Van Creveld, Vietnam, and Iraq

(Continued from preceding post.) The Transformation of War is a fertile and wide-ranging source of ideas, though perhaps not all of them are thoroughly verified. The central theme, though, is the extreme, widely unappreciated danger of "low-intensity warfare" to conventional armies, and indeed, in those countries fighting insurgencies on their home territory, to the very nation-states whose power these armies uphold. If conventional forces cannot physically protect their own nationals, the states themselves will be discredited, and citizens will transfer their loyalty to whatever alternative form of organization can protect them.

A strong army fighting a weak insurgency, van Creveld says, must have iron self-control (p. 177). It is imperative to avoid indiscriminate violence, collective punishments, and the use of heavy weapons, even in the face of provocations designed to elicit such responses. This is the only way not to alienate the population, incur the condemnation of international onlookers, and suffer a collapse of discipline as a result of violating the army's own code of conduct. The British have consistently exercised such restraint in Northern Ireland, according to van Creveld (who is an Israeli historian). My impression is that even though The Transformation of War is said to be required reading for American officers, the American forces have failed to recognize the need for this level of restraint (which they might well regard as effeminate) in Iraq. In any case, van Creveld suggests, even self-restraint will probably only delay, not prevent, the moral collapse of the occupying force. Furthermore, an army that has grown accustomed to fighting in this restrained fashion may well prove useless when it is faced with an enemy with equal firepower to its own. Van Creveld cites the poor Argentinian performance in the Falklands as a consequence of this kind of military ruination (p. 178).

Van Creveld, who is by no means a party-line liberal, has attracted considerable attention in the blogosphere. Some more recent online articles of his are of more direct relevance to the case of Iraq. In November 2004, in an article entitled Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did, van Creveld went into some detail about Israeli general/journalist Moshe Dayan's observations of America-in-Vietnam. In 1966, the Americans, besides being burdened with the inherent problems of a "strong" occupying force, lacked a clear sense of their objectives. They also lacked (partly because of a shortage of translators) adequate intelligence about precise enemy locations, with the result that their overwhelming firepower tended to be wasted on empty jungle. Field-Marshal Montgomery of Alamein said to Dayan, on the record, that the American policy was "insane". Dayan found that at the top American levels, only Robert McNamara (who was to resign the next year) had a clear picture of the strategic position. Yet at this time, the American forces in Vietnam believed in the rightness of their cause and formed a cohesive, technologically advanced fighting machine; the collapse of morale came only later, once reality had sunk in.

Van Creveld suggests that in Iraq, the Americans are again suffering from deficient intelligence, leading them to strike nonexistent targets or (worse) noncombatants. Like the Vietnamese, the Iraqis do not wish to be Americanized. And once more, there is the problem of being the "overdog":

. . . he who fights against the weak—and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed—and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters' skids.

In another article late last year, van Creveld called Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them" (which at least put President Bush in "august" company). He stated that the only choice now open to the Americans was to withdraw and let Iraq descend into civil war—while leaving behind some forces, apparently to guard the oilfields, though he seemed a bit vague on this point.

A June 5 report in the "nonpartisan" Capitol Hill Blue seems to bear out van Creveld's predictions, claiming that field commanders are privately reporting that American forces are being "pushed beyond the breaking point" and that the war "is lost", though such reports are being subjected to heavy censorship. The new Iraqi Prime Minister is accusing American forces of crushing Iraqi civilians with their vehicles and killing them on mere suspicion.

Update (07/17): The top uniformed officer in the U.S. Army has declined to state that America is winning the war in Iraq.

Counterinsurgency and atrocities

The following passage from Martin van Creveld's far-sighted The Transformation of War (Free Press, 1991) seems timely in view of the Haditha allegations.

In a situation like Vietnam, where regular forces are employed against guerrillas and terrorists, the distinction between combatants and noncombatants will probably break down. Unable to go by the ordinary war convention as expressed in the "rules of engagement," all but the most disciplined troops will find themselves violating those rules. Having, by the force of circumstances, killed noncombatants and tortured prisoners, they will go in fear of the consequences if caught. If caught, they are certain to blame their commanders for putting them into a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. The commanders, in turn, will hasten to wash their hands of the whole affair, claiming that they never told their subordinates to break the rules. There will be atrocities, as happened at My Lai, and attempts to cover them up. Where the cover-up fails a few low-ranking members of the military establishment may be turned into scapegoats, as Lieutenant Calley was, whereas their superiors will deny responsibility. With the men unable to trust each other, or their commanders, disintegration occurs. When this happened in Vietnam, tens of thousands went AWOL, and an estimated 30 percent of the forces were on hard drugs. Soon such an army will cease to fight, each man seeking only to save his conscience and his skin. (pp 92–93.)

