"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Iraq syndrome?
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March 8, 2007
Ira Chernus has an article at TomDispatch that talks about the Iraq syndrome in terms of the victory culture that motivates the desire for empire as a way to address domestic security. Chernus says:
Victory culture assumes that the United States is bound to win in the end -- that, in fact, we deserve to win because our motives are less self-interested than those of other nations. We may sometimes fight a war ineptly or incompetently, but we always mean well at heart. We want democracy, prosperity, peace, and stability -- not just for ourselves but for everyone.
And:
And in victory culture, we kill only because others are out to ambush and kill us. We are by definition the victims, the innocents, never the perpetrators. That whitewashes our motives, whatever they may actually be...To go on believing that we are virtuous, we must go on seeing ourselves as profoundly insecure, as beset by enemies, as invariably simply defending ourselves out there on the planetary frontiers of an aggressive, dangerous world...
Will the desire to "cure" the Vietnam syndrome became a springboard to an unabashed, militant nationalism and a broad rightward turn in the nation's life, as it did with the Vietnam syndrome? On that would push US politics and culture back to a glorification of military power and imperial intervention as instruments of choice for seeking "security? This would mean that an aggressive war is the royal path to domestic security.
Chernus links the Iraq syndrome to American identity:
It would, however, be hard to avoid seeing any kind of withdrawal from Iraq as a retreat under fire, as a quitting of the field of battle, as an admission that the U.S. cannot always save faraway people in faraway places. That, too, would call into question all the traditional stories that are still so widely seen as the bulwark of American identity... When a whole nation has to cope with an identity crisis, when it has to struggle to believe in narratives that were once self-evidently meaningful, there is no telling what might happen.
The neoconservative mantra is "peace and security through strength."
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:45 PM | Permalink |
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