For example, I’m certain that Pol Pot was enabled by the Kissinger/Nixon illegal bombing of Cambodia that undermined the whole structure of that country. To try and tar the hippies with pro Pol Pot ideas seems a little disingenuous.
Maybe Aurelian remembers being annoyed that the songs he sang were not that popular back then? No more guitar playing, move on to essay writing. Thankfully for us.
But, the longer the essay goes on, the more impressive it becomes. As a critique of the opposition though.
It still avoids directly criticising imperialism from Washington as a deliberate strategy. Indeed, from The City of London up until now. They may not be the only actors but that is their agenda: Empire.
And, they are still powerful.
Not everything is complicated. Processes maybe, actors not so much.
Saved me the task of replying. You've said it better here. The processes are indeed complicated - intentionally so. All the better to prevaricate and obfuscate, although those two tactics are hardly even necessary anymore.
Most of us – ALL of us - only understand things in hindsight. I surfed the 60’s without understanding it perhaps because we all embraced the hope of the post war generation.
A dialectical view of history would acknowledge that an objective/realist/material understanding of forces (economic, cultural, racial, military, social) is a pre-requisite for effective government. Just ask Bismark. But he had no problem with the ten commandments. It just wasn’t enough as a basis for conducting world affairs. It was on a different ‘level’.
This was considered the ‘private sphere’ just as some of the modern liberal views which ‘centrists’ are now trying to impose on us all by law should be private – like one’s religious views or sexual preferences. Personal liberalism - fine. Imposed ‘liberalism’ is a recipe for getting literally everything wrong – and unnecessarily wrong because it can never achieve consensus and looks to fight battles that should be avoided because they are on the wrong territory.
So private ‘morality’ (and indeed any view) is on a different level to the practise of politics, particularly geopolitics. And this is why I have contempt for lazy Liberalism because it is sloppy and fails to acknowledge unpleasant reality. Couple that with the messianic platitudes of ‘Blairism’ and you have all the ingredients for disaster.
There are some things that we need to protect our political masters (and ultimately ourselves) from. Acknowledge the argument of a foe who is determined, and dangerous. Look at the power of the enemy in every dimension. Put yourself in his (or her) shoes and try and find a solution (or way out). The very opposite of what ‘we’ have done in Ukraine and before that in Iraq.
When it comes to evaluating your point about politicians - ‘decision-makers like to think of themselves as moral actors: the world would be a considerably safer place if they didn’t' – why do I think of Yvette Cooper? They USE arguments that they must know are utterly specious. Are they that thick? Or are they just opportunists? Or, worse, do they actually believe it?
The problem with messianic liberalism is that it is really back to the Crusades. We attack even when we are outnumbered because ‘it is the right thing to do’. General Bernard Montgomery put it well when he was asked about his lessons on war – ‘Page one, Rule one – Don’t march on Moscow’.
So, I’m all for liberal moralism so long as it stops at the front door. When it comes to politics we need to take into account the strength of the forces we need to prevail over against the desire whatever it is we want to achieve. (And there is a BIG debate over who ‘WE’ are).
That being said – that there is a need to work as much as possible for the demise of the Anglo/US Empire – but this must ‘be done slowly’, with as little kinetic conflict as possible because the only way the Anglo-Empire will survive is through war.
Whatever Liberal virtue it may have had has been eroded in its ‘Forever Wars’ and buried once and for all in Gaza. Military defeat stares in Ukraine; economic defeat accelerated by BRICS and Trumps sanctions and moral defeat in the ruins of Gaza. (The ultimate punch in the face for ‘Liberalism’).
Liberalism gave us hope in the 60’s and 70’s BUT it isn’t enough. So, the last typically sardonic line ‘It’s a good thing the international environment is so stable, or we might be in real trouble.’ reminds me of that line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – just before they charge out with all guns blazing against the might of the Mexican army.
“the world could be changed by moral force alone”. Well I was part of those times too, but I never belived that, after reading Mao’s comment that ‘power grows from the barrel of a gun’. Unfotunately for me I’m also allergic to power.
“a military career was treated as a kind of mental illness” as should be the case in any society with aspirations to being a moral civilisation. (Of course, ‘morality’ will be a meaningless concept to those who wearily convince themselves that ‘realpolitik’ is the only way states can interact).
“today’s fashionable assertions of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany.” - you are behind the times, Aurelian - this only applies now to Russia. The rest of the wartime allies (and their opponents) are now pillars of moral respectability (although Gaza is now forcing them back into culpability).
“the “arms dealers cause wars” trope” Are you seriously postulating that the relationship, for example, between Boeing, Macdonnell-Douglas, BAE etc and the US government, with all the mass bribery that all these firms indulge in, has no effect? Why then do they bother with the bribery? Market differentiation? I doubt it. Although admittedly not heading an arms firm, William Randolph Hearst is famous for his quote that ‘he would provide the war’ - and he did. Was he a one-off? I doubt that too.
“the Six-Day War of 1967, . . . seemed romantic adventures more than anything serious.” - well, not if you had an understanding of how the ‘state of Israel’ happened to be founded.
“the country [Vietnam] was unified by force in 1975” presumably, going by the tone of this paragraph (and all the rest), this event is much much worse in your eyes than the country being dis-unified for no good reason by diplomatic/political western maneuvering in 1954 - I wonder why that is?
