“The Peace Paradox" Is, Paradoxically, Peace-Free

[a.saccus]

“The Peace Paradox" Is, Paradoxically, Peace-Free

Since this is “Super Sunday," it’s not surprising that readers of The New York Times (February 4th) got a “super" helping of propaganda along with their breakfast this morning.

The Peace Paradox.

As I sat down to my meal, and as examples of reality twisting and distortion jumped out at me at every conceivable opportunity, I knew I’d found a Pathocrat's Delight: A Baker’s Dozen of Intellectual Deceptions:

February 4, 2007 Reconsideration

The Peace Paradox

By DAVID A. BELL

Historical analogies have always been popular in foreign-policy debates, and the present day is no exception. For liberals, the best description of our current situation is “Vietnam II" (as Maureen Dowd dubbed it in a Times column): another ghastly quagmire from which we can do little but walk away. Nonsense, reply conservatives. It’s really “World War IV" (the words of Norman Podhoretz, who counts the cold war as III): another deadly struggle against totalitarianism for which we must mobilize every possible resource. As for the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, writing in Vanity Fair, the best analogy is what could be called Rome II. We are another colossal empire, perched on the brink of decline and fall.

1.Note that there is no interest in what the truth of the matter might be. The paramoralism being pushed here is

There is no such thing as truth; only different opinions.

As is pointed out quite nicely here:

If there is no truth, only opinion, then there is no reason to believe that the skeptic’s argument is fact instead of merely [an]opinion[itself]. It must be opinion, according to the argument. The skeptic says, “The truth is, there is no truth," and in that statement he contradicts himself…

For psychopaths, there is no such thing as truth, just different stories, like different buttons, which evoke different reactions when pushed. Keeping in the spirit of the day, let’s keep score: this is Paramoralism #1.

Any act can thus be proved to be immoral or moral by means of paramoralisms utilized as active suggestion, and people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found.

There is no act more profoundly immoral than getting someone to believe that there is no such thing as truth.

Yet since history never repeats itself so neatly, the most useful historical analogies are not those that promise to predict the future but those that may reveal unexpected things about the present.

2.The deft “never repeats itself so neatly" deflects, ever so craftily, the unwary reader away from the fact that, in the major events of our time, history does repeat itself. The effect is to stun by direct contradiction (conversive thinking) anyone who happens to notice how remarkably similar our times are to the rise of Nazi Germany. The conversive thinking used in this case is to say that history does not repeat itself -- qualified “neatly" to make it seem emminently reasonable -- when the truth is just the opposite.

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements,…This occurs as a result of the activities of similar etiological factors in this phenomenon, namely the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential properties.

Consider, for instance, a parallel rarely cited in current debates: the one between the post-cold-war period and the age of the French Revolution.

3.One good reason the parallel is not cited is that it exist nowhere but in David Bell's mind, as I will show below. Thus this statement is an outright lie.

Both began (by coincidence, in years numbered ’89 and ’90) with moments of extraordinary elation and hope. A powerful and much-loathed regime (the U.S.S.R., the French absolute monarchy) not only collapsed unexpectedly but did so with surprisingly little violence. So transformative did the change appear that many advanced thinkers predicted nothing less than an age of democracy in which warfare would have no place. In our own day, Francis Fukuyama famously spoke of “the end of history," by which he meant an end to conflicts over the proper form of society. Two hundred years before, the fall of the French Old Regime led to surprisingly similar visions. In 1790, the new French Revolutionary state even renounced aggressive war, in what became known as its “declaration of peace to the world." A French legislator promised giddily that from now on the human race would form “a single society, whose object is the peace and happiness of each and all of its members."

Yet in both cases, disillusion followed with cruel speed. In our own time, of course, there were the wars in the Balkans and the gulf, followed by the global upheaval triggered by 9/11. In the 18th century, less than two years after the declaration of peace, there began a series of wars that would drag in all of Europe’s major powers, take millions of lives and continue, with only small breaks, for more than 23 years, until France’s final defeat in 1815. They would make possible the career of a man whose name is synonymous with military hubris: Napoleon Bonaparte….

4.That this kind of material can be used with impunity is a tribute to the massive dumbing down of American society that has gone on over the past century. With most of their history classes reduced to dry and pointless memorization of dates and names with no hint about the ponerogenic processes at work actually dictating the course of events, most people abandoned history a long time ago out of sheer boredom. Unfortunately, history is just about to catch up with them and relieve their boredom by rewarding their ignorance.

