The State Must be Saved

Part II of Divided About the War. It was a socialist government in Germany that in January of 1919 had to suppress to Spartacist uprising in Berlin. How did that work?

The insurrection of the radicals had to be met with all the force the government could organize. What forces were there, however, that the government could muster? The tragedy of the German revolution lay in the fact that when the democratic elements of the revolution required the necessary force and power to give stability to their rule, they found no such source of military power among their own worker supporters. The pacifist and anti-militarist tradition of the Socialist movement stood in the way of creating a strong republican military force to protect the new regime. After the resignation of the Independent Socialists from the cabinet, the three Majority Socialist ministers published the following plea to their supporters: "If you burden us with responsibility you must do more: You must create power for us! There can be no government without power! Without power we cannot carry out your mandate! ... Do you want the German Socialist Republic? ... Then help us create a people's force for the government that will enable it to protect its dignity, its freedom of decision and its activity against assaults and putsches. ... A government ... that cannot assert itself has also no right to existence."

The response from the followers of the Majority Socialists and from the democratic bourgeoisie was weak and ineffectual. When military force was needed, the Majority Socialist government had to seek allies among the militarist circles of the old officer caste and the old army. The government decided to entrust [Defense Minister Gustav] Noske with the obligation to restore order. Noske, fully aware of the ominous character of his task, declared: "Someone must become the bloodhound! I cannot evade the responsibility." He became governor general of Berlin, and established his headquarters in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin. He secured the cooperation of several old-regime generals ... and recruited and drilled several thousand soldiers and officers. On the night of January 10 he marched on the center of the city. The buildings held by the rebels were stormed in several days of bitter fighting. The troops that rallied to the government were full of bitterness and scorn for the rebels and did not bother too often to discriminate between the different political tendencies. Indiscriminate shooting, brutality, and terrorization were practiced upon the prisoners. (p.383-384)

This, progressives and liberals, is what you get when you want and exercise power. This is why there can be no "progressive" state power that does not end up shooting people. (Because state power is all about shooting people.) And since liberals and progressives themselves are unlikely to want to do the shooting (and the torturing), they have to rely on those most willing to do that work -- sadists (who don't care who they work for), militarists and conservative statists. And you wonder why your progressive welfare state doesn't exist yet? And will never exist? Because it's wedded to warfare and police power. That power takes its pound of flesh in exchange for its loyalty. And then some.

Ancient Debates

I realize the time of intense theological disputes between Marxists has long gone (the only Marxists who retain any influence in the world are critical theorists, whose work permeates academia but doesn't allow people to think clearly about much of anything), but I've always been at a loss to understand what Marxists mean (or meant) by the term "dictatorship of the proletariat." (What they really mean...) I find this from Pinson's book on Germany to be, well, interesting. Pinson is describing Socialist attitudes in 1919 toward revolution and the Soviet state in Russia:

Hugo Haase, respected by his political opponents as well as by his followers as a man of indisputable integrity and of statesmanlike qualities, retained his adherence to the Marxist goal of world revolution and world socialism. Like left-wing Social Democrats throughout the world at that time, he viewed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as a positive step forward toward the goal of international socialism. But he, like [Rudolf] Hilferding, [Karl] Kautsky, and [Wilhelm] Dittmann, was repelled morally by the brutality and terror of the Russian regime. These Independent Socialists were not opposed to dictatorship per se, but they wanted a dictatorship resting not upon a minority, as in the case of Russia, but upon the will of the majority of the people. The Independent Socialists were objective and honest enough to admit the great bulk of the German workers were in the ranks of the Majority Socialists. All that the Independents could do under the circumstances, therefore, was to pursue a program of educational propaganda in order to develop revolutionary clarity and revolutionary energy among the masses and to hope thereby to win them over to their side eventually. The U.S.D.P. [the Independent Socialists], declared [Arthur] Crispien, wants a soviet system based on the free will of the masses and not on a militarily disciplined obedience, as in Russia. "By dictatorship of the proletariat," he maintained, "we understand ... not the setting up of a reign of terror, but the exercise of political power by a working class led by scientifically schooled Socialists with a considered and conscious planning and organization imbued with the highest form of socialist ethics." (p.376-377)

Not a reign of terror. But sweet, gentle democratic socialism? The bureaucratic, managerial welfare state? I am I reading this right? Is that the "dictatorship" Marxists had in mind, or were they thinking of something else entirely?

Divided About the War...

... But not about war.

As per previous posts, I have been reading Koppel Pinson's Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, which I picked up from the discard shelves at the LSTC library. I have commented on the book before, both here and in one of my columns at lewrockwell.com.

