1 Artist on War
Vasily (Vasilii,
Vasilij, Vasiliy)
Vasilievich Vereshchagin (Верещагин, Василий Васильевич,1842-1904)
was a
Russian artist and humanist. He left a
pictorial record of his travels, including Balkans,
Middle East, India, Japan, Philippines, Cuba, and USA. Behind
this short bio clip lies a rich creative life and unusual
destiny. Vereshchagin, an anti-war batalist,
described also as Artist at War in the book in
English of the same title (http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=BAROOS93
), remains a personality of global rank, well remembered
but still
relatively little called under the light of modernity—and
postmodernity—outside
Russia. He was by no means anchored to his Russian
background. His Apotheosis of War
(Figure 1) was painted in
Munich, among other works in the Barbarians series.
It was inspired by the painter's
impressions during the Russian-Turkestan war (1868) on the territory of
today's Uzbekistan, a former Soviet Republic. It was intended as a
symbol and supplied with an inscription: "Dedicated to all
great conquerors: present, past, and future ones."
Figure 1. Vasily Vereshchagin
(1842-1904), Apotheosis of War,
1871.
Tamerlane
(Timur Lang), one of the greatest and bloodiest conquerors,
died in 1405 and was buried in his capital city of Samarqand (or
Samarkand) in Uzbekistan. His grandson Ulug Beg (Ulugbek), famous
of his patronage of arts and sciences, especially,
astronomy, and not of murder, was buried aside Tamerlane. For the fans
of historical
symbolism that may mean something about the precedents for progress in
the Middle East, to which Uzbekistan belongs. All you need is the
oriental patience, for which the American Constitution, with
presidential elections every four years, did not make any provision.
Quite to the contrary: the midterm elections gave a limited
opportunity to the citizens to vent their impatience
every two years.
Although
Vereshchagin had seen some small piles of sculls during his travels
along the Russia-China border, the
following photo from Cambodia (Figure 2)
testifies that Apotheosis was not
painted from nature: in his painting the lower jaws look still attached
to the sculls. The ongoing global murder makes us all experts in such
things. Vereshchagin's prophetic imagination was surpassed by the
reality of the killing fields of the twentieth century.
Figure
2. Victims
of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge rule
in
Figure 3. Golden Opulence
Sundae,
$1000. Cambodia. The skulls and bones of
thousands
of unidentified victims are displayed at the
"Museum
of Genocide." Photo and caption from:
http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/blackbook_communism.htm
I have already used the photo of the Golden Opulence
Sundae, $1000, in Essay
46.
I confess that the sundae with its "edible gold" struck me more than
the
photo of human bones, for which I had already been prepared by
the catacombs
of Paris and the living skeletons of the Holocaust. The
Golden Opulence symbolizes the remarkable stability of America amidst
turmoil. It celebrates wealth, the best ballast for hot air balloons in
stormy weather. It does it with a cavalier attitude toward gold: the
omnipotent tyrant is forced
to crawl through human bowels to the infamous end. This
is why I counterbalance the gray morbidity of Figure 2 with Figure 3. The picture of hell
is unconvincing without paradise as an alternative. And vice versa.
Regarding Tamerlane, here is
his place in an excerpt from the roster of wars:
—And
David and his men went up, and invaded the Gesh'urites, and the
Gezrites, and the Amal'ekites: for those nations were of old
the inhabitants of the land, as thou goest to Shur, even unto the land
of Egypt.
And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, and
took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and
the apparel, and returned, and came to Achish. Samuel, 27:8,9
—Ordered by Mangu to subdue the Mongols' western
neighbors, Hulagu led his enormous army into
Persia in 1251 and by 1256 had crushed the heretic Ismaili order of
Muslims (also known as the Assassins). In 1257 he besieged and sacked
Baghdād after the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustasim rejected Hulagu's
demand for Abbasid surrender. In the massacre, only Christian lives
were spared, apparently due to the intervention of Hulagu's Christian
wife. Baghdād burned for seven days, and some historians estimate
as many as 800,000 people, including the caliph and his family, were
killed. In a letter to King Louis IX of France, Hulagu estimated his
army killed 200,000 people.
—On
Tamerlane's distant expeditions,
where his purpose was only to loot and
strike terror, he ordered atrocities that are still remembered. At
Eșfahān (Isfahan), in Iran, which had rebelled after
surrendering in 1387, he massacred 70,000 people and constructed towers
of their skulls. In 1398 at Delhi, in India, he had 100,000 Hindu
inhabitants slaughtered and razed the city.
—The
human cost, not including more than 5 million Jews killed in the
Holocaust who were
indirect victims of the war, is estimated to have been 55 million dead—25
million of those military and 30 million civilian.
—On the
night of February 13, 1945, hundreds of Allied bombers released a
firestorm of bombs on Dresden, killing 135,000 people and demolishing
80 percent of the city.
