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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: foreign policy

Nuclear Weapons Are a Black Hole

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

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Tags

Albert Einstein, Cold War, Containment, Einstein's Monsters, foreign policy, Geopolitics, MAD, Martin Amis, Mutually Assured Destruction, Nuclear War, Nuclear Weapons, peace, War, Weaponry

Martin Amis

“What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves. Nuclear weapons can kill a human being a dozen times over in a dozen different ways; and, before death — like certain spiders, like the headlights of cars — they seem to paralyze.

Indeed they are remarkable artifacts. They derive their power from an equation: when a pound of uranium-235 is fissioned, the liberated mass within its 1,132,000,000,-000,000,000,000,000 atoms is multiplied by the speed of light squared — with the explosive force, that is to say, of 186,000 miles per second times 186,000 miles per second. Their size, their power, has no theoretical limit. They are biblical in their anger. They are clearly the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, and they are mass-produced, and inexpensive. In a way, their most extraordinary single characteristic is that they are manmade. They distort all life and subvert all freedoms. Somehow, they give us no choice. Not a soul on earth wants them, but here they all are.

And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun. Already it is falling apart from within.”

__________

Pulled from the introduction to Martin Amis’s collection of stories about the nuclear world Einstein’s Monsters.

Because Kingsley, Martin’s father, is in my opinion the funniest post-war writer, I have to include the following anecdote, which comes only a few pages later:

I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers… [he] regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given.

Anyone who has read my father’s work will have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I told him that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, “Ah. I suppose you’re … ‘against them,’ are you?” Epater les bien-pensants is his rule. (Once, having been informed by a friend of mine that an endangered breed of whales was being systematically turned into soap, he replied, “It sounds like quite a good way of using up whales.” Actually he likes whales, I think, but that’s not the point.) I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been to him since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, “Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.” He usually ends by saying something like, “Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could…” The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don’t know what to do about them.

We abandon the subject. Our sessions end amicably. We fall to admiring my one-year-old son. Perhaps he will know what to do about nuclear weapons. I, too, will have to die off. Perhaps he will know what to do about them. It will have to be very radical, because there is nothing more radical than a nuclear weapon and what it can do.

I apologize for the extended break — personal business. I promise to try to make it up in the next few weeks.

Read on:

  • Bernard Baruch, who still, over seventy years on, can claim to have created the sanest proposal for dealing with nukes, argues we need an international law with teeth
  • Also from Monsters: Is the world getting worse?
  • Hooman Majd on the difference between Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, and Persians

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Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

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Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, al-Qaeda, Bush Doctrine, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Harry Kreisler, Imperialism, Iraq, Iraq War, Lawrence Wright, Red Army, September 11th, Shia, Sunni, Taliban, USSR

ISIS

Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.

They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.

Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.

If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.

Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.

So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.

It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.

So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.

__________

Messrs. Wright and Kreisler, chatting about Wright’s fantastic chronicle of the origins of the war on terror The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Keep going:

  • The story of how Christopher Hitchens was almost killed in a lynch mob in Pakistan
  • In 1907, Joseph Conrad already realized the psychology of terrorists
  • From Wright’s book — inside the mind of Muhammad Atta

Lawrence Wright

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Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, War

≈ Comments Off on Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

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Anti-Semitism, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Pearl, Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, foreign policy, Islamic Jihad, Judaism, racism, Terrorism

Hitchens


“
Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college and was the chair of the Islamic Students Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected.

Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that their hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it.”

__________

The closing of Christopher Hitchens’s fantastic Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, given in March 2010.

Daniel Pearl, one of the first Americans killed at the hand of Islamic extremism in the post-9/11 era, was murdered 13 years ago this month. His death looks more and more like our most stark, literal harbinger of the kind of barbarism we now see everyday in the Middle East and around the world.

As a supplement to Hitch’s talk, I recommend reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?. In it, BHL argues convincingly that Pearl was murdered not only for his Jewish/American roots, but also because he had uncovered hidden connections between the Pakistani nuclear program and al-Qaeda.

Daniel Pearl

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What Happens When They Return?

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, War

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Tags

Cider with Rosie, Douglas Murray, foreign policy, George Monbiot, George Orwell, interview, Islam, Jihadism, Laurie Lee, politics, terror, Terrorism, War

Kurds2

Interviewer: I’m wondering about your take on the British-born Muslims leaving to wage Jihad abroad. Of course we should be concerned about what they’re going to do while they’re there, but how big of a concern is it for when they return?

