Absolutely nothing, answers Tony Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books.
Judt, a conservative historian, but an excellent one, looks at the way the horrors of the 20th century - rather than being viewed as stark lessons are increasingly seen as a treasure trove to be mined to construct the materials of postmodern morality plays. In an interesting twist on the American exceptionalism thesis, he makes a powerful point about the absence of war from the territory of the continental United States has led to a dangerous militarisation of society and politics, while in Europe after World War Two, the devastation total war brought both to the “winners” and the losers led to a will to conduct political affairs non-violently, and the sorts of ethical postures and institutions now derided by the angry voices of American Empire.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
Quoting the late French conservative sociologist, Raymond Aron, at the time of the Algerian War, “torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war…. What needed to be done was end the war”, Judt argues:
We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them” —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?
Not counting Great Britain and France. Oh, okay, and Russia - but it’s not a particularly “advanced” democracy.
The EU States, including the newer members (as the controversy over the new missile shields reminds us), live beneath the defense umbrella provided by the United States.
Pull that away and see how long their “self-righteous cult of memory and memorials” would last.
I recently shared a train carriage with a couple of European students who saw me reading American historian Robert Gellately’s book “Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. The Age of Social Catastrophe”.
This upset the female student who made a point of giving me a lecture on Gellately’s allegedly “reactionary” view of European history folowed by a brief survey of the terrors of the “American Imperium” during the last 100 years, especially as it has affected the smaller nations of the world, but not excluding Russia.
After she settled down a bit, she introduced herself and her boyfriend. She was Italian and he was German.
Doubtless they interpreted the broad smile that then crept across my face as sheer delight at having met two such stirling intellectuals.
Very similar piece by David Bromwich in the current LRB. Not online unfortunately.
Really? In the same way as in America?
Judt isn’t talking about support for the military per se, but about constant bellicosity in rhetoric, deference to military figures in making policy, appearing in public surrounded by uniforms, etc.
Challenging post Mark.
Judt’s argument appears to be based on the supposed lack of experience of US society of war.
And in Judt’s viewpoint, war is to be understood primarily as “total war”. Europeans shy away from war because of their devastating experiences of “total war” wherein there are no winners. This view of the futility of total war is probably true.
But the problem is that since the advent of the nuke in 1945 there have been no total wars. Since then, all wars are small, circumscribed, proxy, low-intensity wars.
Europeans, with their history of violent nation-building and their history of imperialism have had experience of those sort of war as well. And since WWII the US has fought in dozens of these wars. The US return on the investment of blood and treasure has been patchy, but with some measurable success. On the other hand, Europeans have done nothing but lose such wars since 1945 (with the exception of Desert Storm and the minor aberation of the Fawklands War).
My argument against Judt’s thesis is that he is looking at the wrong kind of war. Total war hasn’t been particularly relevant since 1945.
Moreover, I’d argue that US decision-makers can point to a few successes of militarism since 1945 that encourages further military adventurism. US military failures have arisen from an overconfidence in the effectiveness of military force.
This US failure to determine accurately when a military option may be successful is a question of understanding of circumstance rather than an argument against ever taking a military option.
I think it’s an interesting, and initially very attractive argument, but I would disagree - not for the reasons of Eliot (take away that nato missile shield Eliot, and what would happen? Nothing. But having a missile shield and belli-philia are two different things anyway).
But rather because the US has, in fact, experienced total war: “The [American Civil] war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease.
The war accounted for more casualties than all other U.S. wars combined.[131]”
The effect of this war did result in a certain amount of peace-loving, you could argue, vis. US reluctance to enter WWII and particularly WWI. I would be reluctant in the extreme to tie the US taste for proxy conflicts with a war-loving nature more generally. I would say, like many nations, they like wars they think they can win. No wonder Australia are pacifists.
What about OZ? I mean, Anzsc Day, fer Crissakes! Howard couldn’t get enough of photo opportunities woth military brass. I mean, okay, most of the time, ultimately, we were on the winninmg side, except for Vietnam, but most of the great Aussie military feats - Gallipoli, Greece, Singapore, immediately come to mind, were defeats. We have had two great victories, Kokoda and Long Tan, and one of them was in a war we lost. Lessons learnt, post WW2, do what the Brits and the Yanks ask. Rudd’s reversing that on Iraq (sort of) but not on Afghanistan.