“seeing the source of all evil in Washington, because complexity was simply beyond them” - an exceptionally idiotic remark.
It is a fact (on record) that since the end of World War 2, the United States has:
Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected
.
Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
.
Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
.
Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries
.
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
Plus … although not easily quantified … more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.
The United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. No other state (apart from the UK and to a small extent France) has such a record
But perhaps complexity (if there is in fact such here - it doesn't seem very complex to me), is beyond you too?
““The Left,” . . . is best described as a superficial and largely frivolous anti-militarism . . . it was a dislike and distrust of western militaries and their activities, because they seemed to represent the detested western “establishment” in its purest form. However, this dislike didn’t necessarily extend to other militaries, so long as they were fighting the West”
Well, this is just ludicrous. What exactly had the west to fight about or defend against? Were they being invaded or bombarded by colonial powers? Was Russia threatening (in perfectly discernable reality) to attack Europe or the US? No. The west were the colonial powers, and had exerted themselves as such in Russia, China, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, Ireland, Serbia, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria (some of these numerous times) etc. etc. etc. and so on and on and on . . . I.E. The ‘west’ you are so concerned to whitewash were aggressive powers, while the ‘third world’ (for want of a better term) was preyed upon and was reactive and defensive. Your shallow and dismissive ‘analysis’ of this (the latest of a number of others in a similar vein) nullifies your pretensions to being some kind of responsible pundit. I have to say that Ewan MacColl, despite your sneering dismissal, had an integrity and comittment to truth and humanity which are sadly lacking in your cynical attempts to create a sanitised portrait of the west. Poor show, really. I had for a time hoped that you might be at least interesting, but:
I can’t be bothered pointing out the various contradictions after this point. In fact I can’t be bothered reading any further. In my estimation, these articles are reactionary propaganda masquerading as some sort of vaguely ‘centre-leftist’ pseudo intellectual analysis. Why anyone would want to pursue that is beyond me - it seems to be a futile occupation, possibly a vanity project? If so, they will have a bit more rigorous and even-handed if they are to be even slightly convincing.
I agree completely with your points about US imperialism and aggression. Thank you for saying it.
But I still find value in the author’s discussion of how this aggression (even if he does not see it as such) is today sought to be justified as “humanitarian intervention,” and that this is in turn premised on the flawed logic of the Kantian categorical imperative, which can be used to justify anything.
Where the author goes wrong is in accepting that all western decision makers are acting on (faulty) moral motives—that these are not just ex post facto rationales. This may actually be true of some politicians… but not those who are true decision makers, a category that I assume includes a few politicians, but mostly unelected deep state bureaucrats. There is no plausible argument that they are sincerely motivated by moral considerations at all and not just their own (warped sense) of national interest. Of course humans are highly prone to self-deception, so it is likely most actual decision makers have a self-excuplatory story based on the “ultimate good” and “tough decisions” that they tell themselves before going to bed each night. But the consistent **patttern** of the evil they have done cannot be explained as the the “unfortunate and unanticipated outcome” of good intentions.
Well this is the "true decisions makers" hypothesis. In decades in government, I never met them. What I met was confused, often ignorant, often ideologically-motivated people. whose intentions were very often at least equivocal. You obviously have met the true decision makers so can you share some of your experiences?
So I’m committing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? Perhaps. But I don’t think so.
I have not met any true decision makers; I have not worked within the top levels of the CIA or State Department bureaucracy. I only assume that *not everyone* in the US government is actually making decisions about matters like regime change operations and “humanitarian interventions”; that the general pattern of mischief that one observes is not the random outcome of well-meaning and ill-informed bureaucrats of the type you have described in this and previous essays; and that books like David Talbot’s biography of Allen Dulles, _The Devil’s Chessboard_ (or the portrayal of men like John Bolton) do accuraretly relresent the motives and mindset of that minority of bureaucrats who shape US geopolitical strategy and decide its actions.
Do you not accept that the pattern of harm that the person I was responding to is real, and that the simplest explanation of it is a “morality” premised on the idea that the ends of maintaining US dominance always justify the means, because however bad we may be, our enemies are much worse? I have actually heard this rationale offered by two different people within the US intelligence community that I’ve had the opportunity to converse at length with. I would not describe either as “decision makers,” but one was high enough to have given the president his daily intelligence briefings. The other was much lower down, just a military intelligence guy who admitted that all the things the US did in Latin America through the 1980s were just brutal as critics portray them… but justified under the circumstances.
Following on my comment on your previous article, as I think that what is said and shown on television has little to do with chance, there is something peculiar happening on French TV these last days.
For about 10 days maybe, almost every evening we have documentaries about WW2 : Pearl Harbour then the war in the Pacific, the Normandy landings, the epic story of the Free French Army, the tragic but necessary bombing of Japan, the evil Gestapo... You name it. Sometime, 3 of them at the same time on 3 different channels with the same ones repeated every each 2 or 3 days. And of course, they all follow more or less the same pattern : how brute force or malicious cunning gave Germany or Japan some success at the beginning of the war then how the mighty and heroic (Western) Allies always prevailed in the end. The only kind you won't see is how Germans tried to invade USSR and how they were driven back to Berlin a few years later.
