The Logic of Realism: With Sides

 

The Logic of Realism: With Sides

Peter Schultz

 

                  The logic of realism, from Newman’s book, JFK and Vietnam: “At the time the picture of the war MACV presented to McNamara was one of gradual success but one in which more aircraft, equipment, and men were always needed to get the job done. The success story both forestalled the notion that the situation was desperate enough to warrant a Laotian-type political solution and justified the further expansion an intensification of the ‘winning’ US effort.” [p. 320 emphasis original]

 

                  It is important to recognize that as a realist McNamara was already convinced by such logic, and the intelligence General Harkins offered merely validated his doctrinaire realism. Hence, he didn’t question Harkins’ intelligence. To see the need to question Harkins, McNamara would have to have seen the need to questioned realism, his and others. Had he been willing to do that, he wouldn’t have been among “the best and the brightest.” Rather, he would have resembled Kurt Vonnegut or Cormac McCarthy. To be a “player” requires buying into the prevailing ideology, into realism, into the single vision. And such a purchase, rendered the best and the brightest, unbeknownst to themselves, blind.

 

                  An aside: Trump’s blindness. Trump may be able to dismantle the Department of Education, but this will be useless unless he subverts the realism, the single vision ideology that underlies our educational institutions. Our problem isn’t bureaucratic. It is philosophic. Unless that is understood, playing around with bureaucracies will prove futile. Bureaucracies do not create evils; rather, the evils are created by the philosophy of realism, of the single vision. “If the rule you followed brought you to this point, then what good was your rule? “(Anton Chigurh, No Country of Old Men)

 

                  Another aside: JFK’s blindness. Because he was a realist, JFK was forced to act deceptively regarding Vietnam. His realism required that he claim to be leaving Vietnam without losing the war. Realists cannot abide by defeats because defeats call into question their beliefs. Failures are unacceptable for realists by undercutting their convictions.

 

                  But deception is problematic insofar as JFK’s deceptions could be – and eventually were – subverted by events in Vietnam. As the war worsened, the logic of realism required renewed and intensified efforts to succeed, to avoid defeat. So as the war worsened, the commitment to an intensified war effort grew. Only insofar as defeat could be legitimated, made acceptable, justified, could the logic of realism and an ever-greater war effort be subverted. What was needed was a mindset that rejected the idea that defeat in Vietnam would be “losing Vietnam.” A mindset was needed that did not see Vietnam as a nation to be “won.” A mindset was needed that did not see nations as merely entries in either “the win column” or “the loss column” of international politics. A mindset was needed that sees nations as entitled to self-determination, i.e., as entitled to choose their politics, their destinies, despite how those choices impacted U.S. national security. A mindset was needed by which U.S. national security did not trump the right of a people to self-determination, ala’ the Declaration of Independence.

 

                  The logic of realism is all about winning and losing, about winners and losers. Were JFK to “lose” Vietnam, he would have been condemned as a “loser” and presidents cannot legitimately be losers. They have to be winners or, at the very least, look like winners. Hence, deception or duplicity is legitimate, even when it means putting US soldiers’ lives at risk in order to win an election - which is what JFK was doing in 1963. It is also what LBJ did prior to and after the presidential election of 1964, as well as what Nixon did in his first term. The politics of realism involves, repeatedly, deception or duplicity because failure is inevitable in politics. Ironically though, our realists cannot accept this reality. So it goes.

 

 

Realism and the Political: Reflections on Vietnam

 

Realism and the Political: Reflections on Vietnam

Peter Schultz

 

                  Here is an interesting passage from John M. Newman’s book, JFK and Vietnam: “McNamara did not question [General] Harkins’ view that the war was being won….Harkins’ claim seems so incredibly naïve that one may ask: how could the American commander [and the Secretary of Defense McNamara] be so out of touch with reality? … We do not know what motivated Harkins, but whatever it was it surely defies a sound military explanation.” [pp. 287 and 288]

 

