Politics: The Way Toward Understanding
Peter Schultz
“The heart of the problem is the
refusal to recognize the participants in these conflicts as political actors,”
Li said. “We just suck all the politics out, latch on a word like ‘jihadism,’
and then place it into a category of evil existing outside of space and time.”
“Consider for a moment three different
things: the Irish Republican Army, the Republican Party in the United States,
and Plato’s Republic,” Li told me, by way of analogy. “All of these employ the
term ‘republic,’ and all of them somehow have a connection with violence. If
you lumped them together and claimed they represent an ideology called
‘republicanism,’ that obviously wouldn’t make any sense. Yet that’s what the
category of ‘jihadism’ essentially does.”
I
came across these two quotes in an article entitled “A New Book Takes on the
Problematic Academic Discipline of ‘Jihadism,’” by Darryl Li of the University
of Cchicago. And I think they can be applied more generally that Li applies
them to “jihadists.” It seems to me that it is commonplace for people to refuse
to recognize their declared enemies as “political actors.” Take for example the
concept of “communism” as used in the United States, especially during the Cold
War. The US had to wage war in Vietnam, e.g., because the “communists” were
trying to take over Vietnam. As people eventually noticed, such a
characterization “sucked all the politics out of” what was actually going on in
Vietnam and placed our enemies “into a category of evil [that] existed outside
of space of time,” that is, outside of reality. This led the US into an ever
expanding dehumanizing and destructive war, where war crimes became part and
parcel of US strategy and tactics. So, in opposing what our elites understood
as an “evil existing outside of space and time,” those elites were led into
evil, which they embraced as proof of their “virtue.” This is best described as
a kind of madness, a madness that might be called “innocence.”
More
generally, it makes me wonder whether we can understand the world we live in without
recourse to politics. That is, once that world is drained of political actors
and political actions, the real world, the actual world disappears and is
replaced by a world of abstractions like “communism,” “capitalism,”
“socialism,” and so on. Then these abstractions are taken to be real and to be
dangerous, leading even otherwise decent people into brutal, dehumanizing, and
destructive wars. By sucking the politics out of our enemies, by turning them
into “evil existing outside of space and time,” all bets are off in terms of
limits on making war. And this is not a healthy situation at any time, and
especially not in a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
Americans
are not especially fond of politics, seeing it as a dirty business that if only
we could rise above the world would be vastly improved, if not actually
saved. But it could be that without
politics, without understanding our enemies as political actors, the world is
doomed, if not to annihilation than to endless wars. As the author of The
Republic put it: Only the dead have seen the end of war. My guess is that Plato
did not have much hope that human beings would come to see that understanding
the world politically is the only alternative to the madness that characterized
and characterizes the human condition. There might be moments, ephemeral
situations where peace reigns but that is all that should be expected. And that
we are not in such a moment now should be obvious to all as we go on waging war
on “jihadists,” “socialists,” “communists,” the “deplorable,” or on “immigrants.”
