Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories depicting a moral sickness found
deep inside the souls of New England Puritans, fearing he himself
was infected by this strange malady which turned warm blood into
ice-water. Great historians, such as John K. Fairbank (who
mentioned in The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 that
American opium-smugglers in China, all from the Northeastern
states so far as I know, weren’t devoted to crime but rather to
good rates-of-return whether from criminal or legal activities)
and David Herbert Donald (who wrote in Lincoln of
Lincoln’s knowledge of the role played by Northeasterners in the
slave-trade and how it led him to consider his intended `kindly’
treatment of the South after the war to be simple justice). More
recently Alfred McCoy in authoritative books about or touching
upon the crimes of the American national security agencies, Peter
Dale Scott in a number of books on similar matters, and James
Bradley in some books on the delusions and crimes behind the
American Empire—which never really took coherent shape, have
dealt with the role which drug-smuggling,arms-smuggling, aggressive
war, regime-changes, and other crimes have played in this strangest
of all Empires, tied together only by an American ruling-class which
exploits its fellow-citizens as much as it betrays friends and foes
throughout the world.
Here is the confession of Captain Ahab from Melville’s great
novel, Moby Dick:
All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
This quote from Captain Ahab inspired my essay: My Ends
are Mad and Now I’m Also Stupid, which I published in
2006/12 near the dawn of my blogging activities. The title tells
the truth about the American leaders and their lapdogs in Europe
and other parts of the world.
It’s perhaps still worse than that. The leaders, and citizens, of
the Western countries are not only mad and stupid but also
shallow. From inside their heads, they view reality as modern
children view a movie about worlds of which they have no
experience or knowledge, including the world in which their
parents grew up only a few decades ago; that is, their minds glide
over reality as do their hearts and hands. This is why so many
find it easy to break their deepest relationships, such as those
with family-members and others we saw often when growing up.
Something had gone terribly wrong in the West during and after the
Enlightenment and that wrongness had ripened in Puritan New
England and a few other states in which Calvinism had some major
influence on feelings and thoughts and modes of behavior: New
York, New Jersey, Delaware, and even Pennsylvania.
The Americans of past generations and of this generation should
have paid attention to Nathaniel Hawthorne and other insightful
thinkers who saw the same problems in the New England Puritan
moral character as he. Alexis de Tocqueville even predicted that
Americans would form a sort of society never before seen, a
benevolent totalitarianism in our modern terms, because of their
ability to avoid seeing even the bluntest of facts if those facts
conflicted with their existing view of things; Solzhenitsyn called
Americans a “uniquely evil people” because of his realization of
the same when he learned of the large-scale round-ups of civilian
refugees (3.5 million or so) by the American and British armies in
Europe during 1946-7, which refugees were turned over to the
Soviets to be used as slave labor.
The more recent American problems have developed because of
serious problems in our ruling class, children of privilege and
students—if that be the right word—of the Ivy Leagues.
Writing of the problems in American human being rather than of the
resulting crimes and suicidal programs, these were the problems
Hawthorne saw in his own Puritan ancestors and also in the
Americans of his day whether they retained the Calvinist faith or
had become some sort of Deist or even a variety of atheist. As
our goals and motives have become even more insane than those of
Captain Ahab, we have held them all the more to be holy and
righteous. Even attacks on American soldiers who are part of a
criminal invasion are taken as signs of evil on the part of the
residents of the victim country; We dig even deeper into our own
minds as we, or our soldiers or our leaders or our corporations,
come under verbal or physical attack in countries where we have no
business being since we weren’t invited and those countries were
no danger to us. Let me try again: the fact those countries
resist our invasions are proof of their evil. Or so goes the
story.
Oh, well, what is to be done with a people who are so decent in
their own communities and so ignorant of history and so willfully
selective of the knowledge they take in of ongoing events?
That erratically great Founding Father John Adams tried to warn
his fellow-citizens that a ruling class would inevitably develop
as men who had gained great wealth and power—by fair means or
foul—would do their best to pass that wealth and power on to
their descendants. As President and as a private citizen, Adams
tried to get his fellow-citizens to support the development of an
explicit aristocracy to establish peace and order by drawing those
powerholders and wealth-holders into the open where they would
receive public honor in return for constraints on their behavior.
