totalitarianism today

A brief history of the AK-47.

The AK-47 was the brainchild of Mr. Mikhail Kalashnikov, a man who holds fast to the mantra that every human being must defend himself.

I found him sitting in a small room, Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, a small, squat man with grey, coiffed hair and quite a few gold teeth, hands unsteady but Siberian eyes alert as a wolf, still wearing his two Hero of Socialist Labor medals.

Born in November 1919, he was one of eighteen children of whom only six survived, a Soviet T-38 tank commander in 1941, wounded in the shoulder and back when a German shell smashed part of the tank's armor into his body. "I was in the hospital and a soldier on the bed beside me asked: 'Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?' So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Automat Kalashnikova-- the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov-- AK-- and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947."

The AK-47 can be found anywhere there is a revolution or a remnant. Its sultry curve astride the hip of any man who means business. Larry Kahaner says:

It's so prevalent because it works. It just simply works. You can drag it through the mud. You can step on it. You can put it under water and it will work every single time. It's very inexpensive, so anybody who feels like they want to start a war can start a war or continue a small war. It never jams. And because anybody can use it, you can have all different kinds of level of soldiers, including child soldiers, which is one of the sad outcomes of having this weapon available.

Kalashnikov circa 1997 in true Soviet fashion

Kalashnikov believes we "may live to see the day when good prevails", when his weapons will not be used or needed. Until then, however, he is quite proud of the role his invention plays in nation-building and burning. Kalashnikov knows better than Dale Carnegie the best way to make friends and influence people:

"When I met the Mozambique Minister of Defence, he presented me with his country's national banner, which carries the image of a Kalashnikov submachine gun. And he told me that when all the liberation soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons 'Kalash'. I think this is an honour, not just a military success. It's a success in life when people are named after me, after Mikhail Kalashnikov."

Those who don't agree on much agree on the AK. Currently, some version of the AK-47 is used gentlemen and women in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon, CapeVerde, Chad, China, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Iran, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Russia, Turkey, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam, Yemen. 

The Lebanese Hizballah include the AK-47 on their Islamic banner-- the rifle forms the 'l' of 'Allah' in the Arabic script.

The Kalashnikov AKM is an improved version of the original.

In 2004, the Kalashnikov Museum opened in the city of Izhevsk. Nadezhda Vechtomova, the museum director stated in an interview that the purpose of the museum is to honor the ingenuity of the inventor and the hard work of the employees and to "separate the weapon as a weapon of murder from the people who are producing it and to tell its history in our country."

Professional soldiers, "the quiet professionals", discuss what to look for when buying a used AK-47.

You can use the Romanian version "for fun or just shooting around". Take it camping. There are new versions which offer the benefits of an add-on knife bayonet.

Krugman and Wittgenstein: A pastiche.

 

Two wars are not enough.

America's economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today.

Nobelist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, and Harvard's Martin Feldstein, the former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, achieved an unnerving degree of consensus about the future during an economic forum in Washington.

[Source: Michael Hirsch, National Journal]

413. For suppose you were guiding a blind man's hand, and as you were guiding it along yours you said "this is my hand"; if he then said "are you sure?" or "do you know that it is?", it would take very special circumstances for that to make sense.

414. But on the other hand: how do I know that it is my hand? Do I even here know exactly what it means to say it is my hand?-- When I say "how do I know?" I do not mean that I have the least doubt of it. What we have here is a foundation for all my action. But it seems to me that it is wrongly expressed by the words "I know".

[Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty]

Robert Gates endorses J. Crew.

At Duke University, no less. Think burnt sienna, goldenrod, Gothic architecture, and sidewalks laden with leaf-crunching freshmen. 

Some of my warmest memories as former president of Texas A&M are of walking around the 48,000-student campus and talking to students. For nearly four years now, I have been in a job that also makes me responsible for the well-being of a larger number - a very much larger number - of young people.

But instead of wearing J.Crew, they wear body armor. Instead of carrying book bags, they are carrying assault rifles. And far too many of them will not come home to their parents.

These young men and women, all of whom joined knowing what would be asked of them, represent the tip of the spear of a military that has been at war for nearly a decade - the longest -sustained combat in American history. The Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns represent the first protracted, large-scale conflicts since our Revolutionary War fought entirely by volunteers.