One parallel (a proportion, actually) David A. Bell could be trying to establish here is:

As the French Absolute Monarchy is to the (Nasty)Napoleonic Imperialism

So is Communist Russia to (Nasty)Post-Communist Russia.

The only problem is that post-Communist Russia is not nearly nasty to the degree that the France of the conquering Napoleon was. But at least it's parallel. So if that's what Bell meant, then it must be rejected because it's false.

But what Bell actually did -- and I can’t call it “sleight of hand" anymore than I can call a load of elephant feces in my living room “spring fresh" -- is to set this monstrosity up:

As the French Absolute Monarchy is to (Nasty)Napoleonic Imperialism

So is Communist Russia to the USA of Balkan wars, Iraq I, and 9/11

Where did that last term--the USA of Balkan wars, Iraq I, and 9/11 come from? Mars? The Triffid Nebula?

The parallel isn't "parallel".

Unconscious elimination of data which are, or appear to be, inexpedient gradually turns into habit, and then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. The problem is that any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of psychopathology.

In short, the Enlightenment vision of perpetual peace gave way rapidly to a conflict in which states directed every possible political, social and economic resource toward the utter defeat of the enemy — mankind’s first total war.

5.This is a consequence of the previous error. He adds a term, compounding his problem:

The sequence Absolute Monarchy to Napoleonic Imperialism means that the Enlightenment is a Failure.

Therefore the sequence Commie Russia to Post-Commie Russia means that the US Democracy is Flawed.

Is this a coincidence? During the late 18th century, the Western world largely took war for granted. The major powers fought one another at regular intervals and devoted the lion’s share of their budgets to the purpose.

6.In this statement Bell is trying to make us see that war is a natural and normal thing. Paramoralism #2 on your scorecards:

WAR IS NORMAL. DON’T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY.

For this very reason, however, they took care to practice a degree of restraint and to treat their adversaries with honor. The French reformer Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne was exaggerating when he said that “armies [now] slaughter each other politely ... what was once a wild rage is now just a moment’s madness." Still, particularly in Western Europe, war took less of a human toll in the century before the French Revolution than at almost any time in history.

In fact, advanced thinkers who believed in the new, Enlightenment creed of secular human progress came to hope that war might fade away entirely. European philosophers like Baron d’Holbach called it nothing but a “remnant of savage customs," and no less a figure than George Washington agreed, in 1788, that it was time for agriculture and commerce “to supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest." It was precisely such sentiments that inspired France’s declaration of peace two years later.

7.Dissing the truth. It is true that war is “nothing but a “remnant of savage customs." It is also true --still-- that it is time for agriculture and commerce “to supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest." Basing his reasoning on the exploded parallels above, Bell insinuates that the above anti-war statements cannot be true. That one faux moved has yielded three invalid arguments, puffing up the façade of erudition.

Yet the idea that warfare might actually end had a paradoxical effect, for it destroyed any rationale for waging war with restraint.

8.The powerful ponerogenic forces at work at the end of the Eighteenth Century were responsible for the Napoleonic rampage across Europe. The Enlightenment and ideas about peace had nothing to do with it. So on the one hand, it’s either an outright lie, or it’s a misdirection. In either case, it rates as Paramoralism #3:

DON’T THINK OR DESIRE PEACE. PARADOXICALLY, IT LED TO THE RAMPAGES OF NAPOLEON

Within months of the declaration, one of its liberal proponents was warning that if revolutionary France did nonetheless come to blows with other European powers, it would be “a war to the death which we will fight ... so as to destroy and annihilate all who attack us, or to be destroyed ourselves." In 1792, claiming to be acting out of reasons of preventive self-defense, France declared war on the Austrian Empire, and its leading general declared, “This war will be the last war" (the phrase uncannily foreshadows “the war to end all wars" of 1914). To achieve such an exalted end, any means were justified, and so there followed total war and the birth of new hatreds that made the idea of perpetual peace look more utopian than ever. France and its enemies both declared that the “barbarism" of the enemy made it impossible to respect the ordinary laws of war and proceeded to ravage civilian populations across the continent.

In our own day, the lurch from dreams of peace to nightmares of war has not (yet) translated into destruction on this terrible scale (except, alas, in Iraq).