—In a contrast between
Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, the Black Book [of Communism]
notes that while an average of 68 people were executed a year under the
Czar, up to 690 000 executions a year could be carried out under the
Commissars (such as in The Great Purge!) In 1918, Lenin personally
authorized the execution of 15 000 people in just 2 months. In just 7
years 7 million people were condemned to the concentration camps, in
the gulag. Source: Peter Hammond, http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/blackbook_communism.htm
The above quotations, except
the first and the last, are from: Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. ©
1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
What
the above incomplete roster tells us is the
confusing nature of war: a war can be waged against a side that, as the
Jews, Cambodians, and the victims of Stalin's terror, does
not offer any resistance. Moreover, the absolute majority of
the Geshurites, Gezrites, Amalekites, inhabitants of
Baghdad, Esfahan, Delhi, and Dresden did not resist either. Moreover,
a war, as war on cancer, smoking, drugs, poverty, terrorism, global
warming, Democrats, and
middle class, can be waged without firearms against an abstract or
invisible enemy. Furthermore, a war can be waged only in somebody's
imagination or even against yourself.
At least since the times of Socrates, to serve in
the army and navy has always been a
noble occupation, which, I believe, it should be. It
is the intentional mass murder of unarmed people and not the war
itself that stands alone in
the history.
A confusion descends on me like the morning fog from
the
Pacific when I watch how the
awful
human toll has been accumulating over the years in the Iraq war. Mass
murder can be committed incrementally, triggered unintentionally,
displayed openly, and executed without a slightest personal
responsibility: no Tamerlane could be found.
The
following is my own personal impressions
of an impatient, but mostly passive, witness of five wars:
WWII, the war of the Russian Communist government on its own people
(ended
in 1987), the war of the militant Islam on the West, the Cold Civil War
in America, and the Iraq war. As for the wars with myself—I have lost count of
them.
Watching TV on September 11, 2001, I had an overwhelming feeling of
defeat:
my new country was built with windows and doors wide open and left
unguarded against the hostile world from which I came.
The
Iraq war has been another defeat: the self-proclaimed "only
superpower," the world hatchery of technical
miracles, the richest country in the world, the nursery and attraction
of the most brilliant minds, the source of a unique system of
democratic ideas, and the shelter for refugees like myself, is
shamefully failing in a limited war with invisible but certainly human
enemy, armed only with simple weapons, fanaticism, and honed through
ages cruelty.
I mourn the dead on both sides, but I also mourn our defeat.
One of the causes of the defeat is another war —or,
worse, a chronic disease —that
eats up America from the inside: the Cold Civil War. A war ends up with
peace. A chronic disease may end up in death. The Democratic
tsunami of 2006 dispelled the heavy stale air, but I still cannot
regain my
equilibrium. I see a slim chance of truce, a ceasefire, but not the end
to
the CCW. America confronts only one unfriendly world superpower:
herself. America and I are of the same blood.
I
foresee scores of books written about the Iraq war, probably, even more
than about the Vietnam War. I am not qualified for any
professional judgment about war. All I can say is that I am not a
pacifist and I do not believe in the end of history. I also
believe
that there could be sound reasons to invade Iraq. The tragedy was not
the
invasion itself but the utmost inability of America to win the war,
understand the situation, learn the lessons, adjust to reality, stop
the slaughter, to prove the "number one" status of the only superpower,
and even to think more than one election ahead.
I am not familiar
with military theory. I am not a fan of military
literature. I can hardly say anything original, but the topic of
war is something I have to get off my heart.
Next I will share some thoughts after reading The War of the World
by Niall Ferguson. Further I will approach the abstract concept of war
as a chemist, using the metaphor (ideogram) of surface tension. Finally, I will convey some
impressions of the Iraq war and conclude with a political recipe.
For a different take on war see History as Points and Lines.
2 Historian on War
I see The War of the World
by Niall Ferguson (The Penguin Press, New York, 2006) as a brilliant
performance.
The
main events of the twentieth century are
widely known. It is performance of the epic that matters. What is
performance? Instead of definition I suggest comparing any two movies
based on the same book, for example, Munich
(Steven Spielberg, 2005) and Sword of
Gideon (Michael Anderson, 1986), both based on Vengeance:
The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George
Jonas. The difference is in performance. In classical Japanese
theater Kabuki and
other traditional theaters of Asia the
audience is attracted not by the content of the ancient plays, which
everybody knows by heart, but by the way the actors perform the
familiar roles. In modern theater, however, the faithfulness to the
original is not required. Cesar might well kill Brutus.
