237. How a Compassionate Cruelty Program Could Be Kept Going

 

All right, the Alliance for Security and Advancement makes this great start and then what?  Nations get tired of making the necessary sacrifices in goods and trade and Americans get tired of watching all the suffering they are allowing or causing.  Once again reality throws its weight against high resolve.  Another flawlessly theorized program grinds to a halt.

So how will my super president, my Bismarck of the democracies, keep his alliance going and his own people in line?

Well, with the alliance he's got a wonderful resource at hand: money.  Just what Britain had to keep its allies going against Napoleon.  He deals it out as needed, according to the chances of defection.  Remember, the U. S. is not only the richest nation in the world, it's saving money.  By not doing invasions, and maintaining armies abroad, and rebuilding defeated countries, this president can more than make up the losses other advanced nations will suffer.  By the Iraq measure alone he's got over a trillion dollars to play with.  I think that kind of money will do the job.

Next the suffering in the backward countries his people will have to stand by and watch.  This is the really big problem.  No matter how well they have pictured the suffering, no matter how well they have prepared themselves to bear the sight of it, no matter how thoroughly they have blotted out their contribution to those people's earlier suffering, or the presence among them of people to whom the suffering can teach nothing (the already advanced, moderate people), when the sufferers appear on a television screen they can't stand it.  None of us can stand it.  At this point all our softened hearts will cry out for an end to neglect and cruelty.  No matter how convinced we were that it would end in greater humanity.

This may be an insurmountable problem.  A compassionate cruelty program may run so counter to human nature that it's not worth trying to implement.  Especially when the media, the screens, are so alert to cruelty, so quick to stoke compassion.

I can't see any president, no matter how super, opposing this alone, and on the spot.  He'd need the help of prior education, particularly the kind that develops the imagination., the faculty that let's us call up, ahead of time, the images our schemes, our plans, our programs, our desires, will produce.  All that we have committed ourselves to.  In Churchill's time, for the British. it would have been the blood, the sweat, the tears, the cruelty they were going to inflict, the suffering they were going to have to watch.  "Go ahead, Mr. Prime Minister, bomb Dusseldorf no matter how many good Germans are in it."  Collateral cruelty goes with the program.

Here for Americans it would be the ability to see, at the moment they pictured little girls of the future growing up whole and happy, the little girls whose present suffering CNN would put before them each night.  The price paid for the better future. 

What would the American president have to have in order to give his people, in such a short time, this ability to see and accept?  Churchillian eloquence?  Maybe.  For the short term.  For the long term only education, going through history books seeing how much cruelty and injustice is attached to every advance in humanity and justice.  Without some education like that in the populace his eloquence might well fail. 

If he succeeds, his speeches to the moderate, advanced people inside a backward country will not be unlike the speeches Churchill might have made to good Germans.  Our president could, with his people behind him, say, "This suffering, this damage, good Iranians, is the price you pay for putting up with leaders like Khameini, giving them the final say."  Or, borrowing from Mao, he could say to the general citizenry, "You, your culture, your religion, determine the water, the temperature of it, the acidity, in which these jihadist fish swim.  Do something about it or suffer with them."

"But think how we made them suffer, so wrongly, in 1953 ," say the Soft Hearts beside him.  "You are victimizing your own victims."

Here our president has to become a philosopher. "Reconsider," he says.  "Are we trying to satisfy the dead or provide for the living?  I ask the question here as I ask it in Israel, where satisfaction of the Holocaust dead is so urgent.  In both places the welfare of the living and their descendants comes first.  Sure we feel guilty, but that has nothing to do with our decisions and plans."

God knows if that will work.  The president wonders too.  All of those hurting hearts, all of those willing hands, all wanting to help.   So he does things that would shock the pants off philosophers if they ever found out about it.  He has the CIA slip all kinds of aid into the backward countries — arms for the opposition, trainers, advisers, any American (as long as he's not wearing boots) who can help.  And, where he can get away with it, he lies about their presence and mission.  Also, there are the organizations he doesn't have to lie about, the NGOs.  All the while he's been talking up toughness he's been cranking up the NGOs.  Anything to reduce the suffering that will be seen on TV, anything to grease the Soft-Hearts over the rough part of the track.

