VICTIMIZATON AS CASUS BELLI


An article in a recent issue of ‘The Nation’ reveals more than perhaps it intends to.

Writer Ann Jones observes – with some respect for complexity – that if the US pulls out of Afghanistan it will be ‘abandoning’ Afghan women.

This puts “us and Afghan women in a double bind”, she admits.

The Taliban will come back into power and that won’t serve the cause of Afghan women. True enough.

Nor does she hold much hope for Hillary Clinton’s “assurance that a ‘reconciled’ Taliban will agree to observe women’s rights under the Constitution”, which Jones sees as “either cynical or naïve in the extreme”.

I presume she refers to the U.S. Constitution; I can’t imagine that the U.S. has genuinely succeeded – or ever could succeed – in imposing a U.S.-style constitution on the Afghanis.

And this is not because in the eyes of contemporary American feminism the Afghan culture is ‘patriarchal’, ‘oppressive’ and so forth. Rather, it’s because I don’t think it’s wise or prudent U.S. policy to try to impose itself on any other people.

Especially at the point of a bayonet (or automatic weapon or drone or what-have-you). Napoleon famously observed that folks don’t appreciate the ministrations of “armed missionaries”.

And since those purported ‘Constitutional rights’ are to no small extent still not fully accepted over here, then I can’t see how it makes sense to use the military to impose them elsewhere.

Especially with a nation that is known – and has been since long before American feminism gained traction through the vote-addled support of the Beltway – to most stubbornly and effectively want to be left on its own, unmolested (as it were) by the dampdreams or ‘progress’ of other cultures. If this was true of the Brits – who in the 19th century were simply trying to use the Afghanis as pawns in their Great Power maneuverings against the Russia of the Czars – it will most certainly prove to be true about the Americans, who – under the aegis (and cover) of some form of Victimology and liberation-from-victimhood – have been trying to drag the Afghanis into some U.S.-friendly (and U.S.-shaped) broad sunlit upland of ‘progress’.

Let’s face it: American feminism as it has evolved as a political agenda and in its most essential philosophical justifications and objectives constitutes a profound assault upon society and culture (which, being presumed ‘patriarchal’ and ‘oppressive’, must be Deconstructed and Re-constructed root-and-branch forthwith).

This is not the ‘spin’ that has been put upon it here, and indeed to even suggest it is to prove oneself a ‘victimizer’ and ‘re-victimizer’ and ‘backlasher’ in the scripts that govern mainstream American elite discourse.

But the Afghans can be forgiven for not being as susceptible to American elite discourse and agitprop as the American elites themselves.

Not that they care a whit whether American elites forgive them or not.

Would any nation want to accept so profound and fundamental assault not only on its perceived short-comings but – given the deep and broad scope of such a cultural and societal re-structuring – on the most visceral and vital organs of its entire worldview and its lifeways and folkways?

Wouldn’t any nation – if it were able to retain its independence of thought and action – exert itself vigorously to repel such an assault, no matter how comprehensively spun as ‘progress’ and ‘liberation’?

Indeed, given this reality, haven’t We now set up a situation where – in attempting to drape Our military and geo-strategic objectives in the sheeps-clothing of feministical liberation – the Afghans see Us as far more of a grave threat to their national existence than the Taliban?

And if so, then Our adventure over there will not – cannot – end well.

Let me say here that my primary objection to the current mutation of American feminism is not first with its Vision (although Deconstruction, especially of such vital social organs as Marriage and Family and a robust, genuine, well-Grounded Maturity, is a lethal virus indeed). Had the Citizenry been given a chance to deliberate, some of that Vision would have been adopted here, although only after being run through the filtration of broad public debate and consensus-building to filter out the more lethal elements.

But – again, with the Beltway’s pandering help – the entire filtration process was side-stepped and instead the radical-feminist agenda was stove-piped right into the nation’s vital systems and organs.

This was not merely due to the impatience of Youth or the committed cadres of Revolution.

It was due to the gimlet-eyed awareness on the part of the vanguard-elites that their Vision precisely required so massive and fundamental assault on the ethos of American culture and society that no Citizenry in its right mind would have accommodated it whole-hog.

