war, not for peacetime production. Worse, both were in the hands of socialists and syndicalists, which so inhibited their recovery that they were soon overtaken by their former enemies — Germany and Japan. Progress is never guaranteed, neither material nor moral.

The Rape of Nanking

Like it or not, the world is still ruled largely by the heart: It is full of sin and sorrow, sturm und drang, madness, and the kindness of strangers. It is a world whose history, as Voltaire observed, is “a collection of the crimes, follies and misfortunes” of mankind. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army made history. Previous records in depravity were broken when the devil worked overtime for a six-week period. When it was over, an estimated 377,000 people had been slaughtered.

The victims were not soldiers of the Reich or draftees of the Kremlin. They were men, women, and children of all ages and party affiliations. Democrats. Catholics. Confucians. Bricklayers… They shared one common mistake — they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These people were not obliterated in an impersonal air raid, such as the 60,000 thought to have been killed at Dresden or the 200,000 killed at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nor were they killed methodically and systematically as the Nazis and Bolsheviks usually did with their victims. Instead, they were put to death one by one, or in small groups, after being tortured, degraded, and made to suffer as much as the killers’ imagination made possible.

Butchery. Barbarity. Bestiality. It is hard to describe what happened in words that do it justice.

When the Roman legions destroyed Carthage, they took the lives of about 150,000. Timur Lenk killed 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398. He built towers of skulls in Syria in 1400. Yet no cameras recorded the spectacles. Meanwhile, the photos in Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking, provide evidence against those who believe in the inevitability of moral progress. The event in question occurred more than 100 years after the Rights of Man had been declared. And nearly two millennia after the birth of the Prince of Peace. The prohibition against murder was well-established in all major religions. Of course, the victims would have welcomed murder — it would have been a comfort, like a stop loss in a bear market.

Japan is one of the world’s most law — abiding and polite societies. But storms of evil blow up from time to time. No race or nation is beyond their reach.

Those who believe in the perfectibility of man have a lot of explaining to do.

Regards,
Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin

August 14, 2009

Industrial Slaughter and War: The March of Progress was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

That major wars occur at such long remove from each other probably isn’t an accident. Really catastrophic wars, from at least the days of Troy on down, have usually been the Great Events that resound through living memory. The Great Event of a century forms the thought and character of everyone alive when it happens, influencing them relative to the stage of life they’re in at the time. Perhaps that’s why a people will collectively do its best to avoid a repeat, at least while there’s anyone still alive who saw the last crisis.

(It’s been said that war is a force that gives life meaning. And I think that’s true, although it’s perverse that the most destructive and idiotic activity that it’s possible to engage in would just have to be the most important. Maybe, after the orgy of self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption that has characterized the past couple decades, Americans collectively feel they need to prove something. There has to be some rationale for the current war hysteria other than pure stupidity…)

In any event, the way the current generations line up relative to historical analogs, an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 – seven years from now – plus or minus a few years in either direction. The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of ‘29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is, practically any random event that’s sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. (Close, but not quite.) An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group – or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.

(In the historical context, 9/11 will be viewed as the opening kick-off for the coming Crisis… and the messianic overreaction of Bush and his cronies as the catalyst for turning things from bad to worse. It may be that Hurricane Katrina, for instance, a completely accidental event, may be blamed for providing a pin to burst the financial bubble – which would be a pity, since the neocons could then blame it, not themselves.)

There’s no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That’s going to depend not only on exactly who’s in control, but what they do, whom they’re up against, and a hundred other variables we can’t even anticipate. One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong (although not necessarily wise) leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln – both very dangerous precedents. The Boomers in Elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WWII, overlain with today’s ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson, and it’s a real witch’s brew.

If things evolve over the next decade as they did in past analogs, it will be a very un-mellow time indeed. That’s assuming things end well, and there’s no guarantee they will, as many foreign countries have discovered throughout history. We’ve been uniquely blessed.

What to Do

Strauss and Howe aren’t financial types, and their advice is nebulous along those lines. To sum it up, their suggestion is to learn to swim with the tide by not hoping the current good times last forever; the chances of the good times are coming to an end now. They’d also advise not sticking your head up above the crowd, something that is always very risky when times are in turmoil; remember what happened to Japanese-Americans during the last crisis. They suggest that there will likely be a resurgence of nationalism, much as was the case during past crises. It won’t be a good time to be a maverick in the U.S., a thought that makes places like Argentina and New Zealand look even more appealing.

(I bought property in both places shortly after this was written, and have been rewarded with a quadruple in both instances – considerably better than would have been the case in the U.S.)

Strauss and Howe suggest you look to diversify in all things, so everything won’t go bad at once. Brace for the collapse of public support mechanisms. Set your roots with your family, because people you can rely on will be at a premium. Heed emerging community norms, bond with like-minded people, and return to basic, classic virtues. This is sound advice any time, but critical if you’re rigging for heavy weather.

Assuming you wanted to stay in the U.S., you’d rather be on some land near a small town, and far away from a major city. You’d want to be self-sufficient in as many ways as possible – freeze-dried food. etc. Perhaps Howard Ruff will make a comeback with advice like that, which seems quaint today. But then I’m nothing if not a contrarian.

(In hindsight, the original article could have been a bit more specific – other than the suggestions about Argentina and New Zealand. Personally, I believe that unassailable wealth is the best protection against global crisis. For it to be unassailable, your wealth must be at once substantial, free from threat of confiscation, divorced from the whims of the masses, and located in a country or currency that has a good risk/reward profile. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t make the cut.

In the first instance, the single best way to build wealth now, while there is still time to do so, is in carefully selected gold and other resource stocks. In order for it to be free from the threat of confiscation, at least some part of your wealth needs to reside in a country where you don’t. To state the obvious, I would be very cautious about traditional stocks and bonds until we see how things shake out. Rather, get positioned in gold and silver stocks now, ahead of the curve, then sell out for a big profit to the panicking masses and move an increasing percentage of your wealth into tangibles such as gold, silver, and maybe, as part of a diversified portfolio, real estate in especially attractive areas – but only after the bubble has decisively burst.)

A Parting Parable

In case you have any doubts, I buy the theory outlined above and its many ramifications that there isn’t room to explore here. It really is scary to think that we could again experience a real Crisis with a capital C; I’m not talking about just a bear market in stocks. If it happens, I promise you stocks and mutual funds will be about the farthest things from most people’s minds.

At the same time, there’s no point in feeling terrorized. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of history. So let me leave you with a parable. I could appropriately quote Ecclesiastes (To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted, etc., etc.). But everyone knows that reference. Let me rather give you John O’Hara. At the beginning of O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samara, he tells a brief parable, which I’ll summarize:

There was a merchant in Baghdad who went to the market with his servant. There they saw Death, who stared at the servant in what seemed a threatening way. Later the servant said “Master, lend me a horse. I shall ride to Samara, and there Death will not find me.” The merchant did so, then returned to the market, where he again saw Death, whom he approached and asked why he had stared at his servant in such a threatening way. Death responded, “I wasn’t threatening him. I was just very surprised to see him here in Baghdad, since I have an appointment with him in Samara later this afternoon.”

(Strange, the location for the proverb, in that this was well before the current war.)

There is no doubt that we are now in the Crisis stage… which, according to Strauss and Howe’s “Turnings” theory, may last another decade or more. Is there any way to escape this economic tsunami unscathed?

Regards,
Doug Casey

January 21, 2009

Foundations of Crisis, Part III: War (So What’s Next?) was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.