08.16.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:17 pm by diantus
In the final analysis, one cannot deny that America’s history in modern times has been a pretty amazing story. Coming from the humblest and most idealistic roots, she has risen to become a world power whose scope is nothing short of incomparable. This is not to say that none have tried. Comparisons have been drawn between the US and Rome, the British Empire, and many other great and powerful political empires throughout history. While all of these comparisons are apt, and there is much that America could learn from such lessons, none can adequately describe the scope of American influence in the world today.
To elaborate on this point, let us understand America as having established a legacy in every conceivable corner of the globe. America holds the reigns of the global Internet, has cultural and commercial entities in virtually every country regardless of their ideological bent, and, for better or worse, remains the single most formidable military power ever known. None of the great powers throughout history have wielded quite as much clout as the US, and none have possessed population so indisposed towards the level of global responsibility that America has.
With this in mind, I’m going to take a different tack towards my homeland and dispense with my typical criticisms. Let us argue for a moment that there is much desirable about having a largely democratic and free-market oriented country such as the United States as the final arbiter in world affairs. As I watch the US whittle away at the good will extended to her by many of her allies and enemies, as I watch her plunge herself into conflict after conflict, I cannot help but be reminded of the elements of power that America seems to have forgotten.
Every great power in history has been sustained by a single critical calculation. This is productive potential and military potential. One alone cannot ensure dominance without the other. In the Second World War, a German general was quoted as saying that the Americans didn’t fight with men – we fought with shells. Many of the most important engagements of that conflict were testaments to our nation’s ability to out-build our enemies and smash their war machines. Had we, for example, lost the Battle of Midway, would it have crippled our armed services in the Pacific? Hardly. While we might have lost some time in our advance, the construction of new ships and the training of fresh troops would have overcome the loss of those battle groups. In the end, Japan simply could not hold against the might of our industry. This factor made any incompetence shown by our military leadership tolerable and its brilliance undefeatable.
I am not suggesting a return to mercantilism. On the contrary, I am a staunch supporter of increased levels of multilateral globalization and the further integration of the international economy. But I am becoming increasingly concerned by the declining returns enjoyed by the average American. Despite the ongoing claims concerning rising wages, the truth is that there has been a steady stagnation and even decline of real wages for American workers over the course of the last twenty years. From the Marxist perspective, this movement of wealth away from the lower and middle classes should be expected. But the fact is that between those two factors that ensure “Great Power” status, one is economic productivity and wealth at home. If the level of wealth in your population is lower, a nation has a much harder time sustaining healthy development and growth rates.
This brings me to the second, related issue that affects the sustaining and development of American power: military strength. While our ability to wage conventional warfare may be unassailable, military strength is no longer as cut and dry as it may have been in the past. What military analysts refer to as asymmetric warfare has become commonplace and easier to do in an increasingly productive and industrialized world. The infrastructure of warfare has opened somewhat in recent years. Those groups that we refer to as “enemies” have locked us into conflicts over which traditional methods of warfare simply cannot prevail. How do you fight an enemy that will not surrender and will fight literally to the last man? How do you fight an enemy to whom every defeat signals a call to recruitment? Genocide?
Americans have the military capacity to simply eradicate all who stand before us. The weapons and technology exists to simply obliterate entire regions of the earth, and the United States’ current government’s proclivity towards unilateralism certainly could allow for actions from which the diplomatic fallout could be severe. Moreover, the capacity to wage this kind of asymmetric warfare can escalate far more easily than America’s ability to increase military pressure. In other words, we are now involved in a series of conflicts that allow no simple way out. What must be found then is a compromise. The United States must find a way to regenerate its image as a benevolent hegemon; one that doesn’t threaten the values and lives of the people that we claim to be protecting.
I believe that our twin problems must be, and can be solved together. Obviously, in a multipolar world, overwhelming military might doesn’t count for as much as it once did. The fact is, that we already have sizable possessions around the world. The names might change, but Rock n’ Roll and the dollar still reign supreme. Sitting in a bar in Osan, South Korea what I hear on the radio is American style pop music being sung in Korean; what I read in the paper is the responses of American statesmen to developing hostage crises in the Middle East. What I also see is a growing resentment to the overt and largely ineffective displays of American military power in all corners of the globe. Our men are flying from Japan to the Philippines in order arrest terrorists. Are we solving geopolitical problems or simply meddling? Most people see the latter.