The entire ‘democratic’ process HAD TO BE side-stepped, and through Beltway stove-piping it was.

Now, since the citizens of a far-distant nation are not legally under the aegis of the Beltway’s authority and its hyper-excited illuminations, the effort will be made to put them under the aegis of military invasion and occupation.

I can’t imagine that the Afghanis don’t see this. Only Americans, it seems, don’t see it – but of course, the ‘beam in one’s own eye’ is one of the great and classic strategic traps, as even Scripture saith.

Nor is it legitimate to insist that with a little ‘democracy’ imposed upon their polity the Afghans can surely make their own changes. They very well may not.

And to claim that the Identity of ‘women’ overrides national Identity and the sovereign authority allowed to nations and peoples, is to undermine the Westphalian international system that has managed to hold the modern world together for 350 years or so. And while that system has not been perfect – may indeed be riddled with limitations – yet, as Churchill said of ‘democracy’, it is still “the worst of systems – with the exception of all the rest”.

Humanitarian invasion to right perceived wrongs or – worse – preventive invasion to prevent perceived wrongs – is not ‘progress’; it introduces a hugely regressive wild-card back into the deck of international affairs (which is a chancy game as it is). No government – and few human beings – can be trusted to wield justly and effectively so huge and freighted an authority as the authority to preventively invade and occupy and Deconstruct and Re-construct whomever they think is not performing up to expectations.

Yes, the Federal government did it to the Jim Crow South, for the (originally) limited objective of abolishing that system’s clear violations of long-recognized and accepted Constitutional rights.

But even within its own nation, on its own turf, the Federal government was seduced into expanding its objectives virulently, to the point where it has made a lethal hash of some of this nation’s and this polity’s most vital and quintessential supporting structures.

And I can’t imagine that the Afghans (or any other nation) haven’t seen that; the mess is, so to speak, visible from space, for heaven’s sake.

I had Posted a while ago on the effort to get the International Violence Against Women Act passed, which would essentially turn the entire planet into a herd of ‘potential’ abusers and sex-offenders and rapists and ‘oppressors’, and bring them under the ‘legal authority’ of the enlightened Beltway elites and their pandering pols.

Although that Act has not – to the best of my knowledge – made it into law, its essential dynamics are being shrewdly deployed in Afghanistan and against the Afghan culture.

I can’t help but notice the hell-hot irony: just as the Beltway attempts to further justify its military presence over there by claiming to be liberating some feminist conception of ‘victims’, just so does it incite genuinely patriotic resistance by locals (the Afghans) who don’t relish the Deconstruction of their entire ethos.

They know – as We have not allowed Ourselves to know – just how surely Deconstruction rides in the train of Our current ‘humanitarian’ interventions.*

Nor, in another hell-hot irony, will there be success through the effort – perhaps to kill several unpleasant birds with one stone – to use American females (military or contractor) to fan out and soft-sell the whole thing to the local villagers. The elders won’t pay much attention, and if the Western females try to ‘organize’ the village females instead … well, I don’t see things progressing well from that point on. And you are well-advised to put as little trust in happy-face reporting of ‘success stories’ in this regard as you might put into official military media’s happy-face, can-do BurbleSpeak about how We are advancing boldly on all fronts, where no man/person has gone before.

This is the real-world, not Star-Trek, even that oh-so-transgressively-Correct ‘Next Generation’ that cruised through the early 1990s in the equivalent of a flying Marriott concierge-level suite.

But those were the salad-days of the American feministical movement as its radical elements managed to spin its moderate elements as gender-traitors and spin themselves as the One True Feminism.

A lot of good that’s done Us.

And the Afghanis know it.

NOTES

*I wonder if someone isn’t going to come up with a Four Horsewomen of the American Apocalypse sort of image: Deconstruction, Re-construction, Identity Politics, and (fill in the fourth blank as you see fit).

AMERICAN DEFICITS THEN AND NOW

Over on the Counterpunch site the insightful military commentator Andrew Bacevich conducts a useful bit of history. In light of Obama’s suggestion (see the immediately preceding Post) in his Commencement Address in Ann Arbor, this is all to the good.

Bacevich’s first point it to observe that the greatest and most dangerous American deficit is in self-awareness. He’s in good company here: the ancient Greeks were strong proponents of it in their best moments: Know Thyself.