Meanwhile, here is Creveld on the beginnings of insurgencies:

. . . in the recent past, [a Clausewitzian] view has often prevented low-intensity conflict from being taken seriously until it was too late. In both Algeria and Vietnam, to say nothing of the West Bank, the first limited uprisings were at first dismissed as simple banditry that "the forces of order" would suppress easily enough. (p. 57.)

How serious is the military threat posed by an insurgency? Creveld notes that the only Third-World insurgency successfully quashed by a European colonial power was that in Malaya—and this was probably only because, first, the insurgency was supported only by the Chinese minority, and, second, Britain had promised to get out of Malaya once the insurgency had been defeated (pp 22–23).

Eric Voegelin (9)

Hitler and the Germans

For most readers this is probably one of Voegelin's more accessible and interesting books, though he does not seem to have put as great a value on it as on some of his more theoretical work. It is basically a critique of modern German culture, which he sees as to a large extent "radically stupid"—as incapable of correctly perceiving reality—despite the existence of individual sages such as Thomas Mann and a few others Voegelin names, and of the substantial fraction of ordinary German voters who refused to vote for Hitler. Those who refuse to acknowledge the prevalence of this stupidity are forced to conclude that Hitler was either not really all that bad, or else some kind of demon with hypnotic powers.

Such radical stupidity was by no means cured by the German defeat in World War Two, Voegelin finds. It extended and extends (as of the 1960s) through all levels of German society, into the churches and universities as well as the political leadership. Germany has church leaders who are ignorant of basic theology, writers who are oblivious of the existence of the basic literature in their fields, politicians who are morally and intellectually unqualified to lead, let alone to assume the role of "Teacher of the People" as Hitler presumed to. Such stupidity is not confined to Germany; but he regards other countries such as Britain and the United States as suffering less from it, apparently because of their greater experience in self-government and relative freedom from the influence of ideological thinking (which has corrupted German philosophical language into a kind of Newspeak). God knows what he would think of the current state of political, academic and ecclesiastical life in Britain and America.

Voegelin follows Robert Musil (in Precision and Soul) in distinguishing "simple" from "higher" stupidity. Simple stupidity is consistent with "decent middle class" virtues such as loyalty and purity of feeling. These have nothing to do, however, with the higher virtues—the primary Christian virtues of faith, humility, charity and asceticism. (Josef Pieper might put the classical virtue of prudence or wisdom at the top of this latter list.) The middle-class decencies, the virtues of the "good Germans", merely serve to add effectiveness to evil if the higher virtues, which should guide them, are missing or deformed. The German problem is that of

the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but who then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere . . .

Since one cannot expect everyone to possess higher virtues, such guidance is properly the role of social élites (I may be interpolating a bit here). But in Germany the élites are riddled with people who lay claim to higher virtues, or at any rate higher knowledge, while actually lacking them. These are the stupid in the higher sense. Professors and bishops, too, can form an ignorant "rabble".

Voegelin recommends Alan Bullock as an intelligent biographer of Hitler (while noting that Bullock was largely unknown in Germany).

An interesting aside: Voegelin, who does not usually talk about natural science, remarks that Darwin derived the idea of the Survival of the Fittest from Herbert Spencer, not the other way around. Darwinianism is a derivative of early English liberalism (p. 144). To refer to "Social Darwinism" is in effect to make the false claim that the political ideology of the Survival of the Fittest is founded on objective scientific knowledge.

