I’m certainly not the first commentator in the last four years of war to cite the late sociologist C. Wright Mills. But his 1958 work, The Causes of World War III , is so contemporary, so prescient that it can hardly be over-quoted.
I’m talking about his concept of "crackpot realism," a tough-talking, no-nonsense, power-driven line of thought and action that invariably leads to disaster. Mills was particularly concerned with looming nuclear war, but his analysis holds fine in today’s non-nuclear (so far) conflict.
“In crackpot realism,” he wrote, “a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. ... So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.”
You might think he was reporting on the planning of the Iraq invasion when he wrote, “... They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines... In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what.”
Well, it’s apparent now what we’ve won, yet anyone who offers another path or another view gets the same contempt from the people who brought us to this horrible place. For instance, there is the rebuke libertarian Ron Paul received from Rudolph Giuliani during Republican debate for suggesting that our ongoing bombardment of the Middle East was a cause of the World Trade Center attack. “That's really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani insisted. “As someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.”
On May 23, John Edwards told the Council on Foreign Relations, "By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam."
First we framed the Middle East conflict as a war when it wasn’t, then we initiated a full-scale war to match our language. Then, we lost.
The response to Edwards was either to attack the messenger, as the RNC did, or to dismiss it as fantasy, as the right-wing blog world did. Hard-headed realists like Dick Cheney simply continued to push the war, and the Congress continued to fund it. Apparently, a majority of federal legislators fear being identified as traitors to a war that was crackpot from the get-go. Mills would understand.
--Alec Dubro |
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 10:06 AM
