Politics and Justice

  

Politics and Justice

Peter Schultz

 

                  If, as many believe, politics is about justice, why are the results so very often injustice? Could it be that injustice is more firmly established in the political arena than justice? Ruminate on the following passages from the book, No Good Men Among the Living, and see what you can see regarding justice, injustice and the political.

 

                  “Across the country … the story repeated itself. In a way…, retribution should have been expected. After all, the Taliban’s human rights record … inspired no sympathy. The problem was not so much that the Taliban were targeted but that they were uniquely targeted: the men allied with the US [had] similarly deplorable records…, yet their crimes went unpunished. A true reconciliation process would have required bringing justice to people from across the political spectrum, or pardoning them all. To the Taliban, justice unequally applied felt like no justice at all.

 

                  “For the top Taliban leadership, the apparent inequity of a ‘war forced on us’ … was so great that there seemed no choice but to organize resistance…. In late 2002, the leadership met … and voted in favor of a last-ditch effort to come to accord with Kabul. Emissaries were sent … but with reconciliation still a toxic idea in Washington and in Northern Alliance circles, the effort fizzled.

 

                  “The course now seemed set. Mullah Omar organized … a dozen top Talibs … [in] a new leadership body…. Mullah Obaidullah took on the task of resurrecting dormant Taliban networks in Afghanistan. He and others reached out to communities … where the resentment was steadily building over the killings, the night raids, the abductions, the torture, the broken alliance, and the fractured hopes. In these communities, the American presence was … seen as an occupation, and Karzai’s government … as Washington’s venal and vicious puppet.

 

                  “From this point on, there would be no turning back.” [195-96]

 

                  Where did the pursuit of justice lead? Retribution is a kind of justice, but it led to injustice. The pursuit of justice short-changed any possibility of reconciliation, ultimately leading to a rebirth of the Taliban and, hence, renewed violence and further injustices. Could it be that despite the claims of many, injustice is intrinsic to politics and what’s required for human decency is to turn away from seeking justice and a turn toward caring and/or reconciliation? Human life is more humane to the extent that caring supplements or displaces justice.

 

                  Machiavelli taught that political greatness, the peak of political virtue, rested on inhuman cruelty. Empires, that is, the greatest political achievements, rest on cruelty, as has been illustrated time and again throughout human history. The greatest political actions, the greatest human actions are the cruelest and bloodiest of wars. Their victors are celebrated with fame, a kind of immortality. When Socrates went in search of justice in the Republic, he ended up recommending the banning of the poets and the exiling of everyone over the age of ten. When Aristotle went in search of the best regime, he ended up with slavery joined with a powerful warrior mentality. As Rousseau said: “Man is born free but everywhere he is chains.” And Huck Finn had to flee “sivilization” in order to be happy, while Tom Sawyer had to manipulate and obfuscate in order to displace and become “the model boy of the village.”

 

                  The line between being president and being criminal is a fine line indeed – as we are witnessing today. In fact, being criminal seems intrinsic to being great politically. Politics may be defined as socially acceptable criminality. And isn’t that one thing that draws people to organizations like the CIA or the FBI? It certainly draws people into the military, as socially approved killing offers fame and glory for those who are most proficient at it, e.g., Chris Kyle, “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history.”

 

                  So, ironically, the pursuit of justice has ambiguous consequences, including the encouragement or production of injustice. As is emphasized in No Good Men Among the Living, Americans engaged in combating the Taliban in Afghanistan were led, again and again, to embrace cruelty. “… the political has a way of making a virtue of necessity, [which meant] that soon suicide bombers became the outgunned Taliban’s answer to B-52s and up-armored Humvees.” [208] Politics also has a way of making a virtue out of injustice, and even of cruelty.

American Savagery

  

American Savagery

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following, which is from the book, No Good Men Among the Living, by Anand Gopal, is an account of US allies in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, called the

“mujahedeen.”

 

“Like victors in a medieval battle, the mujahedeen attacking Afshar hauled captives and booty away. Some…were forced into slavery…. After two days of bloodshed, most of the population of Ashar was dead or missing….Sometimes [the] killing was not enough. A man named Fazil Ahmed was decapitated and his limbs sawed off; his body was found with his penis stuffed in his mouth.

