Pictured: Champions of egalitarianism and de-funders of the police, Stalin and Lenin, pose with comrades at the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, March 1919.
Interrogations.
Following our pre-COVID meditation on Syria, I intended to continue the discussion from where we left off. The theme was to be freedom. It was to do with freedom fighters, revolution, democracy and other emotive themes evoked by America’s engagement with the Middle East. Syria, Iraq and the Arab Spring were to frame the discussion.
Now there is a little more to it, for there are two new developments that inform our understanding of the dynamics at play in Syria and elsewhere. Like what’s going on in the Middle East conflicts, these current events lead us to consider freedom, ideology and the use of authority and power. They also call to mind my earlier thoughts on humanity’s relationship with nature.
Freedom will therefore be about all of these things, not just about Syria. And for the sake of simplicity, I will write this as a series of separate pieces, each no longer than a ten-minute read. Consider this the first part, which serves to introduce the events at hand while touching upon how they relate to the philosophical questions that interrogate our involvement in the Middle East.
The human virus.
Inescapably, we have to think about COVID-19. It obviously raises questions of freedom and governance. But COVID also presents a greater ethical problem. This has to do with the balance between nature and humanity’s power to resist it—namely to what extent we should be free to resist death.
In some sense, COVID represents the rivalry of two viral agents. Humankind is the damaging pestilence that erodes the environment’s health, and COVID is seemingly a facet of nature striking back. In other words, our overpopulation and sterilization of the world contends with nature’s attempt to get the human infection under control.
That stark contest is certainly about freedom and power, even if it takes place in a realm of extreme proportions. It is tantamount to a human struggle for freedom against nature itself, and nature’s uprising against what might be human tyranny against it.
Nonpartisan Totalitarianism.
A more mundane question raised by COVID is how far state power ought to restrict freedom in the name of protection. This is the dilemma at the core of every criticism of dictatorial powers. After all, no despot holds power by saying he is working against the welfare of the people. Quite the opposite. The totalitarian regime is the consummate nanny state, supervising the children of the nation from cradle to grave lest they harm themselves. This is true of right-wing fascist and left-wing socialist totalitarianism alike.
Whose side are you on?
The second current event of consequence is the wave of domestic revolts: the astonishing scenes of Middle East-like protests in America, with toppling of statues, renaming of antiquities, portions of cities overrun by mobs, and at least one city center barricaded and declared an independent state by would-be saviors.
It is a familiar picture to me, as is the conflation of peaceful protestors with violent anarchists. This happens when peaceful activists side with pseudo-nihilistic revolutionaries. They do so with the best of intentions, responding to injustice and sympathizing with platitudes that no one in their right mind would disagree with. What they don’t see is the deeper agenda of the activists, which would in fact strip the sympathizers of all they value.
They are not alone in lacking discernment, however. The reactionary right, which might be completely correct in opposing destructive elements, closes ranks against both the radicals and their innocent sympathizers. They also conflate the two. In short, none are able to discern the critical differences. Positions harden, individuals feel compelled to choose one camp or the other, tensions escalate.
Placards and pitchforks.
In my experience, these scenarios never end well for anyone. It is usually the peaceful activists who wind up harmed the most, their property suddenly in ruins and somehow simultaneously on the wrong side of both anarchist and counterrevolutionary.
Peaceful protests by progressives or conservatives are of course a good thing. It is one of the means by which we can challenge the misuse of power. Or when authority does not notice important issues, protests shine a light on them. But protest and process are not the same as revolt and brute force. One is a facet of democracy, the other is a lynch mob.
The Arab Spring too, we should remember, was at first nothing but peaceful, justified protests against a dictatorship. It sought a structured solution through a legitimate and non-violent process. The problem was that the movement was hijacked by extremists. Then, making it all much worse, Western leaders rushed to legitimize them. Globalist progressives could not separate placard from pitchfork. It was all or nothing at all.
The result was catastrophic. I work every day with innocent families who suffered the fallout from this well-intentioned disaster.
People’s police.
So what is one to do? Again, I will urge non-ideological prudence. Thinking antithetically is a sure sign that we are not thinking clearly. These issues are far more complex than that, and importantly, they are not really moral questions—they are merely sociological. We must not encourage politicians to define themselves as the antithesis of others. We must not look for a messiah to fix our problems, nor for a messianic cure-all political system. Such solutions want to control every facet of life and speech. Total solutions of this kind are not politics, they are religions.
Avoid simplistic platitudes. “But all the young occupiers want is freedom.” Yes that’s what they say, but what does it mean? Hypocrisy and oxymorons abound.
For example, consider the contradictory ambitions of a guaranteed universal income and the dismantling of the very state that would have to organize and pay for it. Or the insistence on granting health officials dictatorial powers while calling for the abolition of policing powers. Many of the demands would require a tremendous use of power to enforce. Without state and without police, the power of enforcement would be left with the mob. This is exactly how the evolution of protest to nihilism takes place.
