| Subject: | [socialcredit] Re: Fukuyama [now a CITS Capital & Debt Watch Alert] | | Date: | Thursday, March 23, 2006 14:01:55 (-0500) | | From: | W. Curtiss Priest <bmslib @...edu>
|
Jack Hirschfeld wrote:
>
> From next Sunday's book review:
>
> The New York Times
> March 26, 2006
> 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama
> Neo No More
> Review by PAUL BERMAN
>
> In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative
> think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured
> speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually
> unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience
> enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the
> obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he
> explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the
> Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would
> have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He
> and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was
> Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid,
> scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's
> masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."
>
> But that was then.
>
> Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative
> movement
...
oh, my, yes
Thank you Jack for posting this, please do add this
disclaimer when you post copyrighted materials:
["fair use," "teachable moment," "archival," Section 107(a), 1976
Copyright Act and 1998 Digital Millennium Act]
Thanks to my wife, we receive the NYTs Book Review. And,
I find myself much more informed, and possibly more
intelligent, by regularly reading this publication.
I have no time to read, almost, any book. Someone once
said that the sign of a "good book" was to say one thing,
many times, many ways.
So, unless I/we lack important detailed knowledge, these
reviews are quite worth their money.
***
I partly read the review because I still hadn't a clear
idea of what neoconservative philosophy (or ideology)
consisted of.
This review helped me to better define that. I see --
because we have, via our democracy, the "secret" to all
countries' living the "good life," we may thrust our
ideology onto others.
Duh! Last time I checked, this country was overly
materialistic, overly conspicuous consumption, and quite
in debt.
I really don't wish this on any other country, even if
done in the name of "Human Rights."
Along this vein, I watched CNN a day or so ago, and the
speakers trounced Europe for workers taking the afternoon
off -- one said, for a nap.
EXCUSE ME. First, it is a blatant lie that all of
European workers take the afternoon off. Yes, Europe
understands how to provide more leisure time, yes, Europe
has certain retirement promises to keep.
But, it was simply disgusting to watch the "holier than thou"
depiction of Europe. What Europe hasn't done is to indebt
itself to the point of bankruptcy. So, while the program
said the wealth of the average US person (read, my guess,
in the top 5% of the median wealth) is twice that of France,
I would rather live in France, and, don't count those
US chickens too soon.
WCP
Full NYT's article below:
["fair use," "teachable moment," "archival," Section 107(a), 1976
Copyright Act and 1998 Digital Millennium Act]
["fair use," "teachable moment," "archival," Section 107(a), 1976
Copyright Act and 1998 Digital Millennium Act]
The New York Times March 26, 2006 'America at the Crossroads,' by
Francis Fukuyama Neo No More Review by PAUL BERMAN
In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative
think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured
speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually
unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience
enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the
obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he
explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the
Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would
have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He
and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was
Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid,
scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's
masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."
But that was then.
Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative
movement - though for reasons that, as he expounds them, may seem a
tad ambiguous. In his estimation, neoconservative principles in their
pristine version remain valid even now. But his ex-fellow-thinkers
have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful
errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he
has no alternative but to go away and publish his complaint. And he
has founded a new political journal to assert his
post-neoconservative independence - though he has given this journal
a name, The American Interest, that slyly invokes the legendary
neoconservative journals of past (The Public Interest) and present
(The National Interest), just to keep readers guessing about his
ultimate relation to neoconservative tradition.
His resignation seems to me, in any case, a fairly notable event, as
these things go, and that is because, among the neoconservative
intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the
most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious. Then again,
something about his departure may express a larger mood among the
political intellectuals just now, not only on the right. For in the
zones of liberalism and the left, as well, any number of people have
likewise stood up in these post-9/11 times to accuse their oldest
comrades of letting down the cause, and doors have slammed, and The
Nation magazine has renamed itself The Weekly Purge. Nowadays, if you
are any kind of political thinker at all, and you haven't issued a
sweeping denunciation of your dearest friends, or haven't been hanged
by them from a lamppost - why, the spirit of the age has somehow
passed you by.