Indeed, no major war in our history has been fought with a smaller percentage of this country's citizens in uniform full-time, roughly 2.4 million active and reserve service members out of a country of over 300 million - less than 1 percent.

He couldn't help himself. J. Crew aside, Gates' lecture (which I expect he will repeat in other mediated forms over the coming year) is a frank reminder of the strain imposed on our military by current foreign policy. J. Crew is the stuff of nostalgia, and Gates summons it as such. I don't know which is worse- a cultural context in which war is fought by few or the summoning of style mores without J. Crew.

War crimes, individual guilt, and collective responsibility.

In Scientific American, Jon Horgan asks if war crimes are "caused by bad apples or bad barrels". Since one bad apple in the barrel quickly spreads to create other bad apples, his question is partly answered without even reading the article. But you should read the article anyway. Because it is an interesting read. And because we need to ask these questions as more information comes to light about war crimes in Afghanistan. 

A poster from WWII by Victor Keppler.

A stunning piece of journalism by Jeff Sharlet: The holy warriors among us.

Jeff Sharlet's "Jesus Killed Mohammed", published in the May 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine, is a stunning piece of journalism. The distinction between merely decent and stunning journalism rests on the ability to combine information in a way that offers a new perspective on disparate events and ideas without abandoning the structural charms of the story. By identifying and examining the "evangelical transformation of the military", which began during the Cold War, Sharlet digs into rocky and ungiving soil. 

The development of a volunteer-based military in the post-Vietnam era made self-selection for military service the law of the land. But the end of the draft also signaled the end of a continuing public interest in the workings of the US military. Since most American men would never spend time in the military, the public lost interest in the details. Sharlet describes a current "civil war" between the "majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith and lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done" and the "small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps". 

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

Sharlet cites the Officers' Christian Fellowship as a key player in the "fundamentalist front" of the officer corps, with 15,000 active members at 80 percent of military bases and a recent annual growth rate of 3 percent.

Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

In the context of the war on terror, the expansion of the spiritual warrior into a representative of US diplomatic policy threatens more than just the secular tradition of the military. Many Muslims believe that the war on terror is secretly a war against Islam-- against their culture, way of life, and community. Comments like those made by Army Lt. Gen. William Jerry Boykin serve to reinforce and validate such views. While US policy makers have insisted that this is not the case, that the war on terror is not a holy war in disguise, the beliefs and behavior of US troops abroad are far from persuasive on this point. 

Threat perception plays a large part in the formulation of foreign policy-- "national security interests" and "threats" depend on where you stand, how much you fear the dark, how much you want to control, and your preferred methods of engagement. For many Muslims, the only palpable information about the US military's intentions abroad comes in the form of interaction with American troops. 

Three significant and equally-destructive consequences would likely result from the US military's domination by Christian holy warriors. These consequences should be upsetting to Americans in general and American Christians in particular. The first consequence would be an insecurity-generating confusion over purpose and plans in the policy community. US foreign policy would no longer represent the security interests of the American people; instead, it would represent the particular policy agenda of a specific Protestant outlook. As such, US foreign policy could not be relied upon to serve the American public during a time of generalized international uncertainty. US foreign policy would not serve the interests of peace and freedom; it would serve the interests of Christians who consider military service a form of missionary work. 

The second consequence easily follows. For many living in closed societies around the world, the introduction to Christ and the Christian faith would be a violent, coercive, and possibly even oppressive one. Professing to prosleytize with a gun on your shoulder can hardly be taken seriously; few of us will get into arguments about ethics with nice policemen that have glocks in their hands. 

The recent experience of communism in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states showed that the majority of human beings are willing to espouse even vulgar Marxist materlalism to protect their loved ones and their lives. Remarkably few former citizens of communist regimes risked their lives or well-being to refuse the predigested promises of communist ideology. In fact, many actually chose to pay lip-service to the idols of communism to secure better schools, vacations, food rations, residential assignments, and career advancements. Those with a tendency towards opportunism will probably employ the same approach to a US military which attempts to win converts for Christianity, especially if increased access to financial goods, careers, and positions of authority are involved. Guns rarely make for good mission work. 