Judt (and you) rather overstate the case, I think. The perception of the military in the US has not always been uniformly positive (think early 70’s Vietnam War fallout.) I don’t know there were too many politicians being seen “exalting and glorifying” the military at that time. It probably just goes in cycles depending on perceived geo-political circumstances at the time: be seen with the military a lot after a “good” engagement, like Kuwait, for example. Same probably goes for Britain (especially during Falklands War), although I suppose you could argue that it, like the US, it didn’t suffer total war like much of Europe did.
The Europeans are also massive hypocrites when it suits them. The Jerusalem Post runs a piece today, for example, complaining that the Swiss are happy to sign up an enormous energy deal with Iran that undermines sanctions designed to persuade it not to go nuclear. Like that will help the cause of Middle East peace? The Jews have particular historical reasons to be unhappy with the Swiss, too.
The Europeans are not the fount of all wisdom when it comes to international politics, regardless of the suffering they had last century.
There is also no “slippery slope” regarding torture in America: the issue of its use has been continually debated, and to the limited extent it was used, it seems to have been authorised with a considerable amount of angst. (Did you see The Daily Show this week, where Jon Stewart kept trying - unsucessfully - to get his guest to agree that it was appalling that the VP, Rice and others met to decide the exact scope of what could be allowed in interrogation of a half dozen important prisoners? Stewart was appalled, but in fact I reckon you can take encouragement from that, since the people involved clearly knew it was not a case of “anything goes”.)
People are certainly entitled to argue it is wrong in any circumstances to use what has previously been held to be torture (eg, waterboarding); but to suggest that it is in danger of being entrenched as some routine form of State activity is just over the top.
And by the way, I note that Judt’s article has one section which strongly supports John Howard’s attempt to get back to the “old” narrative way of teaching history, rather than just through the eyes of current interest groups.
Whilst the argument here puts forward an aspect (and only one aspect) worth considering, when you think about it for a minute as a fundamental explanation of anything, it becomes rather pat and unconvincing pretty quickly. Counter-examples and counter-arguments are simply too numerous and ready to hand.
For instance, the thesis ignores the glaring fact that no-one suffered more from the catastrophic effects of war in the 20th cent. than the Soviet Union, with China following as a close second; yet neither of these powers abjured either literal militarism nor militarist semiotics in their policies afterwards, and indeed, to date. Africans have suffered horribly from war, yet African governments and guerrillas continue to pursue war and political violence on numerous fronts. From this we could mostly only infer that the African political climate is simply not like that of the West, for various reasons. The thesis also ignores the reality of war in North America, from the (really quite bloody and destructive) Civil War, to the Indian wars of the 19th-cent., to the close observation of Mexican civil wars and race wars, and the chaos of Latin America.
The American experience of the “catastrophe” of war may not consist of the European experience of having your own cities invaded and bombed and burned down, but Americans did indeed experience it in a subtler way: at the dawn of the 20th cent. they were mainly sitting at home, living their mostly pleasant lives and not worrying about the outside world, when the chaos and stupidity of Europe dragged them quite unwillingly into a century of violence which many of them really would rather have avoided. This experience led many Americans to undergo the tragedies of lives lost to and otherwise destroyed by war, as the consequence of repeatedly having to rein in somebody else’s wantonness. It’s a subtle and insidious experience of the stupidity and destruction of war, and leaves a lot of us not as naive as you might think.
“the devastation total war brought both to the “winners” and the losers led to a will to conduct political affairs non-violently…”
What it really led to was a willingness to outsource the violence part to the US, which was happy to take over the role not because it revels in military violence per se, but because the giant smoking crater that was the first half of the 20th-cent. was fully the doing of the Europeans, and it seemed wise to disarm and neuter them before they tried it again. Maybe we neutered them a little too much, which is having its own unexpected repercussions.
As to the role of military symbolism in American politics, there are I think other perhaps more accurate ways of parsing this, but that’s the matter for another comment, if this thread continues with some vigor.