A live witness of most
of the bloody century, including WWII, and a reader of a big
stack of
books written by the WWI and WWII generations, I find the
representation of the misery of the twentieth century by Niall
freguson, born in
1962, amazingly correct. Of course I well remember the triumphal side
of the era,
too, but that was not the objective of the book. Even though I am not
sure that
the author proves his thesis ( the exclusive violence of the
century and three e-s (ethnic,
economy, empire) as its cause, all of that
unimportant, though), I refuse to criticize his
book because whatever flaws one might find ,
there
are no standards for this kind of project. Thus, I completely approve
of his minimalism regarding military operations and ignore slip-ups
like attributing a Russian opera to a wrong composer.
At the
first reading I dropped the book
after a couple of chapters: it all was too familiar. But something was
still pulling me to the heavy volume. When I had opened it for the
second time, I got
glued to the pages.
A
younger generation of readers without any relevant
background may perceive the book differently, but I got captivated by
the work
of novelty and talent. Scores of small details, stimulating
ideas, arrogant parallels (Roosevelt and Hitler, Holocaust and
Hiroshima), and troubling questions hide in the wide folds of the
generous and eloquent narrative.
I see the book as a study of organized mass violence—a difficult
topic, especially because of the overabundance of material—but not as a theorizing or even descriptive study
aimed at assembling and
organizing facts. More like a study (étude) in visual arts, it
works also as a novel, a painting, a symphony, and a
play combined. I attribute its design and style not to its TV
affiliation, but to the
postmodern shift in arts and humanities, probably, most of all
influenced by Michel Foucault. See Essay 46. Postmodernity: Postmortem for
Modernity.
Postmodernity looks not for the
truth, but for entertainment.
In no particular order, this is what still reverberates in my mind
after reading Niall Ferguson's book.
1. The
use of the word war
regarding
unarmed people as
victims leads to a misconception. In a fight between two soldiers
both have a chance to win, as in sports, while an unarmed civilian,
especially, woman or child, has no chance to stand against a
gathering of hostile and murderous people. The fatal doom
of organized non-military violence comes from the clash of an
individual with a group,
usually armed. The individual always wins in the westerns, but hardly
ever in real life. The "war against the Jews" and the war against
Imperial Japan are two very different species in the taxonomic family
of organized violence. I believe that the war on terror
and the war of Islamic terror against the West are two new separate
and still
very little explored
kinds.
2. The victory of the Allied forces
against the enemies who did not regard
them as human was possible only because the Allies also saw the enemies
as
inhuman. Military victory against a powerful
and determined enemy is impossible without
extreme hate and dehumanization of the opponent. A strong, clever,
cruel enemy
can be defeated only by ruthless, brutal force—or by decades and centuries of patience. What follows
is that the side that starts the war, the aggressor, loses a
significant part of its strength because it
inflames and legitimizes the reciprocal hate on part of the
victim. Counteraction equals action.
This
instinctive understanding of war as necessary dehumanization can
explain the initial trust of most Americans in George W. Bush. He
and his circle, as
I believe, saw many things right, although not too far ahead. I expect
some of the
future historians say that one of the reasons the initial fast
victory in Iraq turned into a defeat was that America was not as brutal
and wily as the customs of the invaded land required. One cannot
conduct a war in a politically correct way. I see
plenty of evidence that the administration had realized that and tried
to
outsource cruelty, but one cannot outsource hate. The idea of a native
strong man in Iraq was
quite expedient,
but, unfortunately, not PC. Actually, there is a more weighty
property than political correctness: EC, "election
correctness"
or suitability for electoral campaign.
With a belated soberness Americans began to realize that the same
things have different meanings in different cultures. Thus, corruption
is natural in cultures of stark survival. Harsh and violent
measures are seen as natural in authoritarian cultures, which explains
the resurgence of Stalin's cult in Russia.
3. The ultimate outcome of the modern war,
if it does not end soon, depends on the superiority of human
and material resources, in spite of some lessons from ancient
history. Planning the invasion of Russia, Hitler counted on the
kinetic effect, i.e., the advantage of speed. The final outcome,
however,
was, as the chemists say, under the thermodynamic
and not kinetic
control: the grand finale of WWII was ensured by the Russian
resources
critically enhanced by American help. The Korean War was under a
similar spell.
Thermodynamic
reaction control
takes place with vigorous reaction conditions or when the reaction is allowed
to continue over a long time to give a slow reaction time to
reach equilibrium ( Wikipedia).
The way chemists see chemical
reactions, if translated into the language of war—and,
by the way, of political action as well as of Hollywood action movies—predicts
that if the attack is fast, the enemy can be
completely overpowered in
the short run and
prevented from realizing its advantage if
the situation is quickly frozen. If,
however, the struggle drags on over a long time, the side with
numerical, intellectual, and material advantage wins more often than it
loses. The high art of war,
therefore, manifests its effectiveness mainly in the beginning of a
military operation. If the victory is not swift and decisive, the
protracted conflict goes into attrition and the battle of
resources instead of the battle of ingenuity. This is true of the
war as a whole and of its episodes.