Douglas Murray: Obviously it’s a real concern. I don’t think it’s being overhyped; to the contrary, I don’t think people realize how dangerous a thing this could be.

We’ve been quite lucky in recent years. I don’t say that lightly. A lot of people who’ve been involved in plots in this country have had the desire but not the capability. I’m thinking of the second set of attempted suicide bombings in July 2005, where the chemicals were mixed incorrectly so four additional bombs didn’t go off in the heart of London.

Or take, say, the Detroit airline bomber, Abdul Mutallab, who tried to ignite the device in his underwear which just ended up burning his genitals off. But you know, we were lucky that that didn’t go off, because if so we wouldn’t be laughing about the underwear bomber — we’d be mourning the thousands of people on the plane and on the ground in Detroit who were killed on Christmas Day.

So a lot of these people haven’t had the technical knowledge that the IRA did, say, at the end of their campaign in the 1980s.

But there is a real risk in Syria of jihadis going out and, aside from anything else, connecting with people who actually do have the technical know-how, who do have the expertise, and then coming back.

There are various reasons why it might not play out like that, though. For one, there is a large likelihood that nearly all of the people who go out will be killed. There are believable rumors that there are squads of executioners specifically roaming Syria and now Iraq in order to find foreign fighters and machine gun them immediately. Because they don’t want these foreign fighters and actually realize foreigners are part of the problem — that they come to do bloodthirsty things and boast about it then go home.

So a lot of these people won’t return, and I don’t shed a tear for any of them.

But I do think there’s a question which is worth pondering about why anyone would end up in that situation.

There’s some historical revisionism about it. There was an awful, lamentable George Monbiot column in The Guardian earlier this year, saying the jihadis that have gone out to Syria are no different from those who went out to fight Franco with international brigades in the 1930s. He even went on to say that British jihadis are the Laurie Lees and George Orwells of this generation.

But I’m fairly sure that after a few months of chopping off peoples’ heads and killing innocent Muslims in Syria and Iraq, these guys aren’t going to come back and write ‘Cider with Rosie.’ They won’t even write ‘Sparking Water with Rosie’s Dad.’

And I think that part of the problem is precisely saying that these jihadis are like that — getting history wrong and getting the present wrong — and giving them an additional boost.

__________

Douglas Murray riffing in an interview last summer (these comments can be found 22 minutes in).

Go on:

  • Murray reflects on why terrorism works
  • Murray laments the excuses we give terrorists
  • Clive James asks what good is culture in the face of terror?

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Martin Amis on Terror, Iraq, and His Father

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Martin Amis on Terror, Iraq, and His Father

Tags

ethics, Father, foreign policy, interview, Iraq, Iraq War, Islam, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, morality, Quran, Son, Taliban, terror, Terrorism, Terry Eagleton, War

Jon Snow: Look at the war on Iraq – do you not think that would stir an urge in the Arab world when they see women and children ravaged by what we Westerners are doing?

Martin Amis: I’ve said in print that by far the greatest danger of terrorism is not what it inflicts, but what it provokes; and the Iraq war has been a disaster. I was against it at the time, and I’m against it now. Blowing up a London nightclub on lady’s night [as an uncovered terrorist plot had planned] doesn’t seem to me to be a proportionate act in response to that.

The other night, I asked an audience to put up its hands if it felt morally superior to the Taliban. To the Taliban – who have two-day massacres, slash the throats of children, not only subtract women from society, but black up the windows of the houses they’re confined to. And only a third of the audience raised its hands.

Jon Snow: But do you feel morally superior to Islam?

Martin Amis: I feel morally superior to Islamism, yes. By some distance.

Jeremy Paxman: Islam itself?

Martin Amis: Well, I feel an intellectual distance from it.

Jon Snow: What do you say to the charge that you are your father’s son?

Martin Amis: Well, he’s now being lazily and cornily defamed by his critics when he’s not around to defend himself. You have an argument with your father all your life – and he’s been dead for twelve years, and I’m still having that argument.

I was on most things to the left of him. But critics are accusing him of impulses he never had – he was never homophobic; he had a difficult time in his relations with women, but was not misogynistic; was not, in any sense, anti-semitic, except in the odd impulse. And why do we not admit to these odd impulses?