I am in the middle of the chapter on the German Revolution of 1918-19, and Pinson is describing how German socialists -- who made up Germany's new Republican government -- fared and ruled. They were divided, in part because the largest socialist group in the German parliament, the Majority Socialists, had voted for war credits in August, 1914, and had enthusiastically supported the war until sometime in early 1918:

The Majority Socialists were never able to free themselves from this association with the pro-war policy. Politically and psychologically there could not bring themselves to admit that their policy of the Burgfrieden [the policy of peace and cooperation with the government of Wilhelm II during the war] had been a mistake. And the deep and profound nationalism which prompted their stand on August 4, 1914, remained equally strong in 1918-1919. It never occurred to them that a complete break with the past was either desirable or feasible. It was not only that they were reformist Socialists and opposed to violent revolution because of possible bloodshed and chaos. It was that both the strength and continuity of national tradition were matters of profound conviction for them. [Italics mine.] It was not utilitarian or pragmatic design when [Socialist leader Philipp] Scheidemann referred to Marshal von Hindenburg as a man "before whom the entire nation can only have the greatest reverence." ... Despite the long anti-militarist tradition of the party, the Majority Socialists could never get themselves to eliminate the glories of German arms from the memory of their nationalist past. (p.372-373)

Does this seem familiar? If anyone wonders why Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party establishment, have not more openly regretted the invasion of Iraq, or formally apologized for approving it, it is because Democrats are still nationalists (militarism and nationalism are just as at home in the Democratic Party, even if Democrats don't idolize them as much as Republicans do) and still committed to war and empire.

The Problem of (and with) Democracy

I'm no fan of democratic governance. By "democratic," I mean the parliamentary nation-state in which sovereignty allegedly rests with "the people." This form of governance, combined with some form of republicanism (the election of "representatives" by the people to exercise that sovereignty), is the primary form of governance in the world today, and has been the idea of good, progressive, popular, effective and moral government since at least the middle of the 19th century (it is what the revolutionaries of 1848 were clamoring for). Jacques Ellul in Anarchy and Christianity notes:

We have to ask whether things became any different under democratic systems [than it had been under monarchy in Europe]. Much less than one might think! The central thought is still that power is from God. Hence the democratic state is also from God. The odd thing is that this was an old idea. From the 9th century some theologians had stated that all power is from God through the people. Plainly, however, this did not lead directly to democracy. In "Christian" democracies we find a similar alliance to that already described, except that the church now has fewer advantages. In lay democracies there is theoretically a complete separation, but that is in fact not the case. The church has shown much theological uncertainty in this area. (p.29)

Ellul goes on to describe the various arrangements between churches and government in France (of the two Napoleons as well as the republic), acceptance and support of the Nazi government by German Lutherans and Roman Catholics, and especially the decision by the Orthodox Church to serve the Soviet state following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June, 1941. 

This is not the concern here. What I'm interested in is the statement that "the democratic state is also from God." Or, better, "that all power is from God through the people." This, as I understand it, is the point of Defensor Pacis, the late medieval treatise on secular authority. 

It's funny that when monarchs assume the divine right to rule, this is called "tyranny." But when "the people" assume the divine right to rule, this is called freedom. It also, I think, prompts some questions:

• Who are "the people?" What defines "the people?" 
• Is there some place "the people" aren't? Are there some people who are not "the people?"
• If "the people" are all people everywhere, what limits could possibly exist on their power?
• If "the people" are the expression of the will of God politically and socially, does that make opposing the will of the people -- which is, after all, the will of God -- a kind-of heresy? Is it possible to oppose the will of "the people?" Can one say "no" to "the people?"
• How do "the people" effectively exercise their sovereignty? If it is through agents, then what moral cause allows those agents to use that delegated power on "the people" themselves?
• Or, if "the people" is an amorphous collective, can agents of sovereignty use their delegated power on individuals who are members of "the people" (or not) but who do not, as individuals, constitute "the people?"
• Are "the people" empowered by God to make laws or exercise power without limit, or are there limits to the power of "the people?" If there are, how can you possibly defend limits binding the will or power of God?

Modern democratic political theory as applied in the late 18th and 19th century gave human beings real tyranny and totalitarianism, forms of government impossible with monarchy because enough people (as Ellul notes in the pages prior to the above quote) understood that the personal government of the monarch worked against them. That they were not their government and they knew that. Democracy annihilates this intellectual and moral distinction between ruler and ruled (while keeping it in practice, because it is impossible to do away with), thus giving the state one more tool to subdue those most likely to object. Democracy also subjects to the state, the instrument by which the will of God is realized in the world, all things, thus cracking the door open for totalitarianism -- that of the revolutionary socialist state or the social democratic welfare/warfare state.

Multiculturalism and Empire (With Update)

I tried sometime last fall to read radical orthodox theologian John Millbank's Theology and Social Theory. I appreciated the central claim he was making or trying to make in the book: that the endeavor by religious thinkers to answer the Enlightenment on the Enlightenment's terms was a failure because the Enlightenment itself is religious (a conclusion I had come to some time before reading Millbank). I really liked that he was trying to end the "conversation" between sociology and religion, and the social sciences and religion in general.

