Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  —Robert Bernays, Liberal MP,

  House of Commons, 1934

  Another part of intelligence is ability to learn, to include learning the things that are unpleasant. Contemplate the phenomenon of pacifism, clearly an intellectual doctrine, though, of course, there are strong pacifist streams in a number of religions, too, as well as religions—Jainism, say—that are entirely pacifistic.

  I’m here to talk about intellectualism, though, not religions. I’ll leave them aside with the observation that, to the extent they’re unworldly, that they expect their judgment and reward in the hereafter, and scorn the material world of the day, they are, at least, internally consistent and have nothing of major principle that they really can learn. It’s already set in stone for them, graven articles of faith, and contrary temporal facts are irrelevant.

  But what about the intellectual and secular pacifist?

  Pacifism’s been around about as far back as we can see in history. Even so, it really got its start, in any big way, as a result of the Great War. You can understand—it’s not at all hard to understand—how pacifism got that big shot in the arm: Millions dead, millions more disabled and disfigured for life, entire landscapes ruined, cities blasted and crumbled, the Earth poisoned—in places it’s still poisoned—the economies essentially bankrupt, and over four years of waste almost beyond imagining, and all of that for a lousy cause and a poor resolution, with subsequent revelations that most of the wartime propaganda was lies, thus adding insult to injury.

  I’m not a pacifist, not even a little bit, but, you know, I could almost see myself becoming a pacifist, if I’d been through that and had no contrary factors to weigh. Sadly, however, and I do mean sadly, there are now, and have been since at least 1939, contrary factors to weigh.

  We may doubt just how much the Oxford Pledge, that “In no circumstances will this house fight for its King and country,” really swayed Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. One suspects very little. It didn’t have to. It was not primarily a cause, but a symptom of the pacifism that swept the United Kingdom and France—to a degree the United States, too—following the Great War.

  It was that pacifism that caused France to acquiesce in Nazi Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. It was that that caused Britain and France to acquiesce in the Anschluss between Germany and Austria. Pacifism saw the Sudetenland occupied, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia gobbled up or severed away. One suspects that the cultivated unaggressive, nonbelligerent, nonviolent attitude was at least in good part responsible for the most welcome break Germany got, during and after the invasion of Poland, up until the invasion of Denmark and Norway, and their assault on the west, in 1940. Too, it was at least a factor in American isolationism.

  Sixty million or so dead later, most of the world had learned. Yet the pacifist intellectual never did. Though Bertrand Russell bounced around quite a bit after the war, he ultimately ended up pretty much where he’d started, having apparently learned nothing he could accept from the events of 1939-1945. Perhaps . . . even probably, he never could have learned, because learning would have meant for him, and for the intellectual pacifist, generally, profound personal unhappiness at having to give up his fantasy. The pacifist still believes, despite the vast and compelling historic evidence to the contrary, that pacifism—though it can only be locally, hence dangerously, applied—is inherently and universally moral.

  Of course, the Second World War was not the only refutation of pacifism out there. Contemplate the Moriori people who inhabited the Chatham Islands. Total pacifists by the command of their (dare I say it? I dare; I dare.) intellectual king; when eight- or nine-hundred Maori showed up in 1835, the Moriori were conquered, killed, enslaved and eaten. The few survivors were forbidden by their conquerors to have children together and thus was their existence as a people effectively extinguished.

  In their defense, the Moriori really weren’t given a lot of time to learn, so rapid was their destruction. But the modern, intellectual, secular pacifist? What’s his or her excuse? Why haven’t they learned? How can that failure to learn be considered intelligent? And if the rest of us haven’t learned or won’t learn from pacifism’s grotesque and murderous misdiagnosis prior to 1939, and its continuing fraud cum idiocy after 1945, how unintelligent would we be?

  For those who subscribe to this view, the “manufacture of consent” metaphor gives them a clear conscience to undertake the wholesale reeducation of the deluded masses in order to get them to see their true good, which—no surprise—can be secured only by following the dictates of their intellectual superiors, whose capacity to think independently is proven by their rejection of all traditional and local values and their adoption of the ideal of rational cosmopolitanism.

  —Lee Harris, The Cosmopolitan Illusion

  I’ve dumped on Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” before, in Carnifex. Perhaps I owe her an apology. (If so, it would be a debt that rested very lightly on my shoulders, to be sure.) Not that I think I pegged it precisely wrongly, mind you, but—mea culpa—I don’t think I really understood what was going on there, at the core of the thing, at the time I wrote. I think I do now. And here it is, perhaps in somewhat convoluted form. (But then, we’re talking about some convoluted minds and trains of thought, so you’ll have that.)

  First, a question: What is happiness? (Oh, stop the Genghis Khan quotes. That’s, at most, how to get it, if you’re a fairly odd sort, not what it is.) The pshrinks and philosophers seem to differ. Some say it’s an emotion. Others disagree. No one seems to disagree, however, that, as a minimum, happiness is a derivative of emotions, an emotional state. Just shunt that off to one side of your mind for a bit, but we will get back to it. I presented it here, early, just to give you a little time to re-assimilate the concept.