                  Newman fails to see that McNamara and Harkins, et. al., were realists. They embraced realism as a doctrine or dogma and so long as they did, success was taken for granted, at least once the realistic way forward was discovered and applied. That’s the essence of doctrinaire realism, viz., that being realistic guarantees success. Doctrinaire realists have no reason to doubt their eventual success because that’s the promise of being a realist, being successful. One becomes a realist in order to be successful. So, it is only by questioning and abandoning realism as doctrine that failure becomes visible, becomes a real possibility. So long as elites embrace realism as a doctrine, just so long will they be unable to see failure as a real possibility. Realists always presume when facing what looks like failure something like the following: “We just haven’t found the realistic way forward and if we keep looking and trying, we will find that way. Guaranteed!”

 

                  So, McNamara and Harkins, et. al., not only had “a wholly unrealistic view of the war,” they also embraced a doctrinaire view of the world that blinded them to “real reality,” which includes of course the possibility of failure. Being realists was, unbeknownst to McNamara and Harkins, their real problem. Their problem was a philosophical problem, not a military or a political problem. Their philosophy of realism blinded them to the possibility of failure, which was obvious to many U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers and even to many Vietnamese peasants and many American dissenters. “The best and the brightest” were neither.

 

 

Imperialism and the Political: Kenya

 

Imperialism and the Political: Kenya

Peter Schultz

 

                  Here’s an interesting passage from the book, The Rule of Empires, by Timothy H. Parsons, regarding British imperialism in Kenya.

 

                  “The Kenyan imperial state was one of the most oppressive manifestations of the new imperialism. It grafted its deceitful legitimizing ideologies onto a highly exploitive model of the kind of old-style settler colonialism that destroyed the Amerindian and Aboriginal civilizations of North America and Australia. Dressing the East Africa Protectorate’s pacification campaigns in the garb of liberal humanitarianism was bad enough, but the settlers’ argument that they were civilizing the people of the highlands by exploiting their labor was simply disgusting. As one dubious official in the Colonial Office acidly noted: ‘Does anyone really believe in the educative value of labour on a European farm?’ The reality of the settlers’ self-avowed goal of making Kenya into a ‘white man’s’ country turned Africans into a permanent underclass.” [p. 348]

 

                  This suggests that the ideology of liberal humanitarianism was merely a “garb,” used “deceitfully” to hide what was really going on. The implication is that had the ideology of liberal humanitarianism been taken seriously, then the Kenyan imperial state would not have been oppressive.

 

                  But this assumes that the ideology of liberal humanitarianism is not pathological, that it constitutes a kind of politics that is not only best but is actually “ideal.” In fact, as the dubious official in the Colonial Office observed, such an assumption is unwarranted insofar as it requires believing that labor intrinsically has “an educative value,” and that those who labor will not therefore be relegated to a permanent underclass that necessarily detracts from the laborers’ human worth by having them engage in dehumanizing work.  

 

More generally, by this assessment, the oppressive character of the Kenyan imperial state was the result of deceit. But if all political orders, all regimes are pathological, intrinsically so, then even if the Kenyan imperial state had been genuinely based on liberal humanitarianism, it would still be oppressive. Insofar as all regimes are pathological, defective, unjust, and oppressive, then all forms of imperialism, including that form that may be labeled “liberal humanitarian imperialism,” will be defective, unjust, and oppressive.

 

Machiavelli observed in The Prince that while most everyone admired Hannibal’s greatness, they failed to see that his greatness was due to his “inhuman cruelty.” The same might be said of mankind’s greatest empires, that while they might appear to be most admirable, they were only made possible and maintained by inhuman cruelty. The inhuman cruelty that the British engaged in Kenya to try to maintain Kenya’s imperial state was no accident. And once that inhuman cruelty was no longer acceptable to the British, the Kenya imperial state failed. So it goes.

Robert Strange McNamara: Dominatrix

 

Robert Strange McNamara: Dominatrix

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from JFK and Vietnam by John M. Newman, and it describes a Joint Chiefs of Staff memo sent to President Kennedy on January 13, 1962 arguing that it was essential for the United States to commit combat forces to Vietnam.