But it was a tough read. Tough because Milbank writes like a critical social theorist. For every pithy paragraph (worth three or four excited readings) describing that the capitalism of the modern world reflects Scottish economist James Stewart's ideas more than it those of moral philosopher Adam Smith, or that the very concept of "society" is an invention of the Enlightenment, there were pages and pages of ponderous drivel dealing more with high theory, aesthetics and even mythology. It was not as difficult a read as Horkhheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was itself so steeped in the aesthetic and mythic as to think one can tell the story of human ideas and human history that way. This approach is similar to that of Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, or James Frazier in The Golden Bough, or Toynbee, grand theories of everything which make human history as much the story of the artistic and aesthetic as it is economics and events. In which myth is authentic history, more authentic than recorded history, and thus the stringing together of myths can effectively tell the human story. This approach, which may make sense to others, make utterly no sense to me, and I can get little or nothing out of such history telling. (This may or may not be a subject for a later time.)

At any rate, at one of the Christian Anarchist websites I've begun frequenting, I found an essay by John Milbank, "Sovereignty, Empire, Capital and Terror," from a 2002 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, and it is refreshing to see the man can actually write and communicate clearly. I have not read the entire essay, yet, but I came across an interesting description Milbank uses for the difference between American and European approaches to empire:

Because of its history of expanding frontiers—its internal wars against native Americans, African Americans, British loyalists, Spaniards in the South and West, the dissenting Confederate states, southern and Central America, dealers in alcohol and drugs, and Communists in the 1950s, the United States has in a sense been long preparing for this new sort of global conflict. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued in their Empire, American neo-Roman imperialism works by a constant subsumption and inclusion of "others," such that difference is apparently welcomed, yet actually subordinated to an unremitting uniformity. This subsumption coincides with an obliteration of the older distinction between colonies as the extracapitalist sources of "primary accumulation" and the fully capitalized home markets. Now all comes to be within the unrestricted one world market. ...

This contrasts with older European imperialism, which held the other at a subordinated distance, permitting its otherness, even while subordinating it for the sake of an exploitation of natural and human resources. And one should I think add to Hardt and Negri that, in the case of Britain and France, there were also many utopian imperialist schemes that went beyond even this subordination and tended to deploy the peripheries and "savage" to mock the center and "civilized" (see for example Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines). Such nuances are often overlooked in pseudo-left-wing American "postcolonial" discourses, which actually assist the ideology of the American Right by implying the original "innocence" of the United States as a once-colonized nation, and it's natural solidarity with all the colonized.

Now, what I find most interesting about this is the implication that the American empire is one of forced inclusion, of forced assimilation. Annoying New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been the most forceful advocate of forced assimilation and inclusion as the solution to the problems of globalization -- that those left out or choosing to be left out must be forcibly included in the emerging "global" economy and society as a way to protect those who have chosen or at least accepted that globalization. This has been the Bush Regime's reigning justification for war in the Middle East, or at least was in the beginning when things seemed to be going well.

The response to assimilation as a ruling ideology of empire has been the creation of multiculturalism as an alternative to assimilation. Multiculuralism appears to assume that cultures are organic wholes, are based largely on ethnicity/race, language and religion, and that assimilation demands the abandonment of one's own "culture" in order to assimilate, to accept the values and assumptions of the ruling culture. Rather than impose one specific "culture" as normative for an entire society, multiculturalism seeks a process by which all "cultures" can retain integrity and influence (and be influenced) by other cultures in a given society. Individual members of a "culture" need not abandon whatever culture they bring in order to be part of the larger society.

I take issue with multiculturalism's sense of itself as an alternative to assimilation because it is assimilation. It assumes many of the same things that assimilation does -- the moral legitimacy of the nation-state and of the community bounded by the nation-state ("society") and defined by shared citizenship. It assumes that all social relationships between individuals and communities ("cultures") within "society" must be governed by one set of values, values imposed by the state through the catechetical process of compulsory public education (the greatest evil perpetuated by the state) and backed up by state violence (law and law enforcement). The multiculturalist, like the assimilationist, cannot abide the desire by individuals to live in self-defined communities or enclaves that refuse to participate in "society." The autonomous enclave is as unacceptable to the multiculturalist as it is to the assimilationist. Now, multiculturalism may make some sense as an idea created by people who viewed deliberate and purposeful segregation and exclusion from "society" as the problem. But it still seeks the same answer as assimilation -- forcible inclusion and participation of all in "society." Whether they want to be included or not.

And because of this, multiculturalism is just another ideology of empire, just another very American ideology of "unremitting uniformity."

Pluralism, and not assimilation/multiculturalism, is how people really live. It is how they choose to live when state and parastatal actors are not trying to compel assimilationist ideologies upon them. This is why I love great big cities. I myself do not care if I live surrounded by people who "look" like me. I do not assume that I hold anything in common with such people. In fact, my most passionate prejudices tend to be be against working-class and poor white people, especially those with tribal and communal outlooks. But I accept there are people who want to live surrounded by folks who "look" or speak (and thus, they hope, think) like they do. And there are lots of people for whom ethnicity, language, religion and kinship are very, very important. So I say let them make the neighborhoods and communities they want, so long as no one is compelled to participate or (more importantly) prevented from leaving. There are plenty of places where such communities intersect, especially in big cities, where one can be properly cosmopolitan and meet and form communities with other cosmopolitans. And you can always pick up and move to someplace suitable cosmopolitan.