I
found Ferguson's concise portrayal of the battle of
Kursk (pp. 533 and 534), which was mostly attrition, heartbreaking in
its
eloquence. On page 111 one can find a great example of lost kinetic
control resulted in Moltke's nervous breakdown.
The Iraq war is another example of the
kinetics-thermodynamics play. The initial speed of invasion and
the easy military victory had been lost and the balance of power began
to
shift due to the overwhelming numerical and suicide-technological
advantage of the Islamic world.
Quick, harsh, cruel, politically incorrect American actions would lock
in the
initial success, but the American commander-in-chief simply had neither
guts nor brains to do that. War can be driven only by a clear goal of
victory, not ideology. There was no clear American idea of victory,
either. On the one hand, it was democracy, on the other hand, it was
domination, on the right foot, it was oil, on the left foot, it was
another military base. And yes, the elections in the head.
We
may wonder how Turkey could become a working democracy, with all its
shortcomings. The answer is simple: Kemal Ataturk acted as a
decisive and
cruel dictator establishing secular democracy. To compare,
Vladimir Lenin was a
decisive and
cruel leader successfully
turning a fragile democracy into a
dictatorship. His clearly stated goal was never democracy but dictatorship of proletariat.
Do I call for hate and terror? If we are incapable of it, we
should not start preemptive wars. Much better, we should never start
wars at all. We can do better with defense, even if it means a
defensive war.
4. Nothing is more cruel than a civil war.
If a scale of qualitative comparison is
possible, the recent civil war in Sierra Leone set an absolute record
of cruelty, while the Iraq war excels in madness. But
why is it so? My tentative explanation is that a side in a civil
war is an army that has no state
behind its back.
Each of
two armies may have headquarters, but no common government and no
border. Since
the civil war starts with the conflict of ideas, however
primitive, one
can never be certain that his neighbor shares the same idea. The
fault lines of civil war run across families. Each side feels
a fundamental uncertainty of statelessness and recurs to the most
intimidating and barbaric acts of terror to make up for the absence of
the security and supply that only a state can give. This is
especially
applies to rebels who, being at a numerical and material disadvantage
and lacking tanks and airplanes, use hacking off the limbs of children
or the torture with power drills as psychological
warfare.
5. I do
not see any proof that the twentieth century was
the bloodiest of all. We simply know much more about
its atrocities and the productivity of the murderous technology.
They have been documented in all detail, photographed, and kept fresh
in memory.
I
certainly agree with Niall Ferguson that collapsing
empires release the worst miasmas from their former subjects. Does it
mean that
empire is a source of order and stability, as he apparently believes?
Probably. Ferguson was
even accused of being a kind of a neocon ideologue. A
label
and a
battle banner instead
of facts, analysis, and logic is the sure sign of postmodern polemics.
The main conclusion I have drawn
from my life
experience is that we have to reject the primate of any abstract idea—whether
democracy, or empire, or dictatorship, whatever—over
the basic human needs. Am I completely sure that this is right?
No. I do not know what is right or wrong, unless history leaves a
record to judge on, but then the categories of good or bad lose
meaning. To be happy is always
good.
Looking back at my life during
WWII, under Stalin, and further under the dictatorship of Soviet Politburo, I see
that the adaptability of
people to the pressure of circumstances is enormous. What people need
most is stability and hope. Nothing undermines stability and fuels hope
as much as a new abstract idea, usually false one. Hope without
stability is the most common source of bloody conflicts.
In short, I am for defense. I believe in a great moral and practical
advantage of defense over offense. This could be a sign of age, of course.
By
attacking we always empower the enemies within and without. Defense
gives us maximum freedom to think and invent, plus the right to believe
in our supremacy. Starting an offense, however, we must be rough.
6.
"Why do the men
obey?" asks Niall Ferguson, following Leo
Tolstoy. My answer is: because when a man considers a
conflict with the state or tribe, he knows that the state or the tribe
comes to his door as a group of armed
men.
It
is the same as to ask why we die. We face a much stronger opponent, we
have no choice, and everybody dies alone.
When we join a group or an army, we regain stability and we hope that
we will not die tomorrow.
7. Although Niall Ferguson
lists military technology among the causes of the "bloodiest century,"
he does not consider it a decisive factor.
Nevertheless, he
vividly depicts the role of railways in the initial stage of
WWI.
From all I have read about WWI I conclude that the mere
logistic and bureaucratic inertia of the huge mass of matter rolling
with little friction across huge distances at high speed was one of the
main reasons the great war could not be stopped. The American overseas
wars
with planes and ships instead of trains could not be easily stopped
either. The speed is a kinetic factor. A whole host of new
weaponry launched in WWII was a thermodynamic factor,
especially, artillery in the field, on tanks, and in airplanes.
To stop a war is extremely difficult. On the contrary, to start a war
one needs only to sign the orders and push a button.
