Sometimes you come across an editorial that really clarifies things. Shelby Steele has such an editorial up at the Wall Street Journal. He takes on a taboo subject, and one that has caused some argument here at BT when I raised it a few months ago. How have the moral scruples of the West contributed to the West’s inability to win wars of liberation in the post-World War Two era? How could France and America lose a military fight with the Vietanmese? How could Russia fail in Afghanistan? And are we losing in Iraq because we refuse to bring the full measure of our military might into the fight?
In the past, I have argued that we have lost the ability to win these fights because we have lost the ability to commit what are now termed “war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and/or genocide”. And, I have stated that our unwillingness to commit such acts (at least openly, unapologetically, and over a sustained period of time), is a very good thing. However, Steele sees it as a very bad thing. But, reading his reasoning is quite enlightening.
Iraq
Steele believes that the collapse of colonialism, post-World War Two, is better understood as a collapse of the legitimacy of White Supremacy. Now, he is going to be forced to walk a very fine line in his argument. If he is merely being descriptive, his observation could be seen as obvious. The Holocaust, as well as the brutality of the war, had a jolting effect on the moral authority of the West, as well as its claim to higher civilization. Moreover, as India and China asserted their independence, the preeminence of White civilization declined. But, Steele goes beyind beyond being merely descriptive. He sees the loss of the legitimacy of white supremacy as a problem that must be somehow rectified. Unless we rectify it, we will not be able to use the level of violence necessary to win wars against lesser powers. Let’s looks at his argument.
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America–the greatest embodiment of Western power–goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past–two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy–and the resulting white guilt–introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past.
Interestly, Steele makes little to no effort to rationalize the ‘evil of the Western past’. He isn’t apologizing for our treatment of Native Americans, for slavery, for Jim Crow, or for imperialism. He is not trying to rehabilitate the legitimacy of white supremacy either, although that seems somwhow implicit in his argument. He is saying that our guilt about past human rights abuses constrains us from committing human rights abuses in the present. And, for Steele, that is the problem. Why? Because sometimes we really do face enemies that need defeating, and we cannot defeat them if we contrain ourselves with human rights considerations.
One could dismiss his argument out of hand. It certainly has a visceral objectionalness to it. But, he may have a point. Insofar as he does have a point (in that, there could be a war that needed to be won and could not be won without total ruthlessness) he opens up an interesting area for hypothetical debate. But, his argument fails when it comes time to administer the remedy. For Steele, white people have so evolved, and so repudiated the legitimacy of white supremacy, that we no longer need feel guilty about the white supremacy of the past…and therefore we can kill, torture, and relocate brown people without remorse of conscience. Only when we learn to stop feeling guilty, will we once again be able to conquer new territory.
Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites–and nonwhites–to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life–absorbed as new history–so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
So, Steele and I agree on the reason that we cannot win wars like Iraq and Vietnam…we refuse to use biblical levels of force. But, whereas I take that as an incredibly good sign, he sees it as an enormous problem. Where I take that as a lesson that we should avoid entering into such wars, he sees it as an obstacle to the successful use of necessary force.
Nothing could better define the differences between the right and the left.
also in orange.
I like the points you make here, BooMan. About the differences between right and left on this issue. I think they are important observations.
But one point of view I think I would offer: I don’t know that I agree with the premise that we can’t win colonialist wars because of our own guilt.
First, I’d note that guilt is a human emotion. One that ought not to be mistakenly ascribed to a state. Any state might act in a given way, if its government is run by a guiltless actor or actors. So if the commander-in-chief is a sociopath, and does not participate in the human emotion of white man’s guilt, and he is allowed to operate by a do-nothing, no-oversight Congress, then a nation might easily act without the guilt preventing genocide. Such an actor could threaten, and use, nuclear weapons on a brown population that does not possess such weapons.
Second, I think that recent history dispels the notion that genocide is no longer allowed. It seems to be practiced on a routine basis. The former Yugoslavia, Palestine, Rwanda, Sudan, East Timore and Iraq (we’re beginning to count the dead in the hundreds of thousands now, and that’s not including what the depleted uranium is going to do to that population in the years to come). Man is surely still capable of wiping out his brothers and sisters who he views as different. To ascribe a more enlightened motive to the white nations of the world is too generous by-half. We are the world’s most efficient killing machine. Blood on all our hands. And chickens coming to roost.