In fact, they had worked out a rather comprehensive view of things. Socrates put it well: “Wars, factions, and fighting, have no other origin than this same body and its lusts. ... We must set the soul free from it; we must behold things as they are. And having thus got rid of the foolishness of the body, we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and shall in our own selves have complete knowledge of the Incorruptible which is, I take it, no other than the very truth.”

Human beings, as individuals, must free themselves from false or illusory awareness, which they so often incorrectly deem ‘knowledge’. Rather they must always try to see the world as it is and things as they are.

But to do that humans must see themselves as they really are. Each individual human must accept this urgent and profound task. (Which is something all Citizens should do as well.)

Nor is this simply a matter of training the mind; it is a matter of disciplining the soul. (Which gets you into the whole territory of what Christians came to see as Original Sinfulness – the seemingly universal tendency of humans to deny their own best Ideals and their own best potentials.)

Plato came up with the allegory of the Cave. There are those who are seated in the Cave, facing the back wall; they have been chained there all their lives. A fire is burning behind them and on the back wall of the Cave, which is actually on the wall in front of them, they see shadows of persons and things passing between their backs and the fire itself. There are thus projected on the back wall of the cave the gauzy shadow-shapes cast by the movements in front of the fire.

The chained come to mistake these half-phantasmic forms as ‘real’, being the only type of thing they have ever seen.

One person (nicely called by Plato ‘the philosopher’) manages to get out of his chains and walks toward the fire, thereby coming quickly to realize that what ‘everybody’ has been calling ‘reality’ is nothing but ephemeral shapes; and he sees the real moving persons who have cast those shapes in the first place. Human beings, perhaps carrying objects like stones or blocks of wood or statues … to the chained they all are of equal ‘weight’ and ‘reality’.

The philosopher quickly comes to see that there are humans and there are stones and assorted objects, and even statues that are cast in the human form (or fantastic animal forms) but are not alive (though they are ‘real’ in their own way).

And then imagine that the philosopher is brought outside the Cave into the full light of day and the real world in its fullness.

And then imagine that, in a fit of compassion and the eagerness to share his new knowledge he goes back to his still-chained compatriots and tells them all he has seen … and they try to kill him. It is, after all, easier to kill the messenger than to try to adapt yourself to a new reality (or reality instead of phantasmagoria) after you’ve spent your life getting used to the phantasms. Such is Our species – at the lower end of its range.

Such are the trials of the philosopher – of any human who tries to penetrate more deeply and fully into the truth and reality of self and world.

Bacevich sees America as being historically (if not also congenitally) unable to sustain awareness of human knowledge’s limits and incompleteness, and thus Americans lack the humility, prudence and caution that accompany such a clear sense of limitation.

Which can result in imprudence, overconfidence, haste, impatience, in addition to all the mistakes and bad consequences that flow from whatever actions are taken in such a state of illusion.

And once you’ve started racking up a history of such mistakes, it’s also easier to forget them than to fix yourself, let alone face the frak you’ve caused.

You can accomplish that by the low road: distracting yourself and dulling your senses to the wrack and ruin, turning yourself into – for all practical purposes – what used to be called a ‘moral idiot’ and is now called a ‘sociopath’(although that clinical term leaves out the moral bit – which is unreal, I would say).

Or you can take the high road and believe that what you’ve done was God’s will and so it simply can’t ultimately be a frakkulous mistake. Woodrow Wilson, in 1919, having successfully maneuvered his country into war in order to prove his own greatness and to force the country to grow into its own Noble Destiny (as he saw it), confided that “If I didn’t think I was doing God’s will I’d go mad”. Which is what happens when ‘great things’ and ‘noble secrets’ result in wrack, ruin, and the queasy awareness that the Golden Goal (such as ‘an end to war and militarism’) is still not within reach.