3
Chemist on War
Consider a case of a standoff across the border between two enemies: BLUE and RED, Figure 4.
  
A
B
C
Figure 4. Borders between enemies. A: moderate, B:
minimal, C: extended
|
The
mutual animosity means that there is a border
tension
between the
sides. Naturally, the longer the border, the more probable an armed
conflict and the more pronounced overall tension. The border can
be abstract. Thus, the length of an idological border is measured by
the number of disputed issues, or, better, by the sum of the
intensities of all debated issues.
Thus, the number of the
disputed issues between Republicans and Democrates in the Cold Civil
War may be quite insignificant. It is the intensity of the single
non-ideological issue of who has the voting power that makes it so
brutal.
When a conflict flares up, it runs like a chemical reaction in which
the
human and material resources are transformed into waste, which can be
only partially
rehabilitated and restored.
Border tension has a semi-permanent presence in the world news.
The following data are taken from Google on November
13, 2006: Results 1
- 20 of about 30,200 for "border tension".
TIME: The Korean
DMZ Tension between the two Koreas escalates after
the North tests a nuclear weapon.
US and Mexico
ease border tension
Serbian border
tension growing
Border
tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea has eased
Syria
Turkey Border Tension and Water dispute
Scoop: Border
tension between Ethiopia, Eritrea continues
India
and Bangladesh Confer On Reducing Border Tension
Thai-Burma
border tension eased
Border
tension as escape route to Syria stays open
A border can be sleepy or full of anxiety. Anxiety means
instability. All things considered, the longer the
border, the higher instability. Figure
4 presents two extreme cases:
a border of a minimal length (B)
and a tortuous extended border that exacerbates all typical border
problems (C). The type C
border is common for ethnic and religious maps and for unsettled areas
like Palestine where it is, in my opinion, one of the few main factors
of the initially local and later regional conflict turning into a
global one right before our eyes. A similar situation was a cause
of the murder and exodus after the division of
India and the first page in many other macabre chapters of world
history.
Civil wars have the
longest front lines.
The
problem of minorities, including the origins of anti-Semitism,
has roots in the pattern (ideogram) of border
tension. Small groups of "different" people or, quite often,
"different" individuals of high prominence are surrounded by an
unmarked border, which can be sleepy or inflamed, too. It can be
ethnicity, religion, class, flamboyance, intellectual superiority,
arrogance, any other distinction that draws lines in rock, sand, or
water of human interactions. The authoritarian state tries to reduce
tension by instinctively "scientific" measures: the Pale of Settlement
for the Jews in Czarist Russia, discrimination by race or origin,
unsustainable colonial borders, internment of the Japanese Americans
in WWII. All such acts substitute a group distinction for an
individual one and in this way shrink the border.
The
K-street project, the brain child of the Republican ideologues of
the
Bush II era, i.e., discrimination by party allegiance in the bipartisan
democracy, was a typical border foray amid the Cold Civil War. To tell
the truth, it was far from a national discrimination by political
allegiance, but it was both a pattern and a seed of one of the
traditional tools of totalitarianism. McCarthyism was another
configuration in the same
pattern. There are only a couple of steps from the
K-street seed to the all out political job discrimination and, by
the way, political boycott of companies as a response. The CCW
has a lot of steps to escalate, all the way up to HCW.
NOTE
(March 15, 2007). Here is the next step: Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales fires US Attorneys for lack of anti-Democratic zeal.
Surprisingly few people have connected the two dots.
Two traditional ways an individual can escape the personal border
tension are emigration or joining a group.
In 1636, Roger Williams, who
had
individual border tensions with the Massachusetts Puritans, founded my
dear little Rhode Island, where another different personality, Anne
Hutchinson found a refuge from border conflicts with the same drowning
medium. During the midterm elections of 2006 the blue Rhode Islanders
were torn between the genuine esteem for their incumbent Republican
senator Lincoln Chafee and the Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse.
In the border conflict of the state with Bushism, Chafee found himself
under a
water-repellent coat and the Ocean State rejected him with a heavy
heart. I felt proud of my impuritanic American roots.
I am catching myself on switching from border tension to the
physical phenomenon of surface tension, which is exactly the ideogram I
am trying to draw.
(Google, November 14, 2006: Results 1 - 20
of about 1,800,000 for "surface tension" )
When
we put some salt, sugar, or alcohol in water, the substance
dissolves because it has affinity for molecules of water
and the solution is more stable than the heterogeneous mixture.
It
is not the same with oil and water: they separate. Furthermore,
liquids and gases are both fluids, and the mixtures of water and air
separate, too. The droplets of water have a spherical form
in air, as if they were covered by a thin stretched rubber
surface.
The surface tension arises on the border between immiscible
fluids, when molecules of one type have more affinity to each other
than to another type. They, so to speak, feel good (a metaphor
for stability) among those like themselves. On the border, however,
they have less neighbors of their kind than in the bulk, which
decreases the stability ("feeling good"). This is the essence of
surface tension for dummies. Surface tension needs at least one
fluid and it exists also on the borders between fluids and solids.