I anticipated the argument that we are doing just fine committing genocide in Iraq right now.
I don’t want to debate the proper definition of genocide here. But, we are losing, in part, because we are not willing to use the same amount of force that Saddam used. Now, as Anglos, we’d probably need more people and more ruthlessness than Saddam to achieve the same security. But, obviously it could be done. What we can’t do is convince ourselves that we have the moral authority to treat another people with that level of brutality. In other words, we are no longer sufficiently racist, nor do we believe sufficiently in our own superiority, to justify such acts in our own minds.
It’s a lot easier to do from the sky, or when it is hidden from public view. But we can’t sustain it.
I think that it’s good that we have extended human rights to all humans. Bush thinks it is an annoying constraint.
I wrote this long response. I don’t think you should be dragged into a debate over this. I recognize you as one of the good guys. So I should probably delete it. But it is the longest thing I’ve written in a month (I’m in full-editing mode, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for writing). And I just didn’t want to delete it. I’m not trying to piss on your diary. I like it. And you were making important points. But…
You are right. This is not a good form for a debate on the definition of genocide. I’m certain I don’t have time to do it justice. And I know you don’t either.
But the insistence that what we have done is in some way less brutal than what Saddam did strikes me as having a very American bias. The whole American exceptionalism thing. A positive bias we have not earned under the rule of this emperor.
Looking a a quick tabulation of human rights watch numbers of deaths attributed to Saddam’s brutality, I get a high figure of 300,000 or so. Over his entire regime. (Let’s just say I’m woefully wrong and that number should be a million). Last high estimates I saw for U.S. caused Iraqi deaths was over 200,000. And we’ve done ours in just over three years as opposed to three decades with Saddam. We’ve both tortured. We’ve both raped. Quibbling could go on ad nauseam. But not stuping to debate this point is just going along with that old-American adage, Saddam was really evil and we’re not capable of that kind of evil. Saddam’s evil. America’s evil. A debatable point, but at least comparably debatable. The fucking amount of nuclear material we have knowingly put in that land, as a matter of calculated policy, is almost beyond comprehension in human terms. The birth defects. The fact that countless civilians will be sickened and killed. The fact that hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers will be sickened and dying in the next ten years. No one is a winner. And there were good American men and women sitting around drawing up plans to use this very heavy, cheap metal on our munitions. I don’t like throwing around the word evil. We’re all just apes. Doing our best. But if Saddam was evil, we sure as hell are on that level.
Saddam sided with Sunni dominance. We have sided with a Shi’ah-Kurd alliance. People are still dying. If anything, Saddam has proved the far better administrator of his people. Is it because he was more brutal? Not from what I can see. Perhaps because he was at least a man of the culture. And cross-cultural occupations tend to become very violent insurgencies.
I just can’t accept the premise that the U.S. invasion and occupation is quantitatively or qualitatively better that Saddam.
BJ-
I think your are taking worst case best case numbers here, but that is not important. The main thing is not numbers.
Insofar as we have emulated Hussein, we have not done it systematically, not without apology, nor in the open, nor with any sense of righteousness. And as things like Abu Ghraib come to light, they are absolutely debilitating to our ability to sustain public support or the high moral ground internationally. That would not have been the case during the Boer Wars for example.
The argument is not about how many people we have killed versus Saddam, but whether or not we can crack down ruthlesslly enough to restore order. We can’t, and it becomes even more impossible when he try to do it half-ass while pretending to promote democracy and human rights.
That is my point and Shelby’s point. We disagress on the lessons that should be learned from that point.
I appreciate your differences with Shelby.
But I’m saying, I think that you/we (almost all Americans) are blindly biased toward believing we are not the evil we see elsewhere in the world:
we have not done it systematically — what do you call a well-planned invasion with precision bombing of targets and calculus that weighs civilian casualties in some sick trade-off? the pentagon is a system. our military industrial complex is a system. calculating what are acceptable civilian losses is a system. we’re just better pr people than Saddam, probably because our pr operation is far better funded.
not without apology — have you heard our Government formally apologize for this war? I haven’t. I hear hollow PR that says, “We’re sorry for civilian deaths, but…” But I don’t hear apologies for our systematic destruction and occupation.
