The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The French Revolution ended this eighteenth-century interval of limited and instrumental war. Ferrero continues:

  At the end of the eighteenth century, an historical convulsion threw France into confusion and brought to power a generation of men full of energy but without experience, strangers to the tradition of wisdom which had revealed to those who governed before them certain limits beyond which force was of no avail. The young revolutionaries embarked on a bold adventure, full of danger, during which, at a certain moment, they were seized by fear; and impelled by fear, they over-stepped the limits which their predecessors had learned to respect. If the Revolution did much evil, the reason was that at a certain moment it was afraid of itself and of the world. And in the madness of fear it believed it had discovered a new art of warfare, a new diplomacy, a new policy which were nothing but illusions about the power of force … to oblige men to be free by force. It might be possible to compel them by force to say that they are free, but not by force to be, that is to say to feel free. If any principle of legitimacy is only valid in so far as it succeeds in obtaining the inner consent, the sincere adherence, the spontaneous impulse of the will, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is completely identified with free consent … [With this choice by the revolutionaries of] metaphysical adventure a new torment came to afflict humanity … [From it] Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism have all sprung.5

  Mainstream Western thought in the nineteenth century usually expressed confidence in the application of impartial reason and the progress of science. Educated opinion was that which Isaiah Berlin has attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian literary intelligentsia, that “solutions to all the central problems existed, that one could discover them, and, with sufficient selfless effort, realize them on earth.” There already had been a number of utopian proposals and experiments for reordering society, including those of the utopian socialists, followed by the one that would prove the most important, Marx’s dialectical and “scientific” interpretation of history, the basis for intensive political activity on the continent before 1918, as well as the rationale for the revolutionary uprising in Russia of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin.

  Liberal confidence was destroyed in the general moral, social, and material catastrophe of the First World War. Afterward, the Europeans in 1919 turned to Woodrow Wilson and the United States with near-hysterical enthusiasm because the United States had stood apart from the revolutionary nineteenth century and had not been implicated in the war until its final months, when it was credited with bringing it to an end—even by the Germans and Austrians, who knew they could not be expected to stand against the millions of men the United States was calling to arms. This permitted both the Allied peoples and those of the Central Powers to believe that America might provide the rational and lasting solutions Wilson promised. They were unfortunately mistaken.

  Karl Marx provided the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most influential sociopolitical theory about past and future, with his account of man as divided into classes with conflicting interests, whose dialectical struggle would eventually empower the most progressive class, the working class. It was a rationale for twentieth-century revolution in Russia, after defeat by Japan in 1904 and humiliation by the Central Powers in the First World War. It was one of the motives for revolt, or left-wing or right-wing coups d’état, in interwar Europe and China, and it sustained movements of national affirmation and social protest in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the postcolonial period. It survives today as an analytic tool and an influence on social democratic and revolutionary thought, and even on literary criticism.

  Romanticism was the most important and consequential political force of the first half of the nineteenth century, following the Enlightenment, a challenge to Enlightenment rationalism, celebrating nature’s authenticity and emphasizing feeling and emotion as more important to human fulfillment than bloodless reason. Romanticism was of German origin and was one of the sources of the developing nationalism in Europe as feudal institutions and dynastic power faded. Nationalism, an expression of community identity and felt destiny, became the most powerful political force in most of Europe during the post-Napoleonic period, and the most influential enemy of Enlightenment values. It was the main force destroying the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and influencing the rise of Fascism and National Socialism. The most remarkable achievement of the European Union since the Second World War has been to overcome nationalism among its own members, although it survives, sometimes virulently, in Balkan Europe and in the states that in the past were part of the Russian and Soviet empires.*

  The search for a secular utopian solution resumed after the First World War with Benito Mussolini, editor of a highly successful Socialist popular newspaper, who invented the term “totalitarian” to describe the commitment demanded by his inspired combination of socialism with nationalism in a new political party. In Italian Fascism the initial ideology was Mussolini’s alliance of war veterans with workers in a party that broke the rules of the Italian system, brutalized and tortured its opponents, and proclaimed an imperial ambition. He was a charismatic figure, had actually been to war, served in an elite unit, had been decorated, and subsequently conducted himself as a hero, although as Luigi Barzini has said, when the new war he wanted actually came, his preparations and his bluster both proved empty.6

  In the Nazi case, which unlike Italian Fascism was racist from the start, domination was by a self-identified racial elite. Nazi military aggression in the 1940s, and the Nazi party’s defiance of the established rules of diplomacy and war and of existing treaties and international conventions on torture and treatment of prisoners and noncombatants (in the beginning mainly, but not exclusively, violated in Central Europe and on the Eastern Front), together with its attempt to exterminate the Jews, among other peoples deemed inferior or corrupt, demonstrated Nazi contempt for European civilization. Nazism could not expect to universalize its values because these were by definition the natural and exclusive possessions of the Nordic (“Aryan”) peoples, so while Scandinavians, the Dutch, and certain other groups could be admitted to full membership in the Nazi order, it subordinated “lesser” peoples to the status of serfs or set out to exterminate them as obstacles to a Nordic empire.