Protest for better policing? Absolutely. Work for sound changes? Sure. Take over city hall and demand immediate revolution? Not so much….
We are reminded of Lenin: “Comrade workers…in order to give the people all those pressing and essential reforms…one must throw over the policy of support for the…government…. To carry out those reforms, one must not allow the police to be reinstated…. A people’s militia instead of the police force and the standing army is a prerequisite of effective municipal reforms.”
We all know how kindly Lenin’s people’s militia turned out to be. And if I might add: Lenin’s kids at least dreamed of the Workers’ Paradise. Ours dream of its perversion: a Non-Workers’ Paradise where the citizen reclines upon a bed of universal income under a cloud of burning cannabis.
Temper tantrum.
This is certainly how it has played out in the Middle East over and over again. I have spent years pulling youth back from that kind of lazy rhetoric of freedom. Many are seduced by it, join the revolution, and then end up in chaos or under the harsh rule of the ideological mob-turned-militia.
It is disheartening to see the same lack of rigorous thinking, where logic and process is replaced by blind moralistic outrage, sweeping through American millennials as it has in the Middle East. I can detect in both sides a childish streak. As with all toddlers, when charm does not work at getting their way, a temper tantrum soon follows.
What’s needed is an adult in the room to provide firm boundaries and to lead them to maturity. The goal should indeed be a human environment better than the one we have tolerated, but it can’t be achieved solely through tearing down the old world. Alas, our political leaders—and I believe this to be true on both sides—are the worst children of all. Frequently they are nothing but the ring-leaders of the toddler uprising.
So then; freedom, ideology, hubris, prudence, environment: each point informs the others, and they do so in all of our challenging circumstances, from COVID-19 to the battlefields of the Middle East. We could start with any one of these contexts and explore our way to the others. With that in mind, I plan to carry on as promised, starting at Syria and the Arab Spring. It will be larger than that of course, but it was always going to be.
Global Spring.
You see, the Arab Spring was in fact a much larger issue for the American president who presided at the time. For President Obama, the Arab Spring was not about Arabs in particular. It was about his worldview. It was about his vision for what would save not just Arabs but the world. As such, it was about a dream of Paradise, that memory-as-aspiration which drives us and sometimes deceives us. This is such a compellingly utopian dream that it tempts us to brook the possibility of intense violence and social disruption en route to its promise. It is the dream of Crusaders, Mujahideen and Bolsheviks of every kind.
For President Obama, the Middle East became a place to test his thesis. If the world submitted to his beliefs, even if it meant arming protestors, there would be through that spasm an end to human suffering. In this, he was not unlike his predecessor, Mr. Bush, who tested his own version of globalist hegemony in Iraq. We must understand that Obama’s and Bush’s vision is the same. Their’s is a conviction that if the world falls in line with them and their kind, the end of history and the world as meant to be will follow suit. There is nothing new in this. Civilization was built and re-built by the same tiresome notion from its beginnings, the same solution repeatedly perpetuating the problem it claims to cure.
Untangling the knot.
To address all this properly and with due respect to the complexity, I will aim to present a series of shorter discussions. Next up is a specific appraisal of the Obama years and the Arab Spring. Later, I will want to look at some developments from Turkey, including the recent decision to restore Hagia Sophia as a mosque. What has this to do with Islam’s vision of a better world? What are President Erdogan’s long-term plans? (Hint: they are eschatological—it turns out he has the real answer to our problems….)
Lastly, I’ll turn again to the debate between hubris and prudence in more general terms and ask what it means for us to be prudent in our relationship with nature—even with nature when it presents itself to us as a virus.
This inevitably returns us to the subject of civilization and what can be done about its excesses. I am intrigued by how the spectre of the city hovers over the whole discussion. Urbanization is perhaps the key vector in all of this. It is both a human blight upon nature and COVID’s incubator. It is also the hothouse of political violence.
To that point, I needn’t remind you that swelling cities are the breeding grounds of conflict in the Middle East. (Typical of the region, from 1950 to 1995, Syria’s urbanized population lurched from 30% to 52%.) This is not surprising since the city was the first creation of civilized man. Since it’s inception 6000 years ago in what is now Iraq, the city has been the axis of new disease and despotism. Somehow in the phenomenon of the city appears the entire world of trouble that now vexes us.
Links and sources:
Earlier entry on the environment: Optimism
Seattle’s Brave New World: did black children’s lives matter once the police were gone?
“People’s militia”: Pravda No. 49, May 18, 1917. From, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pages 350-353. Available here.
Header image: Stalin, Lenin and Kalinin seated left to right at center. 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, March 1919. Public Domain. (http://lenin.rusarchives.ru/sites/default/files/img/doc-0795.jpg)
Inline image: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-114346, [Smog obscures view of Chrysler Building from Empire State Building, New York City] / World-Telegram photo by Walter Albertin. LCCN https://lccn.loc.gov/95508508