What is needed is a concerted effort to increase America’s appearance of multilateralism. We need to work with our allies and make our enemies into friends. No government claims that its main goals are the destruction and oppression of its own people. We must hold them accountable to the standards of the societies over which they rule, and not attempt to overtly dominate them. The fact is that the benefits of increased contact and integration will win the battles for us. Like any good merchant, we simply need to offer our wares and let the people line up to buy.
But changing our national outlook and increasing pessimism begins at home. Our own people are suffering from a decrease in the quality of education and the sale of the American dream. We remain the wealthiest nation on earth, but a sizable proportion of our people are only barely subsisting on unacceptable wages and non-existent healthcare. America’s greatest age was one in which the distribution of wealth was far more equitable and everyone really was offered ever opportunity to succeed. We need a return to those policies – before corporate greed ruled our politics and handouts went to the needy and not to the wealthy in the vain hope that they would stimulate the economy. It is time for us to step back and really evaluate the direction our country is going. We are unique in history, but we do not defy analysis. If we aren’t careful, we are likely to find ourselves desperately overstretched, increasingly impoverished, and totally used up. It would be a disservice to the American people and the world if we allowed that to happen.
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05.27.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:33 am by diantus
Communism. I want you to roll that word around in your head just a little bit. Think for a moment the images that come to mind. Let them drift through your head and form impressions. Most of us, myself included, will see soldiers in formation, parades through the Kremlin, a man alone on Tiananmen Square facing down a line of tanks, red flags, and other deeply engraved symbols of dictatorial oppression. Others of us find our thoughts drawn to the idealism that gave Communism its early appeal – an appeal that still exists. We try to remember what it really meant to raise the red flag and what that act meant to established powers.
Because of this, there is a natural impulse on the left to defend the actions and aims of regimes who can trace their origins to revolutionary fervor. Once upon a time, they claimed to be building a new world and trying to make things better for all of us. We think to ourselves, “if not for the constant meddling of western powers, who knows if they wouldn’t have succeeded.â€Â In this way, we absolve ourselves the weaknesses of our own analytical models, inadvertently forgive tyranny, and provide comfort to powers that have no business being comforted.
This problem is especially pointed in South Korea where a whole new generation of young leftists is growing up in the shadow the world’s last “communist†regime. Having only just emerged from the shadow of dictatorship itself, this country is new to free speech and relatively open political debate. Moreover, until very recently, the writings of Marx and Engles were illegal (as I understand it), despite the fact that a close reading of even the more basic works suggests a strong opposition to iron fisted dictatorship, since the real commitment in their thought was to genuine equality – made possible by a dictatorship of the proletariat (something like this emerged during the Paris Commune or the original system of Soviets immediately prior to the formation of the USSR). Leftist students across the South are engaged in active study of their northern countrymen, hoping to find the answers to political troubles at home, and in a country so obviously dominated by powerful business interests and a strong militaristic streak that exists hand-in-hand with vehement anti-communism, the problems are many.
Two important thoughts come to mind in light of all this. The first is that being a Leftist does not necessitate being a Communist in the first place. The leftist criticism does indeed find its best expression through a deep mistrust of capitalism and the complex interplay of power that accompanies it. While the most influential thinker on the subject is Karl Marx – the founder of modern communism (though everything he actually wrote about the governmental system known as communism couldn’t fill a small brochure), simply being interested in alternative models of development and economic activity does not necessitate the full own adoption of Marxist thought. Secondly, there is nothing explicitly “Communist†about the regimes in China and the DPRK.  Communism is supposedly a system that embodies fairness, justice, progress, and individual liberty. Forced labor camps, deep repression, dictatorship, a complete absence of civil liberties is not Communism and more than it can be heralded as socially progressive and democratic.
Of course, it is only natural for a leftist thinker to want these regimes to succeed in their stated aims. It is also easy to cite the numerous crimes committed by hegemonic regimes against so-called communist powers. It is also easy to speculate as to how things might have been different had there been less interference on the part of these powers. I often wonder how the world might have been changed in the US embraced the USSR as a partner before the rise of Stalin. Maybe they would have succeeded, and maybe it was wrong for us to have forced such a defensive posture on the basis of an ideological conflict. Eventually though, you need embrace the reality of the now, and understand that places like North Korea will never be worker’s paradises and that Kim Il Sung was never a great revolutionary and was, in fact, a dangerous ideologue who cloaked himself in revolutionary rhetoric in order to obfuscate his own megalomania despite being a puppet of greater powers in China and Russia.