  Hitler was also a decorated war veteran and possessor of charismatic powers, as was true of Leon Trotsky, an agitator, writer, and journalist. Trotsky proved a remarkable military organizer, creating the Red Army that defeated the Allied intervention in Russia of 1918–1920. Stalin had him murdered as a rival in 1940.*

  The followers of the modern totalitarian leaders can scarcely be called the “marginal” people Norman Cohn found in the medieval movements. We have become aware of the ordinariness of most of the totalitarian parties’ officials and members, and even of those implicated in Nazi and Leninist-Stalinist crimes. Much evil was done by soldiers or mobilized police who in peacetime would never have dreamed of carrying out orders of mass murder, but under the discipline and social pressures of war obediently did so, sometimes even keeping photos or other souvenirs. Many villagers obediently killed their Jewish neighbors simply because they were told to do so. The same was true four decades later in the wars of Yugoslav succession, when Serbs and Croats fell upon one another, or on the Bosnian Muslims, for no reason except that such had become the thing to do as a consequence of the Serbian determination to create a “greater Serbia.” In Rwanda, ethnic-linked class, power, and historical issues were being revenged.

  We are left with the important question of the susceptibility of modern and enlightened people, not at all marginal, Asian as well as European and American, to the appeal of the secular utopian ideas of Fascism, Marxism, or of Pol Pot and his followers, or to accept the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution, believing in its “boundless, millenarian” promises.

  We know from much personal and biographical testimony and experience that between the founding of the First International in 1864 and the Communist Internati
onal in 1919, to the end of Soviet Communism in 1991, uncounted numbers of well-meaning people, including many intellectuals, artists, and academic figures, voluntarily accepted party discipline, suppressed their doubts, committed crimes, and engaged in clandestine struggles and conspiracies that in the end proved merely to have aggrandized the power of the leaders of totalitarian parties.

  The attack on the established international order by Leninist Russia, its creation of the Comintern (the Communist International, controlled by the Soviet Communist Party), and its sponsorship of foreign Communist parties intent on subversion and overthrow of other governments, together with the criminal practices of Stalinism in controlling Soviet and Soviet-dominated societies, demonstrated one lesson about modern secular utopianism that must not be lost : Ruthlessness is seductive, perhaps particularly to intellectuals convinced that they see the future and therefore are licensed to sacrifice to it vast numbers of unimportant people (in military terms, “cannon fodder”).

  The willingness of Communist Party members and fellow travelers to submit themselves to Party discipline rested upon their confidence (or secular religious faith, to be exact) that Marxism was indeed an objective scientific account of society and its future, which it was not—as should have been apparent to serious people from the start . The notion of an eventual proletarian age in which the apparatus of state would fall away while “a new type of man” created by Socialism (and its “towering leaders”) would live in permanent harmony with his fellows could only be accepted through the deliberate suppression of the critical faculties of any Communist adherent with experience of political society or any knowledge of history.

  As with Nazism, self-intoxication was everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of intelligent people went to Communism “as to a spring of fresh water” (as Picasso said). Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, said Communism rescued him “from inauthenticity”; he was “thirsting for faith”; he “felt the jubilant exaltation of being free” the day he joined the German Communist Party. Thoughtful people had always been willing to believe in a heaven located in heaven, but since the beginning of the secular age, all too many of them have been glad to believe in the possibility of heaven on earth.7

  This was possible within a new Western intellectual and moral structure that rested wholly on faith in science and secular progress. Peter Gay was correct to call ours an age of the Modern Paganism, since the period has been dominated by the aggressively pagan ideologies of dialectical materialism, Bolshevism, racism, an ultimately nihilistic Nazism, and Maoism—to take the major ones; although one must add a nihilistic capitalism.

  The drama in the contemporary Middle East is usually thought to be linked to religious fanaticism, in turn associated with totalitarian thought. Few, in the United States at least, are accustomed to see jihadism as a political phenomenon—a defense of religious and cultural identity against hostile foreign influence, which is a version of “nationalism.” Yet terrorism involving Muslims made its appearance in contemporary history as a reaction to Western political (or imperial) interference in the Middle East . Palestinian bombings and hijackings began as resistance to Israel. Israel’s creation itself was preceded by both Zionist and Arab terrorism during the 1930s and 1940s, most of the Zionist attacks being directed against the British as the mandatory authority. Terrorist attacks by Muslims have widely been interpreted as irrational, seemingly senseless or gratuitous acts because in many cases they are suicidal and they kill innocent individuals, including fellow Muslims and even sympathizers, as well as people believed infidels and the enemies of Islam. But Osama bin Laden himself identified the U.S. military presence in the Middle East as the motive for al Qaeda’s suicidal attacks against the United States in 2001—attacks that were deliberate blows against symbols in New York and Washington of Western capitalism and militarism. The attacks were meant as revenge for the presence of “infidel” American bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia.