 

“What is certain, however, is the Ashar violence had clear enough political motives: to eliminate a Hazara militia stronghold….At the top of the chain of responsibility sat the operation’s architects, Massoud and Sayyaf….A number of their sub-commanders bear direct culpability, yet every one of them has emerged politically unscathed. Marshal Muhammad Fahim, who oversaw the operation and commanded an important outpost during the siege, became a key American ally during the 2001 invasion, earning himself millions in CIA dollars. Eventually, he became vice president of Afghanistan. Baba Jan, who also helped plan and execute the siege, became a key Northern Alliance commander. After 2001, he grew extravagantly wealthy as a logistics contractor for the US military. Mullah Izzat, who commanded a group that led house searches, also struck gold after the invasion….Zulmay Tofan, complicit in the house searches and forced labor, reaped his post-2001 windfall by supplying fuel to US troops.

 

“The twin dislocations of the Soviet invasion and CIA patronage of the mujahedeen irrevocably reconfigured Afghan society, leading directly to the horrors of the civil war, then to the Taliban, and ultimately to the shape of Afghan politics after 2001. Still, when Zbigniew Brzezinski…was asked in the late 1990s whether he had any regrets, he replied: ‘What is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” [66-67]

 

Brzezinski seems to think that his answers are, self-evidently, the correct ones and indisputable. But, of course, the USSR was on its way to collapsing and probably would have done so even it had not been attacked by the US and its mujahedeen allies in Afghanistan. But let’s say it did not collapse. Wouldn’t the world and Afghanistan have been a better place if the savagery created by the USSR, the US, and mujahedeen had not occurred? Had the USSR prevailed in Afghanistan, women would have been much better off, as would many Afghan men. The Taliban would not have appeared, and its tyranny would be unknown. In fact, it would seem that the best outcome for Afghanistan would have been the rule of the Communists. It would also have meant that the 9/11 attacks would not have occurred. Brzezinski tries to turn the US involvement with the mujahedeen into a melodramatic turning point in world history. Maybe it was, but it is far from clear that if it was, it was a turning point that improved the human condition. It certainly did not improve the condition of Afghanistan and Afghanis as savagery was imposed upon them. But, then, savagery is precisely what realists like Brzezinski embrace, even taking it as proof of their virtues.

From Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald

 

From Fire in the Lake

Peter Schultz

 

                  “The United States might leave Vietnam, but the Vietnam War would now never leave the United States. The soldiers would bring it back with them like an addiction. The civilians may neglect or try to ignore it, but those who have seen combat must find a reason for that killing; they must put it in some relation to their normal experience and to their role as citizens. The usual agent for this reintegration is not the psychiatrist, but the politician. In this case, however, the politicians could give no satisfactory answer to many of those who had killed or watched their comrades killed. In 1971 the soldiers had before them the knowledge that President Johnson had deceived them about the war during his election campaign. All his cryptic signals to the contrary, he had indicated that there would be no American war in Vietnam, while he was in fact making plans for entering that war. They had before them the spectacle of a new President, Richard M. Nixon, who with one hand engaged in peaceful negotiations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and with the other condemned thousands of Americans and Indochinese to die for the principle of anti-Communism. To those who had for so long believed that the United States was different, that it possessed a fundamental innocence, generosity, and disinterestedness, these facts were shocking. No longer was it possible to say, as so many Americans and French had, that Vietnam as a ‘quagmire,’ the ‘pays pourri’ that had enmired and corrupted the United States. It was the other way around. The U.S. officials had enmired Vietnam. They had corrupted the Vietnamese and, by some extension, the American soldiers who had to fight amongst the Vietnamese in their service. By involving the United States in a fruitless and immoral war, they had corrupted themselves.” [511-512]

 

The appropriate designation for the war wasn’t “the Vietnam problem.” It was “the American imperialism problem.” American imperialism corrupted both Vietnam and the United States. The corruption of the United States continues to the present day.

The Morally Virtuous

 

The Morally Virtuous

Peter Schultz

 

                  Here are two passages from Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake, that reward some attention.

 

“To admit that the war was excessive, destructive or that it was not being won was to admit to personal as well as institutional failure….” [457]

 

“’Don’t you realize that everything the Americans do in Vietnam is founded on a hatred of the Vietnamese?’” An embassy official.

 

                  The first passage points to the fact that Americans in Vietnam did not differentiate institutional and personal virtue. There was a “sense of righteous mission that led the United States deeper and deeper into Vietnam. So, the Americans in Vietnam saw themselves as possessing a moral infallibility that justified their actions, their killing and destruction.