This reminds of a clip from the Bill O’Reilley show I saw some time ago. He was railing against those ‘far left atheists’ in the Netherlands, with their liberal views on drugs, sexuality and prostitution, and in particular how Christians were a supposedly prejudiced minority. He talked about how ‘Holland used to be a very Christian nation, but now being openly religious can be very dangerous’.
Anyhow, the implicit message was this; America is morally superior to those clog making European heathens, because religion is still a big part of our lives and our politics, and over there it is not.
It was then that I realised that in many ways, the US is simply an immature nation. O’reilley (who I realise doesn’t speak for most, or even many Americans) patronises the Europeans for their secularism, without any acknowledgement that religious wars and power struggles between faiths cost the lives of countless 1000’s for hundreds of years in this part of the world. Religious conflict plagued continental Europe before Columbus was even born, but I’m sure this would never occur to someone like O’Reilley.
So yeah, I believe the American, some might say, obsession, with all things military might be a case of immaturity and blissful ignorance of the full horrors of war.
I’m not endorsing Judt’s thesis. I can think of a few objections of my own. But I think it’s an interesting proposition, and I posted it as a discussion starter.
He’s worth taking notice of. His work on 20th century European history is first class stuff.
Carl, ever heard of the Civil War?
I wouldn’t describe the southern states of the USA as being “blissfully ignorant” of the full horrors of war. And yet to this day they harbour some of the most militaristic sub-cultures in the country.
I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today.
It’s not that the Europeans are innocent in any of this, but there’s only been one 20th Century war in which the US was remotely justified in flexing its military, and even that ended in the dropping of atomic bombs.
katz - I’ll stun you and say I agree with your post above unreservedly. We’ll no doubt disagree war by war but what you layout above as an overall analysis is entirely reasonable.
Point taken Mercurius, ‘blissful ignorance’ is a bit much, but those southerners are a bit of a mystery, and I can’t help but think that the sterotypical American disinterest in the rest of the world has contributed to current, undesireable state of affairs.
The US Civil war did see massive death tolls but it was only parts of the south that saw 20th style devastation. Those who keep this memory alive are a minority. But on any evaluation the major American divergence from the rest of the world is religious: Americans are much more religious and as a consequence much more tolerant of religious and cultural diversity, sadly for the right America is the great multicultural example.
Judt’s thesis is compelling but while I agree with the distinction he makes between ‘total war’ and the various military adventures and proxy wars fought by the US since WW2, the wars fought by the US and its allies in the period since WW2 have often been ‘total war’ for the societies and people’s on the wrong end of the unique US ‘mission civilitrice’. Think Vietnam, think Cambodia, think Iraq. I doubt anyone could argue that Iraq for example is a nation and a society which has been comprehensively destroyed in the past five years, with a proportion of external and internal refugees and civilian deaths that would equal anything in Europe in WW2.
As for the argument that the return for the US while ‘patchy’ has produced some rewards, it is arguable that it is precisely because the real costs of those adventures and incursions were borne by others, and not by the US citizenry, (until the latest debacle ) that has produced the peculiar lack of popular resistance to the perpetual and unending military alarums and excursions engaged in by the US elite since 1945. That situation might be coming to an end, not because of ‘total war’ in the US, but because the costs understod as ‘treasure’ and not as blood’ now threaten to bankrupt the place.
Good on Judt for drawing attention to the fascist militarization of the US that began before 9-11 with the illegal spying and preparations for the use of the BIG LIE technique ( In Italy with the Niger forgeries)
It is a little too neat though.
I seem to recall the EU calling a referendum on becoming a super-state with all that entails - ie a vast fascist military. I am using ‘fascist’ broadly here , but if the entire world is military then crime consists of not killing should orders dictate it.
The spontaneous reaction to that proposal by the Left and the Right against the Big State *Middle* forms the centerpiece of what I call Impi strategy. That when-ever the Center Statist’s get to big for their britches then that is when the Left and Right ‘horns’ should rip them a new one.
You fuck with the Bull - you get the horn.
* Middle* = Really totalitarian statism…like Amerikkkan so-called ‘centrism’.
I agree with your comments Amused.