Negative solid-fluid surface tension means that a fluid freely spreads
all over the
solid surface, which is used for lubricating engines.
Serious sources on the Web use similar
language:
Another way
to think about it is that a molecule
in contact with a neighbor is in a lower state of energy than if it
weren't in
contact with a neighbor. The interior molecules all have as many
neighbors as
they can possibly have. But the boundary molecules have fewer neighbors
than
interior molecules and are therefore in a higher state of energy. For
the
liquid to minimize its energy state, it must minimize its number of
boundary
molecules and therefore minimize its
surface area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension
Border tension and surface tension belong to the same pattern, for
which I prefer more general surface
tension as the label for the ideogram.
As another illustration of generality of the surface tension ideogram, I refer
to the title of the book:
Meg
Daly, Surface Tension: Love, Sex and
Politics Between Lesbians and Straight Women. Touchstone, 1996.
Obviously, it deals with situations on the surface between two
social groups with limited miscibility, which all men and women, as
well as
adults and children exemplify, with scores of books on the subject,
actually, most of the world literature.
There
is a universal and known since ancient times chemical
way to reduce the surface tension between two
liquids: soap, or, more generally, surfactant:
a substance that has affinity to both incompatible media and thereby
reduces the surface tension. Egg yolk in mayonnaise is a
surfactant. Thus,
numerous American political figures have tried to play the role of a
surfactant in the surface tension between the Israelis and
Palestinians, to no avail, though. The name for a
geopolitical surfactant is shuttle diplomacy. Weather,
small talk, a cup of coffee, a joke (ice-breakers)
are
social surfactants.
Even
within the short span of twenty years I have been observing the
constantly diminishing tension along the racial and sexual rifts
of America. The most powerful surfactant was simply the public light
under which the idea
of tolerance can self-propagate, assisted by the power of personal
experience and habit.
With religion and politics, however, it was the opposite. During
the Cold Civil War, George W. Bush did all
he could to divide the country and increase surface tension between
fractions of society.
How can we increase surface tension? What is the chemical equivalent of
hostility and intolerance?
Taking the water-oil pair, we can do it by adding to the oil small
amounts of a substance with a much greater surface tension in contact
with water, for example, a silicone oil, known for its water-repellent
property. Under surface tension as ideogram, all extreme
and narrow views (complete ban on
all abortions, complete ban on all prayers, war until victory) increase
surface tension by generating
intolerance and are met with hostility.
Throughout
history we see startegies of reducing surface
area:
dense Greek
phalanx, Roman tortoise formation, compact medieval castles,
fortified cities, colonization by conquest instead of settlement, and
the American gated communities. Note that the reduced area increases
stability, but does not
mean a reduced intensity of surface tension measured as force per a
unit of length. Centrism is the only
reliable
political surfactant, which does not imply its ultimate efficiency:
without extremism it leads to stagnation.
Eloquence is a powerful surfactant invented by the Greeks, employed by
Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan, and practically lost in current
American politics.
The evolution of the
American two-party system in terms of surface tension could be a great
subject for an undergraduate paper. Someday.
The social chemistry, like the molecular chemistry, has a whole array
of factors that can influence social evolution,
among them
concentration,
catalysis, temperature, and pressure
(also an ideogram). In the Iraq war, the
tension-easing function of American occupation was designed
basing on fantastic ideas about the chemistry of the
Iraq society. In the Palestinian conflict, the
American affinity with the Jewish side (or pressure of various groups)
was
certainly higher than with the other, and the temperature of both sides
was too high, with that of Palestinian side at the boiling point.
Figure 5 presents symbolic
pictures of a tight (A)
and separated (B)
mixture of two abstract "liquids." The nonexistent void between
the droplets is left for the convenience of graphics. An emulsion, as a
fine mixture of two liquid is
called, looks typically as (C).
Figure C can be interpreted as
terrorist or dissident cells, as well as xenophobic ethnic or political
enclaves.
The way to ease the overall surface tension in such systems in the
absence of surfactant is to reduce the border to the Figure 4B type.
If
we accept that the abstract surface tension is the main source of
conflicts, the first recipe for reducing the threat to American
interests is to shrink the border with the opponents. American physical
presence in the world
looks today like Figure 5C,
with main globules in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Korea. The presence of terrorist cells in the West, of which nobody
has exact knowledge, looks the same, only the size of the enclaves is
minuscule. The only conclusion we can make
is that the
palestinization of the world, i.e., overstretching the border
between the
enemies as result of fragmentation and insularization of physical
presence, is a source of increased danger. This is a consequence of
globalization.
The excessive
shrinkage of the border, however, leads to the bottleneck effect, for
which I would prefer the term Thermopylization.
