Bush's vision: A critical look (1 of 2)

One of the best discussions I've seen of Bush's vision from the viewpoint of the politics of war and mass psychology is Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World (2003) by Robert Jay Lifton. His book was written after the invasion of Iraq and after a strong resistance movement against the American occupation had emerged.

Lifton is a psychiatrist whose previous work has included studies of Chinese Communist "brainwashing" techniques during the Korean War, survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the Aum Shinrikyo cult that conducted a nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway.  His concept of "coercive persuasion" has been an important one in the analysis of the cult phenomenon, and in the psychological treatment and counseling of those who have left cults.

In Superpower Syndrome, he takes on the tricky task of describing some of the processes that have affected American policymakers and the general public in the response to the 9/11 attack and the so-called "war on terror."  In doing so, he manages to make useful observations without descending to sloppy pop psychology or careless generalization about "national character" or similar dubious entities.  Careful readers will have to remind themselves at times that generalizations about how "Americans" react to this or that actually mean that some people react this way, some another way and some still another.  But he does a much better job of being cautious about his generalizations than the typical Big Pundit ever attempts to be.

Survivor Missions

A key part of Lifton's analysis of the American response to the 9/11 attacks has to do with "survivor missions."  He is very clear to distinguish between the experiences of those who were more directly connected to the 9/11 attacks, such as those in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or those who lost close family members, and the American public at large.  But because of the intense publicity and the national atttention to the attacks, he does think that in some important sense most Americans have something of a "survivor" experience from the attacks.  As he says:

The overall task of the survivor is to find meaning in his or her ordeal. We are meaning-hungry creatures, and what has been devastatingly chaotic must be given form.  Only by finding meaning in the death encounter can one find meaning in the rest of one's life.

No war or disaster, however extreme, provides meaning in itself.  That meaning must be constructed by survivors or others who have been affected.  What such a disaster does do is infuse any constructed meaning with life-and-death dimensions, which in turn can be passionately fused with ultimate values.

This brings to mind some of the intense divisions over the Iraq War.  Many people who were suckered by the administration's propaganda connecting the Iraq War emotionally with revenge for the 9/11 attacks are ready to dismiss those of us who opposed the war as enemies.  And those of us who feel strongly that the 9/11 attacks required some special kind of response directed at those who perpetrated it are appalled in an intense way that anyone would cynically manipulate the 9/11 attack the way Bush and the advocates of the Iraq War did - and are almost as outraged at those who got suckered by the scam.

Lifton talks the way in which survivor missions can take very different, even seemingly opposite, forms for people who experienced very similar wars or disasters.  Elsewhere, he has written about how for some Vietnam veterans the loss of fellow soldiers made them more determined to see that the war be "won" so that their sacrifices wouldn't be in vain, while others turned against the war and made a survivors mission out of protesting against it so that other soldiers wouldn't be needlessly sacrificed.  In this book, he describes how Meir Kahane, the founder of the radical-rightwing Jewish Defense League (JDL) who took a survivor mission from the Holocaust which for him included "encouragement of violence toward anyone seen as an enemy of Israel or the Jews."  He also describes a group of Holocaust survivors who in 1969 were moved to protest the My Lai massacre because, as they told Lifton, the meaning they drew from their own experiences "was that systematic slaughter of innocent human beings by other human being must not be tolerated."

While opposite types of adaptation can serve similar psychological functions, and make be equally healthy for particular individuals, Lifton isn't arguing that every kind of adaptation is equally useful or rational or socially appropriate.  But whether the adaptation is constructive or destructive in its effects on the world, it can become a mission "to which the survivor dedicates much of his or her life."  And that it functions as a form of witness, of making a new narrative out of the tragedy.  He calls the less constructive kind of adaptation a "false witness," and explains that the American soldiers who carried out the My Lai massacre in Vietnam were operating in part out of a murderous survivior mission in which they saw the execution of innocent civilians, including small children, as revenge for the loss of fellow soldiers how had been killed.  His warning is one that Americans, especially Republican war fans, still need to hear:

The American response to 9/11 has a number of motivations, but must be understood in the context of survivor emotions and a survivor mission ... Tragically for us and for the world, much of that response has been a form of false witness.  America has mounted a diffuse, Vietnam-style, worldwide "search and destroy mission" on behalf of the 9/11 dead.  Here, too, we join the dance with our al-Qaeda "partner," which brings fierce survivor emotions and considerable false witness of its own.

The survivor's quest for meaning can be illuminating and of considerable human value.  But it also can be drawn narrowly, manipulatively, and violently, in connection with retributive and pervasive killing.

Thanks to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a great deal of attention has jusfiably been paid to Bush's response when he heard about the second tower at the World Trade Center being struck, and he sat for several minutes seemingly stunned, listening to a grade-school class reading My Pet Goat aloud.  Without being judgmental, Lifton also talks about that episode, noting that Bush had an entirely rational - maybe we could say "reality-based" - fear that he himself might be the target of a deadly attack.  Though he's obviously speculating from a distance, this observation is a good one, and emphasizes an angle that I haven't seen explored anywhere else:

What becomes of great importance is one's manner of dealing with death anxiety, and with fear in general.  In the case of the president and his advisers, that deathanxiety could have contributed greatly to their overall belligerence.  The immediate insistence that we were at war had to do not only with the devastating dimensions of the attacks - and with longer-standing projections of American hegemony - but also with the president's own psychological style in relation to anxiety and threat.

Certainly the president and his advisers are by no means alone in responding this way.  There is a widespread psychological tendency for people experiencing death anxiety to become aggressive, and in some cases engage in violent rhetoric or actions.  When threatened with individual annihilation, one may lash out at others as a means of reasserting one' vitality, of simply feeling alive.