The most recent episode of Showtime’s “The Tudors” rather remarkably has the Duke of Sussex returning to a castle accompanying Henry VIII on a royal visit, only to be confronted in his bedchamber by the ghost of the castle’s previous owner, a nobleman who led a popular resistance against Henry’s suppression of the Church; Suffolk, in order not to lose the love of his King, had led the royal forces and mercilessly put down the resistance, killing men, women and children to make an example and betraying his word to this now-deceased but hardly ‘dead’ gentleman who sits before him. America has learned only to laugh at ghosts in movies; there’s sooo much more to it than that. We have lost communion with the ‘dead’, and especially with those whose death came about on Our authority.

With the Marines back in Marja, in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, Bacevich reminds Us that We have already been there, in the days of Ike: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had decided that a massive agricultural reform project would be just the thing to domesticate ‘the natives’ and convince them to set down roots. It was working in thousands of American Suburbias, so why not everywhere else?

(Although, as We know now – and were informed in 1963 courtesy of Betty Friedan – each of those Suburbias was a Dachau for women and – courtesy of Alice Miller in 1981 – an Auschwitz for children. You’d think that after such revelations Americans of Left or Right persuasions would want to re-think their too-optimistic assumptions about their latest conceptual fads, but … let it never be said that Americans since 1945 can be legitimately accused of thinking-too-much.)

Not that anybody was trying to ‘liberate’ anybody. It was just that the Pashtuns of Helmand had been reading the papers and traced a line of US blurbing for ‘self determination’ stretching back to 1919 (not so very long ago as memory goes in that part of the world) and throughout the excitements of 1939-1945.

But neither the Afghans nor the Pakistanis – the favored US players on that part of the Board – wanted to see an independent Pashtun state. So the US conceived the idea of distracting the natives with tractors and Tupperware.

Well, tractors and Tupperware and a huge dam – but the Americans didn’t quite do their homework on the local hydrology. And toss in the 15 acres, 2 oxen, and a lifetime supply of free seeds – but the Americans didn’t quite do their homework on the local ancient and deeply rooted culture.

Needless to say, when the Soviets arrived in Afghanistan in 1979 they could still see the skeletal steel and concrete remains of their American predecessors’ failed efforts at politely distracting the natives.

Even though there exists a 1973 US study of the whole misadventure there, citing a “plague” of “cross-cultural misunderstanding and technical miscalculations”, Bacevich figures that the current American foray – something along the lines of ‘armed missionaries’ masquerading as ‘armed social workers’ – isn’t going to do things any better.

Although, come to think of it, the squeaky and decaying pump of the ‘Washington Post’ was conveniently primed with the waterous wisdom that this time the Americans would get the dam and agriculture stuff right. And maybe this whole new kind of ‘war’ too. Gee, that’s swell!

Bacevich acutely lists the core problems – not just the ‘technical challenges’ that no doubt will be reported as ‘largely solved’ in this generation’s version of the Five O’Clock Follies, but rather the profound assumptions as to what ‘reality’ is over there.

Dr. Socrates to Cave One stat! Paging Dr. Socrates!

In a soberingly low-key delivery, Bacevich ticks off the lethal American mis-assumptions:

“a) that the Pashtun way of life is defective; b) that the Pashtuns know this and yearn for something better; c) that United States officials understand where the problems lie and by mobilizing American resources and skill can repair them; d) that in doing so, the United States will both improve the lives of ordinary people and enhance America’s standing in their eyes and in the eyes of many others.”

One is reminded of the fact that Titanic was already doomed in her design stage by the use of hand-driven iron (rather than steel) rivets in vital areas of the hull; by the reduction in height of her watertight bulkheads (to make room for grander staircases); and by the reduction in the number of lifeboats (to make for grander views from the – you’d think aptly called – boat deck).

But of course, if the ship is unsinkable to begin with, then you don’t have to pay attention to the sinkage stuff, do you? Good frakking grief. It’s amazing the Brits built her before We did.

We have yet to see how the countries of the world are going to take this latest form of colonialism: call it the Humanitarian Grandiose variant of the colonialist enterprise.

Bacevich nicely hits the nail on the head. The Beltway Bear is utterly certain of its possession of the One, True and Right Ordering of Things: “secularized modernity”, consisting of a free-market economy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, quality education, and – but of course – ‘gender equality’ (a code term whose precise practical contents and consequences are still not fully known). Toss in, he adds, birth control to keep the birth-rate down.