I
derive it not from the Greek root for heat but from the battle of
Thermopylae (incidentally, from the same root). In 480 B.C. 300
Spartans and 1100 other Greeks delayed the
advance of over 200,000 (some think millions) Persians for eleven days,
with the fight
locked in the narrow Thermopylae pass. The conflict looked as in Figure
6, which is another ideogram, related to bottleneck or channel.
The small area of the direct contact of the warriors equalized
their grossly unequal resources, although, of course, the Spartans
were doomed.
Figure
6. Thermopylization
Thermopylization is not the same as the
kinetic control: in
chemistry it is a kind of the diffusion
effect.
The kinetic bottleneck in chemistry means simply that the slowest
process in a chemical system determines its overall speed—quite like in life, war, and
business.
The above effects illustrate
the meaning of ideogram:
it is a very general pattern
that spans across the borders between very
different complex evolving systems.
Political recipes are beyond me (nevertheless I will give one at the
very end), but within the framework
that the surface tension ideogram offers there are not too many choices.
Here are some:
1. Use of surfactants, i.e.
negotiations with whoever occupies large
and small droplets of trouble, from terrorists to dictators. The
policy of the current government has been the opposite: erection of
impenetrable walls, condomization, so to speak, of the rogue world,
with
military conflict as the only remaining option. Diplomacy is the most
common international surfactant.
I am wondering how to
classify bribe... neither lubricant (it does not spread), nor
surfactant (the sides are eager to deal). Just a transaction.
2. Cutting the lines of supply to the areas of conflict
and communications within the area. De-globalization, i.e.
localization.
3. Transforming the antagonistic medium by propaganda, the tool
as powerful as intimidation by extreme violence, although slower. Both
act upon the mind.
Figure 7 symbolically
presents two kinds of propaganda effect
Propaganda
can decrease the resistance of the opposite sides by raising
doubts in their own propaganda. I am convinced that it is
currently the weakest part of the "war on terror." It was a
powerful tool in the Cold War with Russia.
Since propaganda works upon human mind, it should be developed by a
sophisticated human mind. Since it should penetrate the surface
between incompatible views, all said about surfactants applies to
propaganda. Start with ideograms.
 A threat and an offense can be
counterproductive Thus, the cartoon in Figure
8
("Your future, al-Zarqawi")
could only boost the will of
al-Zarqawi's henchmen.
A piece of disinformation, once
discovered, which is easy in our wireless time, undermines a whole
batch of other disinformation. A promise could be somewhat better. But
nothing works better than truth and logic, which I experienced on
myself
while listening to the Voice of America and BBC in Soviet Russia.
There is a lot of amazing material on propaganda and its over 100
varieties at the SourceWatch web site:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Propaganda_techniques
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Propaganda
NOTE:
Surface tension is a
physical phenomenon. Only chemistry, however, relates physical
properties to the intimate structure of molecules. This is the very
essence of the chemical view of the world: it penetrates complexity,
individuality, and uniqueness.
I believe there is no way
traditional physics and chemistry can be applied to social phenomena. It can be done
only in a more general framework of
evolving complex systems (X-systems) based on the notions of structural
compelxity, novelty, uniqueness, and individuality.
4
Paul Revere and the Internet
Regarding
the reasons for the Iraq war, we have to wait until the dust settles
and the
library shelves fill up with memoirs. I believe that George W.
Bush could have some quite rational motives (Niall Ferguson in Colossus thinks so, too)
underlayed with some emotional impulses, also
understandable . I
believe that the initiators of the war were driven
mostly by their understanding of American national interests. I believe
that when history enters a new phase it is rather difficult to
interpret it. Nevertheless, there are always people who do it
correctly and some who make mistakes. The best example I am aware of is
the advent of
Nazism. Those who had looked far ahead, left Germany in time.
Regarding
history, however, the only way to look far ahead is to look far back
into history.
What I can see today as the main revelation of the Iraq war —while
the whole nest of lies remains still unearthed —
is political, technical, and military incompetence
of the
administration and, quite probably, of the army. My personal worst
problem with this is that I, unlike
friendly foreigners, cannot separate the administration from
America.
I
believe that America is in a new stage of history and not only because
her environment changed. America is a large evolving complex
system: a system with novelty.
The historical novelty can always be outlined and formulated. Thus, the
novelty of fascism consisted in the network of wired and wireless
one-way mass media, fast
transportation, and instant two-way communication. The novel technology
was combined with historically traditional ideology of conquest, hate,
and violence. The person who discovered and formulated the
novelty
knew it from the inside. He was Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister
of Armaments, and he did it in his last
word on August 31, 1946, before the judgment
in Nuremberg was pronounced:
Hitler's
dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its
predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present
period
of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use
of all
technical means in a perfect manner for the domination of its own
nation.