  On to “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”! More specifically, what I intend to do is show how Nussbaum’s thesis is objective nonsense and then postulate how it came to be that a well educated and eloquent woman could put forth and maintain such nonsense with a straight face.

  At the center of Nussbaum’s idea, I think, is the notion that logic demands that, once we’ve drawn the circles of nationality around ourselves, we must—having been exclusive, the once—continue to draw ever narrower circles. This is false, as I alluded to in Carnifex. Whatever the logic might be in a closed system, one with no external threat, we don’t live in that system. The system is, indeed, a fantasy. It would be intensely illogical—if survival and freedom have any value—to draw circles so narrow that successful collective defense becomes impossible. Just ask the Arabs, who usually have weak nations, but who have perhaps the most closely drawn circles in the world, how well they’ve been doing against the Israelis for the last six decades.

  Yes, that means that, in the real, the non-intellectual, world, we do not necessarily draw those circles narrowly because, logically, factually, objectively, and intelligently, we might well end up being kicked out of our homes if we did.

  Also, as I mentioned, in Carnifex, what does actually happen when national boundaries are erased, or at least weakened, in a theoretically closed system without an actual, admitted or perceived external threat, is that, contra Nussbaum, then people start drawing narrower circles. Scots and Welsh, for example, start ceasing to be Britons and begin to revert to much narrower identities, as the EU becomes more powerful and the nation states of Europe weaken. It is very unclear that the European identity the EU would like to foster will ever get out of the starting gate, except among a very few.

  Similarly, no useful pan-African identity has come from sub-Saharan Africa’s weak states. Less still does a pan-human identity develop, in a place without those nationalist circles. No, no, there the narrow circle of the tribe matters.

  So if logic demands it, why doesn’t it happen? Why, indeed, does the opposite happen? It’s really quite simple: Logic has little to do with it. Rather, the driving force, the one Nussbaum is loathe to admit to, is not logic, it is emoti
on. And reason’s part in this is only to realize, accept, analyze, and deal with the fact that emotion rules, not a distant logic, and especially not one with false premises, ab initio. Anything else would be illogical.

  It is obvious. It is intelligently applied emotion—not cold logic, except for the logic of defense against a threat—that makes people draw the largest circles to which they can feel an emotional tie.

  So why can’t a woman as well educated, eloquent, and apparently logically reasoning as Martha Nussbaum see that? I can’t be certain, of course, but I can offer a suggestion as to what I think was going on. I think it was a multistep process: 1) she was projecting her logic on to the rest of mankind, despite copious evidence that mankind is not logical, 2) she was simultaneously denying our right to be, and our existence as, primarily emotionally driven beings, 3) despite the probability approaching certainty that a people which loses its sense of nationhood will fragment into weak and possibly warring factions, and high likelihood that such a people will become, thereafter, subjects, or perhaps slaves, of those who did not lose their sense of nationhood, she would still have us do it, because, 4) the attempt would make her happy, which is to say, it would engage her emotions in a personally satisfying way.

  In other words, a) I doubt that even she, herself, realizes that she is as emotionally driven as the rest of us poor, ignorant ’eathens, and that that drives everything she says beyond the merely trivial, while b) though she does so differently from the way some other noted and notable intellectuals use others—financially and sexually—she has no more care than they do for what would happen to the rest of us, in the real world, should we be so silly as to follow her advice, so long as our doing so makes her happy.

  That, friends, is sociopathy. We do not exist as independent, morally significant, individual beings to Nussbaum anymore that we would to Sartre, Shelley, or Marx. Our function is merely to make them happy.

  If I am right in this—and I frankly do not see any other way for a clever person like Nussbaum to put forth such a factually fraudulent argument—can we reasonably call making that kind of misprediction, maintaining it in the face of copious evidence to the contrary, and that kind of lack of personal insight, truly intelligent? Again, glib and eloquent I readily concede, but intelligence is more than these.

  One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

  —George Orwell

  One of the ways to tell if a philosophy is inherently illegitimate is to ask and answer certain questions, the answers to which either must be historically and universally valid, or must postulate some profound change in the human condition such as to allow them to be valid in the future even if not in the past. These include: “Would the philosophy depend for its continued existence and prosperity on a particular kind of society, which society is its antithesis? Would it undermine the defense of the very kind of society it requires to continue to exist and prosper? Having undermined its home society, would it need universality to continue to exist and prosper while having no credible way of attaining that universality?”

  My typical reader will probably understand fully how those three apply to both pacifism and cosmopolitanism. But let me give one that that some of my readers are likely to choke on: Ayn Rand’s objectivism, coupled with her rejection of altruism.