Eric Voegelin (8)

Some leftist self-examination

While googling for information on the Keighley video (see preceding post), I came across the site of leftie Londoner "Holly Finch", a passenger on the Piccadilly subway line on the day it was bombed in 2005. (From the single post I read it looks as though she was probably seriously injured, but this is unclear.) She and one of her readers have some observations comparing their reactions to Islamic and BNP extremism which may be enlightening. . . . CONTINUE

On a rational level, Ms. Finch finds that that the Islamist bombers and BNP leader Nick Griffin are fundamentally the same kind of extremist, "locked head to to head, differentiated only by their chosen enemy." She neglects to point out that the BNP, unlike the Islamists, have not actually killed anyone—let alone launched an indiscriminate terror attack—and she seems to blame Islamic extremism on BNP-style racism, which is largely incorrect in my view. But let us accept for the sake of argument that the extremism of the BNP and of the Islamists are morally equivalent. (This is not too far-fetched, as the BNP leadership apparently has at least associated with Italian terrorist train-bombers, for example.) How, then, does she react on a gut level to these two extremisms?

I have engaged in various debates with people since 7th July, many of whom have found it hard to understand my lack of anger towards the bombers. I don't hate them, I don't know how to . . . . I have tried to understand Mohammed Sidique Khan and his compatriots [sic]. In my most 'leftie liberal' moments I have even tried to blame our society for allowing them to grow up in an environment which enabled such hatred to germinate and bloom.

By contrast,

The seedy secret videos of BNP leader Nick Griffin froze my heart and sickened my soul . . . . I do not feel the same way about Nick Griffin [as about the tube bombers], but should I? I do not have any urge to understand him. When I heard his words I felt the first early rumblings of hatred.

Commenter "Yorkshire Lass" says she has similar reactions, and doesn't know why this should be. Holly Finch can suggest only that it has something to do with sympathy for the underdog.

I think this illustrates rather well a basic difference between leftists and rightists. Other things being equal, leftists will hate "their own people", that is, those of their own culture or nationality or race; rightists will prefer to hate foreigners.

As Ms. Finch's post suggests, the leftist reaction comes from a deep emotional level. The rightist, xenophobic reaction is also deeply rooted. But it is the natural one. People are at first, as children or in primitive societies, naturally loyal to what they perceive as their own group, and have to be taught to take the interests of outsiders into account. In a properly ordered society, this education is at a conscious, rational level: one remains emotionally tied to one's own primary group in preference to others, and only intellectually admits the rights of outsiders to fair treatment. When one gets carried away there is then always the danger that one will forget about the outsiders' point of view. (One's view of who is defined as belonging to one's primary group may also become more elevated, even on a "gut" level.)

On the other hand, it seems to me that the leftist gut reaction, in favour of outsiders as such, represents the triumph of a kind of brainwashing, an inversion of natural feeling. It can be maintained only by rigorous ideological control of education and the media, and even then is liable to collapse suddenly. Leftists are not aware of the pervasiveness of self-hatred in contemporary cultural messages, so the source of their hatred of "their own people" is mysterious to them. Probably it is rare for them to acknowledge it the first place, as Ms. Finch does. (Though I imagine that she would indignantly deny that the BNP were "her own people".)

Both leftist and rightist attitudes to outsiders can have evil consequences. These are obvious in the case of right-wing xenophobia; perhaps less so in the case of leftist self-hatred. We do not really know other groups as we know our own. Thus, focusing our benevolence on outsiders is likely to be wasted or counterproductive. Self-hatred also leaves a society defenceless against aggression by other societies which believe in their own values and which are prepared to impose them on others. As xenophobia is likely to destroy others, self-hatred is likely to result in the destruction of one's society, and of whatever good is in it.

It is insane for a society to adopt self-hatred as a principle, rather than as a reaction to specific flaws in one's society. While recognition of genuine flaws should lead to social improvement, principled self-hatred logically leads only to suicide. But the West has chosen principled self-hatred, which is merely rationalized on the basis of perceived flaws. This is why Western education now has the character of propaganda.

The BNP and a controlled media

I have been updating last month's post on the British National Party with information as I come across it. One piece of information seems quite significant, but doesn't seem to appear on the Net: BNP leader Nick Griffin's statement in the "Keighley" video (2004) indicating his ideas about the media under a BNP government. If my transcription is accurate, Griffin said that once the BNP is in power at Westminster,

. . . then we make the laws, then we control the television and the newspapers, and we can make sure that what has been happening in Keighley is on television, in documentaries, night after night after night after night, until the British people really realise the evil of what these people have done to our country, until they say right, now we really are going to sort it out.