9.The parenthetical “yet", in this context, strikes me as indicating that Bell does indeed think that nightmares will result. But no matter; he still loses points, for the more serious deception contained in this passage is Paramoralism #4:

THERE ARE ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF SLAUGHTER.

The paramoralistic direction is given to disregard and consider, for example, relatively insignificant the 650,000 Iraqi dead, since they are less than the estimated 3.5 million dead (combatants and civilians) in the Napoleonic Wars.

Any number of deaths is, to a normal, psychologically healthy human being, the cause of sorrow and is incalculable, and therefore unacceptable. To a psychopath, however, it is a non-issue; for the psychopath is unable to process this type of information. Thus they can weigh the deaths of partial millions against millions. This also fits in quite conveniently with one of the principal needs of pathocrats:

Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long as that “other" world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into the non-pathological majority a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country’s population will never stop dreaming of the reinstatement of the normal man’s system in any possible form.…its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be “educated" and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings… harsh discipline and poverty must be endured….Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality.

David Bell’s article is one such attempt at “masking".

Of course, the enemy has failed to inflict significant damage on us, and even conservatives have not urged the sort of mobilization and sacrifice that we experienced during World War II. What has happened is a growing willingness to abandon traditional restraints on proved and suspected enemies, foreign and American alike.

10.A glimpse of the future? “suspected enemies… American…"

When’s the last time you saw an “American enemy" on an American street?

What exactly does an “American enemy" look like, I wonder?

Well, if David Bell cares to ask, I can give him a long list of genuine bona fide “American Enemies" anytime, and a hint: Don’t look too hard.

“Among ourselves, we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle," wrote the British diplomat Robert Cooper in an influential 2002 essay. With ideas like this in the air, abuses like those at Abu Ghraib and Haditha become far more difficult to prevent.

11.This is an outright lie. The abuses are only “difficult to prevent" because the people who are supposed to be preventing the abuse are the actually ones sponsoring it.

Could it be, then, that dreams of an end to war may be as unexpectedly dangerous as they are noble, because they seem to justify almost anything done in their name?

12.Paramoralism #5:

DON’T THINK ABOUT PEACE -- IT COULD BE DANGEROUS.

This one must be pretty important, because this Dis-Peace Piece has been repeated three times in this short article! “Third time’s the charm," eh? Wonder what sort of spell they’re casting? From what I’ve seen, it’s Black Magic of the worst kind.

“What the history of the late 18th century shows is that talk of fighting “so as to destroy and annihilate all who attack us, or to be destroyed ourselves� justifies a slide into “the laws of the jungle" that usually contributes more to polarization than to real security. It magnifies the importance of our enemies and swells their ranks. In short, it actually increases the danger of bloodshed on a massive scale. As the French Revolutionaries learned to their terrible cost, talk of the apocalypse can easily be self-fulfilling.

David A. Bell is the author of “The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."

13.David Bell has not even touched the real “Peace Paradox".

The real paradoxes of peace are hard but necessary lessons that we need to learn and take to heart -- now more than ever -- as the neo-cons and the psychopaths in Washington and Jerusalem send the children down to die in Iran:

---That peace cannot be given.

---That peace must be earned; but it can only be earned by gaining knowledge of how to recognize and remove the obstacles to peace set out by men infected with evil.

---Then, and only then, will we have peace.

A. Lobaczewski in "Political Ponerology" shows us where to start:

Suffering, effort, and mental activity during times of imminent bitterness, lead to a progressive, generally heightened regeneration of lost values, which results in human progress….When bad times arrive and people are overwhelmed by an excess of evil, they must gather all their physical and mental strength to fight for existence and protect human reason. The search for some way out of the difficulties and dangers rekindles long-buried powers of discretion. Such people have the initial tendency to rely on force in order to counteract the threat; they may, for instance, become “trigger-happy" or dependent upon armies.

Slowly and laboriously, however, they discover the advantages conferred by mental effort; improved understanding of the psychological situation in particular, better differentiation of human characters and personalities, and, finally, comprehension of one’s adversaries. During such times, virtues which former generations relegated to literary motifs regain their real and useful substance and become prized for their value.