  How would objectivism have dealt with Nazism or Stalinism, in the past? It would self-evidently have failed; only the intensely stupid could imagine Rand’s self-centered egotists dealing effectively with either the altruistically motivated Wehrmacht or the Red Army. And don’t bother with, “Well, that just shows that altruism is inherently evil.” That’s simply nonsense; like a firearm, altruism is morally neutral, neither good nor evil except in respect to the uses to which it is put. (Yes, this does mean that generally pro-gun objectivists who make the claim have latched on to the moral and intellectual equivalent of the gun grabbers’ argument for gun control and confiscation.)

  In any case, what Rand was doing there was something profoundly intellectual, and profoundly unintelligent, fully equal to the stupidities inherent in pacifism and cosmopolitanism. She forgot that there was a real world outside her brainpan and beyond the limits of her fantasy, which world contained people whose emotions, whose altruism, could be harnessed for purposes inimical to Rand’s own, and which she could neither convert, defend against, nor conquer.

  You can call this intelligent intellectualism if you want. But why would you?

  I’ll be continuing the conversation in the next volume of the Countdown series, Criminal Enterprise.

  GLOSSARY

  APERS—Anti-personnel

  AT—Anti-tank

  Barangay—Tagalog word meaning an administrative district, a neighborhood, or a village, similar to Barrio.

  C-4—An RDX based plastic explosive. Among other uses it forms the filling of a claymore mine. It has a very distinctive, plastic cum solvent, smell to it.

  Camp Fulton—A military installation in Guyana, main base of M Day, Inc, though there are a number of smaller satellite bases for the constituent battalions and squadrons. Named for Master Sergeant (retired) Robert “Buckwheat” Fulton, who was killed in action in Africa during the initial operation.

  CH-750A—sport plane with very short take off and landing abilities

  Chemlight—Also Lightstick. A plastic tube with two chemicals inside, one in a glass vial, which, when broken, produces cool light for a limited period of time. Some produce light beyond the human visual spectrum

  Clacker—The detonating device for a claymore directional anti-personnel mine

  Claymore—A directional anti-personnel mine. There are many broadly similar versions made around the world.

  Daisy Chain—A series of explosive charges or claymores, connected by det cord, such that the explosion of one will set off all the others. Not a good place to be down range of. Oh, and curb your thoughts.

  Datu—A traditional Moro title of nobility and authority.

  Det Cord—Also “detonating cord.” An explosive, formed inside a thin plastic covering, that is about the size of, and sometimes strung like, clothesline. Useful for having one explosion set off another.

  Dustoff—Aeromedical evacuation.

  Eland—A light armored car, French designed, South African built. Different models have different armaments. M Day’s are all either 90mm cannon armed, or have had the turrets removed to clear space to load up infantry.

  FSB—Federal Security Service; the successor to the Soviet Era’s KGB.

  Gun Pod—Also minigun-pod. A self contained, generally aerodynamically sound, container, meant for attaching to an aircraft, and holding a machine gun or multi-barreled minigun. Some gun pods carry light cannon.

  Gurkha—Also Gorkha. Nepalese-born or descended mercenaries serving in the British Army, in small numbers, the Indian Army, in huge numbers, and as sundry security detachments around Asia. Amazingly brave, tough, resilient, and aggressive soldiers, especially considering that they spring from a Hindu culture loaded with charming and inoffensive people.

  HEAT—High Explosive Anti Tank; a shaped charge warhead.

  Kalis—A kris, a (usually) wavy knife or sword, traditional among the peoples of Indonesia, Brunei, southern Thailand, and the Moros of the Philippines.

  Kano—Filipino slang for American. No necessary prejudice involved.

  LCM—Landing Craft Mechanized. The Regiment has obsolescent LCM-6s.

  Lightstick—See Chemlight

  M Day, Inc.—AKA, “The regiment.” A private military corporation, begun as a single use, ad hoc grouping, to effect a particular hostage rescue, the members mostly decided to stay together and keep in the business. Besides hostage rescues, they engage in various other military and quasi military actions, around the globe, along with running a jungle training school at their main base in Guyana.

  Marsden Matting—See PSP

  MI-28—A highly capable Russian-built helicop
ter gunship, analogous to an American AH-64 Apache.

  Minigun Pod—See Gun Pod

  Mufti—Civilian dress

  No-Such-Agency—NSA, the National Security Agency. They don’t really deny that they exist anymore.

  NVG—Night Vision Goggles

  ODA—Operational Detachment Alpha, an “A Team,” a twelve man grouping of special operations soldiers

  Out—When speaking over the radio, a term indicating the conversation is finished. “I have nothing else to say.”

  Over—When speaking over the radio, a term meaning, “I’m done talking now; your turn.”

  PASGT—Personal Armor System, Ground Troops; the American military body armor that started the modern trend toward heavily armored soldiers.

  Pecheneg—A Russian light machine gun, modified from an earlier model, the PKM. It is M Day’s standard light and general purpose machine gun.