Looking at his analysis, I am beginning to see a verrrry historical pattern: We are heading into a series of colonial and resource wars (the oil and cash are running out and the industrial capacity is already out-sourced) that the ‘elites’ of both Left and Right can love.

A nation sitting on top of desirable resources – even if it’s just a desirable location (location, location) – needn’t be formally occupied for the sake of ‘oil’. Nor need it have an odious ‘regime’ as did the Iraqis.

It need only be some version of non-secular patriarchal oppression (which, as the feministicals assure Us, includes most of the rest of the world). Such blasphemous (as it were) oppression would immediately justify a mission civilisatrice for the purpose of ‘liberating’ all the oppressed and spreading the enlightenment that only postmodern American culture can bring. The Great Board is back in play, but now for a ‘good’ purpose. Yah.

This was precisely McKinley’s scam when he forced a war on decrepit Spain in order to grab the Philippines (so close to the Open Door of a decrepit China just waiting to be turned into a ‘market’): he would civilize the benighted natives, bring them culture, and stay around and in charge for as long as it took to see the job completed.

Of course, in McKinley’s day America had other things to do than engage in extended foreign wars, and the resultant Filipino (pick one: revolt, insurrection, insurgency, resistance, patriotic war against the invader, terrorism) that lasted four bloody and vicious years was unsought (though in preparing that generation of Americans for their role as world-class ‘players’ it had its uses).

Nowadays, however, a far different and much-diminished America has nothing better to do. So ‘humanitarian liberation’ in the form of spreading that Correct culture that the Beltway’s mission civilisatrice against its own People (namely Us) has achieved (the Beltway would like to think) will now be a secular blessing that will be shared with (read: imposed upon) the cultures of any under-developed country that can’t defend itself and hasn’t got anybody else to stand up for it (like Serbia in 1914, that had the Russia of Nicholas II behind it and thus lustily led the way into World War 1).

But of course, the natives nowadays are no fools (if indeed they ever were). They know that to accept the American ‘partnering’ or ‘liberation’ is now going to mean the deliberate and sustained deconstruction of their culture (and I am not suggesting here that all other cultures are ‘good’ and ‘nice’ or couldn’t use some work).

So they will fight.

And so We will have a fight – many of them, most likely. And they will go on.

Which is pretty much a fine working example of the ‘self-licking ice cream cone’.

But those fights will be furious and bitter. Not because the ‘natives’ are fuddy-duddy ‘backlashers’ but because they know freakish danger when they see it and they will fight for their beliefs and their folkways. Because they know, as the frakkulously imbecile cadres of the Revolutions of the Identities over here did not know and have never learned, a culture is a living thing, and things are connected to each other like the intricate weavings of, say, a finely-woven rug. And if you pull out one thread, or a whole bunch, the thing is soon going to come apart in the winds of Time and Events.

And most ‘natives’ aren’t going to sit still for that.

And We are no longer the Masters of the Universe. Not in the goofy, gap-toothed version embodied in American boys encountering the Cargo Cult natives of the South Seas in World War 2, and not in the gimlet-eyed, lock-and-load, embrace-the-suck sand-troopers of Our current misadventures. (And upon them all be peace.)

We are becoming truly decadent.

Cut loose (officially and among the now-entrenched ‘elites’ anyway) from any Beyond except the American Shinto of the idolatrous, nation-worshipping Fundamentalists, We are now like a Ferris Wheel that is no longer restrained by its struts, drunkenly careening through the Fairgrounds, carrying its passengers (namely Us) with it as it rolls over persons and properties, until at some point it will crash into something big enough to stop it, or it will lose enough momentum so that its own weight will pull it over, carrying its passengers (namely Us) with it.

I’m not sure that in a situation like this ‘optimism’ is the most constructive – or the most mature – approach.

In looking at the Beltway nowadays, I am reminded of the story of the scorpion and the lion. Both need to get across a large and strong river. The scorpion can’t swim and asks the lion for a lift. The lion demurs: your kind bite and you’ll kill me in the middle of the river. To which the scorpion replies: If I did that we’d both drown, and that wouldn’t be very rational, would it? The lion sees the rationality in that and takes the scorpion on his back. In the middle of the stream, the scorpion bites the lion. As he feels his strength ebbing away, the lion says to the scorpion: You’ve killed me and now we’re both going to drown – why did you do it? To which the scorpion replies: Because I’m a scorpion and biting is what I do.