 

                  “In it the Chiefs described the stakes in Vietnam as incredibly high, and said they had done all they could under the restraints of the President’s program….Their solution, of course, was to send U.S. combat troops to Vietnam….Since the prevention of communist domination in South Vietnam was an ‘inalterable objective’ of the United States…,the military objective ‘must be to take expeditiously all actions necessary to defeat communist aggression there.’ The Chiefs stated categorically that ‘the fall of South Vietnam to communist control would mean the eventual communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.’ U.S. allies and neutral India would be ‘outflanked,’ and the last significant British military strength in Asia would be ‘eliminated’ with the loss of Singapore and Malaya. Then all of the Indonesian archipelago would come under Soviet ‘domination.’” [p. 163]

 

                  This is an excellent example of what might called “the domination myth.” According to this mindset, domination is not only possible, but it even seems to be the all-too-common result of political activity. So, unless the U.S. committed itself, in the strongest way possible militarily, against communist forces in Southeast Asia, then willy nilly Southeast Asia would fall under the domination of the communists and the Soviet Union. Moreover, this myth is evident not only in the analysis of the communist threat but is also evident in the Chiefs’ recommendations for military action via combat troops. That is, if the U.S. opposes the communists, then the U.S. can and will dominate Southeast Asia. Failure to dominate, either by the communists or by the U.S., isn’t entertained as a possibility.

 

                  So, even more so than what was called “the domino theory,” whereby the nations of Southeast Asia would “fall over” like a row of dominoes one after the other once South Vietnam “fell” to the communists, the domination myth lay at the bottom of the thinking that led the U.S. into a war in Southeast Asia, a war that it eventually lost. It is this myth that helps explain why failure and its consequences were never analyzed by U.S. policy makers, and especially not by Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. Convinced that if the U.S. committed itself to war in Southeast Asia it could not lose, McNamara, despite a lot of evidence that should have told him the U.S. was losing that war, pushed on and on and on. The domination myth made McNamara act like a dominatrix, as it were, thinking and acting as if he could control, i.e., dominate the North Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Chinese, and eventually all of Southeast Asia. Domination is the key to success, in politics and other activities, so it is best to have a “dominatrix” in control. And it was McNamara who was thought to possess the expertise required as he allegedly demonstrated during WW II and in his career at Ford Motor Company.

 

                  The implications of the domination myth are widespread. Consider, for example, the phenomenon labeled “transgenderism.” It seems indisputable that what we call “gender” is, well, “slippery” or often ambiguous, with more than a few humans feeling that the gender they were assigned at birth isn’t their actual gender and so, sometimes, these humans seek to “transition” to their actual gender. But this assumes that the gender we are born with, however ambiguous or arbitrary, can be changed. That is, it is assumed that we humans can and should dominate our gender issues, just as we can and should dominate our political issues. The U.S. failure in Vietnam – and elsewhere – might indicate that domination isn’t always possible and certainly isn’t always desirable.  

Going Postal

 

Going Postal

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from the book, Going Postal, from its chapter entitled “The Banality of Slavery.” The book ‘s author is Mark Ames, and the book is well worth a read.

 

                  “…why is it that in the roughly twenty years of Soviet gulags we know of only one serious uprising … in spite of the millions who perished? Why did so many Russians ‘willingly’ go the camps and ‘let themselves’ be brutalized without a fight? Varlan Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is perhaps the greatest, most wrenching account of how men adapt to the most degrading conditions. It describes how they adjust to the new ‘normal’ life as brutalized slaves, how the word ‘normal’ has no fixed meaning, and how every one of us is hard wired to be a slave, given the right conditions. It is not something we want to think about too much, which is why Solzhenitsyn’s version of the gulags, with its focus on evil Communist oppressors and the few heroes who resisted, is infinitely more popular in America than Shalamov’s version, which avoids facile divisions between good guys and bad guys, heroes and oppressors, and digs into our inner slave.