 

[Niall]

Thanx Saccus! You're really helping me with understanding Political Ponerology

High Five

 

[Redrock12]

Well written, a. saccus. You've cut through all of Bell's lies and psychopathic justifications for barbarity magnificently. If Bell has an e-mail address, it would probably be a good idea to forward him a copy of your critique, just to let him know that he isn't fooling everyone; that there is a significant number of us who can see behind his literary mask of evil deception.
Again, well done. :o

 

[a.saccus]

“The Peace Paradox" Is, Paradoxically, Peace-Free

In my original post, the following passages appeared:

Yet since history never repeats itself so neatly, the most useful historical analogies are not those that promise to predict the future but those that may reveal unexpected things about the present.

2.The deft “never repeats itself so neatly" deflects, ever so craftily, the unwary reader away from the fact that, in the major events of our time, history does repeat itself. The effect is to stun by direct contradiction (conversive thinking) anyone who happens to notice how remarkably similar our times are to the rise of Nazi Germany. The conversive thinking used in this case is to say that history does not repeat itself -- qualified “neatly" to make it seem emminently reasonable -- when the truth is just the opposite.

Lobaczewski wrote:
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements,…This occurs as a result of the activities of similar etiological factors in this phenomenon, namely the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential properties.

* * * *

Correction: 02/05/07 02:00 AM.

This passage turned out to contain a very skillful manouver by Bell, so skillful, in fact, that I only partially caught it the first time around. It was only upon reading some passages from Lobaczewski later that night that I realized my lapse. Here is the entire passage re-written with this new understanding in mind. I have left the original post intact, and the insight-yielding passage from Lobaczewski which caused the changes has been incorporated into the long quote from him which ends this segment.

* * * * * *

Yet since history never repeats itself so neatly, the most useful historical analogies are not those that promise to predict the future but those that may reveal unexpected things about the present.

2.By deftly qualifying “history never repeats itself" with the addition of “so neatly", Bell manages to divert attention away from the question of the repetition of historical events in such a way as to be able to deny that this is what he is doing. The unwary reader moves away from pursuing the reasons for the fact that, in the major events of the past century, history is very MUCH repeating itself. The effect is, at first glance, sufficiently subtle and apparently innocuous enough in itself; but it causes just enough diversion from the true line of inquiry that the inquirer actually misses entirely drawing the truly frightening but valid conclusion that current events in the United States resemble features from the period in Germany just prior to BOTH of the 20th Century’s World Wars! Thus Bell avoids the obloquy of a blatantly direct contradiction of the truth (“conversive thinking"), and yet manages to achieve exactly the same result by more indirect means.

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements,…This occurs as a result of the activities of similar etiological factors in this phenomenon, namely the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential properties.

A relatively well-documented example of such an influence of a characteropathic personality on a macrosocial scale is the (page 107) last German emperor, Wilhelm II….He developed a personality with infantile features and insufficient control over his emotions, and also a somewhat paranoid way of thinking which easily sidestepped the heart of some important issues in the process of dodging problems.

…overly critical people, …were replaced by persons with lesser brains, more subservience, and, sometimes, discreet psychological deviations. Negative selection took place.

…An entire generation grew up with psychological deformities regarding feeling and understanding moral, psychological, social and political realities…(108) Large portions of German society ingested psychopathological material, together with that unrealistic way of thinking wherein slogans take on the power of arguments and real data are subjected to subconscious selection.

This occurred during a time when a wave of hysteria was growing throughout Europe, including a tendency for emotions to dominate and for human behavior to contain an element of histrionics…

Even those historians familiar with the genesis and character of the Prussian state, including its ideological subjugation of individuals to the authority of king and emperor, and its tradition of bloody expansionism, intuit that these situations contained some activity of an uncomprehended fatality which eludes analysis in terms of historical causality.

(107-109)

With respect to Iran, I propose that there are a great number of people who now possess that deja-voodoo same sense of an uncomprehended fatality.

* * * * *

 

[Ryan]

“The Peace Paradox" Is, Paradoxically, Peace-Free

Excellent analysis of a particularly twisted piece of propaganda. Thanks for writing this.

 

[Yossarian]

“The Peace Paradox" Is, Paradoxically, Peace-Free

Just gotta say great job as well-very helpful-thanks!

 

[finnius]

Hello,

Does anyone know which French revolution legislator Bell refers to as "giddily promising that from now on the human race would form a 'single society, whose object is the peace and happiness of each and all of its members.'" Specifically, does anyone know what the "declaration of peace to the world" is??

If someone could help me with this or direct me where to look, I'd greatly appreciate it.