  Attacks on American or other foreign soldiers in Lebanon or Iraq or Afghanistan are described by those responsible as attacks on “occupiers” or intruders, and Hizbollah and Hamas terrorism attacks Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands as well as the very existence of the state of Israel in the Middle East. While the religio-political utopianism of today’s radical Islam includes certain features of the religious fanaticism of the past, notably in its view of martyrdom, it is actually a modern phenomenon in that its purpose is political, to create a grand union of integrist Muslims to oppose heresy in the Islamic world, and to oppose foreign cultural influence and military invasion. Like the Zionism and Jewish nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, committed to creating a Jewish homeland, the utopian Islamic society the radicals promise would exist in this world, not the next . It is one more version of modern utopian nationalism—which in the United States of America has meanwhile assumed a wholly different form.

  * Believers in a God-creator remote from the realm of human experience.

  * The American neoconservative idea in 2003 that a “new Middle East” would emerge once Saddam Hussein and other despots were overthrown was a sad corruption of this distant idea, but so are many modern ideas. Corporate America and Republican politicians for many years preceding 2008’s global capitalist economy crisis held that “big government” is the modern problem, and that the unfettered market would prove to be an expression of innate human reason and justice. Their belief in the collectively infallible rationality of the market echoed the utopian Socialists, such as Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Robert Owen, visionary Socialist predecessors of such utopian capitalists as Alan Greenspan (and his mentor, Ayn Rand).

  * The actual words of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, were: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we should deal falsely with our God in the work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses.” Aboard the ship Arabella, 1630.

  * One heard an echo of this in the radio appeal made by Osama bin Laden to the American people in 2007, proposing a simple way to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The Americans should give up Christianity and accept Islam.

  * The irresponsible Western policy of pushing invitations to NATO onto Ukraine and Georgia stimulated destructive forces in those countries, and in Russia as well, by seeming to promise Western military support for irredentist or separatist ambitions that—as a reckless Georgian regime discovered in August 2008—would never actually be supplied.

  * The influence of Trotsky’s doctrine of perpetual revolution persists to the present day. Most of the original American neoconservatives were of Trotskyist political (or even family) descent, so that his utopian and absolutist thinking influenced both the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and Israeli right-wing extremism.

  III

  The Sources of

  America’s Moral and Political Isolation from Europe

  It is impossible fully to understand the predicament of the American and Western political situation today without placing it in the context of the entire period that began with the European discoveries of the Americas and their indigenous societies. This was followed by the Enlightenment, and the related and contingent foundation of the United States by the British North American colonists, unwilling to continue to live as British subjects lacking full parliamentary representation. These Americans escaped the principal cultural consequence of the Enlightenment that was producing among European elites a crisis of established religion, and what might be described as a revolution in eschatological expectation, and hence in confidence in the established nature of political society.

  The full meaning of the American Declaration of Independence was its “declaration” of a new, separate, and self-sufficient manifestation of Western civilization in the supposedly innocent terr
itories of North America, a step not taken by Spanish and French colonists.* The customary citation of John Winthrop’s identification of America as a divinely provided refuge for English Protestant dissidents has led to a popular disregard of the political and secular intellectual forces that went into the new republic’s creation, which was seen as indeed providing man’s “last, best hope” as a new political dispensation replacing the monarchical order of Europe. As Thomas Paine put it in The Rights of Man, “the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world … We have no occasion to roam for information in the obscure field of antiquity nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are … as if we had lived in the beginning of time.”

  The counsel originally drawn from this was that the new nation should keep a safe distance from the affairs of Europe, then considered (as often remains the case today in the United States) an exhausted society and source of political and moral corruption. The nation followed the prudent advice of George Washington in 1796: to avoid permanent alliances with the European states (“entangling” alliances, as Jefferson added in his first inaugural address). The advice was generally respected during the century and a half following the nation’s foundation, reinforced by the Monroe Doctrine, which opposed any further European intervention in the Americas.

  From the beginning, Europeans and others had been imaginatively and morally gripped by the American national adventure, seeing in it the same universal importance Americans attributed to their nation and national example, as a republican political and egalitarian social experiment, a decisive departure from the Western past . This awareness was religious for the Puritans who settled Massachusetts and Connecticut, but more than a century later it was also implicit in the exalted language and noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The United States became unique among nations as one that created itself consciously, as a new beginning.