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Aftermath of a Dishonorable War
By Manuel Yang, TheWorldJournal.com

We're surrounded by dead voices and dead ideas. This is true enough. Ever since the collapse of the Russian and East European State Communism, the only views that the triumphal intellectuals of the so-called Free World have presented as a postmortem and a prospectus for the future have been brittle, decrepit pronouncements ranging from the "end of history" to the "free market" as a messianic panacea for all our ills. Is it possible that these long-time hardened erstwhile Cold Warriors cannot bear the thought that ideas and words have as much life span as any social system or organic creature and that they--to use a distastefully surreal phrase of the French thinker and historian Raoul Vaneigem--"have corpse in their mouths"? And there is no time in a life span of a country that more corpses are made--no less so than on a battlefield of ideas--than during a time of war.

Chalmers Johnson, an incisively clear-headed elder statesman of contemporary East Asian historiography, has recently noted in his review of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir "Secrets" that the inside leaks on the order of the "Pentagon Papers" could never happen today. As to why this was so, he pointed out that Ellsberg and his colleagues in the U.S. intelligence and security agencies of the 1960s knew the horrific realities of war first-handedly while today's agencies are staffed with career bureaucrats who have had no combat experience under the feverish charge of death and carnage, having only viewed war at the level of antiseptic simulation games on screen or ossified Orwellian neologisms on paper. William Appeleman Williams, a pioneering U.S. diplomatic historian who took away from his death-dealing experience as a naval officer in World War II enduring lessons of integrity and moral choice, lambasted the Reagan administration and his minions, such as Oliver North and William Casey, during the post-Irangate 1980s for acting dishonorably in violation of the code of a true solider. "Hagakure", an eighteenth-century Japanese text expositing the martial code of an honorable warrior, famously summed up the way of a samurai as a way of finding one's death.

If socialism died (some argue it never happened), then our system must also die one day. This is no different from the recognition of facing up to your own imminent mortality, whether as a citizen, commoner, merchant, or solider: can you die honorably? Miyamoto Musashi writes in "The Book of Five Rings": "the Way of dying is not limited to the warriors alone. For even monks, women, farmers and the classes below them, there is no distinction in their having a sense of duty, in knowing shame and being resolved to their own deaths." And hence we may say that "honorably" simply means the knowledge of shame and being decisively resolute in the face of one's own death. What we find around us, both politically and individually, is the opposite of such martial--indeed universally human--virtue: fanning inordinate fear of the enemy among the populace, selfish monopoly of resources, shameless self-advertisements of one's prowess and virtues, and, most fatally, an utter incapacity to even acknowledge the fact that one's twilight days are in the cards.

Lao-Tzu, facing ceaseless wars for continental hegemony among the ancient Chinese states in fifth century B.C.E., sternly invoked the proper decorum of a nation that has waged a victorious war: "No victory is free of grief,/and so to celebrate one is to glory/in the death of innocent people. At glad times, the place of honor is on the left:/after disaster, it is on the right./So in the army, the officers stand on the left/while the general stands on the right.//So the whole thing is staged like a funeral.//When a war kills many, we must mourn for them--/And if you win the war, you must grieve it." Instead the rulers of our country bid us to "glory in/the death of innocent people" under the pretense of defending our national security when, as the history of ancient and modern empires teaches us repeatedly, the greatest source of global insecurity invariably stems from the most powerful state reigning in that age, which in our times is unarguably the United States.

Nineteenth-century European observers of the United States, such as Tocqueville and Marx, accurately grasped the novelty of its political and economic institutions as being entirely free of the feudal legacies that had bound and shackled their continent of origin. Although mired in the original sin of mass slaughter of the indigenous population and trans-Atlantic slavery, the U.S. was ostensibly the first completely bourgeois republic that evinced great potential for democratic development and radical economic self-sufficiency. Two hundred and a quarter of a century later, not only has the battered but tireless ship of the state consistently failed to choose the republic over the empire but, perhaps given its youthfully buccaneering spirit and perpetual repression of its own historical memory (these two characteristics are not disconnected), instead of finding the meaning of its own eventual death, has produced masses of corpses in the wake of dynamically reaching for new markets, resources, labor, and military power. Some may aver that this is the cruelly inevitable logic of history, especially of capitalist industrialization and state power. Perhaps, but, since history and statecraft have never attained the rigor and precision of the sciences (in spite of their quantitative masks and pretensions to the contrary), such a sweeping notion must remain merely a generalization closer to the spirit of poetic sentiments than an ironclad law of historical determination.

Many samurai and Buddhist monks before dying left a sparsely lined, poetic inscription of their sentiments in what is called a "jisei". A composition of "jisei" is perhaps what the U.S., at the level of collective consciousness, should be preparing now. In bombing and invading Iraq--and Afghanistan as its prelude--what appeared as youthful vitality of incessant imperial massacres in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century (rationalized and glorified as such by Teddy Roosevelt) now appears, a century hence, as a fanatically self-pitying rage of an old man who cannot stand to see his dominance and virility dissipate through the ineluctable passage of time. Hemingway, who understood this eminently American masculine ethos well, blew his brains out. Of course, no one in his or her right mind would counsel someone, even if that be the state, corporation, or an individual to commit suicide, for that would rob from the act its moral rationale and agency. Ritual suicide was a particularly significant act for a samurai precisely because, notwithstanding the feudal logic of duty and obligation that defined it, it was ideally an existentially personal and voluntary choice, to die for a higher cause than for selfish gain or profit. After all, that is what all species of patriotism and nationalism, including our own, exploit: to die for one's country, God, revolutionary creed, etc.

However, when a superpower hegemon takes on states of militarily inferior stature, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, because its own population rightly will not accept any long-term wars after its traumatic experience in trying to recolonize Vietnam (the "Vietnam syndrome"), all language of honor and higher causes emits fetidly decaying odor of war-fevered propaganda. Even if it weren't for the Bush administration's factually vacuous assertion of chemical weapons and connection with Al Qaeda for going to war, such an "act of war" as the one it has just committed would be deemed sufficiently dishonorable, for its symmetry of power is that of a grandiloquently burly wrestler giving a congenitally delinquent child a severe beating. Furthermore, as Sun-Tzu's classic manual of war tells us, war should absolutely be the last resort as a means of obtaining the advantages of the state while true victory lies in winning without any battle, e.g., through diplomatic negotiations (which the Bush administration, from the outset, had preemptively discounted with stubborn vigilance). With a structural economic crisis continuing to tenaciously follow its steps since the 1970s--only cosmetically veiled under the superficial rush of the recently imploded dot.com industries and Enron debacle--the forecast on the U.S. as an abiding imperial system is hardly good. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues in his latest book "The Decline of American Power" that its intervention in Iraq shows all signs of a superpower in eclipse that has continued apace since the Vietnam War.

Knowing its historical record on waging dishonorable wars of profit and self-aggrandizement, it may be pointless to demand the U.S. to pen a "jisei" lamenting the futility of its aggressions and bloodbath, to make peace with the dead that it has slaughtered in the name of democracy and freedom (just as the Soviet Union did in the name of socialism and equality), not the least for the edification of subsequent empires or even genuine republics, before it joins ranks among the ghostly memories of old empires that did not have the daring and imagination to value its republican virtues and realize its unfulfilled democratic aspirations. If that be the fate of this once potentially radical experiment in secular democracy that its most exploited and despised members have tried time and again to honorably resuscitate throughout its history, so be it: go decisively to hell, democracy, we shall say, and prepare our own dying.

© July 17, 2003

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