This third consequence, the seeming militarization of Christianity, silently and covertly mainstreams an extreme and arguably blasphemous fundamentalist understanding of the Gospel. Since this mainstreaming is taking place within the closed, secretive culture of the US military, there is little opportunity for a presentation of alternatives. Once an officer begins to tell troops that they are fighting for Jesus by killing hostile Iraqis, honest discussion about the verity of such statements becomes impossible, given the high premium on hierarchy and order which dominates military life. So while the second consequence might be summarized as the imposition of the Christian religion in dubious scenarios where free will and choice cannot be assumed, the third consequence might be restated as political premium being placed on a modern, mongrelized, and militarized interpretation of the Gospel.  

As Leszek Kolakowski explains in "God in a Godless Time" (First Things, June/July 2003: 14-18), "the entire history of Christian teaching can be considered an unending struggle over the boundary line between the sacred and the profane". Kolakowski, a conservative Catholic scholar who refused to support the communist regime in his native Poland, remarks:

There is nothing profane-- no social or intellectual end-- that Christianity would be better prepared than temporal powers to defend. However much Christianity may wish to engage the things of temporal politics and social conflicts, it nevertheless must perceive all temporal goods as relative....... [W]e sense the temptation to subordinate [the vitality of the Christian message] to temporal ends-- that is, to the temptation to transform God into a tool, a potential object of human manipulation. The (weakened but not dead yet) theocratic tendency-- the disastrous, unsuccessful hope that humanity could be led to redemption through coercion-- and the apparently opposing effort to subordinate Christian values to this or that revolutionary ideology run together in their fundamental point of view. Both transform God into an instrument of ends that, whether justified or not, may never be considered final from a Christian perspective. Each of them runs the risk of converting the Christian community into a political party.

The wisdom of Kowlakowski's warnings written in 2003 find a disappointing confirmation in Jeff Sharlet's perfect (and perfectly sad) article.  One can only hope that it receives more attention in DC policy circles and media outlets. 

Sharlet's bio and butterflies for the chasing: Sharlet's first story for Harper's, "Jesus Plus Nothing", grew into a book about the theocrats filling the ranks of "the Family". As an insider, Sharlet provided privileged information about the secret movement of Christian power-brokers influencing US public policy. In addition to his work for Rolling Stone, Harper's, and the books he can't stop writing, Sharlet blogs at The Revealer, a daily review of religion and the press, and his more personal blog, Call Me Ishmael. You can explore more about Sharlet, his writings, and the ripe terrain of evangelical influence on the military via the following particulars (many of them used as examples in Sharlet's article):

• Watch video of US military commanders urging soldiers to "get em in the Kingdom"                         
• Listen to podcast with Jeff Sharlet from Writer's Voice
• Christian Embassy + Bible studies used in the Pentagon + Christian Military Fellowship + Peace Officers for Christ International 
• A July 2007 interview with Shalet from Get Religion 
• Firedoglake on Shalet and "the Family"
• "God's Senator" (Jeff Sharlet, Roling Stone, 25 January 2006)
• "Biblical capitalism" (Jeff Sharlet, Religion Dispatches, 3 October 2008)
• "Sarah Palin, American" (Jeff Sharlet, Religion Dispatches, 15 Sept. 2008)
• "Holy Fools" (Jeff Sharlet, The New Statesman, 25 October 2007)
• "Preachers of doom" (Jeff Sharlet, The New Statesman, 19 July 2007)
• Interview with Jeff Sharlet by The Wild Hunt, July 2008  
• The Republic of T's take on the Christianized military 
• Stephen Sizer on Christian Zionism 

15 famous minds on 15 different topics.

1. Nietzsche on curiosity.
2. Tariq Ali on the dark side of dissident royalty.
3. Stephen Hawking on the limits of knowledge.
4. HL Mencken on the law and the Bible.
5. Ted Solotaroff on his Commentary days.
6. Hannah Arendt on Isak Denisen / Karen Blixen.
7. Rebecca West on violence in the Balkans.
8. Nelson Algren on heroin.
9. Erica Jong on mothers, daughters, and the shoah.
10. Michel Foucault on non-affirmative painting.
11. Henry George on the law of human progress.
12. Mircea Eliade on the sacred and the profane.
13. Henry Miller on insomnia.
14. Frank Chodorov on misguided patriotism (see chapter 13).
15. Robert Conquest on war.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's totalitarian premonitions.

