236. How "Compassionate Cruelty" Could Solve the Terrorist Problem.

 

If parents can teach their children and Israel can teach its children (the Ultra-Orthodox men) by being compassionately cruel to them, why, I asked in Post #234, can't advanced nations teach backward nations by being cruel to them?  They might do more for them in the end than by being quickly and constantly kind to them.

I didn't consider something compassionate cruelty might do for the advanced nations: meet the threat of terrorists coming from the backward nations.

I know.  Nearly everybody will tell me that I won't have to consider it long. "Thorough, systematic cruelty?  You're going to have to have worldwide co-operation. One soft heart, one turn to self-interest and you're wrecked. Think of the Congressmen you'll have to get on board.  Think of China.  Think of Russia.  Hell, think of France.  Never happen."

Yes, I say, might happen.  But I set some extraordinary conditions.  First there would have to be a monstrous terror attack by some backward people, something that would fill the U. S. with grief and rage and make all its friends tremble with sympathy and fear.  Then the U.S. would have to have a president of extraordinary imagination and skill.  Those two things.  Without them, forget it.

We already know, from attempts to benefit backward people through cruelty, that softhearted people are our biggest problem.  They can't stand watching the pitiful harvests of superstitious agriculture, the illusions of botched book-keeping, the contradictions in wise men's rulings, the rote recitations taken for education, the ignorance forced on women.  "Oh, child, you're hurting."  And they've never been able to stand inter-tribal massacres, atrocities, cleansings.  "Oh, children, you're hurting each other."

So, just when pain starts to do its work, and the backward (I think the old word fits here) are beginning to advance on their own, the soft-hearted step in, make up for lost harvests, straighten out the book-keeping, outline a proper constitution, write out some rights, and, if tribes are killing each other, send in some soldiers to put a stop to it.  They might even send in an army.  Paddle them into enlightenment.

The hard-hearted, whom you might think would get with such a program right away, are also a problem, though a lesser one.  They say, "These are no children of mine.  They're not even in the family."  The hard-hearted look the other way and think only of their own security.  They are a problem because that inward look thickens their heads, and they have trouble seeing that their security might be improved if they soften up a bit.

All right, at home the president of the U.S. has got all these Soft Hearts and Hard Hearts, opposing and often despising each other, and abroad he's got a lot of balky friends and semi-enemies, some of them despising him.  And he's got this plan, a compassionate cruelty plan, that he has to get past the opposing hearts and out where the three-quarters friends and halfway enemies will rush to his side and co-operate on his plan.

Extraordinarily difficult, yes, requiring extraordinary luck, but let's say he gets it.  The monstrous attack comes.  Thousands killed.  "Oh my God we're all under a terrible threat." 

Our president goes to work.  After steely reassurance of the nation (the easy part), he calls Congressional leaders together.  He gets them all to see that the threat is long term, and then he, a regular Demosthenes, gets the Hard-Hearted to see that that threat will be reduced if the backward country is made more advanced and the Soft-Hearted to see that the short-term suffering they will watch is necessary for this long-term advancement.  I mean, he's really extraordinary.

Then he calls the advanced nations to a big conference.  Full of the balky friends and semi-enemies.  In the past it's been hard to get loose co-operation from them, much less the tight co-operation he is going to need.  But our Secretary of State is going to try for it.  He says (in more diplomatic language, of course), "Look, my nation has suffered all these deaths.  Our people want revenge.  Our president is ready to go ballistic.  If you at this conference don't put something together, some alliance, some program, that will give us long-term security I think he's by God going to launch."  They leave the first meeting fearing that the world's biggest stash of nuclear weapons is under the command of a fear-crazed hawk — not an unheard of belief about American presidents.

The president plays along with his Secretary of State.  In fact, he has set it up.  They're playing sane-cop, crazy-cop.  So that he can get this kind of statement delivered to the world:  "We are forming an alliance for security and advancement, starting with the nations that we are assured are no threat to us.  What makes a nation a threat is...(Here would follow what the invitees, with their eyes on the angry U. S. president, decided were the threats that had to be removed.)