Then… just after that, you have a documentary or discussion between learned and very serious-looking TV experts and emotional Ukrainian refugees about Putin. And how he is, without any doubt now, making ready to start World War 3. Or alternatively, probably as an intended stark harbinger of things to come, how his evil sidekick Kim reigns unchallenged over North Korea.
The message seems clear. Obviously, if nothing is done to prevent that, we will fail the moral test that our forefathers passed so brilliantly. At least, it is what we are supposed to think while going to sleep. Give war a chance.
How far this mascarade our beloved leaders think it can go, I still wonder...
-
(BTW, I looking forward to read what you have to say about Gaza. Hopefully, you might shed some welcomed light on such a tragic and desperate situation)
But let just say that “support all western-friendly countries when in conflict with others,” versus “support all countries the West dislikes when in conflict with others” is too quite a common pattern. I hope for something more balanced.
I struggled with the first sentence of the last paragraph: "Western foreign policy is now ideologically exhausted and bankrupt, and no foreign policy is possible with some underlying ideology, no matter how crude or materialistic". Shouldn't that be "_without_ some underlying ideology"?
I wouldn't usually quibble with a post I see on the internet, but I enjoy your writing a lot, and read your posts carefully. Please keep up the good work! S.
I always look forward the reading the next Aurélien. His writing is so well paced, the use of wry humour so very British even if he lives in France. This piece is no exception.
I have recently been watching an early 80s BBC series of Le Carre's The Perfect Spy, partly because someone wrote that Merz' personality is similar to the main character. And somehow I never read the book. I recognise the world Aurélien paints in this series and the way an English public school trained person sees the world.
Ha! If you really want 'wry humour' you should read "The Long Ships' by Frans Bengtsson. That takes wry humour onto a very high plateau and then kicks it all over the landscape, while imparting some live history (as it was understood at the time of writing, anyway).
Nothing wrong with Kant. See also John Rawles. These are self evident. The problem lies in fatuous or dishonest analysis of the situations where moral decisions have to be made. The guitar strummers were and are ( Jesse Welles) the only way to deal with the people who run the evil show.
Just a general comment re the American public's understanding of the world. Remember that a person can only understand the world with the information within reach of him. As much as the ignorance of my fellow Americans can drive me crazy, I would not blame them for it. Most people in the USA today never have a chance to learn about the world. Even if you ARE fortunate to go to schools that teach you *how* to think, we are surrounded with so much propaganda that the majority of people CANNOT understand the world, no matter how curious they are! Google excludes relevant hits and even if you think you've found "opposition", it ends up being controlled opposition. ALL true opposition to American imperialism (or to its misdeeds) is tarred and feathered. Yes, ALL of it.
On top of that, the government has been infiltrating leftist movements for decades, successfully destroying them or rendering them useless. I myself joined a bona fide advocacy/educational group trying to unite working people on all sides, and just before I joined the group, the FBI had paid people to join and cause trouble. As an aside, I don’t know if the intel agencies infiltrate "right wing" groups, or rather whether if they do, that their purpose is destructive or enabling.
There are so many impediments to Americans understanding anything, and then getting together to do something about it, that I get rather sensitive about how "the public" is perceived. I don’t know what it's like in Europe, but in the US, our government and our media lie about nearly everything.
If you see "the new liberalism" as a religion, I think things make more sense.
Well they don't but at least what seems irrational actions fit a framework. So I expect the idiots in charge to do do the opposite of what is sensible, because their lodestar is belief, not analysis. I am rarely surprised, usually dissappointed.
Yes, it's a civic religion. With dogma, temples and great priests. Actually, right now, you can see a good sampling of them performing in Berlin and lamenting the fate of Ukraine.
And indeed, while no less irrational that their theistic counterparts, civic religion are much more prone to disappointment from their followers and observers as they are supposed to bring tangible result sooner than later...
I seem to remember, marcjf, responding (below) to somebody else, but maybe your comment has been edited significantly, and your message just seems different now. I don't see that many new "liberals" except on Gaza. Maybe you mean, like, centrist Dems? Anyone who thinks s/he's liberal but supports these two fiascos is only a vicarious liberal. If any of those are actually plugged into the MICIMATT some place, perhaps they've succumbed to what John Goffman called "Power Disease"?
The songs (then) were too beautiful to believe. After that era (not too long after) I tried to "make sense" of the whole thing reading the heaviest writers I could handle...in my case Roszak, Popper, Ellul. "The Dissenting Academy"? It didn't get very far. There was someone back there in the "after" days I knew that I really respected. I was at a juncture where I could receive her statement, "They're so stupid" [profs]. She probably knew it way better than I did, but she could probably see my understanding had found some crack for a little light to get in at that moment. These days I could say too many were so stupid they believed Russiagate. Lately how quick were they to see what was going on with this antisemitic stuff? Now I could say [like one guy on fb wrote] all institutions are sacrificial. Now I could ask: After you read Camus' "The Rebel" on Marx are there any good reasons that remain to keep reading the latter for years and years and years?
Now I think neither they nor we will identify in the moment exactly where any hope lies. I believe now like Nikolai Berdyaev maintained: the Spirit will keep finding ways to manifest in new manners as fast as the old ones get stale (and it happens relatively fast). I could say the way we rebelled [60s] is fresh enough in the "morphic field" such that it connects with protests on behalf of free speech and against genocide right now (it's speculation, but what else makes sense?).