nor in the open — i’d submit that our abuses have been rather well documented by human rights groups and in the foreign press. i don’t think the U.S. media shares the truth. but I think the world rightly understands that we have openly declared war on a muslim country with no legal justification for our attack. it was naked aggression. for the whole world to see. boasted about as shock and awe.
nor with any sense of righteousness — i’m not sure if you and i are living under the same government. Bush certainly hasn’t said a damn thing about the illegality and mass killing that he is responsible for. he completely asserts he was in the right. my congressman just sent me the umpteenth letter explaining how killing these iraqis for no reason was absolutely the right thing to do. and the democratic party has hardly been a pillar of dislaiming the wrongness of this war. i don’t have a count, maybe you do. but what percentage of opposition candidates are running on the illegality of the murderous war we have wrought on iraq? not in my district.
things like Abu Ghraib come to light, they are absolutely debilitating to our ability to sustain public support — Abu Ghraib broke before the election in November ’04. Bush still rules. We’re still committing the atrocity. This differs from Saddam and his system of government how. If they had fair public opinion polls in Iraq at the time when he was gassing people, I’m sure his unvaforable’s would have been high amongst the shi’ah and kurds. probably right-thinking sunnis, too. but he stayed in power until we removed him.
The argument is not about how many people we have killed versus Saddam, but whether or not we can crack down ruthlesslly enough to restore order. — from what I’ve read, we’re running death squads in Iraq now, exterminating the “insurgent” and “terrorist” groups. we are doing our best to crack down. we leveled and entire city of 250,000 people (the size of my home town) as a show of our force. Saddam was just a better administrator. I’d submit that those reasons have everything to do with the culture of the oppressor, and far less to do with willingness to use brutal force against the “enemy.” And that failure to recognize this shows some bias for a pro-American view of the world. How could we ever be as brutal as Saddam, afterall?
Death is death. It is what we are sowing in the world. As brutally as any “rogue-regime.” I’d submit that you/we just live in a culture where it is virtually impermissible to recognize our own evil. So we create categories of evil, and pat ourselves on the back for not being as bad as the really bad guys.
I’d bet that Saddam had/has a rational explanation as to why he gassed the Kurds and brutalized the uprising Shi’ah. And it makes sense to him. And those of his culture. It doesn’t make it right. So that he/they can continue to believe they are good apes.
It’s not that your points are not valid, because they are. It’s that you are making a different argument.
I am talking about why we cannot sustain a policy like Bush’s over time until it results in victory. You are detailing the reasons that will lead us to abandon the effort.
You are not arguing against my point, but merely documenting the elements of the case that will lead to the collapse of our morale.
It is the causes of the collapse of morale that I am discussing, I am not disputing them. We cannot win a war such as Iraq because we, as a people, will not do what it requires.
Shelby sees that as bad, I see it as our salvation.
My comment was for Boston Joe, sorry Booman, but not this time.
I don`t usually comment in the negative, & in this instance I `ll stick to my ways. I feel the same way you have written your opinion in both comments. I disagree strongly with some of the comments but wish to affirm yours.
I didn’t really mean my comment to be negative. It was just something I was thinking in response to what BooMan wrote.
He is right. My point is kind of outside what he is talking about. Related. But I agree with BooMan regarding his disagreement with Shelby. I just wanted to point out, that in my view, both their positions rely on some sense of American exceptionalism. Something I tend to see from most Americans. They just cannot accept the fact that their government is engaged in very, very destructive actions. They see themselves at the “good guys.” It is congnative dissonance on a massive scale.
This is just my opinion.
Okay, let me try to address this again.
Re-reading your post, I see it as arguing that we are committing a ton of force, and you see me as somehow whitewashing it and not equating it with Saddam’s force, or somehow legitimizing the force we have been using.
That is a misreading of what I am saying. Whatever level of force we are using is insufficient. That’s point number one. So, the argument is about whether or not we are willing to use more force, not about the force we are already using.
Second, even at the level we are using, it is causing a major backlash. Even more so, should we begin assassinating all males over 10, and resorting to overt torture and other blatant human rights abuses.
Here, the point is that we cannot win without committing these acts anymore than Saddam could have retained power without committing them.