Iran clearly gives them a standard by which to measure threats.  "Frequent naming of the U. S. as 'the Great Satan' by the head of state, frequent denial of obvious fact (like the Holocaust) by the prime minister, demonstrable rejection of the norms of advanced, nay civilized, nations (like abusing diplomats — any of whom around the world could be abused if a nation abandoned civilized standards — and then celebrating the abuse year after year as if it were a heroic action) and, most threatening in a culture that promotes martyrdom, moving toward nuclear weapons.  Finally, fixing these people as an intolerable threat, is pointing out that one of them, as head of state, has the last say on national action, like launching a missile."  There it is, the gold standard, the mark our conferees can work down from.  They decide how far beneath it a nation must go before it can be admitted to the circle.

So to the backward nations who are a threat something like this message goes out: no harboring of terrorists, no tolerating those who incite to terrorism, no silence from leaders when terrorists do attack, and, finally, no weapons of mass destruction, with your agreement to surprise inspections to make sure you're not making them. 

On the back side of that message will go this one: staying out of the circle of security means that you get none of the benefits of advancement.  None.  No favorable trade, no help with development, no participation in world banking, no visas for your leaders, maybe not even landing rights at advanced nations' airports.  In short, sanctions in spades. 

I know.  Half of you will tell me I'm dreaming.  "Russia going along with this?  China?  You'll be lucky if France gets aboard." 

But we won't need luck if our Demosthenes has stiffened us enough to play it right.  Start with our close friends, the most difficult of which is France.  We just get hard with them.  "You break the embargo and trade with that country (or, in the extreme case, give their planes landing rights) you lose trade (or your landing rights) with us." 

True we have lost some of the commercial power to enforce this but we probably still have enough to be usable.  Enough for our president to give it a try anyway.  And remember, these countries know their own interest, they don't like being pinched, and some of them may well have been so convinced that these backward nations are a threat to all of us that they'll go along.

If they don't go along our president has to hurt them, or credibly threaten to hurt them.  And he can do that only if his people are willing to hurt themselves.  This is a big problem, bigger than his external problem.   It's been a long time since an American president has asked his people to give up trade, accept higher prices, and make do with less. 

Our great president will see that it's time for the Great Speech, the Periclean Speech.  "My friends, my fellow Americans, my countrymen, I see you all before me as my predecessors saw you:  good soldiers in a war against evil terrorism.  I think that's the way you see yourselves.  But the picture is not complete.  Soldiers in a war have to act like soldiers in a war.  That means making sacrifices, the sacrifices appropriate to the kind of war we're in, which is a war against terrorists.  With them you can't just send Marines to make their kind of sacrifice, you can't just send drones, and you certainly can't just continue to shop in the old way, showing the enemy that he hasn't hurt you.  You have to be hurt.  You have to show that you are willing to be hurt yourselves.  Anybody who has been in a strike situation, on either the labor or management side, knows this.  At this moment, in the kind of war we are in, I, like a union leader, am asking you the questions any worker ought to be proud to be asked:  Will you tighten your belts?  Will you show your willingness to bear the pain in lost trade, higher prices, and lower standard of living that will go with the pain, doubled, that our allies will see they must bear if we hold to our purpose?   [pause]  Will you answer yes or are you too accustomed to luxury, too fat, to far removed from your ancestors who knew what sacrifice was?  What it took to win a war.  'Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.'  Does that slogan make you laugh?  Well if it does I have one request of you:  Quit talking about terrorism as a great evil threat.  Quit calling this thing you are in with terrorists a war.  Quit thinking of yourselves as fighters.  I am almost ready to say, quit thinking of yourselves as Americans. 

"But I don't think you will hold back this 'Yes' I need from you — that advanced nations need from you, that Western Civilization needs from you, and that the backward nations themselves, if they only knew it, need from you.  Will you hold it back?  Will you hold it back?  Remember, your ancestors are listening.  What will it be?"

We know that a leader in a democracy can orate like that but can he really scold his people like that?  Well, Pericles did it.  If he can do it maybe our super president can do it.

Whether it works or not we're left with a pretty good message to the Hard-Hearts, or at least to their most dangerous faction, the Hard-Asses:  This is the harder hardness, being hard with friends.  Being hard with your own citizens and brothers.  Being hard with yourself.  Being hard with enemies, invading their countries, that's the easier hardness.