 

                  But what if the second passage is correct? What if what the Americans were doing in Vietnam was, in fact, fueled by “a hatred of the Vietnamese?” Insofar as the passage is correct, it means that those who saw themselves as on a righteous mission were delusional. If their moral virtue were fueled by hatred, then the status of that virtue is called into question. Somehow, some way, the moral virtue of the Americans was fueled by a hatred of the Vietnamese.

 

                  “What had looked like an attempt to ‘save Vietnam from the Communists’ was rather an attempt to save American ‘prestige’ around the world.” [472] And American prestige needed “saving” because America’s virtues covered over American hatred, of the Communists and of the Vietnamese. At bottom, it was hatred that drove American foreign policies during the Cold War.

A Fire in the Lake

 

A Fire in the Lake

Peter Schultz

 

                  In her book, Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald analyzed America’s involvement and war-making in Vietnam. The following are some of her and some of my reflections on that enterprise.

 

                  “Americans … assumed [that] the Vietnamese [would] trust them, to take their advice with gratitude, to cooperate in their mutual enterprise of defeating the Communists. The Buddhist crisis came as a terrible shock …. Not only the Buddhists but also General Ky and Colonel Loan seemed to resent American interference. The crisis exposed the contradiction between the American desire to get the GVN [Government of Vietnam] on its feet and their desire to maintain some control over GVN politics….” [368]

 

                  “Did their [the Vietnamese] view of the United States as a ruthless, omnipotent force have something to do with their long history of colonial rule? If so, could the Americans, whatever their intentions, cope with these suspicions any better than the French…?” [ibid]

 

                  What are we witnessing here? Are we witnessing the impossibility of a cooperative colonialism? Of a peaceful colonialism? Of a progressive colonialism? Are we witnessing why the United States’ “involvement” in Vietnam, like the French involvement, was bound to fail; that is, to fail to achieve the United States’s best intentions?

 

                  Regardless of how well-intentioned US elites may have been, there was “no possible basis for cooperation between the two governments or between the Vietnamese government and the rest of the non-Communist groups in Vietnam.” [ibid] War was inevitable so long as the US chose to involve itself in Vietnam. It was the only possible outcome. Colonialism, imperialism, regardless of the intentions of the colonizers or imperialists, inevitably lead to war. As Fowler (in The Quiet American) put it: Innocence should be treated as madness and the innocent should be treated as lepers.

 

                  And this includes the best and the brightest. The most crucial knowledge is knowing the limits of the political. Only with that knowledge can well-intentioned but ultimately inhuman politics, such as that the United States practiced in Vietnam, be avoided. Ironically, those with the best of intentions, viz., the best and the brightest, are the most dangerous politically. They are like a “fire in the lake.”

Strategic Hamlets

 

Strategic Hamlets

Peter Schultz

 

                  The strategic hamlet program in Vietnam “was by far the most ambitious of the Diemist land programs,” according to Frances Fitzgerald in her book Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.”  But it turned out that these strategic hamlets were mirages, little more than “fortified settlements that the armed forces could actually surround.” [155] “At least one American admitted that the NLF was not wrong in calling the settlements concentration camps” – without the ovens. “If the American and British officials really envisioned happy and prosperous peasants standing up to defend their villages … their wishful thinking was mighty indeed.” [157] Moreover, it was usually the case that “the circle of artillery and barbed wire enclosed a political void that waited for the NLF.”

 

                  So, on the one hand, the strategic hamlets were actually assisting the NLF, while being sold as the means of defeating them. The Americans and Diem had become allies, as it were, of the insurgents, the NLF and the communists. If this doesn’t qualify as madness, it is difficult to know what would. One of the most ambitious anti-communist programs, supported by the Americans and the Diemists, was not anti-communist at all. In fact, it might be labeled pro-communist.