Fukuyama offers a thumbnail sketch of neoconservatism and its
origins, back to the anti-Communist left at City College in the
1930's and 40's and to the conservative philosophers (Leo Strauss,
Allan Bloom, Albert Wohlstetter) at the University of Chicago in
later years. From these disparate origins, the neoconservatives
eventually generated "a set of coherent principles," which, taken
together, ended up defining their impulse in foreign affairs during
the last quarter-century. They upheld a belief that democratic states
are by nature friendly and unthreatening, and therefore America ought
to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights wherever
possible. They believed that American power can serve moral purposes.
They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions.
And they were skeptical about what is called "social engineering" -
about big government and its ability to generate positive social
changes.
Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems to me too kind. For how did the
neoconservatives propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to
combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to
social engineering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990's the
neoconservatives veered in militarist directions, which strikes him
as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that
neoconservative foreign policy thinking has all along indulged a
romance of the ruthless - an expectation that small numbers of people
might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their
ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that
led some of the early generation of neoconservatives in the 1970's to
champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola; and,
during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to champion some not
very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too;
and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into the swamps
of the Iran-contra scandal in order to go on championing their
guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling
question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have
managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series
of grotesque scandals involving American torture - this very weird
and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But
Fukuyama must not agree.
The criticisms he does propose are pretty scathing. In 2002, Fukuyama
came to the conclusion that invading Iraq was going to be a gamble
with unacceptably long odds. Then he watched with dismay as the
administration adopted one strange policy after another that was
bound to make the odds still longer. The White House decided to
ignore any useful lessons the Clinton administration might have
learned in Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that whatever Bill
Clinton did - for example, conduct a successful intervention - George
W. Bush wanted to do the opposite. There was the diplomatic folly of
announcing an intention to dominate the globe, and so forth - all of
which leads Fukuyama, scratching his head, to propose a psychological
explanation.
The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed
the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those
gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the
lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success,
came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws
of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor - a
formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem
peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the
world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of
Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book
that "The End of History" ought never to have led anyone to adopt
such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly
unreliable interpreter of his own writings.
He wonders why Bush never proposed a more convincing justification
for invading Iraq - based not just on a fear of Saddam Hussein's
weapons (which could have been expressed in a non-alarmist fashion),
nor just on the argument for human rights and humanitarianism, which
Bush did raise, after a while. A genuinely cogent argument, as
Fukuyama sees it, would have drawn attention to the problems that
arose from America's prewar standoff with Hussein. The American-led
sanctions against Iraq were the only factor that kept him from
building his weapons. The sanctions were crumbling, though.
Meanwhile, they were arousing anti-American furies across the Middle
East on the grounds (entirely correct, I might add) that America was
helping to inflict horrible damage on the Iraqi people. American
troops took up positions in the region to help contain Hussein - and
the presence of those troops succeeded in infuriating Osama bin
Laden. In short, the prewar standoff with Hussein was untenable
morally and even politically. But there was no way to end the
standoff apart from ending Hussein's dictatorship.
Now, I notice that in stressing this strategic argument, together
with the humanitarian and human rights issue, and in pointing out
lessons from the Balkans, Fukuyama has willy-nilly outlined some main
elements of the liberal interventionist position of three years ago,
at least in one of its versions. In the Iraq war, liberal
interventionism was the road not taken, to be sure. Nor was liberal
interventionism his own position. However, I have to say that, having
read his book, I'm not entirely sure what position he did adopt,
apart from wisely admonishing everyone to tread carefully. He does
make plain that, having launched wars hither and yon, the United
States had better ensure that, in Afghanistan and Iraq alike, stable
antiterrorist governments finally emerge.