Under certain conditions - some forms of military combat, for instance - that response can be useful.  But when national leaders respond belligerently, they may tap the collective potential of their people for amorphous rage, which can readilybe transformed into war fever.

Competing Visions of Apocalypse

Visions of apocalyptic conflicts in which mighty forces collide with the ultimate triumph of Good (aka, Our Side) in the end have a great appeal for many people.  Our Side wins, the Other Side is defeated and punished, and the world - maybe the whole universe - is regenerated and "born again," we might say.  Lifton writes:

Participation in an apocalyptic project offers expression for two primal human aspirations - the urge toward spiritual or ethical imporovement, in this case through an embrace of what is perceived as radical good; and the urge to become part of something not just larger than oneself but also sacred and eternal.  That powerful sense of immortality can be intoxicating, enough to transform one's existence and offer a new perspective on life itself.

Lifton talks about how the radical and apocalyptic views of Islamists like the Egyptians Muhammed Abd al-Salam Faraj and Sayyid Qutb and the Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.  And he makes an important observation about how the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan gave an enormous sense of validation to the apocalyptic elements of the jihadists' view of the world struggle in which they saw themselves engaged:

There has been some dispute about how significantly Arab fighters, as opposed to native Afghan warriors, contributed to the Soviet debacle, but there is no doubt that the victory was an intoxicating one for Islamists.  Their miraculous success against a superpower - followed by the collapse of that superpower - could only mean that God had made them invincible.  The considerable quantities of military equipment and financial support made available by the United States were dismissed in the exultant claim of (in Faraj's words) "jihad for the cause of [G]od." More than any event, victory in Afghanistan contributed to an apocalyptic confidence of the part of Islamists: the existing world could be overturned and pure Islamist rule established. [my emphasis]

Americans, it will be remembered celebrated the mujahideen in Afghanistan as brave and admirable freedom fighters, with both Republicans and Democrats singing their praises - and voting to provide them extensive military support.

Lifton describes the ways in which the 9/11 attacks were conceived by Bin Laden as apocalyptic theater:

The acts of September 11, 2001, combined a technocratic pragmatism with a strong sense of apocalyptic action. The vision of the project was not just bold but world-destroying.  Consider the targets: the Pentagon, housing and symbolizing the world's most powerful military machine; the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, symbolizing the world's greatest economy; and possibly the White House, symbolizing the presidential authority of the world's only superpower.  The method - crashing the hijacked jetliners into these structures - was both transcendent and technically sophisticated (though containing more than a bit of Hollywood and of video-game fantasy). The American failure to anticipate these attacks was partly a matter of negligence and partly an inability to imagine at any level the apocalyptic dimensions of al-Qaeda's project.  The apocalyptic aura created by the raging fires and the considerable destruction immediately surrounding the World Trade Center caused many people to think of either Hiroshima or Armageddon.  That aura both contributed to, and was furtherd by, the shock waves sent through the American economy (general recession, and the near collapse of the airline industry) and psyche, including painful struggles with vulnerability, and with aggrieved superpoer status.

Although information now in the public record casts doubt on his iplied assumpton that no one in the government imagined the "apocalyptic dimensions" of Al Qaeda's intentions, and the recession had started months before the attacks, his basic description holds up well.

Meanwhile, on the side of the Bush administration and the Republcian Party, there was also a strong tendency, from the personalities involved as well as from the political clout of the Christian Right, to frame the American response in apocalyptic ways.  His description of this political/religious framework is worth quoting at some length:

[The] Christian fundamentalist mindset blends with and intensifies our [American] military fundamentalism. ...

American apocalypiticism is fed by the rhetoric of a president whose conversion to evangelical Christianity - administered [at least in one version of Bush's story] by Billy Graham, America's leading evangelist - saved him from alcoholic self-destruction.  Graham's son, Franklin, remains close to administration leaders, and has a tendency to be a bit more extreme than his father. [Lifton is being "a bit" generous to the younger Graham here. - Bruce] When he recently called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion," the White House quickly dissociated itself from that view and he was forced to apologize, but he may well have been saying someting widely believed by Christian fundamentalists, including some in the administration. ... The "predominant creed" of the Bush White House, "where attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either, has been "the culture of modern evangelicalism." [the latter quotation is from David Frum, Bush's former White House speechwriter.]

Bush's own religious convictions have been associated with dogmatic views and with tendencies toward personal and political fundamentalism.  Certainly his administration has been friendly to Christian fundamentalists, which has provided much of his political base, and has embraced many of its passionately held social and political views: an antiabortion stand so extreme, for instance, that it has interfered with international aid programs, and sexual repression and homophobia so great as to block open scientific discussion of AIDS.

Among cabinet members, his attorney general, John Ashcroft, has views that approach the theocratic, declaring on one occasion, "We have no king but Jesus," a conviction not fully separable from his statements that those who raise critical questions about the war on terrorism "only aid terrorists."

And, indeed, he concludes that the Bush Doctrine as it developed after 9/11 did take on an apocalyptic dimension, both in the definition of the goals, which were both vague and grandiose, and in the paranoid edge that comes from the fear "that terrorists and their supporters are everywhere" which "inevitably becomes associated with a degree of megalomania as well."  Lifton says:

The war on terrorism became apocalyptic, then, exactly because it was militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and because it has no clear end.  It therefore enters the realm of the infinite.  Implied in its approach is that every last terroirst everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are not more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow.)

Tags: bush doctrine