Dr. Stadelmann by Otto Dix, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, W.Landmann Collection
(via Allthingsbeautiful.com)
One of the ideas I’m working for my book is “GridThink” which is an age old dualistic way of thinking that pervades the non-sustianable mititary-industrial-information-entertainment-complex. It has also been called by some, “WhiteThink.” This insidious, world and mind destroying mentality finds its most extreme expression in the so-called National Security State; I say “so-called” because it is one of the most paranoid and insecure ways of viewing the world. Anyhow, the following essay that ran in The Nation discusses the post-war rise and institutionalization of this thinking pattern.
It’s both enlightening and frightening because it suggests that unless this tight clique of paranoids gets checked, the Democrats can do no better reigning them in. Sadly they are completely blind to their Thanatos- Freud’s term for death wish. The worse thing is that they are too chicken to test it themselves, they have to send others to do their bidding. It’s one of the ugliest and darkest qualities generated by the human mind. After Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq, my impression is that they will do no better than the Romans, and will self-destruct, hopefully not taking too many down along the way.
The real affliction is more insidious. For want of a better label, call it “semiwar,” a term coined after World War II by James Forrestal to promote permanent quasi mobilization as the essential response to permanent global crisis. A man who saw demons everywhere, Forrestal was convinced that he alone grasped the danger they posed to the United States.
Forrestal was also a zealot, the prototype for a whole line of national security ideologues stretching across six decades from Dean Acheson to Donald Rumsfeld, from Paul Nitze to Paul Wolfowitz. Geoffrey Perret’s acerbic description of Acheson applies to them all: His “mind turned to the apocalyptic as easily, if not as often, as other men’s thoughts turn toward money or sex.” For semiwarriors, time is always short. The need for action is always urgent. The penalty for hesitation always promises to be dire.
Technorati Tags: Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation
Tags: War