That lying.  It's a bad thing, but like many a bad thing it's done to accomplish a good thing.  Here the good thing is the best thing any 21st-century president could ever give his country: quagmire protection.  Americans risk a quagmire any time they enter a win-lose situation.  Americans hate to lose a fight.  They hate to have their credibility reduced, their word doubted, their standing lowered.  Most of all they hate to see their buddies die in vain.  They're used to fights that win independence, free slaves, repay Lafayette, avenge Pearl Harbor, stop fascism, and contain communism.  American blood on an island sanctifies it.  "Give back Okinawa?  Have you no gratitude?"  Just the other day (1-10-14), on the front page of the Times: "Fallujah’s Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There."  It's to keep Americans from feeling and saying such things that American presidents keep the country going in a fight, no matter how hopeless or ill-considered.

Well this president knows from history that if he doesn't give his country a clear-cut victory in a good cause there's not much in it for him at the termination of a war or end to his term.  Fight for eight years, clearly benefit one people, the Iraqi Shi-ites, and have them throw their shoes at you (Bush).  Or clearly benefit nobody and, after a much greater effort to avoid failure, have to retire (Johnson).

This president also knows that that force, the force against losing, kicks in as soon as Americans think they're officially in a fight.  One way is to stay out of unwinnable fights. The other way is to keep whatever fight you're in from becoming official.  No bell bringing you out of your corner.  If you've sent trainers and advisers you never call them fighters.  You even deny their presence. You lie.  You cheat, you steal, you do anything to keep Americans from saying, "It's our boys against their boys now, and our boys don't lose" — as they could say as soon as Johnson sent the Marines into combat at Da Nang and Bush said go to General Schwarzkopf.  In short this president knows that there is a slippery edge he can never put his foot over, because once he does these forces will keep him from pulling it back.  And they operate for years.

Of course eventually one of the members of our free and enterprising press is going to point out that the president's trainers and advisers aren't really trainers and advisers, and that it's the CIA that is pulling the NGO strings.  What's a quagmire compared to the chance for a Pulitzer?

This is the final challenge and though it's not the biggest it may be the hardest for the president to meet.  Maybe he can't, by himself.  He needs PR people.  But God, what an assignment!  "I want you to spin this so that by the end of the month everybody on television is singing  'God bless the CIA.'"

Well, let's say the super president has super PR people.   And gives them two months.  So that he can work in his speech about how this is a new kind of war, requiring covert fighting.  So he can build up agents as fighters.  Better make it three months.  Time for the movies he'll encourage, or plant.  Under Cover in the Swat Valley.  Sleeper Agent in Pakistan.  He Penetrated the ISI.  Anything to take attention off the win-lose Army and put it on the FBI and CIA, whose success or failure is so slowly and dimly revealed.

Maybe he should make it four months.  Give him time to work on Congress for laws fitting the security-liberties balance to a war that's inside our borders as much as outside.  Time to loosen up the courts a little.  So he won't have to be breaking any laws.  No, four is too long.  Come on, Senate, this isn't 1965.  Come on, Supreme Court, the Department of Homeland Security isn't the Stasi.

OK, three months it is.  Super performance by everybody and on CNN a mother whose three sons were in the terrorist-targeted building says, "Thank God for the CIA."

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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?

169. Rome, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran

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No, Romulus, I don't want any ancient Romans speaking on this blog.  You're heartless.  You decimate people.  Forty percent of the human beings in your empire were slaves.  You'll ruin my reputation.

"OK, OK, but if you had listened to me twelve years ago you'd be a lot better off than you are now.  You'd be at least a trillion richer in dollars and 6000 richer in lives."

Yes, but in how much danger?

"Probably in less danger than you're in now.  You'd have concentrated on danger.  None of this restructuring their society, changing their values, training their young men to be government soldiers, getting them (admit it) to love us.  Just wiping out — or scaring the pants off — the people that are a danger to you."

And how exactly do you avoid what we did?  When you break a country it's yours, isn't it?  You're responsible.  And, long-term, making a country a democracy makes it safe, doesn't it?  Democracies aren't aggressive.