Adams knew strange things would happen if those powerholders and
wealth-holders remained in the shadows. That background
`conspiracy’ described as “They go to the same schools, marry each
other’s sisters, etc.” would operate in either case, but—in
modern terms—if they remained in the shadows, there would also
be a variety of crimes by means of which members of the ruling
class protect what is theirs or increase what is theirs in ways
that hide their very existence as a class.
So it is that the peoples of Vietnam and Iraq and Pakistan and so
many other countries including the United States itself are seen
as existing only to provide wealth and power to the leaders of the
United States, who have developed a genteel and coldblooded
version of the hotblooded greed and lust of the many conquering
barbarians of history. So it was that the rational exploitation
of the peoples of Africa and China and Hawaii was seen as only the
sane means to the insane ends of the ancestors of the dominant
group of our leaders, the so-called blue-bloods and their
proteges. `Sane’ is of course defined in terms of the rational
calculation of rates-of-return.
The interested reader might wish to read two other essays:
Dualism: JFK and the Quite Speakable and Quite
Historical where I discuss these aspects of the American
ruling class (power-elite or whatever) in a little more detail.
For still another look at this sad situation, see It’s
Not Hypocrisy, It’s Brainwashing Deeper than Orwell
Foresaw. Again, the American people have never called
their allegedly great families to account for their activities and
have learned to consider some truly brutal men as being genial and
friendly because of their gentle public personas—there seem to
be few Americans who can detect the presence of brutality verging
on outright evil. Some perspective from a detached viewpoint can
be found in the articles
Opium Wars and First Opium War. Americans were
the beneficiaries of the first war more than the later two; in
fact, some great New England families (and benefactors of some
great hospitals and public libraries in New England and New York)
were smuggling opium in Asia even before the American Revolution,
before the British navy pulverized several Chinese port cities in
response to the Chinese request (addressed to that alleged
Christian, Queen Victoria) to stop the opium-smuggling operations
run by British (and some American) companies and getting their
opium from what were essentially slave-plantations in
India—before and after the British had outlawed the West African
slave-trade.
Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a powerfully insightful book about human
beings titled Dependent Rational Animals. We Americans
have withdrawn inside our heads for our understanding of reality
rather than learning from tradition or learning by responding to
that reality or learning by studying the experiences of those who
have so responded or by learning from those who have analyzed what
we know about reality to make some sense of it all. During that
retreat into our necessarily inadequate selves, we of the
West—with Americans leading the way and New Englanders leading
their fellow-Americans from the shadows—have separated our minds
from our dependency upon each other and upon any God we might
pretend to worship. (That dependency takes various forms: social,
economic, moral, etc.) We Americans, individuals in many cases
but certainly we as a people, have learned to coldbloodedly treat
others (and increasingly each other) as means to our ends.
But who needs Christ or His Father or their Spirit? We can do it
all on our own. Look at all we’ve accomplished. We’ve
established a New World Order, extending it even to such backward
nations as Iraq and Libya and Pakistan. If only we’d not lost our
godly nerves and had dropped more napalm and more explosives, we
could have extended our benevolent rule to Vietnam and North Korea
and to more of Latin America. If killing 2 million Vietnamese and
another 2 million Cambodians, 2 million Koreans in the north, we
should have killed 4 million of each of those peoples. Then they
would have learned to love us and appreciate us for our moral
superiority.
We’re working our divine will, even as I write, in so many
countries and have even turned inward toward the regions of the
United States and Europe where human being isn’t so subservient to
the American ruling class as it is in, for example, the city and
suburbs of New York.
This is a summary of my view of these matters:
Human being in the West lives inside of its individual and
communal minds. The outside world is an annoyance at best, a
Satanic Realm, a Flyover Realm, or a chaos needing to be organized
to the purposes of Wall St and that swamp on the Potomac River.
Choose a description from the viewpoint of your favorite
ideologue, whether Gramscian snowflake or Free-Marketer destroying
human communities to enrich humans of the right sort or
drug-smuggling/arms-smuggling National Security gangster. The
world, the mere world, doesn’t correspond to the truth inside
their heads. The world must be either reshaped to be true or
destroyed.