Body counts are irrelevent to the argument, because it’s not how many you kill but how effectively you coerce. It was easier for Saddam to infiltrate every coffee shop and every political meeting with spies. So, we have to use even more violence to get anything approaching the same results. We cannot do it over time. It’s not that we haven’t stooped to these tactics, because we have. But political contraints limit their effectiveness.
All I am arguing is that we cannot win without becoming the beast we sought to destroy and that we, as a people, will not tolerate it for long. Certainly not unapolgetically as a matter of stated policy, and certainly not for long enough for it to actually create a stable Iraq.
But, most importantly, I think that is a good thing. I don’t see it as a problem that we are unwilling to commit these acts as a matter of stated policy over time. I see it as a problem that we have entered into a war where such acts are a prerequisite for success. It isn’t a success worth having…to say the least.
“But, most importantly, I think that is a good thing. I don’t see it as a problem that we are unwilling to commit these acts as a matter of stated policy over time. I see it as a problem that we have entered into a war where such acts are a prerequisite for success. It isn’t a success worth having…to say the least. “
Now I get where you`re coming from.
I meant that, rather than comment negatively on posts I disagreeded with, I strongly felt the same way about yours, & that was positive praise for a positive post. I also was not putting Booman`s down, but only attributing my comment to the right poster,Boston joe.
…for Vietnam. There are those who say we could have won there, and they take two positions. The first is the little experiment that some very few units tried in the ‘Nam, living in villages with the people. We’re not talking strategic hamlets here, though that was also tried, but rather actually living and fighting with locals in their original locales. The trouble with this technique is that it requires linguists and culturally sensitive troops in vast numbers, and a whole lot of time.
The second technique was an enhanced version of what was already going on: bomb the crap out of the enemy, triple the number of soldiers in country, make programs like Phoenix long-lasting and large, use, as was proposed by some, nukes or some devastating blow like exploding the country’s dikes to drown thousands and starve hundreds of thousands.
“..we are losing, in part, because we are not willing to use the same amount of force that Saddam used.”
There is a huge difference between maintaining an existing power structure and imposing control via invasion.
Rulers seldom have to resort to mass violence in order to sustain dominance. The established lines of power and control operate as smoothly as the Nazi train networks, fueled by individual self interest and inertia. Religious fervor and nationalism can be tapped to increase government power. Violence is needed only to tweak the system.
These same factors work against the invader. Established systems, religious identity, patriotism, and fear of reprisals sustain resistance to would-be conquerors.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life–absorbed as new history–so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems.
I don’t see how you can tell the difference between right and wrong if you have to discard all of your morals to gain “moral authority”. His underlying assumption is that white people are just better than everyone else, which is a patently stupid premise based on the thousands of seriously screwed-up white people I have met.
And Shelby Steele turns out to be a black man. Now I need to reread to find out what kind of moral irrelevancy he’s talking about. I have a hard time understanding any value system where mass killing is considered a good thing, so I’m probably missing something.
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Shelby Steele
Research Fellow Hoover Institution
Expertise: Race relations, American social culture, identity politics
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
…Steele has discussed the effects of “white guilt” among elite groups for at least a decade and a half, although previously his analyses were confined to the domestic side of things.
Ah, the elite groups part is what I was missing. If I had realized that Steele was a significantly more advanced person than me, I probably wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to understand his higher-plane thinking. I should have realized that lesser humans (animals for the slaughter that they are) don’t read the Wall Street Journal.
So, Steele and I agree on the reason that we cannot win wars like Iraq and Vietnam … we refuse to use biblical levels of force.
White supremacy has never existed in history except as a figment of the imagination. White supremacy was used by Hitler to exterminate Jews, Roma, homosexuals and mentally ill persons. The German Blitzkrieg can be equated to Rumsfeld’s shock and awe, except the Germans were highly successful in their military campaigns.
Commerce and trade were used to advance the well being of people, countries and nation states. A colony was used as a safe place, harbors were fortified to protect the settlements and commercial routes to the East. The Europeans did not always suppress the native peoples, but used force to protect their livelihood. Commerce needed a peaceful surrounding and cooperation.
The exploration to the Americas and to Africa was part of imperial conquests, religious fanaticism and excessive bloodshed.
Thus BooMan, if you are set on a conquest of Vietnam or Iraq, you and Steele are probably right. After the atrocities during the bloody 20th century throughout the world, the cold war era of nuclear deterrence, many nations have sought a path toward disarmament, pacifism and an economic union (EU). Europe has experienced the horror and destruction of war, the nations will have none of it, except when attacked.