The significance of this is that the main distinction between a so-called elective dictator, such as a contemporary British Prime Minister, and a full-fledged dictator is that an elective dictator is subject to criticism from an independent media. Thus it seems that Griffin was envisaging something close to a full-fledged dictatorship. Periodic elections are of limited use if the airwaves are pounding the virtues of the ruling party (among other things) into the voters' heads, "night after night after night".

Admittedly, the existing mainstream media also lacks political diversity, and this has probably enfeebled democracy rather drastically. Nevertheless, because it is controlled by a different set of people from the government, it can hold the ruling party accountable for corrupt practices, for example.

Anyone who expects the traditional moderation of the British people to ensure restraint in the policies of a BNP government should probably bear in mind the apparent intention of the BNP to assume control of the media. Voters endlessly bombarded with the BNP view of the world would probably approve of almost anything the BNP wanted them to.

Update (07/17): There is a long argument about the nature of the BNP in this 200-comment Dhimmiwatch thread which started on June 28th. (Also covers "memic penumbras".)

Update #2 (07/25): Here is the website of a new "Popular Alliance" party that appears to be attempting to fill the gap in the British political spectrum between the Conservatives and the far right. So far the Popular Alliance is sufficiently minor that there is not much information available on it on the Web other than at its own site. There have apparently been a number of attempts to make a go of such parties in Britain in recent years (UKIP, Veritas, English Democrats) with little success to date.

Update #3 (07/26): (Deleted)

Next post on the BNP (7/31)

Speaking of political correctness . . .

There is an essay examining political correctness and related subjects, with a number of links which look worth exploring, up at Gates of Vienna. One of those quoted is Theodore Dalrymple: "When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies . . . they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil . . . . One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded . . . . A society of emasculated liars is easy to control." Mahfooz Kanwar (see preceding post) also gets an honorable mention.

Welcome Muslim Canadian voices

(1) Prof. Mahfooz Kanwar, criminologist/sociologist at Mount Royal College, Calgary, interviewed in the Calgary Sun and cited at The American Thinker. Kanwar says (in part) that "multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not . . . . And political correctness threatens us because we can't fight something we refuse to label and understand . . . ." He goes on to say that the amount of political correctness stemming from last weekend's arrests of 17 radicalized Muslims in the Toronto area is "sickening" and "dangerous." "Everybody was tripping over themselves not to state the obvious, that these men mostly attended the same mosque . . . . Political correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens our society . . . . It is the responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not the other way around."

(2) Fatima Houda-Pepin, Quebec MNA, in an interview with Le Devoir, says that Islamist terrorism is due to "the hateful propaganda" that is spreading within the Muslim community "under the cover of religion", and that she doesn't understand why the Canadian authorities don't crack down on it. More details at Daimnation.

Eric Voegelin (8)

The state of modern thought

At one point in The Ecumenic Age (pp 265–267), Voegelin denounces Hegel in particular and post-Enlightenment thought in general as "egophanic" distortions of the theophany that once upon a a time gave birth to Western philosophy and religion.

As the fundamental motivation [of modern thinkers], there can be discerned the legitimate discontent with a doctrinaire metaphysics and theology that has cut loose from the originating experiences and an earnest desire to return to the reality experienced. The desire, however, did not reach its goal. The outburst [of egophany] was personally possible, and socially effective, because by the eighteenth century the gulf between symbols and experiences had become so wide that the standards of control by reason and reality were lost. The atrophied dogma, metaphysical and theological, was so badly discredited that it could no longer function as a controlling authority, while the originating experiences, noetic and pneumatic, were so deeply buried under the millennial accretions of doctrine that their recovery proved considerably more difficult than anybody anticipated at the time. As a matter of fact, by now it has taken two centuries of work by historians and philosophers to gain a moderately adequate understanding of Greek philosophical culture as well as of the New Testament period . . . . But a proper regard for [these] extenuating circumstances . . . must not obscure the clear perception of egophanic self-aggrandizement as the motive power behind the grotesque mixture of brilliant speculation and mischievous semantic games, of vast historical knowledge and arbitrary distortions of facts, of profound insight into problems of the spirit and an almost blasphemous misuse of Biblical texts, of serious concern about the disease of the age and the tactics of deceptive manipulation, of perceptive common sense and the dream of accomplishing a salvation of mankind . . .