"I have not said that a Guru is not necessary. But a Guru need not always be in human form."
Ramana Marharshi
We are too focused on what's been established in academe for the last 220 years. If you ask yourself who is handling things, and you get in any of today's healthcare professions, you'll find out if your eyes are open it's not the academicians.
To me, liberalism had its pros and cons. The pro is lowering the risk of expropriation sufficiently to enable industrial social organisations to shop around for whichever legal system and geography produced the most prosperity. Every other sociolegal philosophy I've heard of has a higher rate of legitimate, part-of-the-system private savings eventually getting seized.
If there is a way out of this double bind, it can only be discovered by taking the chain of why questions deeper, but I can't see how, since questions of agency are the bedrock of ethics.
War is a human condition like love. War will always be with us. Me and my brother and fiends used to beat the shit out of each other to point of losing teeth. one dude even got paralyzed by WWF maneuvers. Still love each other. Anyway waste of time to "fix" it - best get good at it or be a victim.
Speaking of Ozzy, that POS beat the shit outta Randy Rhoads when he wanted to go back to music school and almost killed his wife. See what I mean?
Yeah. Don't use your brain, use your fists instead. Always such a sensible option. Are you and your brothers going for the Darwin Award? It might be worth getting paralysed for.
I bet the Danish, English, French etc think they are a lot smarter than Muslims taking over their countries streets too. Sorry pal brains only gets you so far, anything big that ever happened in this world was through organized violence. Milquetoast intellectual westerners are fixing' to lose their countries because they forgot this fact.
To be fair, I tend to think Gaza, from the perspective of its advocates, is an example of Kantian Categorical Imperative in action, in a twisted way. After all, they have to moral duty to violently sweep aside, even exterminate, the troublemakers getting in the way of their righteousness. So we have, in effect, mutually exclusive and totally opposed Kantian moral imperatives slugging at each other in an old fashioned religious war of annihilation, which would only end when the other side is wiped out.
Your description of the moral problems at the end of the Cold War made me wonder about the end of Reconquista on the cultural religious fabric of Spain, how a society that was, by Medieval standards, very tolerant of religious diversity suddenly flip to expelling all the "nonconformists" or worse. Well, the same logic: you put up with them only as expedient compromise while dealing with greater threats. You don't need to compromise once you "won," especially if you have all the silver of the New World to fund your righteous armies fighting infidels, heretics, and so on...except, I suppose, unlike their modern counterparts, Charles V and Philip II were serious people who understood statecraft...
Yes Netanyahu on X some time back has indeed channeled Hitler's words about life being a struggle where only the strong, the victorious, deserve to live. Almost eerily similar.
Netanyahu adds, for good or ill. As if Hitler's world view is just a reality we must accept. (He doesn't refer to H directly though).
Without getting into any specific case, this worldview emerges naturally from the "universalist" Enlightenment thinking: in the words of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, "2x2 = 4 is mathematics. Try arguing with that." Enlightenment thinking presupposes that everything is 2x2 = 4 in some form or another. If you have the best facts(tm) and logic(tm) on your side, your conclusions are infalliably right and thus unquestionable except by irrational ignoramuses. You don't need to be Netanyahu to get there. (That people think it takes a Netanyahu to get there, imho, is a testimony to how powerful this fallacy is.)
I think that's wrong, personally: we can't escape this problem by arguing that, 2x2=4 is indeed true, just that what Netanyahu is saying is 2x2=5. It is 2x2=4 starting from the premises Netanyahu is starting from. If we start thinking that, if we don't agree with any set of premises that lead to what we think is 2x2 =5 are wrong and should be suppressed for the sake of the Truth(tm), then we are falling into nihilist, anti-cultural, anti-social trap that, ultimately, Aurelien is (I think) pointing to.
Rather, the solution is to reject the argument that 2x2=4 is mathematics and therefore can't be argued with and grapple with the heart of the Enlightenment thinking, like Dostoevsky did. Unfortunately, this is something that probably defies Western mindset: even Orwell, who saw things more clearly than most Weseterners, couldn't get beyond this (obviously, I'm referring to the 2+2 = 5 stuff in 1984).
Kant's maxims are based on the principle of noncontradiction. They are not any old universal maxims you can make up, but ones that cannot be denied without absurdity. I cannot make "everyone should lie" into a universal imperative, because lying conceptually implies truth-telling as a baseline.
Shit, the first bits of this started to annoy me.
For example, I’m certain that Pol Pot was enabled by the Kissinger/Nixon illegal bombing of Cambodia that undermined the whole structure of that country. To try and tar the hippies with pro Pol Pot ideas seems a little disingenuous.
Maybe Aurelian remembers being annoyed that the songs he sang were not that popular back then? No more guitar playing, move on to essay writing. Thankfully for us.
But, the longer the essay goes on, the more impressive it becomes. As a critique of the opposition though.
It still avoids directly criticising imperialism from Washington as a deliberate strategy. Indeed, from The City of London up until now. They may not be the only actors but that is their agenda: Empire.
And, they are still powerful.
Not everything is complicated. Processes maybe, actors not so much.