However, it is important to note that Judt s interested in the perceptions of decisionmakers and citizens in the US. Therefore, the perceptions of folks upon whom the US waged war, while innately interesting, lies outside the ambit of his thesis.
Again, from a global perspective there can be little doubt that war is a negative sum game. Nevertheless, there ar in dividual winners even in a negtive sum game.
I agree with your observations about how the Iraq misadventure is visiting the people of the US in terms of its destruction of US “treasure”.
Carl @ 14: “those southerners are a bit of a mystery”
US social psycologist, Richard Nisbett (a southerner himself), would, I think, say it has a lot to do with the southern “culture of honour” he describes in his 1996 book The Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. The thesis, roughy, is that this makes Southerners more viloent in situations involving personal honour, and ultimatley derives from the different cultural and economic histories of the groups that settled the North and South: English, German and Dutch peasant farmers from European cultures with strong religious and political authority settled the North while the Southern uplands were settled predominantly by Scots-Irish herders, who like herders in other sparsely populated areas of relatively weak central political authority across the world, converged on trigger-happy self-defence, i.e. ‘cultures of honor’, as a survival strategy.
Anyway, a key point that those who take an evolutionary and group selectionist perspective on human history and behaviour and often quote Nisbett’s work, such as Richerson & Boyd (Not By Genes Alone) and David Sloan Wilson (Darwin’s Cathedral), would probably emphasise is that although cultures may evolve and adapt far more rapidly than genes, they are still subject to considerable inertia and as Wilson says, we ‘dance with the ghosts’ of the past environments for cultural evolution - many centuries past perhaps - as we do for the much more distant environments of our genetic evolution.
Several conservative observers of the USSA have noted that the US has slipped into Empire mode before 9-11… while the Left still appears in some ways to be playing catch-up ball. The thing about Empire these days is that when outright colonialism is out, you need a vaguely Leftist ( from the statist and authoritarian end NOT the democratic and libertarian end) ideology to sell that.
Enter the Neocon, or to be precise the Trotskycon.
Seems to me like ideas still have consequences …and we are now facing the sum of all fears. That is the worst of communism and the worst of capitalism combinded.
For as far as I can tell in terms of highly militarized state theory goes we are all National- Bolsheviks these days. We are all threatened by the networks of terrorists exterior to the state apparatus. ( And you can’t spell Nomad War Machine without a ‘rat’ in it.)
Some latte lover, reviewing the young West Wing after Shrub took root, opined, “if only!”.
I disagreed because throughout the slavishly liberal script, the fetishism of the flag and total acceptance/reverence of the military was so much a given as to be unremarkable (to amerikan viewers at least)as a storyline.
I found it stood out like the proverbial dog’s.
Looks like it must be a full moon on this thread, eh wot.
Clausewitz said ( more or less ) that war is the furthering of politics by extreme means .
War is not an isolated event but the result of a set of decisions and needs articulated in a mind-scape ,
The understanding of the mind-scape of decisions taker can help you to understand their emotional actions .
The U.S. are essentially Manicheans , with themselves as the good guys of course ,
the problem is it put any opponents as ipso facto the baaad ones .
greatest fear is to be seen as gutless
typical posture is the show down at noon
Chinese traditionally see itself as surrounded , it must be internally strong and unified and have a hard static perimeter defense
greatest fear is internal turmoil
typical posture is the turtle
Russia understand its past as a never ending effort to repulse the invaders ,often in a death truggle under the very wall of its capital city
deeply integrated in the western culture it has every two generations to bleed to survive western aggressions
greatest fear is a western surprise attack
typical posture is a cornered rothweiller
.
War is just human nature. Soft-cock Luvvies fight through their Culture War - their ammunition is turgid quotes from Walter Benjamin, Foucault, or some GayBC ponce - while real men and sheilahs do it from 35,000 feet.
I hope this helps.
Na, JG. It doesn’t. But that’s to be expected.
Poor old JG isn’t getting enough love at Catallaxy, Paul.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3538&cp=1#comment-91359
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3503&cp=30#comment-89842
JG has become a parody of himself!
He cannot possibly be real.
Maybe one day he’ll turn up at an LP piss-up and then somebody can post a photo here.
