15

Standards for Ourselves

The task of restoring regional standards abroad can be conducted efficiently only if the rear base is stable and secure. Hence the importance of entrenching the values of the culture of terrorism at home.

History teaches terrible lessons about how easy it is to descend to unimaginable horror. Germany was the pinnacle of civilization, science, and high culture in the years when Hitler came to power. Famous as a “great communicator,” he became perhaps the most popular political figure in the history of Germany as long as he was winning cheap victories abroad and carrying out the “Hitler revolution” at home: reinstating “traditional values” of family and devotion, revitalizing the economy through military production, stimulating pride in the nation’s glory and faith in its mission. Nevertheless, despite Hitler’s personal appeal, direct support for his genocidal projects was never high. In an important study of this matter, Norman Cohn observes that even among Nazi party members, in 1938 over 60% “expressed downright indignation at the outrages” carried out against Jews, while 5 percent considered that “physical violence against Jews was justified because ‘terror must be met with terror’.”1 In the Fall of 1942, when the genocide was fully under way, some 5% of Nazi Party members approved the shipment of Jews to “labor camps,” while 70% registered indifference and the rest “showed signs of concern for the Jews.” Among the general population, support for the Holocaust would have surely been still less. The Nazi leaders required no popular enthusiasm in order to carry out what the Nazi press described as the “defensive action against the Jewish world-criminals,” “the liberation of all non-Jewish humanity,” “the mobilization of the German people’s will to destroy the bacillus lodged in its body,” and to purify the society, and the world, by eliminating the “bacteria, vermin and pests [that] cannot be tolerated.” For these tasks, the leadership needed little more than “a mood of passive compliance,” apathy, the willingness to look the other way, to concentrate on personal gain and to accept the symbolism of greatness and power with little skepticism—all of this enhanced, to be sure, by the knout that was never far from sight. The Nazi atrocities, needless to say, are vastly beyond any comparison even to what we have been considering here. But if we think we differ in fundamental ways from those who observed with passive compliance, we are mistaken.

In our far more fortunate case, the state is relatively limited, by comparative standards, in the capacity to control its population by force, and must therefore rely more heavily on the more subtle devices of imagery and doctrine. The culture of terrorism that has grown in our midst is a structure of considerable power, with an impressive arsenal of devices to protect itself from the threat of understanding and with a powerful base in the institutions that dominate every facet of social life—the economy and political institutions, the intellectual culture and much of the popular culture as well. Nevertheless, despite a solid foundation among the educated and privileged classes and the lack of any organized base of dissidence, the system of indoctrination and control is not without internal rifts, and it is far from omnipotent or all-pervasive; the inhabitants of “enemy territory” do not lack means of self-defense and effective counter-action. As discussed earlier, the problem of returning the population to the preferred state of apathy and obedience was consciously addressed during the latter part of the Vietnam war, and since, as it had been when earlier “crises of democracy” erupted, but this time with only limited success among the general population. The resort by the state authorities to clandestine terrorism, with the tacit acquiescence or overt and enthusiastic support of congressional and intellectual elites, was one of the means adopted to confront the persistent difficulties posed by the domestic enemy—with serious attendant problems for the state managers, as we have seen.

It is natural that privileged elites should be frightened and appalled by signs of intellectual independence and a real commitment to the moral values that are hypocritically professed within the doctrinal system. That is why the unmistakable improvement in the intellectual and moral climate among students and many other popular sectors during the dread “sixties” aroused such paranoid fears, eliciting endless tirades in intellectual journals and best-sellers on the supermarket racks that offer their version of the ferment of those years. Suppressed throughout, and understandably so, are the most striking features of the period. These include the rise of sympathy and concern for the victims of our violence, and the awakening to some of the hidden realities of American life, such as the experience of those who had been left aside by the social contract on which the political order was founded and have since been marginalized or oppressed: the native population, women, blacks, working people without property, and other “persons forgotten,” as they are called by historians celebrating the bicentennial of the Constitution, the “special interests” of contemporary political propaganda.2 This is the authentic “counterculture” to the dominant culture of terrorism, and it remains a significant and perhaps growing force, though largely without an institutional structure to sustain it.

Even more dangerous than intellectual independence and moral integrity is a stable organizational framework that might convert these qualities into instruments of popular engagement in social and political life. Correspondingly, it has always been a high priority among elite groups to prevent the growth of popular organizations. In a properly functioning system of subordination to established privilege, there must be no effective unions with real worker participation that devote themselves to serious problems of the social order, groups dedicated to worker self-management and community control, information systems independent of private and state power, political clubs and parties based on active participation of broad constituencies, people of independent mind who choose to see for themselves what lies behind the curtain of propaganda, such as the “witnesses” in Nicaragua who try to build what their state is committed to destroy and are endlessly derided and abused for this sin of integrity and human concern, and so on. The success in restricting such developments is an important feature of American democracy at home. The same priorities have guided policy abroad, notoriously in the Third World, but also in the reconstruction of the state capitalist societies after World War II when it was necessary to dissipate the influence of the anti-fascist resistance worldwide, to undermine independent unions and pressures for workers control, even to “rescue Western zones of Germany by walling them off against Eastern penetration and integrating them into an international pattern of Western Europe rather than into a united Germany,” as George Kennan successfully urged, so as to avoid the danger of “a unified, centralized, politicized labor movement committed to a far-reaching program of social change.”3

Despite all efforts, the enemy at home has by no means been subdued. There is much disaffection and unease, and it has been lively enough in its manifestations to achieve limited but meaningful gains. The terror in Central America could have gone far beyond the frightening levels that it attained, to take just one example; and so it would have, had it been possible to rally the public to the cause. The constraints that have been imposed on state violence are not insubstantial achievements on the part of those who have exercised the effort and personal initiative to engage in serious work for freedom, democracy, and justice, in a society that offers limited means for such endeavors.

Organized and stable communities of solidarity and support make it possible for disaffection to become something more than cynicism and hopelessness. They can encourage independent thought, providing means of intellectual self-defense against the daily barrage of propaganda. They can allow people to find other ways to live beyond those chosen for them by established privilege, to pursue objectives that may be more attuned to their deeper needs and concerns. In the absence of such communities, individuals remain isolated, and often feel ineffectual and confused by what they see in process, far from their control or influence. The temptation to put the world aside and keep to personal concerns is high. People whose day-to-day existence offers them little in the way of satisfying work, control over the conditions of their lives, or even material security will be reluctant to face unpleasant realities and thus to abandon what little they have to give some meaning to their lives, to lose the comforting faith in the images devised to keep them subdued and acquiescent: the noble guardians of the gates, the enemy beyond, the benevolence of our intentions, and the whole array of devices concocted to show that we are wonderful and they are devious, evil and threatening. Others who have access to privilege may be no less reluctant to forgo the ample rewards that a wealthy society offers for service to power, and to accept the sacrifices that the demands of honesty may well entail. That many have nevertheless done so is a fact of much importance.

The standards we choose to set for ourselves will inevitably have far-reaching consequences, given American power and wealth and all that flows from these endowments.