Saved me the task of replying. You've said it better here. The processes are indeed complicated - intentionally so. All the better to prevaricate and obfuscate, although those two tactics are hardly even necessary anymore.
Most of us – ALL of us - only understand things in hindsight. I surfed the 60’s without understanding it perhaps because we all embraced the hope of the post war generation.
A dialectical view of history would acknowledge that an objective/realist/material understanding of forces (economic, cultural, racial, military, social) is a pre-requisite for effective government. Just ask Bismark. But he had no problem with the ten commandments. It just wasn’t enough as a basis for conducting world affairs. It was on a different ‘level’.
This was considered the ‘private sphere’ just as some of the modern liberal views which ‘centrists’ are now trying to impose on us all by law should be private – like one’s religious views or sexual preferences. Personal liberalism - fine. Imposed ‘liberalism’ is a recipe for getting literally everything wrong – and unnecessarily wrong because it can never achieve consensus and looks to fight battles that should be avoided because they are on the wrong territory.
So private ‘morality’ (and indeed any view) is on a different level to the practise of politics, particularly geopolitics. And this is why I have contempt for lazy Liberalism because it is sloppy and fails to acknowledge unpleasant reality. Couple that with the messianic platitudes of ‘Blairism’ and you have all the ingredients for disaster.
There are some things that we need to protect our political masters (and ultimately ourselves) from. Acknowledge the argument of a foe who is determined, and dangerous. Look at the power of the enemy in every dimension. Put yourself in his (or her) shoes and try and find a solution (or way out). The very opposite of what ‘we’ have done in Ukraine and before that in Iraq.
When it comes to evaluating your point about politicians - ‘decision-makers like to think of themselves as moral actors: the world would be a considerably safer place if they didn’t' – why do I think of Yvette Cooper? They USE arguments that they must know are utterly specious. Are they that thick? Or are they just opportunists? Or, worse, do they actually believe it?
The problem with messianic liberalism is that it is really back to the Crusades. We attack even when we are outnumbered because ‘it is the right thing to do’. General Bernard Montgomery put it well when he was asked about his lessons on war – ‘Page one, Rule one – Don’t march on Moscow’.
So, I’m all for liberal moralism so long as it stops at the front door. When it comes to politics we need to take into account the strength of the forces we need to prevail over against the desire whatever it is we want to achieve. (And there is a BIG debate over who ‘WE’ are).
That being said – that there is a need to work as much as possible for the demise of the Anglo/US Empire – but this must ‘be done slowly’, with as little kinetic conflict as possible because the only way the Anglo-Empire will survive is through war.
Whatever Liberal virtue it may have had has been eroded in its ‘Forever Wars’ and buried once and for all in Gaza. Military defeat stares in Ukraine; economic defeat accelerated by BRICS and Trumps sanctions and moral defeat in the ruins of Gaza. (The ultimate punch in the face for ‘Liberalism’).
Liberalism gave us hope in the 60’s and 70’s BUT it isn’t enough. So, the last typically sardonic line ‘It’s a good thing the international environment is so stable, or we might be in real trouble.’ reminds me of that line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – just before they charge out with all guns blazing against the might of the Mexican army.
“the world could be changed by moral force alone”. Well I was part of those times too, but I never belived that, after reading Mao’s comment that ‘power grows from the barrel of a gun’. Unfotunately for me I’m also allergic to power.
“a military career was treated as a kind of mental illness” as should be the case in any society with aspirations to being a moral civilisation. (Of course, ‘morality’ will be a meaningless concept to those who wearily convince themselves that ‘realpolitik’ is the only way states can interact).
“today’s fashionable assertions of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany.” - you are behind the times, Aurelian - this only applies now to Russia. The rest of the wartime allies (and their opponents) are now pillars of moral respectability (although Gaza is now forcing them back into culpability).
“the “arms dealers cause wars” trope” Are you seriously postulating that the relationship, for example, between Boeing, Macdonnell-Douglas, BAE etc and the US government, with all the mass bribery that all these firms indulge in, has no effect? Why then do they bother with the bribery? Market differentiation? I doubt it. Although admittedly not heading an arms firm, William Randolph Hearst is famous for his quote that ‘he would provide the war’ - and he did. Was he a one-off? I doubt that too.
“the Six-Day War of 1967, . . . seemed romantic adventures more than anything serious.” - well, not if you had an understanding of how the ‘state of Israel’ happened to be founded.
“the country [Vietnam] was unified by force in 1975” presumably, going by the tone of this paragraph (and all the rest), this event is much much worse in your eyes than the country being dis-unified for no good reason by diplomatic/political western maneuvering in 1954 - I wonder why that is?
“seeing the source of all evil in Washington, because complexity was simply beyond them” - an exceptionally idiotic remark.
It is a fact (on record) that since the end of World War 2, the United States has:
Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected
.
Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
.
Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
.
Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries
.
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
Plus … although not easily quantified … more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.
(William Blum - www.williamblum.org)
The United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. No other state (apart from the UK and to a small extent France) has such a record
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
But perhaps complexity (if there is in fact such here - it doesn't seem very complex to me), is beyond you too?