The goal of a world empire has passed after the British Empire and colonies collapsed at the end of World War II. Peace can only be attained when a balance of power exists, or the rewards of battle has diminished due to its economic cost and the unrelenting suffering for the victims of war. Germany and Japan were pacified by the Allies. Europe pledged never to wage war on it’s continent again between neighboring nations.
China and India are rising economic powers in Asia, and the world community would make a wise choice for economic cooperation instead of confrontation.
The U.S. policy of isolation and an economic embargo has never worked, look at Castro’s Cuba, North Korea, Iraq and Iran. The boycott and isolation of South Africa did hasten the end of apartheid.
● The Future of Blitzkrieg is Now: US is “Global Strike” Capable ◊ by Steven D
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Jeesas Kreist, this is a WaPo editorial?
So the Washington Post is now in the business of advocating genocide from its editorial pages, since (seeing as though killing 2M civilians and 1M combatants in Vietnam wasn’t enough) the only way for a foreign power to defeat an insurgency is to wipe out the entire population that supports it.
Ominous sign indeed. It has been said that Ghandi was able to defeat the British Empire because the British were too civilized, and that his non-violence would not have worked against the Nazis [in fact, Ghandi supported the British war effort during WWII, quite controversially]. Go ahead, Goodwin-Law me, but the WaPo just took the wrong side in that debate.
it’s the Wall Street Journal, not the WP. Your point still stands.
Sorry, got confused there…
Booman, genocide has nothing to do with right and left. It’s a whle different (and more serious) issue.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
Am I missing something, or is he really saying that we need to regain the moral authority to commit the same moral crimes we feel stigmatized for committing in previous generations? I thought the stigma was there because civilized society recognized that racism and imperialism are immoral and wrong. Was racism wrong or not? If not, what in the hell is a black man like Shelby Steele doing writing an editorial for a national newspaper?
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● U.S. Air Supremacy Over Vietnam
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Your diary has some parallels to a very thought-provoking piece in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine.
The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal by Peter Beinart compares conservative and liberal moral perspectives that are the basis of foreign policy.
In the late 1940’s and 1950’s, intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and policymakers like George F. Kennan put forth this point of view.
At the same time conservatives felt that such questioning made America weak.
Further
Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian, stated further:
It is a great article. Check it out.
This whole analysis misses the point that we are not morally correct do be doing what we are doing in Iraq. If we were morally correct in this war, as I believe we were in fighting Nazi Germany, the brutality would flow freely. Firebomb a few cities? No problem. Drop an A-bomb or two? No problem. And when the morally superior force wins, the defeated peoples understand, somehow, what got them bombed to hell in the first place.
When the morally inferior forces win, their victories are temporary, because the defeated people seeth and smolder and fight back for decades and centuries at a time.
I believe that humans, in general, ARE moral beings who are capable of figuring out when they are being wronged.
In the first and last analyses, it has nothing to do with whose skin is what color. That whole argument is a misdirection from the REAL issue. We ARE wrong to be there, thus we will not be able to enforce our will. NO MATTER WHAT. No matter how brutal we become in Iraq, we will not win. No matter whether we have some ‘white man’s burden’ on us or not. PERIOD.
Blueneck, you are absolutely correct.
So I guess I’m missing the point here. Is he for wholesale slaughter like we had in WWII? Estimates of civilian and military casualties in Russia alone go as high as 27 million people. Think about that – that would wipe everyone in Iraq clean off the face of the earth. War on that scale is a horrible, horrible thing.
Maybe I have more faith in the American people than he does. I think if America found itself caught in another WWII, we would fight and die again. And I think that America’s reactions to Vietnam and Iraq show that once again the American people will support and sacrifice for a REAL threat to our country. But both Vietnam and Iraq are fundamentally NOT conflicts where the America was threatened. Rushing to war with Iran is also just as stupid.
The GWOT is another tragic mistake – not that terrorism isn’t a threat, but that the GWOT is a losing strategy. Clinton was also fighting terrorism, and WAS WINNING even with his hands tied by the Republican Congress. Think about it – did you live in fear of terrorism back then? The threat was just as real, but Clinton didn’t pander to us or play Lone Ranger to the rest of the world. My fear is that Bush will manage to lose to terrorism just like he’s managed to botch everything else.
