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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 - 08:41pm May 6, 2001 EST (#3385 of 3385)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I've already used Casablance as a model for talking about nuclear terror in Psychwar, Casablanca -- and terror http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0 -- in detail from postings 13 to 23 . The movie shows a good deal about how human animals work in society, in peace and conflict, and I try to set that out.

Two of the reasons I liked Casablanca aren't in the text of the Guardian thread now. I've used one point already -- that at the end, a really guilty man, Captain Renault, turns over a new leaf, and nobody seems to think much about what justice to Renault might be - a bad man gets off.

That's a kind of "secular redemption" that has to be expected, sometimes, if we're to get effective nuclear disarmament.

The other point about Casablanca , that I didn't mention before, but find very helpful, is that there isn't any mention of allusion to anti-semitism in the movie. Major Strasser and the other Germans are objectionable because they are merciless bullies. They are liked no better because of their evident discipline, sharpness, and competence. The American military, and military-industrial complex, seen through foreign eyes, looks much too much like the German military looks in Casablanca. I believe that this is an essential aesthetic and practical point. I believe that it needs to be understood in America, as it is already understood in much of the rest of the world.

We can talk about details, and I'll feel better doing so, in the morning. But as a matter of aesthetics and practicality, too, there is something missing from arguments that would have made perfect sense to Adolph Hitler.

And there is something wrong with America if it turns out to be, or acts too much like, what Hitler was hoping to achieve for Germany by the year 2000, with the untermenschen long displaced or killed, and forgotten.

Something impractical, too.

Because the rest of the world has enough power that such behavior is not only ugly from a reasonable American point of view, but also unsafe. Nuclear weapons offer nothing like sufficient protection now. I've spoken of that in some detail.

Discussion with you on nuclear weapons, and on matters of world stability or morality, can be too much like a discussion with Hitler on the same subject might be. Brilliant though Hitler sometimes was, that is an objection.

Not an insoluble problem, but an essential matter to consider -- the one thing, now, that needs to be understood so that real, durable nuclear disarmament, in our own real dirty world, can become possible.

I'd like to leave it there until the morning.

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