Anyway, the president does all that and at least satisfies (or embarrasses) the Hard-Asses.  They'll hold back the Marines they're so eager to land.  But we can't forget the Soft-Hearted, many of whom are ready to bail out over all this hardness.  What will he do to satisfy them?

I see him putting this question directly to one of their gatherings: "Would you like to see an end to the mutilation of little girls?  Do floggings and chopped-off hands disturb you?  We'll make it a condition of entrance into the circle that a nation give up such things."  He gets a paper and pencil and shows how, for example, the number of girls that will be saved from suffering in x future years will far exceed the number that they will see suffer from famine and disease while they wait for the nation to come around.

For their other concerns he will make a promise: he will demand of the advanced nations that they avoid all discrimination against internal adherents of the religion of the backward nations admitted to the alliance.  These citizens must have absolute equality with all the other citizens, be free to wear anything (no bans on religious dress), free to worship in any way, free to observe all their religious holidays, free to celebrate traditions with any food or rituals that aren't harmful, and, most important, have open access to everything — banking, markets, schools, housing — that advanced people enjoy and have used to become advanced.  Thus he will head off Soft Hearted complaints against his rock-hard treatment of the backwards before they are admitted.  But, of course, he will also be sweetening the carrot he holds out to those backward nations.

The final challenge will come from those who, from the beginning, will dispute his word "advanced."  Hard-Heads they are, conceding him none of the claims his favorite words ("enlightened," "progressive," "liberal") make as he dangles his carrot.  "Decadent late capitalism, that's what it is, roping the rest of the world into its consumerist circle.  The old imperialist arrogance, the old colonial paternalism, speaking compassion.  Get out of here with your superpower fiats."  And above these, from the highest brows, these thoughts:  "Consider what you are holding up for these primitives to envy.  A pornified society indulging a popular culture that breaks records for vulgarity.  A civitas that the democratic franchise has filled with half-educated louts.  And on top of all a self-esteem so great that it can present itself to other cultures with full confidence of its superiority." 

These views will be shared to some extent by many middle-brows.  They, in school, will have been made (by Emerson and Thoreau) to feel guilty about their materialism. They will know how T. S. Eliot saw a generation not too far from theirs spending their time: "looking for lost golf balls."   Spiritual idleness.  You expect an abstemious, clean-living Muslim to exchange his zeal, his dedication, for that?

Our wise president will not take that on directly, nor will his think-tank people.  That's for professors and poets.  But he'll know their work and make adjustments to reduce his vulnerability.  He'll make sure that the word "advanced" is not taken to mean "morally advanced."  He's not going to have some literary satirist in Cairo saying, "Oh these advanced nations did away with 20 million of their own in one war and then 60 million in another.  Let's become an advanced nation so we can do that."  He'll make clear that his program is designed, and known to be designed, to stop only one kind of killing, the backward kind.  He'll make clear that the advanced kind, the kind that kills in the millions, is another problem.  "Join up and maybe you can work on it with us," he might add.

And yes, he might, after all, take public note of the heavyweight criticism, even from lightweight comedians.  Showing his own blood, running from satirical cuts, he might say to Egyptians (or Iranians or Bahrainis or whoever), "See, when you're advanced you can do this to your president too."

Well, that's about as much as I can fit into this blog post.  The measures are enough, I believe, to let the compassionate cruelty program begin, but they certainly don't meet all of the objections the Soft-Hearted might make, especially after the allowed pain goes on, and on, and gets full publicity.  "Mr. President, there are many moderate, enlightened citizens in those countries.  In some they're a majority.  They didn't do anything.   You are making all suffer for the behavior of some, as the prejudiced do."

"Furthermore," they might add, "We owe those people something.  "We were terribly unjust to them in 1953 — or whenever, according to the nation.  No wonder they broke out against us so irrationally.  How about a little compassionate understanding?"

Those are serious objections and they need to be met.  There could be a mass soft-hearted bailout.  And you need to see how our president will avoid it.  Well, the picture is too big.  So, a later post?