On a regular basis, commentators of various viewpoints will re-evaluate what we Americans have done in Afghanistan and other occupied countries, wondering whether we could have acted more effectively. Some even express a bit of concern for the impact of our actions on the innocent civilians who have been killed or injured or impoverished in what seems now to have been a useless war against an enemy which was likely never that dependent upon an Afghan base, an enemy whose leader — one leader anyway — had stated a desire to bankrupt the U.S. by drawing our country into wars expensive in financial and moral terms and maybe expensive in lives.
The thousands of Americans killed, the greater number maimed or otherwise injured seriously, is — in ‘realistic’ terms pretty cheap compared to the losses of in the Pacific Theater of World War II and trivial compared to the price paid by the Russian peoples in the European Theater of that same war. Yet, each of those dead or maimed was a son or daughter, husband or wife; in a word — human beings. The same can be said of the far larger numbers of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed, maimed, or injured.
We Americans, and the allegedly ex-colonizing peoples of Europe, have entangled ourselves in various countries of Asia. Perhaps it is only coincidence that we particularly concern ourselves with countries rich with oil or natural gas or with those countries which can provide routes for getting oil or gas out of a landlocked country in such a way that Russia, China, and probably India can be cut out of the action or forced to pay our price. I doubt it’s much of a coincidence.
Let me leave moral issues in a state of suspense to ask a question which most, not all, commentators ignore:
If the issue is access to oil and natural gas and perhaps some other natural resources, why don’t we deal with this important economic issue by way of economic means? We claim to believe in economic freedom. Why don’t we enter good-faith negotiations to buy the oil and natural gas and whatever else?
When a brutal dictator or an elected leader makes a plausible attempt to defend his country’s interests, we invade and conquer, typically making the situation much worse for the common folk of that country. We spend lives and wealth to get what was often provided to us in the oil markets. Maybe we drive the price down but I’d be hard-pressed to believe that our savings in that way come close to paying for the bases and soldiers and weapons systems which help us save pennies at the gas-pump.
Of course, we can say that Saddam Hussein was a bad man who needed overthrow because he supported al-Qaida… Well, he didn’t really but he had weapons of mass destruction and factories for making more… Well, he didn’t but he used some of those weapons of mass destruction, the ones he couldn’t make, in the war against Iran… Well, if he used what he couldn’t make himself, that raises the potentially embarrassing question: where’d he get that poison gas? And that might lead to just enough research to tell us that Hussein had avoided assassination attempts over the years because he knew all the tricks of the jackals, professional murderers in the employment of the Western governments and banks — he had been trained as a jackal himself by the CIA in the early 1960s. (See the books of the economic hit-man John Perkins for a frighteningly plausible, and historically consistent, tale of the brutal though cheaper ways in which the West got its way in less powerful countries. It was in a quick browse of Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man where I read that the term ‘jackal’ is used for the professional murderers, employed by the CIA or other agencies in the West or sometimes contracted from outside gangster organization.)
Let me cut through a lot of trash-talk and sloppy thought, even by those who see the basic truth of the situation. I’ll diverge a little, of course, by referring to two recent essays in which I spoke of the claims of Thomas Jefferson that human beings can be roughly sorted into the two classes of exploiters and producers:
The Western powers, most certainly the U.S., are ruled by politicians and bankers and corporate executives whose skills, and probably basic inclinations, lie entirely in the sphere of exploitation.
Somewhere, I believe in the novel Empire, Gore Vidal tells us that John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, bankster equivalents of Attila the Hun and Louis XIV and N. Lenin, despised the likes of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie. Those poor, deluded fools were interested in becoming rich, and leading rich lives, by creating wealth. What idiots. It’s far better to steal control over the wealth created by others, particularly since it can lead to control over the very minds and souls of other human beings. If an exploiter works things right, he’ll even be able to stomp on the faces of other human beings or to do the equivalent in the psychological or political realms.
As I’ve discussed before in various ways, this is a situation where legitimate roles in the developing Body of Christ, bankers and political leaders, can be filled by parasitical organs. Alternatively, we can say that invaders turn legitimate organs into cancerous masses inside that Body.
Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie might well have negotiated with Hussein or with more decent and more legitimate rulers who were destroyed by the Western powers. The give-and-take of free-markets were home to such men, though they certainly were capable of lesser abuses than those of Rockefeller and Morgan. A free-market can be corrupted by lesser sinners but it can still retain at least some of its moral order so long as the participants are morally well-enough formed. This means the greater and lesser entrepreneurs have to be dedicated to making wealth by way of legitimate means and the citizens have to be strong enough and insightful enough to resist the lure of bribes offered by the exploiters — bribes to be paid back at high rates of interest by future generations.
The West is at war with much of humanity because the West is ruled by those who like to rule rather than those who lead, which class includes those businessmen and bankers and lawyers who are part of wealth-producing enterprises. Moreover, the common folk of the West — for various reasons including truly lousy school systems — are incapable of understanding these issues of human morality, of human politics and economics. So far as I can tell, the ‘non-ruling’ leaders of the West, religious and intellectual and others, haven’t a clue about these major realms of human reality.
For now, I’m only interested in the understanding and not in the ways in which we can use a better understanding of human community life, in good and bad forms, to do better in the future. As I’ve said before, this is a long-term effort. Rome wasn’t built in a day and Western Civilization wasn’t either. The very speed with which the United States was built might well explain the instability and the rapidity of corruption. Various commentators were speaking of deep moral defects in the American citizenry and the American republic very early on. As I’ve noted before in The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, serious defects in moral reasoning and the consequent behavior were to be found in the ‘New England’ mind by at least the time of King Phillip’s War, 1675. Though thinkers from the American South are often spot-on in discussing the moral defects of Northerners, they had their own blind spots, effectively ignoring not only the moral but also the practical problems of slavery. The difficulties of assimilating, at any level, a radically different people is the most important of the practical problems.
The United States was the most likely center for a rebirth of Western Civilization, being both marginal in geographical and cultural terms and also substantial in wealth and population. Early on, we Americans refused to take on that responsibility. Our general refusal to take on serious responsibilities showed in the leaders we chose, men who like to exercise centralized control over that which they don’t understand and can’t build. We chose to be ruled by exploiters rather than producers and it would seem that much of the world is paying for our moral irresponsibility as a people.
I’ll write here as if I were a Biblical prophet. After all, we learn from Isaiah and Jeremiah about how to speak about a Creator who remains active not only as the God of His individual creatures but also as the God of human communities and human history. At least we Christians should learn how to so speak from two prophets who were intelligent and knowledgeable about not only the earlier books of the Hebrew people but also about the politics and history of their times.
The Creator isn’t through with the peoples of North America. We are being humbled, though we are just beginning to realize something is going wrong. We are in the early stages of what seems to be a pulverization, a crushing, a smashing of a sort which would frighten those who saw the riches of Babylon, the power of Rome, the glories of Beijing destroyed. Rome and Beijing have been destroyed more than once, but historical forces were focused on those locations and the peoples who lived there. They could suffer for their stupidity or moral irresponsibility, sometimes for their plain bad-luck, but they couldn’t escape the fate of being fathers to greater civilizations. We North Americans will also suffer to keep alive the possibility that our children or grandchildren will exercise moral responsibility though we had chosen to remain perverse and self-centered adolescents.
The prior paragraph is a prophecy and not an attempted prediction. I think it is quite plausible, and it might prove to be a true picture of the future but I’m merely stating a morally well-ordered goal toward which my work is targeted. As a Christian, my morally well-ordered goal is centered upon the Creator and my understanding of the story He’s telling.
I’ll quote Thomas Szasz as quoted in a recent weblog entry by Jim Bovard:
People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend on them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.
Producers, though they might be morally sleazy in their own characters, are engaged in an inherently moral enterprise. Exploiters, though some might well be admirable in their personal characteristics, are engaged in an inherently immoral enterprise.
Make of the above stew what you will. I’m still exploring and testing lines of thoughts as well as ways of speaking which will allow me to make a greater sense of human communities, past and present and future.