 

                  Moreover, the strategic hamlet program treated Vietnamese villages and villagers as if they were the enemy. As had happened with the French, when the Americans moved in the Vietnamese became the enemy, along with the communists. Hence, it was delusional to say that the Americans were there to help the Vietnamese. They were there to defeat, which they called “modernization,” traditional Vietnamese, defeating via “modernization” or “Americanization” traditional Vietnam. Which is to say that the strategic hamlets were created in order to get some Vietnamese who were willing to kill other Vietnamese, those labeled “communists.” Talk about “wishful thinking.” The Americans in Vietnam wanted to “train” the Vietnamese; that is, to get some Vietnamese to kill or oppress other Vietnamese, by making some Vietnamese enemies of other Vietnamese. The Americans in Vietnam were facilitating civil war in Vietnam, under the guise of “helping“ the Vietnamese.  

 

                  Such civil wars lie at the roots of imperialism, which is why imperialism always involves inhuman cruelty. The Americans, just like the French, being forced to create or fortify or continue such a civil war in Vietnam needed cover stories to hide what they were in fact doing, and so embraced anti-communism and such fantasies as “the domino theory.” The strategic hamlet program could never succeed in creating “happy and prosperous peasants” but it could succeed in turning Vietnamese against Vietnamese and, thereby, serve the cause of those like the NLF who sought to unify Vietnam. So, not only did the Americans lose in Vietnam, they deserved to lose.

Secrecy

 

Secrecy

Peter Schultz

 

                  L. Fletcher Prouty in his excellent book, The Secret Team, has some interesting things to say about secrecy. For example: “a peculiar and dangerous characteristic … [is] derived [from] secrecy.” It those agents working on Pakistan, for example, are not doing so, but are working on another program, a cover story needs be developed. The story “is false – a lie.” The lie is permissible, necessary, and justified. “So if you are on a classified project, it is all right, in fact … essential, for you to lie. So you lie. The other man lies, everyone lies.” [472]

 

                  “In the Pentagon there are many offices established to do one thing. They really do not do that thing at all, but something entirely different. As a result, [many] cannot say what they are doing; or if they are forced to say something they lie.” [ibid]

 

                  When these persons lie to policy makers about their alleged analyses, they are guaranteeing failure for the simple reason that those policies undertaken are based on lies, i.e., they are not “reality based.” So, for example, a war on drugs, which is actually a way of controlling certain groups of people, e.g., blacks, is bound to fail as a war on drugs because that war is a fantasy; it is not real. It will never be successful vis-à-vis drugs, although it may be successful in incarcerating huge numbers of black people.

 

                  The Vietnam War, billed as an anti-Communist war, was bound to fail because the “communists” in Vietnam weren’t real. They were a figment of American imaginations, a label pinned on some Vietnamese to justify the war that American elites wanted to wage there. The war was real, but the communists were not. Ho Chi Minh was not, except in the imagination of some Americans, a communist, just as bin Laden to many Muslims was not a ”terrorist.” And, so, a war on terror and terrorists was bound to fail, just as the war on communism and communists in Vietnam was bound to fail.

 

                  No doubt this will sound strange to most people. But the longer you look at politics, the stranger the world becomes. For example, why is it that otherwise decent people are perfectly willing to engage in or support what have to be described as indecent, even savage acts? Why did decent, god-fearing Brits, for example, support the brutality that took place in Kenya in the 1950s? Why is it that decent, god-fearing Americans supported slavery and wars against indigenous people? How can such duplicities coexist and do so frequently? Is such duplicity intrinsic to the political? Considered empirically, that would seem to be the case.

 

                  In order to hide such duplicity, cover stories are needed, just as they are needed to hide the duplicitous character of the actions of government agencies and officials. American elites wanted to make war in Vietnam, to demonstrate their power there, and they needed cover stories which took different forms, e.g., anti-Communism or the domino theory. As Prouty pointed out with regard to the Pentagon, America elites could not say why they were making war Vietnam and, so, when they were forced to say something, they lied. Although deadly and destructive, this was merely normal political behavior. In fact, it was so normal that some politicians, like Ronald Reagan, did not even know they were lying. They believed their lies, which is more frightening than being bald-faced liars.

 

                  Truth-telliing plays no role in government and politics. Political success, such as it is, is impossible without duplicity, without lies, without making the truth disappear. And, so, those who speak the truth are subversives, are intrinsically and always enemies of the state, enemies of the establishment. Hence, Socrates’ fate, which he accepted and even counseled others to accept, e.g., Crito. Insofar as duplicity is intrinsic to the political, there is no way out, which Socrates recognized. Unless he lied, he knew he would be found guilty – because, truth be told, from a political viewpoint he was. And Socrates always sought and told the truth.