 

                  “We don’t hear much about this inner slave … though it is far more common, and manifests itself far more regularly, than the allegedly dangerous ‘heart of darkness’ of which are warned. The slave psychology is too familiar. It appears in the most banal settings: in the workplace, in relationships, at home or at school. Alternatively, the primitive aspect is fantastic, alien, and exciting. While Joseph Conrad is to be applauded … his Heart of Darkness pitch, compared to Shalamov, is an exotic getaway vacation designed to make the reader feel a more profound sense of self. No one wants to travel up the other African river, the one that reveals man’s heart of submissiveness.” [p. 34]

 

                  It strikes me that Ames’s argument might help illuminate Aristotle’s concept of “regime,” whereby he argued that all political orders, democratic, polity, oligarchic, aristocratic, monarchic, and tyrannic, are regimes or “ways of life.” That is, that political life is composed of regimes as ways of life points to man’s “inner slave” or his submissiveness. In other words, the regime indicates that when Aristotle argued that humans are political animals, he meant that humanity’s default setting, so to speak, is submissiveness. And it also illuminates why Aristotle argued the slavery is a permanent feature of political life and why it is almost never true that the good citizen is also a good person.  At the very least, this is something worth thinking about.

Beware the Best and the Brightest

 

Beware the Best and the Brightest

Peter Schultz

 

                  “Affirming the political” is the way of making one’s narcissism socially acceptable or legitimate. Affirming the political cloaks narcissism, the conviction of superiority, as a political choice, as the best political choice. Hence, to acknowledge that your politics, your political choices aren’t choice worthy or are failures means acknowledging your “superiority” is unreal, means acknowledging your inferiority, as it were. As a result, those convinced of their superiority, those convinced that they are elite refuse to acknowledge that their political choices are failures and refuse to abandon them.

 

                  They are in fact trapped, as if in a vicious circle with no way out. To preserve their “credibility,” their legitimacy, their power and positions, they must “go forward,” e.g., by doubling down on their chosen but failing policies. If bombing isn’t working, then increase its level. If violence isn’t working, then increase the violence. For only in that way can elites maintain their power and positions, their “superiority.” Hence, failure must be denied and disguised, covered up. Failure may even be unthinkable; it is definitely unacceptable.

Understanding America's Politics of Failure

 

Understanding America’s Politics of Failure

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from David Halberstam’s book, The Best and the Brightest, his account of America’s failure in Vietnam.

 

                  “[McGeorge Bundy] was a man with a great instinct for power, and he loved it, he responded to where power was moving, trying at the same time to get people to do intelligent, restrained things in an intelligent, restrained manner.

 

                  “Besides, the idea and the meaning of failure to him and many of the men around him was an almost alien thing. He was so confident in himself, in his tradition and what he represented, that he had no concept about what failure might really mean, the full extent of it. It never entered the calculations. He and others had, in fact, achieved success; they had won awards, climbed in business and academe, each position had brought them higher. They had of course paid the price along the way. Fragmentation had again and again confronted morality, and morality had from time to time been sliced, but it had always been for the greater good of the career. It was the American way, ever upward; success justified the price, longer and longer hours invested, the long day became a badge of honor, and the long day brought the greater title. Success was worth it, and after all, success in the American way was to do well. But the price was ultimately quite terrible. Washington was a company town in the company country where success mattered, and in the end they could not give up those positions and those titles, not for anything. These were the only things they had left that set them apart; they had no other values, no other identity than their success and their titles. The new American modern man was no longer a whole man; it was John McNaughton able to argue against his interior beliefs on Vietnam in order to hold power, McNamara able to escalate in Vietnam knowing that he was holding the JCS back on nuclear weapons, men able to excise Vietnam from their moral framework. So they could not resign; no one decision, not even a war, could make them give up their positions.” [526]

 

                  Or as I will put it: Their positions and titles offered them social approval for their narcissism and so, of course, they could not, they would not give them up even in the face of abysmal failures. Without their positions and their titles, their lives would be meaningless. And, so, they, the best and the brightest, were trapped in their failures.