These "millennial accretions of doctrine" began, in Voegelin's view, with St. Paul's own mistake about an imminent Second Coming, continued with the Church's necessary but unfortunate Christological dogma, and were completed by Hegel's own "egophanic constructions".

The sequence of symbolizations just adumbrated did little, if anything, to dissolve the initial defect, but rather inflated it to monstrous proportions. The result is the grotesque intellectual mess which today has become the principal obstacle to a rational study of history . . . . This many-storied edifice of interpretations, with one derivative symbolism piled on top of the other through almost two thousand years, must be considered beyond repair . . . . It rather has become the philosopher's task to clarify, as far as that is posible, the problem in reality that has been experienced as existentially important enough to inspire the erection of the building in continuity through the millennia, and still inspires our ideological dogmatomachy, however zealotic, doctinaire, aberrant, and dilettantic its efforts may be.

Eric Voegelin (7)

Monotheism and physical science

Natural science is often blamed for demolishing religious faith. Yet a book might be written about how developments in physical science have been consistent with monotheistic religion, though as far as I know only some isolated aspects of this subject have been discussed in print. Here are some of the ideas that such a book might cover:

(1.) Physics seeks a simple unity underlying the apparent messiness of the observed world. This seems to require a basically monotheistic outlook: before monotheism, gods were independent actors within the universe, frequently in conflict with one another; there was no perception of any underlying unity. (I think someone pointed out that the fact of the regular motions of celestial bodies converted St. Augustine to monotheism.) The continued success of the program of unification of physical law—for example, in demonstrating how electricity and magnetism are aspects of a single phenomenon—tends to substantiate the monotheistic world view.

(2.) Specifically, Newtonian physics showed how the same laws governing the motion of the planets could be applied to mundane events on earth as well. At the time of Aristotle, for example, the planets were considered to be deities, part of a separate transcendent world from our own. The unification of the two worlds can be interpreted either as a "profanization" of heaven or as a divinization of the earth, though the former is the more obvious.

(3.) There is a considerable amount of material now available (though I haven't followed it) about the apparent extreme unlikelihood of physical laws and conditions which happen to take the form necessary to produce a cosmos capable of producing intelligent life such as ourselves. See e.g. Penrose's Emperor's New Mind. This seems to support the idea of a benevolent God.

(4.) The fact of evolution towards higher or more complex forms of life, as recorded in fossils (as opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection of purely randomly generated genetic variants), is stunning evidence in favour of the idea of progress in history over a very long time span. Progress is not just a naive nineteenth-century dogma resulting from temporary fortunate economic conditions. Belief in progress, or at any rate in a meaning in history, is, in turn, associated with the monotheistic religions.

(5.) Relativistic physics introduces the idea of spacetime, which can be regarded as representing the "eternal now" of the Divine view of the world, as conceived by Christian philosophy. (See my post on Boethius.)

(6.) Thermodynamics tells us that on the physical level there is an inherent tendency towards chaos which must be counteracted by some extraneous ordering force (or intelligence). This is not just an observation of physical laws of mysterious origin: it is self-evident if one considers the mathematics of probability in detail. There is no need to invoke a "malevolent" chaos-producing force. Extending this observation to the spiritual realm, one would not be puzzled by darkness, but rather amazed at the presence of light. It would be rather difficult, in light of such intellectual developments, to reintroduce Manichaean dualism; yet at one time this might have presented a serious challenge to monotheism.

(7.) The Buddha somewhere advises his followers to regard human bodies as bags of excrement. Did he actually believe this or was it just an exercise for turning their attention to more spiritual things? At any rate, in light of what we now know about the miraculous hidden ordered processes necessary to sustain the life of the body, the Buddha's attitude seems like . . . ignorant blasphemy. On the other hand, the western monotheistic religions have always regarded man as made in the Divine image (though not necessarily on the physical level); it should not be surprising to them that even the physical body of man is a miraculous object.

Dennis Prager addresses the Germans

"Dear Germany . . . . Nazism taught you nothing. Instead of learning that evil must be fought, you learned that fighting is evil."

—American author, columnist and talk show host Dennis Prager (2003), recently highlighted at the German blog Roncesvalles.