 Anne Morrow Lindbergh's journals, War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939-1944, provide a primary source on the domestic isolationist movement as it developed and faltered during the days leading up to American entry into World War II. In May of 1940, Anne writes:

Something, one feels, is pushing up through the crust of custom. What was pushing under The Great War? What behind Communism? What behind Nazism? Is it nothing but a "return to barbarism" as the M. Boels think, to be crushed at all costs by a "Crusade"? Or is some new and perhaps even ultimately good conception of humanity coming to birth-- or trying to come to birth through these evil and horrible forms, these abortive attempts?

It has seemed to me that there is a common element hidden in these terrible things-- an element perhaps social, perhaps economic, the same element that has shown itself in "the New Deal" and perhaps in the reforms of Blum. Hitler "taking in" the working classes, his deification of labor, "the dignity of labor" much of the socialist side of National Socialism, even though forced from the top, brutally.

Lindbergh continues this line of thought into what would become one of her most often-quoted and highly misconstrued statements:

I cannot feel that he [Hitler], as an individual, is that important. Nazism seems to me scum which happens to be on the wave of the future. I agree with people's condemnation of Nazi methods but I do not think they are the wave. They happen to be riding on it.

At the time, she was writing a pamphlet published later that year as The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith. These same words were reprinted in the pamphlet and taken by the mainstream press as a fatalistic acceptance of Nazism to come. In fact, when read in context, her words implied nothing of the sort.

Lindbergh was expressing an idea which was not often discussed or developed-- an idea that connected the growth of Nazi totalitarianism with the growth of Stalinist totalitarianism, and the possible seeds of American totalitarianism in big government programs implemented in the name of the common good and the struggling worker. Lindbergh traced the common threads of socialist programs to this root-- promises of a better world to come combined with a national identity built around a particular nations sole custody of the greatest ideal, the ideal which justified any means for its accomplishment,

For more biographical information about Lindbergh and her struggles in the interwar period, see:

• Anne Morrow Lindbergh profiled at PBS' The American Experience.
• Biography from a family website.
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh's books available for reading online.
• "Dance", Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Harper's Magazine, May 1974.On the intimate dance of marital relations.
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh tribute website with many links and historical records.

How to handle contractors in Iraq?

A report on Section 1206 of Public Law 108-375 describes the role of contractors in post-Saddam Iraq. The questions of legal status hinge on a simple categorization-- contractors supporting deployed military forces and contractors assisting in reconstruction. The report outlines the chain of command and oversight over contractors, while providing insight and historical context for the role and evolution of the CPA. Apparently, "primary oversight responsibility for security contracts and other agreements in Iraq is vested in USG contracting officers". However, contracting officers are only vaguely responsible for the monitoring the performance of contractors-- couched in the language "safeguarding the interests of the United States in its contractual relationships".

The report also include hard numbers on the total number of contractor casualties (1171) and fatalities (166), though US casualties only number around 175 (and fatalities, though comparatively higher at 64). Numbers are followed by detailed descriptions and time-space coordinates for individual contrator deaths and fatalities. This report is a must-read for Iraq-watchers.

Guns for hire.

Since military enlistment levels aren't keeping up with US military needs, the possibility of robot snipers in Iraq is an increasingly likely one. How else might the Bush administration cope with low enlistment rates? Why, paid private hire, of course-- and Frontline has just the feature for those following "Private Warriors" .Grateful to DefenseTech for the links.

Also tangential to this topic, Ed Harriman uses actual budgetary documents in his coverage of the auditors in Iraq for the London Review of Books. Harriman describes the effects of precision bombing as rather unbudgeted:

In March this year, a further $832 million ‘was reprogrammed for management initiatives’, largely ‘for operations and maintenance at various power and water plants, urgent work in the electrical and oil sectors’ to repair sabotage damage, and to pay for building contracts on which it had become extremely dangerous and expensive to work. The most recent audit, issued in April, reports that projects are running between 50 and 85 per cent above the original estimated costs. The free-spending days are over. Americans are having to divert increasing amounts of US development money just to keep what remains of Iraq’s damaged public utilities working, and to finance the Iraqi police and army.