If this is all a sense of guilt – so be it – I view it as the long painful process the human race must go through to improve. I have no desire to return to a world that started WWI almost by accident.
This discussion strikes me as a retread of the arguments from the odious right-winger Victor Davis Hanson’s book Carnage and Culture (2001). I think it’s total crap to argue that moral qualms have made the white folds weak at killing. The United States has killed over 100,000 civilians in Iraq in the last three years.
Yeah, maybe there are some nuances here I’m missing, but the whole discussion is too smelly for my taste. The title sounds like something from a David Duke web site. This is not one of the BMT’s better threads, IMO.
There are technological developments in the works that could make lower-guilt applications of force all too easy. It has been argued that more boots on the ground might have been enough to stabilize (and subjugate) Iraq, and with far less bloodshed than endless bombing campaigns. But soldiers are scarce and the prospect of dead soldiers discourages deployment.
An expensive, experimental, clunky technology will substantially fix that. Now in prototype are “robot troops” — actually, machines directed remotely by a person. No intelligence needed in the box. Note gun:
BBC News: US plans ‘robot troops’ for Iraq
These also come with loudspeakers to shout orders and threats. The eventual prospect is abundant, low-cost eyes and guns on the ground, guided by unkillable soldiers “in the remote-control unit with a Gameboy-style controller and virtual-reality goggles”. This will create growing temptations for the use and abuse of military power.
Welcome to the 21st century.
It will be interesting to see how the right wing builds off of Steele’s article, and what they use it for.
Black right wingers (who almost by definition have bought into and fully support the notion of white supremacy) are usually trotted out to “speak the truth” when something really bad relating to non white persons has happened, or is in the cards to happen. Powell at the UN, Rice in many places, but notably after Katrina – lesser known ones (Sowell, JC Watts, and so on… I’d also include Brazile, but others may not ;)before or after other incidents.
Steele is doing a number of things in this article. First, he is establishing what will no doubt be the main face saving excuse for the Iraq debacle.. .it’s all because of the liberals and the minorities. If it wasn’t for them, America (and Western society) would be able to take their natural place in the world, and things would be much better.
That the notion of white guilt, or not wanting to be seen as imperialists, and not using enough force or ruthlessness in Iraq is the reason the west has not ‘won’ is, if you ask me, false. After the initial invasion, the war was riding pretty high in the polls, and reports of coalition brutalities, the shooting of unarmed families and others at checkpoints, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and etc., made little difference in that, for quite a while. Democracy, omelettes and eggs, “we don’t target civilians, they just get in the way” and so on were the words of the day. (Many)people were quite willing to see complete destruction and huge loss of (Iraqi) life as part of ‘going to war’… until too many Americans started dying, and the insurgency got more skilled and effective. Then the polls went down and more people were upset about the war. I don’t think it had a thing to do with white guilt.
Second thing he does is provide a cover for even more brutality to come… in Iraq, probably, but most assuredly in Iran, as that is a much larger, more powerful country. He does, in one way, by stating that
While this is true in some measure, it certainly isn’t true when it comes to wars and such. Also, the term “white supremacy” isn’t used these days… ‘western civilization” usually replaces it, but it means the same thing (when used in certain instances).
I think one reason that modern western nations are having such trouble dominating and winning against these smaller, “third world” nations is that they see us coming and now they don’t wait… guerilla operations are put into place, either planned or just arising from the populace. Insurgencies/anti occupation forces form, and people go on the offensive immediately. They too have learned from history. Granted, I know very little about war operations and of course one could just drop a few nukes and wipe out the entire place, but I don’t think lack of acceptance of that route has anything at all to do with white guilt… more likely with self preservation.
I’m sure there were other factors for the loss in Vietnam. The Russians were particularly brutal in Afghanistan, but there are many factors there as well.
Well this is getting too long, but I think it’s very dangerous to buy into the notion that things have changed so much that we are ‘unwilling to do what it takes’ to win wars, because of white guilt or a overly solicitous attitude towards the poor and the non white of the world. Accepting this premise means that this leaves an out for those who push for a wider war, or for using nukes…
“Hey, we’re good people, we even lost a couple of wars for you guys, because we didn’t want to be too harsh, and we wanted to make up for the past… so you can’t say that we are imperialists and war mongers. We care. But, now we are up against an implacable, well armed enemy, that happens to be brown, so of course we have to nuke them out of existence. It’s nothing personal, you understand, right?”