To be a leftist in today’s world means to be relentlessly critical of the systems of domination that exist all around us. To be progressively so means to look for ways to improve the distribution of wealth and upset the status quo without hurting the very souls that you seek to help. In the end, a leftist thinker must be highly self-interested and willing to live at the bottom of whatever hierarchy he creates. Justice is truly done when the top has no systematic advantages over the bottom, and the individual is supreme once more.
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09.12.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:56 pm by diantus
 Five years ago, I was working on my undergraduate degree, playing lots of video games, and happily unemployed. September 11th fell on a beautiful Tuesday that year (sunny and cool – my favorite kind of weather), which I remember because was taking a class on ancient China at the time. Needless to say though, we did not talk too much about the Zhao dynasty.  Instead we wound up focusing on the ramifications of the acts of that morning. My second class that day was even less successful. My next professor decided to storm into the room several minutes late and declare, “I was going to talk about Trotsky today, but some damn fool decided to ran two planes into New York and make that impossible. Go home.â€
           He wasn’t wrong. The campus was eerily quiet that day. No one really seemed to know what to make of it. I know I didn’t, but I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid of more terrorist attacks mind you – a display like September 11th is not easily repeated. I was worried about the future. Prior to that moment, things were going pretty well for us. Sure, the economy was a little slow, but so was the president. I was in college with my whole life to look forward to, and these things were going to pass. But then, some “damn fool†decided to crash those planes into New York, and the whole country went mad over the next five years. I couldn’t have known at the time, but I was distinctly uncomfortable by the lack of understanding that morning.
           Of course I realize that this is supposed to be a time of national mourning; that with all the trouble in the world, we should look back at that terrible day with heavy hearts. There are those who use the anniversary to look grimly forward to a future where America will strike down her enemies, punishing them for their transgressions and emerging (someday) as the greatest nation on earth to be loved by all. Most of us didn’t have those kinds of ideas at the time and understood September 11th the same way I did (though I’m not to proud to admit it) and promptly collapsed on my couch for nearly five days of heavy news consumption, only occasionally wandering off for the odd class or meal.
           Looking back, I realize that my interest in political science and associated studies really came from the information overload that I subjected myself to during that period immediately following September 11th. I watched as our understanding morphed and changed over time. I watched the relentless bombing of Afghanistan and the uncomfortable smiles and sympathies of the Saudi crown prince (from whose country Osama came). I watched George Bush turn from the idiot king he was into the idiot king that people were looking to for leadership. I still didn’t understand.
           Then I realized what was happening. No one had the faintest idea what was going on. America was lashing out like a schoolboy that had just been punched in the nose and couldn’t see straight. It was stupid. It was destructive. It was pointless. It was counterproductive. I can’t blame the “liberal†media either. After all, they were reassuring me and trying to tell me that I was being looked after (that and I watched mostly Fox News at the time). It didn’t take me too long to realize that I didn’t really want these sorts of people looking after me. These were people that would lash out recklessly at anything they could. These were people so built up on hubris and patriotism that they couldn’t see past them end of their nose. To make it worse, they decided to declare an unlimited, unending war on an enemy that was every bit as arrogant and morally isolated. They were my countrymen.
           September 11th was an opportunity to create a bold new vision of the world. We could have done so much with the rubble of those buildings. Instead we launched two unsuccessful wars, brilliantly squandered the respect of our allies and would-be friends and destroyed millions of lives. People are still struggling to understand what happened on September 11th and how anyone could do such a thing, but none of them have been paying attention to our blustering polity and its bloody nose. This September 11th, I’d like to take a moment for the victims that have yet to be created. The children of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the United States, England, Israel, and whoever else happens to get caught up in the unending cycle of retribution that has gone on and on and on for the uncountable millennia. This is what September 11th taught me. War is easy. Peace is for the strong. And you and I will never be free.
Someday, on a dusty highway somewhere, a soldier or insurgent, rebel or freedom fighter, will sit down and really wonder why he is fighting and not sitting in a café somewhere and enjoying the quiet company of a few close friends – like I did, five years ago on September the 11th.
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