““The Left,” . . . is best described as a superficial and largely frivolous anti-militarism . . . it was a dislike and distrust of western militaries and their activities, because they seemed to represent the detested western “establishment” in its purest form. However, this dislike didn’t necessarily extend to other militaries, so long as they were fighting the West”
Well, this is just ludicrous. What exactly had the west to fight about or defend against? Were they being invaded or bombarded by colonial powers? Was Russia threatening (in perfectly discernable reality) to attack Europe or the US? No. The west were the colonial powers, and had exerted themselves as such in Russia, China, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, Ireland, Serbia, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria (some of these numerous times) etc. etc. etc. and so on and on and on . . . I.E. The ‘west’ you are so concerned to whitewash were aggressive powers, while the ‘third world’ (for want of a better term) was preyed upon and was reactive and defensive. Your shallow and dismissive ‘analysis’ of this (the latest of a number of others in a similar vein) nullifies your pretensions to being some kind of responsible pundit. I have to say that Ewan MacColl, despite your sneering dismissal, had an integrity and comittment to truth and humanity which are sadly lacking in your cynical attempts to create a sanitised portrait of the west. Poor show, really. I had for a time hoped that you might be at least interesting, but:
I can’t be bothered pointing out the various contradictions after this point. In fact I can’t be bothered reading any further. In my estimation, these articles are reactionary propaganda masquerading as some sort of vaguely ‘centre-leftist’ pseudo intellectual analysis. Why anyone would want to pursue that is beyond me - it seems to be a futile occupation, possibly a vanity project? If so, they will have a bit more rigorous and even-handed if they are to be even slightly convincing.
Well said.
I agree completely with your points about US imperialism and aggression. Thank you for saying it.
But I still find value in the author’s discussion of how this aggression (even if he does not see it as such) is today sought to be justified as “humanitarian intervention,” and that this is in turn premised on the flawed logic of the Kantian categorical imperative, which can be used to justify anything.
Where the author goes wrong is in accepting that all western decision makers are acting on (faulty) moral motives—that these are not just ex post facto rationales. This may actually be true of some politicians… but not those who are true decision makers, a category that I assume includes a few politicians, but mostly unelected deep state bureaucrats. There is no plausible argument that they are sincerely motivated by moral considerations at all and not just their own (warped sense) of national interest. Of course humans are highly prone to self-deception, so it is likely most actual decision makers have a self-excuplatory story based on the “ultimate good” and “tough decisions” that they tell themselves before going to bed each night. But the consistent **patttern** of the evil they have done cannot be explained as the the “unfortunate and unanticipated outcome” of good intentions.
Well this is the "true decisions makers" hypothesis. In decades in government, I never met them. What I met was confused, often ignorant, often ideologically-motivated people. whose intentions were very often at least equivocal. You obviously have met the true decision makers so can you share some of your experiences?
So I’m committing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? Perhaps. But I don’t think so.
I have not met any true decision makers; I have not worked within the top levels of the CIA or State Department bureaucracy. I only assume that *not everyone* in the US government is actually making decisions about matters like regime change operations and “humanitarian interventions”; that the general pattern of mischief that one observes is not the random outcome of well-meaning and ill-informed bureaucrats of the type you have described in this and previous essays; and that books like David Talbot’s biography of Allen Dulles, _The Devil’s Chessboard_ (or the portrayal of men like John Bolton) do accuraretly relresent the motives and mindset of that minority of bureaucrats who shape US geopolitical strategy and decide its actions.
Do you not accept that the pattern of harm that the person I was responding to is real, and that the simplest explanation of it is a “morality” premised on the idea that the ends of maintaining US dominance always justify the means, because however bad we may be, our enemies are much worse? I have actually heard this rationale offered by two different people within the US intelligence community that I’ve had the opportunity to converse at length with. I would not describe either as “decision makers,” but one was high enough to have given the president his daily intelligence briefings. The other was much lower down, just a military intelligence guy who admitted that all the things the US did in Latin America through the 1980s were just brutal as critics portray them… but justified under the circumstances.
The people who rule over us are uninterested in ideology, except as it provides a means to access power.
@Feral Finster
"King Kong said that? Well, I guess it's true. But..."
(See the Elder Dachshund cycle @ The Forest Jar)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB32jU2MhQwWPCi53uwDZFLEC8p96fTIn&si=33NRVa9ZvTsWwGZY
Following on my comment on your previous article, as I think that what is said and shown on television has little to do with chance, there is something peculiar happening on French TV these last days.
For about 10 days maybe, almost every evening we have documentaries about WW2 : Pearl Harbour then the war in the Pacific, the Normandy landings, the epic story of the Free French Army, the tragic but necessary bombing of Japan, the evil Gestapo... You name it. Sometime, 3 of them at the same time on 3 different channels with the same ones repeated every each 2 or 3 days. And of course, they all follow more or less the same pattern : how brute force or malicious cunning gave Germany or Japan some success at the beginning of the war then how the mighty and heroic (Western) Allies always prevailed in the end. The only kind you won't see is how Germans tried to invade USSR and how they were driven back to Berlin a few years later.
Then… just after that, you have a documentary or discussion between learned and very serious-looking TV experts and emotional Ukrainian refugees about Putin. And how he is, without any doubt now, making ready to start World War 3. Or alternatively, probably as an intended stark harbinger of things to come, how his evil sidekick Kim reigns unchallenged over North Korea.
