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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 06:34am Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2614 of 2617)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In my youth, I was carefully instructed, by some very aware government officials, about the details of that black art, and the organized building of ideology, and spent much time with primary texts (learning, particularly, how easy it was, on a sustained basis, to buy ideology from German philosophers and other academics in the 30's -- something I believe has been applied to American academics, on a very conscious and organized basis, since the early 1950's). Some of the intellectual output the Nazis brought into being, and used to shape their monster culture, is set out in NAZI CULTURE by George Moss The University Library, Grosset & Dunlap, a book I was assigned.

I think the connection to the facts and argument set out in Tilting the Scales Rightward by CASS R. SUNSTEIN http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/opinion/26SUNS.html are direct, and not accidental.

When the US government committed to the current patterns of the Cold War, competent people, given all the funding they needed, were encouraged and allowed to buy all the ideology they, in their descretion, felt they needed. Academics were coopted, openly, and in all sorts of ways. People who could be organized were organized, especially wealthy people. The movie Dr Strangelove sets out, in a spoof, some of this ideology -- in my view, often very fairly.

After Eisenhower, this effort has been but little supervised. And it is ongoing today. I believe that the current Bush administration is, to a very great extent, a product of this manufactured, and very distorted ideology.

This ideology is now so distorted, and so virulent, that under conditions where real peace is technically possible, unstable decisions are being made that could cause the world to end.

rshowalter - 07:05am Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2615 of 2617)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

On the Kerry matter. As an undergraduate, recruited to try to sort out some essential questions in mathematics (on which the survival of the nation arguably did depend) and some problems with discourse practices (including problems with arguments that go out of control, that take on a life of their own, and make for wars) I was carefully taught a technique, probably as old as military forces, that the Nazis actually set out in training manuals.

If a young man does something terrible -- something that could easily end both his life and his self esteem -- if, under these circumstances, you "pin a medal on him" and give him special rewards and protections -- you have a co-opted individual, who will have a hard time indeed, at later times, refusing "reasonable requests."

It seems possible that the Kerrey story may be an example of a conscious, doctrine based decision of this sort -- and his promotion to the US Senate may not be accidental. Under the circumstances, the argument that Kerrey deserves to be redeemed seems pretty strong. The same argument, applied to the people and organizations that I believe used him, is in my opinion, much less strong.

NYT editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/opinion/26THU1.html The War Within Bob Kerrey

rshowalter - 07:19am Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2616 of 2617)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

From the back cover of NAZI CULTURE: A documentary record edited and with an introduction by George L. Mosse:

" The Nazis used all aspects of daily life, art, and the sciences religion, entertainment, and especially education, to spread their repulsive ideology."

When the US organized for a sustained Cold War, the people charged with making that Cold War sustainable had studied the Nazi achievement in detail, and had discussed, over long duration and in much detail, what was done, and how it was done, with Germans responsible for the Nazi culture-making achievement.

The USSR under Stalin was so terrible, and so incomprehensible to Americans, that perhaps what was done was, on balance, justified. Many of the American who took the steps they did knew the moral ugliness of what they were doing -- and decided, often after soul-searching and agony, to

" fight the devil of Communism any way they could."

On the basis of what I knew at the time, that seemed right -- it was a decision that I also signed on to. (My dispute with the government had to do with a technical difference -- I did not believe that it was safe to lie to the Russians about my mathematical achievement, on a problem on which military balances depended, because I thought they were scared to the point of instability. And so I refused to lie in a particular case. Not because I was repelled by lies at all times -- only because I thought the particular lie I was asked to tell had an unacceptable risk of producing an nuclear war.

Perhaps the actions taken that permitted the US to win the Cold War without world destruction were the best possible. Perhaps the only ones possible.

No one can know that for sure now. What was done was done.

But the USSR, after long years of trying to find a way to peaceful coexistence and nuclear disarmament, fell a decade ago.

The Cold War ought to be over.

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