Are We now become a scorpion, with only one thing left that We can do: go out and bethump other peoples for whatever ‘good’ cause happens to come to mind? And grab their stuff? While claiming an authority of a God whom Our elites claim doesn't exist to deconstruct their culture in the name of some 'good' that We are somehow authorized to impose anywhere We can land enough troops?

It didn’t have to be this way. We were set up to be a MODEL of democracy, not its AGENT. We weren’t going to be going abroad all over the planet “in search of monsters to destroy”.

But as America’s place in the world became more torturously complex, its People precisely became less able to govern their government.

And if in the 1890s and in 1916 that war-making was accomplished by Jingoist ‘real’ men and Wilsonian ‘noble’ men, now it’s being done by the cadres of Universal Correctness allied to the neocon Jingoist ‘wannabes’ and the Fundamentalist ‘deputies of God’.

This, really, begins to resemble the freak-show of Medieval ‘politics’ and wars.

It’s time for the shareholders to ask if indeed the clowns haven’t taken over the circus and to decide if itsn't indeed time to step up and step in. This government very much needs to be governed.

I don’t see any other way to save what remains to be saved.

CAT’S PAW

I had been talking about the ‘migration of concepts’ in recent Posts: that a concept or idea or technique from one area of activity could be picked up and applied in a completely different area of activity, with more or less (or much less) applicability or with entirely different results and – a word that We should start carving in stone – consequences.

In a recent article, the military writer William S. Lind discusses an axiom of military affairs: the illegitimacy of power. This is a concept, he notes, noted by another significant modern military affairs thinker, Martin van Creveld, who calls it “the power of weakness”.

Both thinkers discuss this concept in its relation to Fourth Generation War (4GW): the type of asymmetric conflict where large conventional armies, deploying great quantities of advanced military force in all its manifestations, are opposed by small, dedicated groups – not ‘military forces’ as such. This is the type of military challenge We face in Iraq and Afghanistan now (and which the Israeli military faces in Gaza, not irrelevantly).

He observes, rightly, that “in a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm”. The overwhelming power of advanced military force is perceived to be ‘illegitimate’ and that perception then assigns ‘legitimacy’ to those ‘unorganized’ and ‘non-military’ forces that arise to oppose it. This happened in France under the German occupation, where the Resistance had the triple advantage of first, opposing a national invader and occupier, that was (second) cruel and oppressive, and thirdly, assumed the proportions of a Goliath in relation to the Resistance agents who arose to combat the occupiers. The population, even if not adventurous enough to actively participate in ‘resistance’ held the resisters in relatively high-esteem.

This created a significant problem for the German occupation forces, one that only got worse as time went on. Indeed, every ‘success’ they achieved against the Resistance served, perversely, to increase the people’s esteem for the Resistance (and it also increased the Resistance’s dedication and intensified their activity).

This principle also worked wonders in Mao’s struggle against the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai Shek (or however it’s spelled nowadays). Even though the Nationalists were also Chinese, they were seen by the people as allies of foreign meddling as well as representatives, somehow, of an old, imperial order.

Whenever resisters stand up against an overwhelming military power, they become ‘heroes’ in the eyes of the majority of the people. There’s something almost primal, certainly fundamental, in this: a human respect for the plucky underdog. It is “the power of weakness”. There is no advanced technology or amount of boots-on-the-ground that can beat it; the more advanced and powerful the aggressive occupier, the higher the burnish of the stalwart resister.

Certainly, the Israelis got along for decades passing themselves off as just such plucky (and righteous) underdogs, defending themselves against the Goliath of the assorted Arab national forces around them. It hasn’t worked so well of late, and the Israelis have found themselves starting to lose that ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the world’s peoples and governments (with one well-remunerated exception being the officialdom and elites residing in the Beltway neighborhood of Washington City).

When this dynamic takes hold, the occupier determined to remain becomes mired in a downward spiral that cannot be broken. For the occupier, things will not turn out well. For the resister, secure in the inevitability of this military and strategic principle (as well as in the rightness of the Resistance cause), need only keep on keeping on.