There's actually something I admire in the anti-globalization movement, and that is the desire to secede, to drop out, to not accept what one is handed and instead create an alternative. As near as I can tell, the anti-globalization movement is protesting not the creation of a global economy and something akin to a global society, but the fact that most folks have no say in how they are forced to participate in that global society and economy. Where I disagree with the anti-globalization movement is in the desire to create a formal global polity that will achieve one of the longest cherished dreams of social democracy -- an economy subject to political, and allegedly "democratic," control. Like the multiculturalists, most anti-globalization activists aren't opposed to globalization, nor are they opposed to force and coercion. They merely want to create institutional structures that would privilege their idea of what globalization is and should be. They claim that capital currently does what it does in an unregulated fashion. This is a lie. Capital can only exist with state support, and the right-wing social democrat believe just as much in the political control of the economy as the left-wing social democrat. Anti-globalization forces would not abolish the World Bank or the IMF; they would merely use them, and all their tools, "differently." But they would still use them.

Multiculturalism, like the assimilationism it claims to oppose, does not accept "no" for an answer. It will not allow self-definition, voluntarism or secession. It is inherently statist in nature, and intervention and violence are by necessity the way it does business. The state defines what a "culture" is and how individuals within those "cultures" must interact with other human beings. The state is the main determinant of all social values. And where "no" cannot be spoken, heard and listened to, where it is not an acceptable answer to the state, there can be no real freedom for individuals or communities.

UPDATE: I finished the Milbank essay. Meh. It was intriguing in places, but as a whole it was not that interesting.

Not Even 3/5s

In a fairly complex case about law, a U.S. appeals court in the District of Columbia appears to have handed down a rather stunning ruling:

The four British men also brought constitutional claims and claims under the Geneva Conventions and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Rejecting all of the men's allegations, the appeals court overturned the only part of a lower court decision that hadn't already been dismissed. That was the alleged violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

"Because the plaintiffs are aliens and were located outside sovereign United States territory at the time their alleged RFRA claim arose, they do not fall with the definition of 'person,'" the court ruled. The law provides that the "government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion."

What the court seems to be saying is that anyone outside the territory of the United States is not legally a person when it comes to dealing with or responding to state action. Not that they weren't subject to the sovereignty of the United States government -- clearly they were. But by not being on U.S. territory, they weren't legally people, and thus had no rights. The U.S. government can claim extra-territorial jurisdiction and act extra-territorially, but then maintains a convenient double standard by making sure that those on the business end of its actions, of the exercise of its sovereignty, can do nothing in response. Nifty trick.

But at least it's good to have a court confirm what we've always known -- that those who aren't Americans aren't people in the eyes of the U.S. government. To quote a certain U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, they also don't have any rights that same government is bound to respect.

For Melissa, Wherever She Is

This is an apology in a bottle, scrawled on a piece of paper, crumpled and stuffed and corked and tossed onto the waves. I don't expect it to get to the person who needs to hear it. Who I'd like to hear it. There are things we break, people we hurt, and we cannot undo them. The most we can do is give those things to God and let God do whatever fixing needs to be done. I've broken a few such things in my life. But this, for Melissa, this is something I've needed and wanted to say for a long, long time.

...

Melissa, I'm sorry I was not the person you needed and wanted. I'm sorry I treated you so badly, that I was so cruel and heartless. That I used you. I was 19, and incapable of being the kind of person who could have loved you the way that you needed to be loved. I was not the person who could have accepted who and what you were and were willing to give me.

I think about you a lot. I pray about you often. I hope you found the love and comfort and belonging you were looking for. You were a sweet, cheerful and persistent woman, and I hope that has carried you through your dark places. It is not that I wish things between us could have been different -- it took encountering Jennifer to truly become someone better than I was, but you and Jennifer had much in common, and it was her that made me remember you, your life, your struggles, and how I did not contribute much (or any) joy -- but I do wish I could have been someone different than the person you met.  

I hope that the electrons, the ether, the spirit, carry this message, if to no other place than your soul. I hope you have found joy, had a good life, have loved and been loved. I cannot, and will not, ask you to forgive me. If you even remember me. I remember you. I will always remember you.

In Defense of Food

When Salon.com is not shilling for the Democrats (which they often do), it's actually interesting and thoughtful. It helps, right now, that Democrats don't hold the White House, so salon.com does not have to regularly defend the indefensible. Presidential power is always morally and ethically indefensible.

There was a good review at Salon on Tuesday of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, his follow-up to The Omnivore's Dilemma. And interesting, because if the review demonstrates anything, it is not the lack of federal regulations that cause problems, but the regulations themselves, because what matters is not the spirit of the law, but the letter:

... America is a gullible nation with a long-standing thirst for snake oil. How could we have resisted the blandishments of marketing departments and their lab-coated allies? We couldn't, and as a result, Pollan writes, "Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished." ... The smart thing to do, he thinks, is stay away from any food that trumpets its nutritional virtues, since "for a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed than a whole food." Meanwhile, "the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute."