He proposes a post-Bush foreign policy, which he styles "realistic
Wilsonianism" - his new motto in place of neoconservatism. He worries
that because of Bush's blunders, Americans on the right and the left
are going to retreat into a Kissinger-style reluctance to promote
democratic values in other parts of the world. Fukuyama does want to
promote democratic values - "what is in the end a revolutionary
American foreign policy agenda" - though he would like to be cautious
about it, and even multilateral about it. The United Nations seems to
him largely unsalvageable, given the role of nondemocratic countries
there. But he thinks that a variety of other institutions, consisting
strictly of democracies, might be able to establish and sometimes
even enforce a new and superior version of international legitimacy.
He wants to encourage economic development in poor countries, too -
if only a method can be found that avoids the dreadful phrase "social
engineering."
Fukuyama offers firm recommendations about the struggle against
terrorism. He says, "The rhetoric about World War IV and the global
war on terrorism should cease." Rhetoric of this sort, in his view,
overstates our present problem, and dangerously so, by "suggesting
that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds." He
may be right, too, depending on who is using the rhetoric. Then
again, I worry that Fukuyama's preferred language may shrink our
predicament into something smaller than it ever was. He pictures the
present struggle as a "counterinsurgency" campaign - a struggle in
which, before the Iraq war, "no more than a few thousand people
around the world" threatened the United States. I suppose he has in
mind an elite among the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are said to have
trained at bin Laden's Afghan camps, plus other people who may never
have gotten out of the immigrant districts of Western Europe. But the
slaughters contemplated by this elite have always outrivaled anything
contemplated by more conventional insurgencies - as Fukuyama does
recognize in some passages. And there is the pesky problem that, as
we have learned, the elite few thousand appear to have the ability
endlessly to renew themselves.
HERE is where a rhetoric pointing to something larger than a typical
counterinsurgency campaign may have a virtue, after all. A more
grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of
gigantic massacres. And a more grandiose rhetoric might lead us to
think about ideological questions. Why are so many people eager to
join the jihadi elite? They are eager for ideological reasons,
exactly as in the case of fascists and other totalitarians of the
past. These people will be defeated only when their ideologies begin
to seem exhausted, which means that any struggle against them has to
be, above all, a battle of ideas - a campaign to persuade entire mass
movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in
favor of more liberal ones. Or so it seems to me. Fukuyama
acknowledges that the terrorist ideology of today, as he describes
it, "owes a great deal to Western ideas in addition to Islam" and
appeals to the same kind of people who, in earlier times, might have
been drawn to Communism or fascism. Even so, for all the marvelous
fecundity of his political imagination, he has very little to say
about this ideology and the war of ideas. I wonder why.
I think maybe it is because, when Fukuyama wrote "The End of
History," he was a Hegelian, and he remains one even now. Hegel's
doctrine is a philosophy of history in which every new phase of human
development is thought to be more or less an improvement over
whatever had come before. In "America at the Crossroads," Fukuyama
describes the Hegelianism of "The End of History" as a version of
"modernization" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress
into the world of modern social science. But the problem with
modernization theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its
attention on the steadily progressing phases of history, as
determined by the predictable workings of sociology or economics or
psychology - and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and
ideologies to the margins of world events.
And yet, what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in
oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies,
which could never be relegated entirely to the workings of sociology,
economics, psychology or any of the other categories of social
science. In my view, we are seeing the continuing strength of
20th-century-style ideologies right now - the ideologies that have
motivated Baathists and the more radical Islamists to slaughter
millions of their fellow Muslims in the last 25 years, together with
a few thousand people who were not Muslims. Fukuyama is always worth
reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the
non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old
arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most
important problem of all - the problem of murderous ideologies and
how to combat them.
Paul Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the
author, most recently, of "Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion
of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath."
--
W. Curtiss Priest, Director, CITS
Research Affiliate, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Center for Information, Technology & Society
466 Pleasant St., Melrose, MA 02176
781-662-4044 BMSLIB@MIT.EDU http://Cybertrails.org
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