In terms of ‘migration of the concept’, it occurs to me that this principle (not ‘new’, although newly empowered) had been adopted by the government here in domestic affairs.

And the manner of it is on this wise.

After the stunning newsreel footage of Southern police beating up on Civil Rights demonstrators in the mid-‘50s to mid-‘60s, the country largely shifted its attitude to police authority. The World War Two generations, used to a certain amount of regimentation and recognizing their own peers among the returned vets who joined police forces, generally accepted and trusted the use of police power. But for them, and for their Boomer children, watching that footage shifted attitudes.

Granted, when the Southern Civil Rights movement entered its ‘second’ phase, the revolution-minded agitations that arose in the non-Southern cities, a significant fraction of the populace became more concerned for law-and-order against urban crimes feeding synergistically off of the agitation-spirit. But the overall sympathy of the public shifted away from the ‘police’, and the police power; it had become ‘delegitimized’.

This explains, I believe, what happened next – over the course of a decade or two. The government became frustrated and perhaps alarmed by the popular predisposition to see any persons caught up in the criminal justice system as ‘victims’, if not also as ‘good’, or even ‘heroes’. The aura of ‘liberal’ concern for the individual, clearly and rightly deployed in the service of protecting the Civil Rights marchers in that watershed Southern phase, now had extended to ‘cover’ all manner of other activity, even as the Civil Rights activity shifted in the mid-‘60s from the South to the urbanized cultures of the cities.

But ‘liberal’ policy – under the Democrats – also then extended to ‘women’, especially as ‘women’ were defined in the ‘vision’ of gender-feminism: helpless victims of an abiding, primitive, inbred ‘male’ aggressiveness and violence. In this vision, the police and the police power of the government were cast as ‘good’, riding in like the cavalry to rescue the settlers in their wagon-trains and homesteads. (Although, in yet more complication, this image would never have been used, since it was – under the aegis of multicultural ‘respect’ – insensitive and, marvelously, itself too ‘John Wayne’ and too ‘masculine’.)

The fire of a genuine conservative concern for law-and-order and the fire of a gender-feminist near-hysteria for ‘protection’ and ‘vengeance’ and ‘justice’ began to burn toward each other in the national forest.

The fires linked up in the later-1980s in ‘victimism’: the assumption that the police power of the government (and I say this with all respect for hard-working individual police officers) was the ‘good’ and that those persons caught in the toils of the police-power were the ‘bad’. Now it was ‘decent’ folks against ‘criminals’. Although again, since the gender-feminists sought to delegitimize ‘decency’ as an instrument of social stasis and ‘oppression’, the actual term ‘decent’ was rarely used; ‘victims’ were simply that, and their status seemed to exist independent of any characterizing descriptors or any other dynamics. A victim was a victim, thus good and the ‘victimizer’ evil, and that was all that needed to be said.

Let the games begin.

All of this exploded into a firestorm as the Democrats took the White House in the very early 1990s. Almost immediately there was an explosion of laws, changes to long-standing legal principles, and entire new categories of ‘offenders’. Within short order there were divorce-law changes and special courts, ‘domestic violence’ laws and registries, quickly followed by ‘sex offenders’ and the still-burgeoning laws and registries.

Government police-power began to expand, with elite support and an initially high level of popular acceptance; it expanded to levels not seen in a modern democracy. The civil-liberties and jurisprudential consequences of such hastily-enacted initiatives were unremarked and – in the popular media – mostly ignored, though the professional literature was rife with alarms and deep concerns.

With its whole-hog embrace of ‘the victim’, the government police-power had found a way to ‘legitimize’ itself. Although it had expanded hugely and ominously, that power gained ‘legitimacy’ by its almost total ‘dedication’ to helping the ‘little guy’ (although that ‘guy’ was now almost always a female).

With both Democrats and Republicans ‘on board’, the entire process swept the country, its institutions, its laws, its ethos.

And when the Soviet Union collapsed, also in those early 1990s, it did not take long for this concept to ‘migrate’ from domestic to foreign affairs. Foreign policy, especially as defined by the larger and more developed nations, began to speak of a ‘humanitarian responsibility’ to over-ride other nations’ national sovereignty in the interests of bringing ‘justice’ and ‘reform’ to backward, 'oppressed', 'victimized peoples.