Do we cleanse ourselves? Do we pretend that we’re homogenous and pure and clean? Do we want to live with that kind of illusion?

The anti-semites, the psychotic misogynists and homophobics are the Islamists.

__________

Martin Amis in an interview with Jon Snow in 2007.

Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca

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What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?

Tags

Arabia, army, conflict, Fighting, foreign policy, Interventionism, Lawrence of Arabia, middle east, peace, T. E. Lawrence, Twenty Seven Rules, War, warfare

T. E. Lawrence

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

__________

Rule #15 in T. E. Lawrence’s “Twenty Seven Rules” which summarized for the British army his approach to Arab warfare. It was published in 1917.

Credit to TheDish.

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Bernard Baruch: We Need an International Law with Teeth

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

9/11, A Choice between the Quick and the Dead, Bernard Baruch, Cold War, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Einstein's Monsters, Fear, foreign policy, India, international relations, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Muhammad Atta, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Nukes, Pakistan, Pashtun, peace, politics, Soviet Union, War

Bernard Baruch

“The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us…

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program not composed merely of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions — an international law with teeth in it…

Let this be anchored in our minds: Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration…

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.”

__________

From Bernard Baruch’s 1946 speech “A Choice between the Quick and the Dead”.

Though he would in the following year coin the term “Cold War”, Baruch concluded this speech with the ungrudging proposal that all nuclear weapons be placed — through a thirteen-step procedure — under some intergovernmental authority. You think that sounds idealistic? Yeah, me too. Or at least anachronistic, especially in a time when the international community flounders purposelessly, not only in its attempt to curb the annexation of Eastern Ukraine, but also in keeping track of a massive commercial airliner with 200 cell-phones on board. What would it possibly do with a couple thousand nuclear bombs?

Though the number of active nukes has shriveled to around 4,100 from a peak of 68,000 in 1985, Baruch’s point is a serious one, especially when our attention is drawn to the Korean Peninsula or the once-unified Pashtun region split between Pakistan and India. Neither of those two neighbors, nor the hermit kingdom of the Kim dynasty, is yet to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, even though they are armed with an estimated 200-plus total (though not all active) warheads.

As someone born in 1989, I’ve never felt the disquiet of a duck-and-cover drill. Nor did I spend geography week in Kindergarten as my mom did: ogling anxiously at the massive Soviet Union — a red Rorschach blot that provoked only ugly words. Fear. Danger. Enemy. Still, if we can form a post-9/11 position toward nuclear weapons, it must rest on the tension between the unfortunate fact and terrifying contingency which follow: The human animal’s technological progress is outpacing its moral progress; what happens when an apocalyptic ideology lays its hands on apocalypse-inducing weaponry? In other words: can there be any doubt that if Muhammad Atta had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it?

There are two additional paragraphs, supplied by Martin Amis in his suggestively titled Einstein’s Monsters (1987), which illuminate a critical generational difference in our attitudes towards the inevitability of living with nukes.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red and dead.”

Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon’s discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun.

Read on:

  • I describe how Baruch became the original “Wolf of Wall Street”
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck riff on the evils of militarism
  • Andrew Bacevich connects the concept of ‘original sin’ to the prospect of future war

Bernard Baruch

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How to Survive a Roadside Bomb: Sebastian Junger Escapes Death in Afghanistan

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Battle Company, combat, Fiction, foreign policy, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, Taliban, violence, War, warfare

Sebastian Junger

Later this week I’m going to type up a short review of Sebastian Junger’s remarkable book WAR. Before then, however, I want to introduce those of you unfamiliar with the text to a disturbing (and particularly telling) section of it.

In this scene, which happened midway into Junger’s 15-month stint in Afghanistan, the men of Battle Company have crammed into four Humvees and set off on a routine patrol of the sparsely inhabited surrounding countryside. The Taliban have recently added a new weapon to their arsenal, makeshift roadside bombs (usually consisting of pressure cookers filled with fertilizer and diesel), “because they were losing too many men in firefights” against the vastly superior American force. Through this twisted new tactic, “the enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck.”

And luck isn’t on the American’s side this day. As the Humvees cruise through a neighboring village, a bomb detonates under Junger’s vehicle. The explosion is triggered about a second too early, missing the main cabin by about ten feet and blasting up through the engine block. Junger is one of the only contemporary Western journalists to witness first-hand such a scene, which has now played out countless time over the course of the Allied occupation. Here is a slice of the ensuing half minute:

The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun… “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”… Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee…

There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.