Paul
If you want to ask me out for a date, don’t be so bashful. I won’t bite.
Oh and Paul, I have enjoyed reading your reviews of historiography, so I would be interested in your thoughts on Ben Kiernan’s latest book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.
Mark
I am curious as to what makes you classify Tony Judt a “conservative” historian?
America can afford to be militaristic still.
Not only does it NOT suffer the reality of war, but with its nuclear deterrence it is able to stretch its resources in expansionist policies to beyond breaking point knowing that everyone else knows they can still press the button when gentle nudge comes to shove. They are never vulnerable to attack.
Well, not quite, Brendon. One of the problems faced by a military industrial state of the size of the US is that its military arm expands so dsproportionately that the amount of money being spent on the military means that other essential areas of the state implode, which in turn means the amount available for expenditure lessens and the military industrial state is unable to maintain its dominance. This phenomenon, first brought to light by Paul Kennedy,{?}has been experienced by the Soviet Union, the British, the Spanish, the Dutch etc etc. It may take a long time to happen, but it does happen.
Personally, I suspect the US is going through the last stage of this process now, mainly as a result of its Middle Eatern adventurism.
Brendon, 9/11 shows they are vulnerable to attack on their own soil albeit by guerilla action rather than by conventional means.
Self-identified, JG.
Military Industrial State? The USA? LOL! They have probably got more left leaning people in California than in the whole of Australia. There are more anti-iraq war demos in the USA than in Australia.
The USA is such a diverse society that attempts to make generalisations, of anything other than the most trite type, are ludicrous.
There’s nothing inconsistent in the assertion that the US has many of the attributes of a military industrial state and tha there are a largish number of dissenters against that fact.
The term “military-industrial” originates with that well-known left-winger Dwight D. Eisenhower. He warned against the possibility that the US may become an MIS. He detected worrying signs in 1961 when he delivered his farewell address.
Ike’s definition of an MIS is when a large proportion of the wealth of a country is directed toward military expenditure AND when there is a convergence of interests between the military who want to buy the hardware and the purveyers of the hardware who hold out inducements of jobs to senior military personnel upon successful lobbying for that hardware. Ike also included pork-barrelling politicians who lobbied to have these industries located in their districts as enablers of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Ike saw the rise of the MIS as a perversion of democracy, not necessarily as destructive of democracy.
Thus, an MIS and legal dissent against its rise can quite easily co-exist.
And who is going to argue that the dangers that Ike foresaw in 1961 haven’t been realised under Bush’s misrule?
Halliburton and no-bid contracts, anyone?
Thanks, Katz. You saved me the effort, and put it much better than I would have. Much appreciated.
brw, Daniel Yergin’s book on the origins of the cold war is also very good on this. Unfortunately, the exact title escapes me.
Marks,
Chile under Pinochet probably had more leftists than military personnel. SLORC has its opponents in Burma. And so on.
Trite generalisations about a society are so very easy to make when you conflate the distinct ideas of “society” and “state” - the latter being the political apparatus that governs and organises the former. Sometimes, as in the case of widespread opposition to the War in Iraq on the part of the US public (the political face of society) the two find themselves at odds.
Katz & Paul - I only learned relatively recently that Dwight originally intended to say “military/industrial/Congressional complex” but was prevailed upon to drop the muchly esteemed Reps. of the people - after all, without all those ‘earmarks’ on various pork barrel bills, many town in the flyover states would be reliant on hogs, corn or spuds for income & taxes.
Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech: amphibious - did he write the speech himself? had he hinted at his disquiet earlier? or was it a one-off, somewhat disconcerting to ike-watchers? was it heralded at the time, or did its importance grown as it aged?
Katz at [38]: c’mon now, that’s a very incomplete story on how Ike’s fears may have been realised. I think I first heard of that famous speech in the late 60’s, when critics of US foreign policy and military power said Eisenhower’s prophecy had already come to pass. George Bush has inherited much; some of it many decades old. He’s not the daddy of the MIC, he’s the great great great great grandson.
BTW, how much of the Soviet MIC has been dismantled under Yeltsin, Putin,… too little, I’d hazard a guess.