The message seems clear. Obviously, if nothing is done to prevent that, we will fail the moral test that our forefathers passed so brilliantly. At least, it is what we are supposed to think while going to sleep. Give war a chance.
How far this mascarade our beloved leaders think it can go, I still wonder...
-
(BTW, I looking forward to read what you have to say about Gaza. Hopefully, you might shed some welcomed light on such a tragic and desperate situation)
Pretend that Russia had done one tenth the atrocities that Israel commits in broad daylight on a daily basis.
The virtue signaling and performative outrage would be a sight to behold.
I will not enter this debate now.
But let just say that “support all western-friendly countries when in conflict with others,” versus “support all countries the West dislikes when in conflict with others” is too quite a common pattern. I hope for something more balanced.
I struggled with the first sentence of the last paragraph: "Western foreign policy is now ideologically exhausted and bankrupt, and no foreign policy is possible with some underlying ideology, no matter how crude or materialistic". Shouldn't that be "_without_ some underlying ideology"?
I wouldn't usually quibble with a post I see on the internet, but I enjoy your writing a lot, and read your posts carefully. Please keep up the good work! S.
Thank you. Stupid typing error on my part. Now corrected.
That's how I read it...
I always look forward the reading the next Aurélien. His writing is so well paced, the use of wry humour so very British even if he lives in France. This piece is no exception.
I have recently been watching an early 80s BBC series of Le Carre's The Perfect Spy, partly because someone wrote that Merz' personality is similar to the main character. And somehow I never read the book. I recognise the world Aurélien paints in this series and the way an English public school trained person sees the world.
And then I look at Lindsey Graham.
Ha! If you really want 'wry humour' you should read "The Long Ships' by Frans Bengtsson. That takes wry humour onto a very high plateau and then kicks it all over the landscape, while imparting some live history (as it was understood at the time of writing, anyway).
Nothing wrong with Kant. See also John Rawles. These are self evident. The problem lies in fatuous or dishonest analysis of the situations where moral decisions have to be made. The guitar strummers were and are ( Jesse Welles) the only way to deal with the people who run the evil show.
I:m guessing you agree, but maybe not. Kant's take looks to me like a close relation to 'Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you'.
Same for Rawls.
They share close family resemblances.
Just a general comment re the American public's understanding of the world. Remember that a person can only understand the world with the information within reach of him. As much as the ignorance of my fellow Americans can drive me crazy, I would not blame them for it. Most people in the USA today never have a chance to learn about the world. Even if you ARE fortunate to go to schools that teach you *how* to think, we are surrounded with so much propaganda that the majority of people CANNOT understand the world, no matter how curious they are! Google excludes relevant hits and even if you think you've found "opposition", it ends up being controlled opposition. ALL true opposition to American imperialism (or to its misdeeds) is tarred and feathered. Yes, ALL of it.
On top of that, the government has been infiltrating leftist movements for decades, successfully destroying them or rendering them useless. I myself joined a bona fide advocacy/educational group trying to unite working people on all sides, and just before I joined the group, the FBI had paid people to join and cause trouble. As an aside, I don’t know if the intel agencies infiltrate "right wing" groups, or rather whether if they do, that their purpose is destructive or enabling.
There are so many impediments to Americans understanding anything, and then getting together to do something about it, that I get rather sensitive about how "the public" is perceived. I don’t know what it's like in Europe, but in the US, our government and our media lie about nearly everything.
Europe is much the same - possibly not so far down the totalitarian road, but on the way.
If you see "the new liberalism" as a religion, I think things make more sense.
Well they don't but at least what seems irrational actions fit a framework. So I expect the idiots in charge to do do the opposite of what is sensible, because their lodestar is belief, not analysis. I am rarely surprised, usually dissappointed.
Yes, it's a civic religion. With dogma, temples and great priests. Actually, right now, you can see a good sampling of them performing in Berlin and lamenting the fate of Ukraine.
And indeed, while no less irrational that their theistic counterparts, civic religion are much more prone to disappointment from their followers and observers as they are supposed to bring tangible result sooner than later...
I seem to remember, marcjf, responding (below) to somebody else, but maybe your comment has been edited significantly, and your message just seems different now. I don't see that many new "liberals" except on Gaza. Maybe you mean, like, centrist Dems? Anyone who thinks s/he's liberal but supports these two fiascos is only a vicarious liberal. If any of those are actually plugged into the MICIMATT some place, perhaps they've succumbed to what John Goffman called "Power Disease"?
The songs (then) were too beautiful to believe. After that era (not too long after) I tried to "make sense" of the whole thing reading the heaviest writers I could handle...in my case Roszak, Popper, Ellul. "The Dissenting Academy"? It didn't get very far. There was someone back there in the "after" days I knew that I really respected. I was at a juncture where I could receive her statement, "They're so stupid" [profs]. She probably knew it way better than I did, but she could probably see my understanding had found some crack for a little light to get in at that moment. These days I could say too many were so stupid they believed Russiagate. Lately how quick were they to see what was going on with this antisemitic stuff? Now I could say [like one guy on fb wrote] all institutions are sacrificial. Now I could ask: After you read Camus' "The Rebel" on Marx are there any good reasons that remain to keep reading the latter for years and years and years?