...

We know that it's possible to alter a culinary culture. No one eating in London in the 1970s could have believed that by the beginning of the 21st century it would be a great food city. A similar revolution took place across the United States -- granted, a revolution in gastronomy, not nutrition (which, as Pollan documents, was simultaneously headed south). Yet the very success of the processed-food industry in putting over its bogus health claims shows, at least, how many people care about these issues.

My friend the low-fat freak is one of them. "What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism," Pollan writes, "the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism -- its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure." Recent research shows the decades-long effort to get us to use trans fat (as in hydrogenated vegetable oil) in place of animal fat to have been -- putting it mildly -- misguided. In Pollan's words, "The principal contribution of thirty years of official nutritional advice has been to replace a possibly mildly unhealthy fat in our diets with a demonstrably lethal one."

My friend, a stay-at-home spouse who tended her family with the devoted ferocity of a mama grizzly, would cook with anything that had "low fat" on the label. There was good reason for her heart-healthy mania: Two of her uncles had died young after heart attacks. Now her husband has diverticulitis (a condition unknown in populations that exist on whole foods, Pollan reports) and her grown son suffers from Crohn's disease. And I can't help wondering whether their intestinal maladies don't have something to do with all the processed glop she fed them, in good faith, back in the '80s.

Not to worry -- medicine has their conditions under control. As Pollan points out, the food industry's blunders have been a blessing to the healthcare industry: "Doctors have gotten really good at keeping people with heart disease alive, and now they're hard at work on obesity and diabetes. Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive."

Our Prussian Emperor and His Very Prussian Court

For as long as I can remember (I am 40), Republicans have been committed to presidential authority or even presidential dictatorship. They have championed executive power over and above that of the legislature (and they like courts only so far as the courts do the bidding of the executive) and have looked askance at any attempt to make the president "accountable" beyond the quadrennial presidential elections.

Part of this comes from a conservative suspicion of politics and a belief that there is a "right" or "optimal" answer to matters of governance. It is more likely, given how many legislators can be elected at any one time, that a chief executive will reflect that view than will a legislature, which will actually engage in the give and take of interest group politics. Republicans are also a great deal more likely to be nationalists -- that is, believe that only "interest group" in the United States that matters is the entire nation, and the only person who can embody that is the president. It is much easier to elect a president than gain a workable or meaningful majority in the legislature.

I also think most Republicans truly believe in presidential dictatorship. They believe that unfettered executive power is more efficient, make sure the man on top is truly in control, truly unified and truly representative of the executive. I think this is due to the fact that the model of leadership for so many Republicans -- whether they have served or not -- is a very idealized version of the military. (Hollywood's idea, but that is a matter for another time.)

One-man rule does not work that way. As Koppel Pinson notes about Wilhemine Germany, in which the constitution gave all effective power to the Kaiser:

German foreign policy under Wilhelm [II] was not only full of contradictions but it was also never quite clear who really determined foreign policy. It is a mistaken notion that authoritarianism and absolute government necessarily means unfiied and efficient control and administration. While William II was the absolute ruler and constitutionally the sole arbiter of both military and foreign policy, he was subject to various and conflicting influences and pressures [in the form of his advisors and his personal character]. (p.302-303)

...

Final decisions in the realm of foreign affairs rested entirely in the hands of the emperor. There was no parliamentary control, except as it pertained to the budget; the general press was rigorously controlled on matters of foreign policy and there was very little critical discussion. As a result there was no check on any of the forces operating around the emperor by the cross-play of discussion and informed public opinion. Public opinion played no role in the shaping of German foreign policy and in the making of vital decisions. ... The supremacy of the soldier, the peculiar attitude toward war and peace and the Hegelian view of the state as the "power" rather than "welfare" all contributed to form a climate which, as [Sir Edward] Grey said, if not ready to take initiative toward war was willing to follow once the warriors made it. (p.307-308)

Again, I am amazed. This is as much the United States of America of today -- run by Republicans and Democrats -- as it was Imperial Germany of more than a century ago.

Duh

According to the ever-prescient Washington Post, the United States gummint (in the form of the Bush Regime) has decided to let Iraqis solve "some" of their problems -- including what their government ought to look like:

In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop "surge" and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.

In many cases -- particularly on the political front -- Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. ...

Although some progress has been made and legislation in some cases has begun to slowly work its way through the parliament, none of these benchmarks has been achieved. ...

In explaining the situation, U.S. officials have made a virtue of necessity and have praised Iraqi ingenuity for finding different routes toward the same goals. Iraqis have figured out a way to distribute oil revenue without laws to regulate it, Crocker has often noted, and former Baathists are getting jobs. Local and provincial governing bodies -- some elected, some not -- are up and running.

Gasp! Iraqis actually cobbling together their own government, and finding solutions to their own problems, without the help of overpaid democracy consultants and advisors from the finest agencies and think tanks and their pimply-faced, politically connected project managers in Washington? Making their way without American help? And Team Bush is allowing this?