Junger then yanks his reader from combat to the classroom, where he digresses on a vital but overlooked lesson any student of war should assimilate – namely, that combat is one of the most thrilling activities a human being can experience:

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged.

Junger elaborates:

War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

This thought is shaped by a closing sentence which could also function as the book’s thesis:

The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years…

Junger is still helplessly strapped into this high-low psychosomatic roller coaster as the men tow their wrecked Humvee back to outpost Restrepo that afternoon. In the still of the Afghan sundown, Junger eventually finds a quiet moment to reflect on the day’s events, and in the process offers a glimpse into how this singular experience of combat-at-full-throttle can disfigure a soldier’s understanding of war.

I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something that wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking.

Junger then returns to the immediate psychological experience of combat, only now it is his subconscious mind, not his front brain, that is processing the day’s traumas.

That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can’t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

Whether consciously or not, Junger tinges this paragraph with the unfortunate residuals of warfare, including survivor’s guilt, isolation from family, and dreams charred with post-traumatic terror. That final coda is perhaps the most lacerating moment of the text: a simultaneous recognition of evil and a resignation to its eventual triumph. Junger is too restrained a writer to paint this conclusion in too bold of strokes, but nevertheless it is latent in the text for some if not most readers. This subtlety is the true achievement of the text, as Junger manages to forge a clear-eyed and wholly human narrative out of a conflict that has been so politicized and depersonalized over the past decade.

Restrepo

__________

As I said, be on the lookout for a short review of WAR in the coming week.

Both of the above photos were taken at outpost Restrepo by one of the my heroes, the late photographer Tim Hetherington.

Read on:

  • Vietnam veteran, Catholic, and scholar Andrew Bacevich reflects on war and original sin
  • Sebastian Junger describes how combat changed him for the better
  • I relate how the professional structure of our military is partially to blame for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

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There’s Always a Reason to Invade: Joseph Schumpeter on Roman Imperialism

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

army, Conquest, foreign policy, Goths, Heinz Norden, Imperialism, Imperialism and Social Classes, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus, Militarism, Military, politics, Roman Empire, Romans, War

Grande Ludovisi Sarcophagus

“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted.

The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people…

Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.

It was certainly not the Italian peasant…

True, it was this class that gave rise to the caste of professional soldiers who remained in the military service beyond the minimum term of enlistment. But in the first place, the rise of that estate was only a consequence of the policy of war, and, in the second place, even these people had no real interest in war. They were not impelled by savage pugnacity, but by hope for a secure old age, preferably the allotment of a small farm… As for war booty, the emperor used it to pay his debts or to stage circuses at Rome. The soldiers never saw much of it.”

__________

From Imperialism and Social Classes by Joseph Schumpeter (Heinz Norden trans.)

Further reading along these lines:

  • How Emperor Tiberius responded to the mindless senate of his day
  • Louis Brandeis explains why “a government’s contempt for law is contagious”
  • How Greeks self-medicated (through booze) to cope with imperialist fatigue

The top photo is of the Ludovisi Battle sarcophagus, an ancient Roman sarcophagus discovered near the Porta Tiburtina in Rome’s Aurelian walls. It dates to about 250 CE and depicts a battle scene between the Romans and Goths.

Joseph Schumpeter

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Gore Vidal’s Hilarious, Prophetic Rebuttal to Bush’s Second Inaugural

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics, War

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan war, American History, Amy Goodman, Athens, Babylon, democracy, Democracy Now, DemocracyNow, Dick Cheney, Dreaming War: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, foreign policy, founding fathers, George W. Bush, George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Address, George Washington, Gore Vidal, Imperialism, Iraq War, James Madison, John Quincey Adams, Occupation, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Sparta, The Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny, War

Gore Vidal

President George W. Bush, speaking at his second inauguration: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited; but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause…”

Interviewer: Gore Vidal, your response to these words?

Gore Vidal: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There’s not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be free,” et cetera, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” and in the process “She would lose her soul.” That is the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe.