“…the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty.”
This man is a serious racist. He is a Nazi. There was never any moral authority associated with the evolution of “white” skin. That is a totally bogus extract from the intersection of racial evolution in a geographical and survival context.
People got white skin because they migrated north and had to cover up to protect from the cold, reducing the production of melatonin. And people who migrated into cold climates and had to be super-aggressive in order to survive also evolved the tools, will, and skills to impose their super-aggressive territorial tendecies on other people.
There is no moral imperative that is associated with having skin that produces less melatonin. Is this a joke?
“Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites–and nonwhites–to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true.”
This is totally confusing, and I don’t know how to address it. White guilt? Whites have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation? Is this the moral transformation that inspires them to worship capitalism at the expense of the human race and our planet? Wow. How do I dodge that guilt, speaking as a “white” person. Give me lessons.
Basically, I see capitalism as the immoral extension of privileging your own personal survival over anything and everything else. It’s like each individual has a world view that sees everything outside of it as a hungry tiger going for the jugular vein. And the worst outcome is that the vast, vast majority suffers. Because we need each other. And we need this planet.
I read this piece of fractured sophistry by Steele this morning before embarking on a day of medical bureauocratic nonsense.
Steele is of course a seriously deranged wingnut and so his rhetoric and false logical constructs are usually not worth addressing. But he’s a creep and I’ve had an unpleasant day so I want to comment briefly.
Anyone who thinks anyone in the Bush regime is suffering from some form of “White Guilt” is even more deranged than Steele. BushCo would certainly be demonstrating even more ruthlessness than they are if they thought they could get away with it, and their own “whiteness” and putative guilt has nothing to do with it. Steele wants readers to infer that the creature known as BushCo has a conscience, and that this supposed conscience causes them to exercise “restraint”. Steele wants us to perceive that the invasion of Iraq and all the other psychopathic acts by BushCo are acts of “restrained” aggression; that they are moderate acts that would be much worse if BushCo had no conscience at all.
This is of course pure manipulative propaganda, a clever bit of psy-ops trickery designed to dupe people into believeing BushCo is not so brutal after all. He wants us to buy into this bit of nonsense;
If it weren’t for Bush’s respect for our Arab and Muslim friends and his sensitivity to their perception that white western racist pathology is the driving force behind this invasion of the Middle East, he would have acted in a far more ruthless way that would have destroyed those pesky insurgents in one fell swoop. (Josef Goebbels would have been proud of this construct.)
In one of the comments BooMan says this;
I disagree. Saddam exercized his ruthlessness and brutality because it was in his own interest to do so as part of his desire to achieve and maintain complete control and dominance in Iraq. But setting aside the question as to whether there was any justification for invading in the first place, the long term interest of the Bush regime’s policy vis a vis the Middle East is to push the entire region into more and more conflict and instability until such time that gaining control of the energy reserves in the region is possible. So the very idea of peace and stability and security in Iraq is anathema to their agenda, and therefore, to the extent that one may comment on the relative degrees of ruthlessness displayed by Hussein and by Bush, the determinant is not that BushCo shows “restraint” for some reason while Saddam did not, it is because the goals are different; for BushCo, more war is desirable, while for Hussein, dominance and control were desirable.
writing steele’s op-eds for him.
found the choicest quote, from joseph conrad’s heart of darkness.
you cannot win a war in a country when the people are against you. Modern history has taught us this in Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan (by Russia) and now Iraq. It doesnt matter how low you stoop in dealing out death, torture and general mayhem. You just end up losing all the same, but the lower you stoop the worse the defeat becomes. Let’s not forget what exactly the French did in Algeria. Let’s not forget the massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam and other poverty stricken SE Asian states. These indiscriminately dropped bombs and chemical agents massacred as many innocents as any more down on earth rifle and bayonet style massacre. Ditto the Russians in Afghanistan. Forgetting what us Americans sometimes regard as our right to impose what we see as “protecting our national interests” on anyone else by any means, the true bright spots of these conflicts were that the people of the country being devastated won their independence and moved on (possibly accepting Afghanistan).