"Oh, you are so wrong.  And in so many ways.  I won't even mention your belief that democracies aren't aggressors.  What do you think your wonderful Athens was?  Jeez, read Thucydides.  And have you noticed that the builder of the biggest empire since ours, Britain, was a democracy?"

No, since you haven't mentioned it.

"All right, let that pass.  Go to this: 'breaking a country.'  You don't have to do that.  You just break what's a danger to you.  Do they have elephants?  You say, 'If I find an elephant in here I'm going to zap it and all the people around it.'  Do they have elephant training camps?   You say, 'I find one and I'll zap it too.  Too many elephant camps in your country, Mr. King, and I'll zap you.'  I know you can do that.  I've read about your spying and zapping powers."

But suppose they worship elephants?  Suppose they have a fetish about using them?  Suppose that's the whole problem: they have an elephant culture.  That culture is a thousand miles from our culture and it's what makes them hate us.  You want us to ignore that?

"Yes! Yes!  Yes!  You're not interested in culture.  You're interested in living, breathing elephants, physical creatures that can hurt you, threats to your life — not symbolic beasts contrary to 'everything you stand for.'  The truth is, you don't understand your best interest.  You don't know the most economical way to satisfy it.  You don't know how to display it.  And you don't know how to voice it, not in a way to make sure there's no misunderstanding."

Well maybe you could tell me how to voice it.

"I can't exactly, not in your terms.  But in my terms it's very simple. To a nation you have entered you say, 'Keep your own culture, worship whomever or whatever you want, treat each other in any way you want.  Just keep the elephants out, the roads maintained, and the tribute coming.  Do it the Roman way and we'll get along fine.'"

And if some evil is growing in that nation, if in their schools they are raising a generation of elephant fanatics, you'll just let that ideology or culture or whatever, grow.  Well let me tell you something, something you don't know: we tried that once.  The evil was named Nazism.  And we let it grow until it was too late to stop it.  And you know who we blame now for that?  People like you.  We call them isolationists.  "Ignore other countries as long as the tribute — or in our case, profit from trade — keeps coming in."

"And so, because of that Nazi evil, you'll never be isolationist again.  But there's isolationism and there's isolationism.  Can you conceive of a kind in which, while assuring that no country's rockets or elephants can hurt you, you just sit behind your fences and make yourself attractive?  Attractive enough to induce your enemies to change?  Be such an example of freedom and democracy they won't be able resist.  And yes, be prosperous.  Work hard at that.  You and all your democratic allies.  The outsiders will see the connection."

And really change?  I can't see it.  The religion goes too deep.

"Here's where you go Roman.  With all that prosperity inside the fence you and your allies build it very high, with strict conditions about coming in and joining up. (You're always open to that; for long-term world peace you want everybody inside it.)  You count on the contrast between the ways the two cultures play out.  And on their ability, eventually, to see the connection between culture and prosperity.  (At first.  Later they may see connections to less material benefits.)" 

You're not who I thought you were.  You know a lot about our times.

"I do because I've done some studying.  But I'm still Roman.  I'm still saying, 'Keep your own culture, worship whoever or whatever you want.'  I'm just adding  'and bear the consequences.'  And I'm ready to get really Roman with those who can't bear to watch them bear the consequences, or who try to soften them.  Help those people, send them technology, say 'there, there, your culture's really as good as any other,' and you're out of the alliance.'  A good Roman is able to, well, 'watch them starve.'  Because he thinks suffering the consequences is the best way to learn about your religion and culture, what's wrong with it.   The starvation he watches is a means to a good end: getting them permanently into a proven feeding system.  Good end for them.  For us, it's securing our lives against them."

And that comes first, right?

"Right.  And you get it by holding to the strict conditions.  Nobody gets inside the fence, nobody joins the circle of the well-fed, without checking his elephants at the gate and opening his courts for a check by the others.  Any member of the circle who makes it easier for an entrant to skip this, or reduce the motivation to accept the conditions, you throw him out."

Man, we'd have to have a lot of power to do that, or a lot of sympathy among the other members of our alliance, or both.

"I agree.  At one time I think you had both.  Right after 9-11.  Now it may be too late.  But what else gives you a better chance against something so deep?"