He doesn’t define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them. That’s the reaction in Europe — and I know we mustn’t mention them because they’re immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese — but, simultaneously, they’re much better educated than we are, and they’re richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won’t be any money left of any kind…

And none of this we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion: two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that…

President George W. Bush

__________

A selection from Gore Vidal’s critiques of President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, which were recorded this week in 2005.

I’ve uploaded a recording of the rest of Vidal’s brilliant, biting response below. It’s relevant and worth a watch even today.

As we now watch President Obama deliver this year’s State of the Union, almost 9 long years to the day since Bush uttered those words, it’s worth reflecting on how little has changed.

The War in Afghanistan, with it’s unprecedented 82% disapproval rate, is almost as unpopular as the Congress which kind of, sort of, almost authorized it. Still, we’re spending about $400 million there each day. Meanwhile, as I walk a block from my downtown apartment in America’s beautiful capital city, I see schools moldering and potholes flecking every street. (That 400,000,000, by the way, does not include the additional $130 million which we are daily funneling into Iraq, nor does it account for the $5.5 to $8.4 billion which we will spend annually to care for our veterans from both wars over the next three, four, five decades.)

Our Constitutional liberties remain largely ignored (much less restored) by a burgeoning surveillance state which, a decade later, is yet to make a single arrest that has prevented a terrorist attack. There are now over a million names on our terrorist watch list: a hay stack that, as it distends, obscures the few needles hiding inside it. Correspondingly, a million people now hold “top secret clearance” to access classified government information — a label fit for the gruesome world of Winston Smith and farcical enough for Peter Sellers or the President of Faber College. It took one in a million — Mr. Edward Snowden — to finally reveal what this unelected, unmonitored, and undomesticated appendage of the federal government was doing with our money and to us and our allies (in Brazil, in Germany, in South Korea), but he, like other whistle-blowers under this administration, was hardly honored for that act of conscience. While his stand has produced some valuable backlash against these security developments, the direction of their momentum remains unchanged; as the surveillance state becomes more opaque to us, we become more transparent to it.

Of course tonight’s pageantry is amounting to little more than a string of platitudes, but nevertheless, it is worth hoping that the coming days will reflect a glimmer of the promise that we are turning away from the imperial and the tyrannical, and turning towards Constitutionality at home and diplomacy abroad.

President Barack Obama

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‘She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy’: John Quincy Adams on U.S. Isolationism

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Speeches

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

American Government, American History, American Presidents, army, Congress, foreign policy, Greek Revolution, Imperialism, Intervention, Isolationism, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Military, Monroe Doctrine, Ottoman Empire, Presidency, War

John Quincey Adams

In the summer of 1821, Greek Revolutionaries rose up to fight for their independence from the Ottoman Empire, and petitioned the United States to join in their struggle. John Quincy Adams, who was then Secretary of State, presented the following response to the U.S. Congress, outlining why America would not intervene.

“Let our answer be this — America… in the assembly of nations, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has… without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: but she would be no longer the ruler of her own soul…

Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

Ottoman Empire

__________

From John Quincy Adams’s address to Congress, delivered on July 4th, 1821. (You can find a lengthy, illuminating discussion of this address in Fred Kaplan’s biography John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.)

As Secretary of State from 1817 to 1824, John Quincy Adams became one of America’s finest diplomats in what was a crucial, formative era in the young nation’s history. Serving in the cabinet of James Monroe, Adams was the chief architect of the famous Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States would resist any European attempts to colonize the Americas, while also remaining unaligned and uninvolved in the internal affairs of European states and colonies.

In 1821, this doctrine was put to the test, as the Greek Revolution erupted along the northeastern corner of the Ottoman Empire. With European powers rushing to the side of the Greeks in their struggle against Turkish occupation, the revolutionaries petitioned the United States for assistance.

Adams looked with sympathy upon the Greek fight for independence. He viewed it as one battle in a larger struggle between Islam and the West, and along with President Monroe, held deep misgivings about the Ottoman Empire, especially in the wake of the Barbary Wars. Yet Adams refused to commit the United States to the struggle for Greece (which would last until 1832, three years after Adams himself would retire from the White House.)

In July 4th, 1821, Secretary Adams delivered a speech to Congress in which he answered the Greek revolutionaries’ request for aid and outlined the broader American approach to foreign policy. His words above are, in addition to very eloquent, a fine summary of the moral and economic merits of non-interventionism.

“We should go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That’d look nice on a bumper sticker in ’16, don’t you think?

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