[MD] Manufacturing Nightmare

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

With *much* appreciation to Khaled for sending me these videos...

Near the beginning of Part I of the BBC's "Power of Nightmares" series,
examining the rise of both Neoconservative and Islamist Terror, we find this
agreement with Pirsig's assessment of the "intellectuals" failing to create the
Great Society.

VO: But now, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that
dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred. One prominent liberal
journalist called Irving Kristol began to question whether it might actually be
the policies themselves that were causing social breakdown.

IRVING KRISTOL: If you had asked any liberal in 1960, we are going to pass these
laws, these laws, these laws, and these laws, mentioning all the laws that in
fact were passed in the 1960s and '70s, would you say crime will go up, drug
addiction will go up, illegitimacy will go up, or will they get down?
Obviously, everyone would have said, they will get down. And everyone would
have been wrong. Now, that’s not something that the liberals have been able to
face up to. They've had their reforms, and they have led to consequences that
they did not expect and they don’t know what to do about.

(From Lila, "The professor had blown up at him. "What you don't know!" he had
said. "We've tried everything! We've tried workshops, study groups, councils.
We've spent years in this. If there's anything we've missed we don't know what
it is. Everything has failed."")

Much of what follows is sections of the transcript for Episode One. I post this
with the recommendation that you watch this. Khaled, I appreciate very much the
time and trouble you took to send this to me. I have since, in my eagerness to
share, found they are available online
(http://www.daanspeak.com/TranscriptPowerOfNightmares1.html), including
transcripts, audio and video.

Into this vacuum that for Pirsig begins a moral schism in American culture,
comes the "return to values" crowd, advocating a return to Victorianism, the
last static latch.

VO: The neoconservatives were idealists. Their aim was to try and stop the
social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They wanted
to find a way of uniting the people, by giving them a shared purpose. One of
their great influences in doing this would be the theories of Leo Strauss. They
would set out to recreate the myth of America as a unique nation whose destiny
was to battle against evil in the world. And in this project, the source of
evil would be America's Cold War enemy: the Soviet Union. And by doing this,
they believed that they would not only give new meaning and purpose to people's
lives, but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.

Professor STEPHEN HOLMES, Political Philosopher: The United States would not
only, according to these—the Straussians, be able to bring good to the world,
but would be able to overcome the fundamental weaknesses of American society, a
society that has been suffering, almost rotting, in their language, from
relativism, liberalism, lack of self-confidence, lack of belief in itself. And
one of the main political projects of the Straussians during the Cold War was
to reinforce the self-confidence of Americans, and the belief that America was
fundamentally the only force for good in the world, that had to be supported,
otherwise evil would prevail.

Here begins the manufacture of nightmare, the constant barrage of fear, of
boogeymen, of the recapturing of power through the guise of the "great
protector", rather than the "great nurturer". Someone had posted about the
alternate views of government as mother or father. I think this describes that
quite nicely.

VO: In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had
different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the
optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And
today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen
simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role
that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams,
politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will
rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And
the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. A powerful and sinister
network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world. A threat that needs
to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which
has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that
has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security
services, and the international media.

VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to
question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by
their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values
which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss
believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that
everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary
illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation. And
in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to battle
the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told
his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.

Enter Team B, a set of disciples who disputed the CIA's claim that the Soviet
Union was not preparing to attck us: Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney.

VO: Team B began examining all the CIA data on the Soviet Union. But however
closely they looked, there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons or
defense systems they claimed the Soviets were developing. Rather than accept
that this meant that the systems didn’t exist, Team B made an assumption that
the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated, they were
undetectible. For example, they could find no evidence that the Soviet
submarine fleet had an acoustic defense system. What this meant, Team B said,
was that the Soviets had actually invented a new non-acoustic system, which was
impossible to detect. And this meant that the whole of the American submarine
fleet was at risk from an invisible threat that was there, even though there
was no evidence for it.

CAHN: They even took a Russian military manual, which the correct translation of
it is “The Art of Winning.” And when they translated it and put it into Team B,
they called it “The Art of Conquest.” Well, there’s a difference between
“conquest” and “winning.” 

(Note the interesting application of Newspeak, both above, and in the following
paragraph)

VO: The neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize the findings of Team
B. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger, and a growing number of
politicians joined, including a Presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.

VO: This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth
that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the
country from moral decay. It might not be true, but it was necessary, to
re-engage the public in a grand vision of America’s destiny, that would give
meaning and purpose to their lives. The neoconservatives were succeeding in
creating a simplistic fiction—a vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all
evil in the world, and America as the only country that could rescue the world.
And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give the neoconservatives great
power and influence.

HOLMES: The Straussians started to create a worldview which is a fiction. The
world is not divided into good and evil. The battle in which we are engaged is
not a battle between good and evil. The United States, as anyone who observes
understands, has done some good and some bad things. It’s like any great power.
This is the way history is. But they wanted to create a world of moral
certainties, so therefore they invent mythologies—fairytales—describing any
force in the world that obstructs the United States as somehow Satanic, or
associated with evil.

IRVING KRISTOL , Founder of Neoconservative movement: The notion that a purely
secular society can cope with all of the terrible pathologies that now affect
our society, I think has turned out to be false. And that has made me
culturally conservative. I mean, I really think religion has a role now to play
in redeeming the country. And liberalism is not prepared to give religion a
role. Conservatism is, but it doesn’t know how to do it.

(Arlo interjects... this is an interesting point to inject some Pirsig,
something I will do at more length in a later post. To wit, "But when the
intellectuals in control of society take biology's side against society then
society is caught in a cross-fire from which it has no protection." The neocons
solution has been to re-elevate social patterns over intellectual patterns,
rather than consider the analysis given by Pirsig in his talk on Hippies and
this time period.)

VO: It was a triumph for the neoconservatives. America was now setting out to do
battle against the forces of evil in the world. But what had started out as the
kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American people
increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives. They began
to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called “democratic
revolutionaries,” who were going to use force to change the world.

VO: The neoconservatives now set out to transform the world. In next week’s
episode, they find themselves joining forces with the Islamists in Afghanistan,
and together they fight an epic battle against the Soviet Union. And both come
to believe that they had defeated the Evil Empire. But this imagined victory
would leave them without an enemy. And in a world disillusioned with grand
political ideas, they would need to invent new fantasies and new nightmares, in
order to maintain their power.

Hopefully that's a good teaser.

Arlo