But some of the democracy consultants, the aspiring (and actual) proconsuls of empire, are not happy with this turn of events. It appears by letting the Iraqis concoct their own solutions, Washington has abandoned them to "sectarianism":

U.S. officials at various levels are pushing the idea for different reasons, said Sarah Sewall, director of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a Clinton-era Pentagon official. While Petraeus has embraced the notion out of "realism," Sewall said, she thinks the Bush administration "has recently arrived at this formula out of desperation -- due to the failure of its past efforts."

Ah yes, the "failure of past efforts," such as the desire to impose a perfect Heritage Foundation agenda on Iraq -- the kind of place Steve Forbes would have been happy to be president of. No doubt had a Gore administration had invaded and occupied Iraq (and I believe that a President Gore would have done so), they would have striven mightily to impose their notion of good governance on the country. Just as intolerantly. And failed just as spectacularly.

The traditional military belief, [one U.S. diplomat said], was that "if you just bring enough resources to a problem and get the right approach, the outcome is guaranteed. But it's very, very frustrating for them, as it is for all Americans, for members of Congress, because we are expending so much on this exercise, and we want to know that we're going to achieve something good.

"But we are learning," the diplomat said. "We are a pragmatic people at the end of the day . . . [and] you don't get anybody ever to do something they don't want to do."

There were those of us in late 2002 and early 2003 who were saying exactly this as the country prepared (discussed would not describe adequately what happened) to invade and occupy Iraq. There are those of us who were opposed to the entire venture from the get-go for this very reason. This is NOT how you do good. This NEVER how you do good. And this is never how you try to do good. EVER.

Saving Ivan Illich

Sometime in 2006, I wrote a long and rambling blog entry on Ivan Illich's Deshcooling Society, which I had just read. Here are the highlights:

Deschooling isn't as good a read as [John Taylor] Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, but Illich does a better job of presenting his ideas than Gatto does. The problem of mass industrial society, for Illich, is that we human beings have created systems (school is the example he uses because it is upon school that all other institutions and systems of mass society rest) that are fundamentally anti-human. That is, the logic of the system triumphs over the logic of the individual human being. For Illich (if I understand him correctly), the mass society, brought about by industrialism, needs to manage individual human wants, to ensure that there is enough demand for the goods and services produced by industries and mass government. The health of the economy, and continued economic growth, as well the position and power of the state, all depend on the management of demand. That management takes the form of both coerscion (law) and persuasion (advertising as one example), but the goal is to make sure that human beings are incapable of managing themselves (either as individuals or as voluntary collectives) and must rely on professionals to manage their needs and wants. School fits in becuase it creates demand for "instruction" and substitutes teaching for actual education, and is also the template by which human beings are made a part of the "system" of mass society and taught to learn their place and function -- mainly as consumers of services and products -- within it.

...

But my biggest problem with his recommendations is that they appear to have actually gotten traction among reformers and communitarians, people who did these things on top of school, not instead of school. That's not Illich's fault, of course. But I'm having a hard time finishing the book because it has stopped reading like a revolutionary tome and has become just another piece of silly futurism gone awry. (Think Toffler's -- or was it Naisbitt's? -- much heralded and very silly paperless office.)

Now, someone at the time suggested I real Illich's 1988 speech on education in Chicago, The Educational Enterprise in Light of the Gospel. Because Illich makes suggestions at how to reform education, there was plenty to be co-opted in the essay -- and much was. However, Illich takes no prisoners in the 1988 speech, and is a great deal more uncompromising in this essay. Which is good.

I want to call your attention to the experience of successful avoidance of imputed needs and their professional management. This ethos of avoidance is founded in the American ideal of the selfmade man. It consists in the enjoyment of the liberty to refuse compliance, to drop out and forego one’s rightful share of costly service. I choose this neglected subject because I believe that the poor deserve special consideration when they act in this way.

The great majority of all Chicago children who leave school before they graduate are Black or Hispanic, and slumbred. By the time they drop out they have been badly mangled in soul and body. Understandably they refuse further care after intensive remedial programs have forced them to acknowledge their incompetence to succeed within the system and to make it into society at large by those routes which their teachers approve of. For the rest of their lives a school record will dog them relentlessly. But these dropouts, in another way are also privileged: In school they have learned to fake almost anything, and to see the school system for what it really is: a worldwide soulshredder that junks the majority and hardens an elite to govern it. They recognize the schoolsystem as an evil, no matter how good or evil, effective or pleasant some schools might be for their pupils, and all schools, occasionally, for some kids. The reflective dropout learns to laugh about the pious platitudes praising modern education, when the enterprise which organizes it is by its very nature an instrument which compounds their truancy with psychological, social and economic discriminations.