This was, clearly, an utter reversal of the Wilsonian principle of ‘national self-determination’; if a government did ‘bad’ things – and what government doesn’t? – in the eyes of a larger and more powerful nation, then its sovereign rights were forfeit and the larger nations, if they chose, would invade or assault, in order to essentially rescue the ‘victims. By 1995 the US was in Bosnia, where – ominously – it still remains, with the UK under the personally sincere and totally convinced Tony Blair bringing up the rear.

The possibilities for grave mischief were rife. Especially in a world where essential resources – oil, grains, even fresh water – are dwindling, the larger and more developed nations have given themselves carte blanche to invade wherever they choose to perceive ‘victimization’ that needs redress, 'oppression' that needs 'liberating'.

And then came 9-11, and then Afghanistan, which was ‘won’ and yet was then ‘lost’ as the government's schemes shifted to Iraq.

‘Victimization’ – and there is enough of it in this Vale of Tears, as God knoweth full well – became a perfect ‘cover’ of ‘legitimacy’ for foreign interventions, invasions and occupations, wherever and whenever the US chose.

Nor, certainly under Bush, did the US choose well.

And here We are.

Nor is Obama going to be able to easily reverse this entire national mind-set and heart-set. ‘Victimism’ and all that supports it, including the manipulative stoking of fear and anxiety and mistrust and vengeance; and the disrespect for established principles of Western and Constitutional justice; and the even more deeply buried disrespect for national sovereignty, is now a well-anchored dynamic in both US domestic affairs (and politics) and in US foreign affairs.

But especially in foreign affairs this game is becoming harder and harder to sustain. Those invaded and occupied do not see themselves as receiving ‘rescue’, and though they most certainly see themselves as being victimized (if not as helpless victims) they ‘see’ clearly that their victimizer is the US.

Nor can their opposition to such a gambit be easily written off as ‘backlash’, as had happened in US domestic affairs.

They are getting shafted, they know it, and they aren’t going to stand still for it.

And the principle of ‘the power of weakness’ will serve to wear down whatever aggressive and advanced military force the US chooses to deploy in the quintessentially American delusion that enough know-how and well-funded weapons research will yield a quick ‘victory’ with minimal (American) casualties and no lasting negative consequences.

It was a lot easier (though hardly more justifiable) for the US government and elites to corrode America’s own Constitutional ethos domestically.

So History is not dead. Although the Constitution is not at all well, and the hostility of both Leftist (not liberal) and Rightist (not conservative) factions in American politics and government does not make for a bright prognosis. Dr. Obama faces a ‘patient’ rapidly enroute to becoming an ER ‘trainwreck’, wounded and injured so complexly and profoundly that any effort to ‘fix’ any one serious problem is going to aggravate several others.

We are cursed with “interesting times” indeed. This is Our rendezvous with destiny. Let Us rise up to meet it.

NOTE

Lind also notes that "Americans, driven by sensation-seeking media, will panic". Yes. Having somehow lost any working sense of Divine Providence or any help from Beyond that helps put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous Life and Fortune, Americans are far more easily spooked, stampeding toward any 'reform' that promises to eradicate pain and suffering in any form from human life.

And having been told for decades (and taught, at 50K a year for college) that 'maturity' and self-mastery and 'seriousness' are all 'male', 'patriarchal', 'oppressive' modes of 'vertical' thinking and must be eradicated ... I can't really see how that has helped.

Additionally, it's not just the sensationalist media. The government and legislators themselves find it a quick and reliable way to garner 'legitimacy', pushing through all sorts of 'reforms' to stop 'pain'. And the national government uses its purse-strings to induce police agencies and cash-strapped State governments to go along.

We are increasingly becoming helpless and panicky - and I don't mean as a nation here, but as a 'people'. And that bodes very ill for The People. And for democracy. And for the Constitution.

Obama has stated that the citizenry needs to start putting more responsibility on itself. One of the primary ways that good advice must be given shape and form is for individual adults to get a grip and not simply panic on cue like the crowds in some mass-disaster movie.