Through
technical devices
such as radio and loudspeaker 80 million people were deprived of
independent
thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one
man. The
telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible, for instance, for
orders from
the highest sources to be transmitted directly to the lowest-ranking
units,
where, because of the high authority, they were carried out without
criticism.
(Albert Speer)
I read Speer's last word for the first time around 1960, in
the multi-volume Russian edition of Nuremberg Trial documents. I
immediately saw how well it applied to the Soviet Union and since that
time I have not found a better short description of
totalitarianism.
While
typing the previous paragraph on my computer, I suddenly realized
that Speer's discovery applies perfectly to the entire history of
the
twenty-first century, including America and the post-Soviet era.
Although in a war with itself, America is a
democracy, whichever accusing fingers are pointing at it and whatever
fumes are rising from the Web. The role of the media and
communication, new no more, but incomparably more powerful, remains the
same. All over the world, humans are placed like iron shavings in
magnetic fields that orient them along proper lines. In
authoritarian societies there is only one magnet, while in America
there are formally two competing sources of influence of different
strength,
painted blue and red over green. In fact, there are more: listening "to
a higher authority" is another one. A complete lack of magnetic
properties is yet another factor.
The same effect has been known for millennia without any
radio and television. A detailed written code of daily behavior
performed the ordering function in the form of Talmud and Koran. Today
the novelty
of the situation is that the interpretation, update,
instruction, and correction to the code, regarding the current
moment, can be delivered immediately all over the world and with visual
illustrations. In tightly interconnected dense tribal society the
deviations from the code are immediately visible to the clan. In
an individualistic loose and scattered society the sinner may be easily
in
charge of an anti-sin department and it could take quite a time to
discover the hypocrisy.
Postmodernity is about speed. It is driven by the kinetic control.
The
great American Constitution was designed and written in the times
when Paul Revere on horseback personified the Internet of his time.
Today two years sounds like eternity, updating all concerns, fads, and
lessons.
American life, which has
been my own life for twenty years, is still amazingly stable.
This "still" is an expression of my anxiety.
5
The Hangman's Bill
I promised a political recipe. Here it is, quite a trivial one: in
order to win over terrorism we have to reduce instability caused by
surface tension by
straightening and shrinking the visible and invisible borders and by
using surfactants. If we strike, however, we have to strike hard,
plugging our ears with wax against the voices of the political syrens.
This is not enough. X-systems depend on supply of energy.
The Western and especially
American dependence on oil and the transformation of oil into edible
gold means that we are
paying for the bullets that kill us. The terrorist system depends on our
dependence. It bribes us.
Hitler made relatives of condemned prisoners to pay for their execution
(see APPENDIX; I read a lot about such bills but this is the first time
I see it).
The price of oil includes the premium for our
funeral.
The price of the cheap stuff made in China includes a bouquet on
the casket.
History is not for the faint of heart and feeble of mind.
APPENDIX 1
Between the next two horizontal lines there is an excerpt from
the site : http://www.thelooniverse.com/books/kastner.html
, by
harrie
verstappen .
(His page is licensed
under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.)
Hangman's
Bill :
To
establish the proper atmosphere, this is as good a place as any to show
a sample of the bill you got for having your husband killed by the
Nazis for political, or any, reasons. Yes, you were supposed
to pay for the execution (or
else...) It comes to a total of what now
must be well over $6000. They even charged you 12 cents for the stamp
to send you the bill.
The document is the bill from a "State
Attorneyship at the People's Court"
sent to Erna Knauf for the execution of her husband Erich Knauf on May
2 , 1944. I removed the last two lines of commentary that did not
belong to
the bill.
The bill contains the following charges: fee for capital
punishment, postal expenses, public defender's fee, cost of
prison detention, cost of execution of death sentence, postal expenses
for sending the bill.
APPENDIX 2
Yes, on January 25, 2007, it is too early to write
history, but there is nothing too early to imagine.
Perk up, Hollywood: two personal stories of
Shakespearean magnitude in one
Imagine two leaders of two distant countries with bad blood—and good oil—between
them. The countries are incomparable in their size,
influence, and power, but the leaders turn out to be comparable along a
mysterious hidden dimension of history: the dimension of
foolishness.
The
first leader, blinded by arrogance and narrow-mindedness, loses a block
of his biggest city, starts a war with the second leader, loses a whole
another city to forces of nature, sacrifices thousands of human lives, loses crowds
of sanctimonious loyalists, destroys the power
of his
political party, loses trust of his people, and—we are right at the border
between reality and imagination—loses a long war with a much
weaker enemy. He sinks into history without any dignity.
As the story goes, at the same time, the second leader, blinded by
arrogance and stupidity, provokes the war with the first one, loses his
army, country, power, freedom, dignity, two sons, tens of thousand of
human lives, and, finally, his own life, regaining dignity in the end,
but leaving no appreciation by anybody.
|