American pluralism has a beautiful but limited tradition. Its enormous variety of educational, medical and ecclesial systems witness to it. But this pluralism has limits. Only in the domain of religion is the constitutional protection of the nonchurched atheist taken seriously. This society is gravely threatened unless we recognize without envy sublimated into grudge that dropouts of any description might be closer to Huck Finn than the church or the schoolgoers. I will now first explain why I want to speak about the dropout in the context of Christian salvation and then why, at this time in history, the school-dropout has even worldly wisdom on his side. I want to motivate Christians, who can claim a privileged understanding of evil to become leaders on behalf of the civil liberties of the Chicago dropout.

... or this ...

... Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.

Just before He started out on His public life, Jesus went to the desert. He fasted, and after 40 days he was hungry. At this point the diabolos, appeared to tempt Him. First he asked Him to turn stone into bread, then to prove himself in a magic flight, and finally the devil, diabolos, "divider," offered Him power. Listen carefully to the words of this last of the three temptations: (Luke 4,6:) "I give you all power and glory, because I have received them and I give them to those whom I choose. Adore me and the power will be yours." It is astonishing what the devil says: I have all power, it has been given to me, and I am the one to hand it on - submit, and it is yours. Jesus of course does not submit, and sends the devilcumpower to Hell. Not for a moment, however, does Jesus contradict the devil. He does not question that the devil holds all power, nor that this power has been given to him, nor that he, the devil, gives it to whom he pleases. This is a point which is easily overlooked. By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as "devil" and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing. They are so strongly motivated by the image of church as a "helping institution" that they are constantly motivated to hold power, share in it or, at least, influence it.

Malcontents are often posed the question: "If you think everything is so bad, why don't you propose some changes?" I have found a fairly simple answer: "I don't want to give anyone any ideas." This essay saves Illich as a thinker for me.

The Wrong of Rights

As I read some writings by Christian Anarchists on a few of the websites I am exploring (like this one, this one and this one), I find myself increasingly drawn to the ideas of Christian Anarchism. I suspected I would be.

I'm already a fan of both Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, and I have just found 41 books by Jacques Ellul in the library at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. (Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity has suddenly become the next book on my reading list.) But I have read William T. Cavanaugh's essay Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good. (Full-text here... sorry, it's only a PDF file.) There's a lot in the essay worth quoting, but I'll keep this short because this both the most controversial and the most important bit of the essay:

The idea of the nation does not remain an elite idea, but becomes gradually more powerful among the lower classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why were common people willing to sacrifice their lives for nations their grandparents had never heard of, as Benedict Anderson asks? Ernest Gellner answers this question by drawing a direct link between the weakening of smaller types of association and the growth of the idea of the nation. The loosing of individuals from traditional forms of community created the possibility and need of a larger, mass substitute for community. Loyalties are gradually transferred from more local types of community to the nation. At the same time, there is a gradual opening of the sphere of participation to the masses of people of whom the state had previously taken only sporadic notice. The rise of rights language goes hand in hand with the rise of the nation-state, because political and civil rights name both the freeing of the individual from traditional types of community and the establishment of regular relations of power between the individual and the state. Marx was wrong to dismiss rights as a mere ruse to protect the gains of the bourgeois classes. Individual rights do, nevertheless, greatly expand the scope of the state because political and civil rights establish binding relationships between the nation-state and those who look to it to vindicate their claims. The nation-state thus becomes something of a central, bureaucratic clearinghouse in which social claims are contested. The nation-state is fully realized when sacrifice on behalf of the nation is combined with claims made on the state on the basis of rights. [Italics mine -- CHF] (p.20)

This dovetails with what Pinson (see below, somewhere) wrote on Bismarck -- the German welfare state during the Second Reich was the creation of a conservative regime that wanted to link those ruled to their rulers and the state. And not the creation of those concerned about providing a basic minimum standard of living or well-being for every citizen. (In fact, I would posit that whatever the claims made about social welfare in welfare states, the desire is always to link citizen to state.) In this context, civil, social and economic rights are the creations of the state, and part of the "contractual" arrangement between state and individual. The state that giveth can also demandeth service and sacrifice.

Small wonder, then, that the state -- or rather, those individual human beings most vested in the power of the state -- cannot accept anyone saying NO to rights the state gives out or the benefits it distributes. Then they might actually say NO to "sacrifice on behalf of the nation."

On Central Banking

I had a good interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com radio today (Wednesday). It went quite a bit longer than my last one (45 minutes or thereabouts), and should be posted in a day or so. I hope.

At any rate, toward the end of the conversation, we talk a bit about central banking and how central it is to the social democratic welfare/warfare state. Scott asked me why liberals, with their suspicion of banking power, aren't more exercised about central banks (like the Federal Reserve). I should have had a better answer than I did.

Central to the social democratic outlook is the desire to subject the economy and all economic activity to the political process. This is called "economic democracy." States have done this imposing regulations and restrictions on business activities, privileging trade unions (at least some of them) in law, and by weaving the state and business together through contracts to provide everything from armaments to roads and ports. Whole industries were created this way (like investment banking) or enabled to survive (like giant steelworks making precision guns, munitions and warships to create modern militaries), the point being to ensure the profitability of heavy industry as well as create and sustain employment for workers who might otherwise be unemployed.