Now I think neither they nor we will identify in the moment exactly where any hope lies. I believe now like Nikolai Berdyaev maintained: the Spirit will keep finding ways to manifest in new manners as fast as the old ones get stale (and it happens relatively fast). I could say the way we rebelled [60s] is fresh enough in the "morphic field" such that it connects with protests on behalf of free speech and against genocide right now (it's speculation, but what else makes sense?).
"I have not said that a Guru is not necessary. But a Guru need not always be in human form."
Ramana Marharshi
We are too focused on what's been established in academe for the last 220 years. If you ask yourself who is handling things, and you get in any of today's healthcare professions, you'll find out if your eyes are open it's not the academicians.
My usual italian translation, here:
"Sentiamoci tutti bene
No, non “Possiamo”."
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2025/08/sentiamoci-tutti-bene-no-non-possiamo.html
To me, liberalism had its pros and cons. The pro is lowering the risk of expropriation sufficiently to enable industrial social organisations to shop around for whichever legal system and geography produced the most prosperity. Every other sociolegal philosophy I've heard of has a higher rate of legitimate, part-of-the-system private savings eventually getting seized.
If there is a way out of this double bind, it can only be discovered by taking the chain of why questions deeper, but I can't see how, since questions of agency are the bedrock of ethics.
War is a human condition like love. War will always be with us. Me and my brother and fiends used to beat the shit out of each other to point of losing teeth. one dude even got paralyzed by WWF maneuvers. Still love each other. Anyway waste of time to "fix" it - best get good at it or be a victim.
Speaking of Ozzy, that POS beat the shit outta Randy Rhoads when he wanted to go back to music school and almost killed his wife. See what I mean?
Yeah. Don't use your brain, use your fists instead. Always such a sensible option. Are you and your brothers going for the Darwin Award? It might be worth getting paralysed for.
I bet the Danish, English, French etc think they are a lot smarter than Muslims taking over their countries streets too. Sorry pal brains only gets you so far, anything big that ever happened in this world was through organized violence. Milquetoast intellectual westerners are fixing' to lose their countries because they forgot this fact.
Weird, to say the least.
To be fair, I tend to think Gaza, from the perspective of its advocates, is an example of Kantian Categorical Imperative in action, in a twisted way. After all, they have to moral duty to violently sweep aside, even exterminate, the troublemakers getting in the way of their righteousness. So we have, in effect, mutually exclusive and totally opposed Kantian moral imperatives slugging at each other in an old fashioned religious war of annihilation, which would only end when the other side is wiped out.
Your description of the moral problems at the end of the Cold War made me wonder about the end of Reconquista on the cultural religious fabric of Spain, how a society that was, by Medieval standards, very tolerant of religious diversity suddenly flip to expelling all the "nonconformists" or worse. Well, the same logic: you put up with them only as expedient compromise while dealing with greater threats. You don't need to compromise once you "won," especially if you have all the silver of the New World to fund your righteous armies fighting infidels, heretics, and so on...except, I suppose, unlike their modern counterparts, Charles V and Philip II were serious people who understood statecraft...
Yes Netanyahu on X some time back has indeed channeled Hitler's words about life being a struggle where only the strong, the victorious, deserve to live. Almost eerily similar.
Netanyahu adds, for good or ill. As if Hitler's world view is just a reality we must accept. (He doesn't refer to H directly though).
Without getting into any specific case, this worldview emerges naturally from the "universalist" Enlightenment thinking: in the words of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, "2x2 = 4 is mathematics. Try arguing with that." Enlightenment thinking presupposes that everything is 2x2 = 4 in some form or another. If you have the best facts(tm) and logic(tm) on your side, your conclusions are infalliably right and thus unquestionable except by irrational ignoramuses. You don't need to be Netanyahu to get there. (That people think it takes a Netanyahu to get there, imho, is a testimony to how powerful this fallacy is.)
I think that's wrong, personally: we can't escape this problem by arguing that, 2x2=4 is indeed true, just that what Netanyahu is saying is 2x2=5. It is 2x2=4 starting from the premises Netanyahu is starting from. If we start thinking that, if we don't agree with any set of premises that lead to what we think is 2x2 =5 are wrong and should be suppressed for the sake of the Truth(tm), then we are falling into nihilist, anti-cultural, anti-social trap that, ultimately, Aurelien is (I think) pointing to.
Rather, the solution is to reject the argument that 2x2=4 is mathematics and therefore can't be argued with and grapple with the heart of the Enlightenment thinking, like Dostoevsky did. Unfortunately, this is something that probably defies Western mindset: even Orwell, who saw things more clearly than most Weseterners, couldn't get beyond this (obviously, I'm referring to the 2+2 = 5 stuff in 1984).
Orwell ended up by being just another fellow-traveller, anti-communist and corrupted.
I think you may be over-complicating it so far nobody will understand it!
All the best
;=)
"suddenly flip to expelling all the "nonconformists"
That was just 'the west' in it's embryo form, getting used to proto-fascism.
Kant's maxims are based on the principle of noncontradiction. They are not any old universal maxims you can make up, but ones that cannot be denied without absurdity. I cannot make "everyone should lie" into a universal imperative, because lying conceptually implies truth-telling as a baseline.