The state could not manipulate economic activity without the ability to create money out of thin air. Growth, the fetish of economic faith (according to Robert Nelson, author of Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics) and an absolute necessity if the state intends to fund the increasing demands of the welfare and warfare constituencies. Thus the social democratic welfare/warfare state needs central banking.

In fact, Nelson says that fiscal and monetary policy (government budgets and central bank policies respectively) as the American way of making the welfare/warfare state work -- the central tenant of American economic theology -- in the post-WWII era (via the two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; now that I think about it, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, now the World Trade Organization, may have been a third bastard child of Bretton Woods). One that was, and to an extent still is, widely exported. And increasingly resented.

At any rate, the promise of central banking is that the economy can be managed to minimize the risk of recession and unemployment (or at least control employment levels) and other nifty goals -- such as home "ownership" -- by controlling money supply, interest rates and bank reserve requirements. It promises a way of making the economy "democratically accountable" while allowing for "private ownership." The state need not own the means of production in order to affect how they are used and foster some sense of "social good" done by the state.

So, Social Democrats of all persuasions, both left and right, are deeply in love with central banking.

UPDATE: This desire on the part of social democrats and Christian socialists of various stripes is what made the Roman Catholic Church's relationship with Hitler and the Nazi state so fraught with difficulties (according to Konrad Heiden, author of Der Fuehrer, an account of Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s). On the one hand, the Catholic church was very aware of Naziism's essential anti-Christian elements and the fact that the National Socialist German Workers Party wanted to create a post-Christian society modeled on a denatured and romanticized version of German paganism. On the other hand, the Nazis also wanted to make the German economy accountable to the state, something the Catholic Center Party in Germany (and Catholic social teaching) had long wanted. Thus, according to Heiden, the Center Party agreed to work with the Nazis in support of that particular goal.

Thank God for Global Warming

Today, it was 61F in Chicago (16C), a little bit of spring in early January. That allowed me to get in a 30-mile bike ride, something I've not been able to do since early November. It won't last. It never does. But I'll take every day that water on the ground (or falling from the sky) isn't frozen as baraka, a gift from God.

I wish there was a Lutheran seminary someplace warm. Costa Rica, maybe. I know there is one in Tanzania, where the snow only appears on distant mountains. Yes, I suspect I'd feel differently about unseasonably warm weather if I lived in the tropics again, but as long as I'm stuck in the upper Midwest with its bitterly cold winters, I'm going to pray for less of them and more warm weather.

More on Being Prussian

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece for Lewrockwell.com -- "We are All Prussians Now" -- in which I compared Otto von Bismarck's unconstitutional rule in Prussia in the 1860s with the United States of America today. Particularly the ineffectiveness of the "opposition" to make good on their rhetoric against Bismarck struck me as one of the greatest similarities:

A deeply unpopular government, in Pinson’s words, facing a unified opposition in parliament just plowed ahead as if it had the mandate of heaven, as it could and did command majority support among the people it governed. Despite whatever popular sentiment existed against Bismarck as chancellor, there was no popular sentiment against the state. And the political culture of Prussia did not allow for any opposition to either government or state. Merely suggesting that no one should pay their unconstitutional taxes got parliamentarian Johann Jacoby arrested and tried for treason ...

The author of the book, Jewish German liberal Koppel Pinson, wrote fairly extensive about Bismarck's political successes in the 1870s, after the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles in January, 1871. Also especially interesting is how easily Bismarck was able to leverage the support of the German liberals and even socialists -- because the liberals and socialists believed in both einheit (national unity) and freiheit (freedom), but when forced to sacrifice one for the other, they were more than willing to sacrifice freedom for national unity and purpose. For various reasons, both the liberals and the socialists wanted a strong German nation led by a strong national government. The liberals wanted that because that was one of the aspirations of the Revolution of 1848. The socialists because they believed they would inherit that power for themselves eventually.

What I find most interesting about this is how easily those with multiple agendas regarding government are manipulated and used by those with a single, focused agenda about government -- power. Bismarck wanted power merely to have it. He wanted to strengthen the state and connect the German people to it -- that is one of the main reasons Bismarck worked to create a welfare state in Germany, in order to link the majority of Germans to the state and those who ruled it. The Liberals and Socialists had other goals. Power was not an end in and of itself for them, it was a means to an end. Those who view power as a means to another end can easily lend themselves to those for whom power is the end.

Consider the utter ineffectiveness of Democrat opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq as well as the sabre rattling against Iran. Democrats, for the most part, are not opposed to the exercise of state power, of U.S. empire, are not opposed to an imperial presidency, and thus are eager to support (and easily misled by) the Republican executive branch when it comes to the waging of war. (Republican opposition to Democrat wars is just as unprincipled, as the GOP is truly the part of unfettered presidential dictatorship.) They want to preserve that power, want to exercise it themselves. But by being committed to that power, the Democrats are simply enabling the Republicans to conduct the policy they claim to dislike so much.

And because they don't get the game is about power, rather than about what gets done with power, they'll always end up in opposition, slavishly voting to approve war and empire.