This blog entry is in english. Yet english is not my native language (italian is), so bear some indulgence with typos or grammatical mistakes. Also, I have been told that I write complex things - whether this is good or bad I don't know: but so, if you are unfamiliar with complex prose you may see grammatical errors not only where there could be some, but also where just a prose you're not acquainted with is. Native speakers with an A+ grade in english say my english, obviously not perfect, imports no major issues. Lend a deaf ear to the errors, vocally disagree with my thesis if you want, but enjoy the style all the while.
Did the war in Iraq (ides of march 2003) increase terrorist attacks in the world, as many allege, or was there a previous trend?
The mystery replied through facts and not through the sibyls: charts showing the amount of terrorist attacks and worldwide victims from 1970 till 2004 included.
Charts above and below from the MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Worldwide Data Base (TKB)
Graphic of amount of terrorist injuries from 1970 till 2004 (TKB).
Should we judge terrorist activity by its amount of victims or by the number of incidents necessary to yield them? The former is probably a more significant indicator of raising application, intentions and "ambitions".
Graphic of amount of terrorist injuries by target type (TKB). Though terrorism can be highly specific because it elects its targets as circumscribed ones, the most hit targets are neither military nor governmental ones.
Graphic of amount of injuries by terrorist groups (TKB). A few of the most active groups.
Active terrorist groups by ideology (TKB). Religious, Separatists, Communists and Leftists inspired take the lead in the first 4 more active declared ideologies.
Graphic of amount of terrorist injuries by region (TKB).
The Bali terrorist attack in Australia - october 2002. Over 200 victims.
The Kenia terrorist attack - august 1998. Over 290 fatalities, over 5,000 causalties.
The Beslan terrorist attack in Russia - september 2004. Over 300 children seized, barbwired, and killed.
Democratic National Convention in Boston: "pacifsts" signify their understanding of the problem.
"The Lady Of The Darkness". Dt. Condoleeza Rice, U.S. National Security Adviser«The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them.
For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient.
Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous to ignore or until it is too late. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of American shipping, the United States did not enter the First World War until two years later. Despite Nazi Germany's repeated violations of the Versailles Treaty and its string of provocations throughout the mid-1930s, the Western democracies did not take action until 1939. The U.S. Government did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat became all too evident at Pearl Harbor.
And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on a war footing.»
(Condoleeza Rice, U.S. National Security Adviser, April 8, 2004 - source)It has often been argued we don't possess a definition of terrorism, so that the vaguest categories may fall in its scope, even wartime sabotage, till the point we'd eventually discover that everyone could have been labeled such.
I suggest this:
Terrorism is an action (1) designed to induce
at least the expectation of casualties, (2) carried out away from any
theatre of hostilities, (3) targeted towards subjects who are
regularly disarmed, (4) with the intention to
extend the hostilities.
Yet that definition is still flawed by an irredeemable defect: it is
still a
technical description, whereas living terrorism is inhabited by a more substantial spirit.
In fact that definition too, like any other, still disguises what terrorism basically is: an
highly dysfunctional, impaired practice whose
real goal is to make sure
never to attain the objectives it declares but, on the contrary, to
perpetuate the miss of the allegedly desired goal, in order to
go on demanding and expanding the contours.
Terror is terror insofar its objective is
not negotiable, or vague enough to be kept such indefinitely. Hitler was an example of
Terror: he did not want simply Chekoslovakia, though he alleged so, and it was
this trait of his what made him look truly
terrifying.
Terror means:
actually insatiable.
Terrorism seems at times
so pointless because it
is basically goal-less: it doesn't know what it wants because, fundamentally, it wants the impossible, it wants
all.
Perpetuating the
expectation of violence, in fact, is the hallmark of an
irreconcilable intention that envisions only truces, and never lasting peace, as possible.
This is why it is
so often felt and said that you can't deal with terrorism.
It is not, therefore, because terrorism resorts to
blackmailing; such consideration, though
often brought forth, cannot be the reason although it certainly plays some role: it can't be, in the sense that it is since ever that men, women and politicians can be subject to blackmailing, and
yet they
yield, and not so infrequently, without being daunted by too harrowing qualms - if not for anything else because, as very acutely Raymond Chandler noted, «blackmailers
do not shoot».
The
deeper reason you feel you can't deal with terrorism is that there is no deal that can be sensed as
rationally possible with a project whose
implicitly received message and symbolism funnelled by its actions, is that of being implacable and unmoved by
whatever degree of immolation on whatever altar: such counterparts whose business is that of such feats, either are never going to say "enough" really meaning it, or their "enough" coincides with elation into a cosmic
totality.
Terrorism is founded upon the roots of
its own fated failures - which of course won't prevent it from being destructive, rather
the contrary:
«Then God forgive the sin of all those
That to their everlasting residence,
Before the dew of evening fall, shall fleet,
In dreadful trial of our kingdom's king.»
(Shakespeare, King John)The idea that persons and peoples would infallibly know where their interest resides and gladly would dwell with it; that they would pursue it consequently and consistently in a rational way; that they are fit to implement process optimization and maximization of the outcome all the while: all this isn't but a futile stereotype we lull ourselves into when reality escapes our analytical capabilities and threatens to leave us alone before our bare impotence and
incompetence.
But persons not only have utter misconceptions about their own interests, but they also host thorough misrepresentations of them.
This futility fully partakes of the
ritual propitiatory invocation to International Legality -and to its more apparent mundane avatar, the United Nations- which, not much unlike a rain dance, we hear besought any time the definition of our interest is elusive enough to desert us, or when the consequences of upholding it are so direfully strict to scare and eject us out of its scope, and we are left forlorn with the desperate need of a patch to delude ourselves into the certainty we have found what it took and what behooves.
This "
Medicina Catholica", this magic
Elisir that cures all the woes, this
Holy Graal that heals all the wounds, even the incurable ones, is what we present ourselves with whenever the challenge trascends our preconceptions so much, that we are lured into frigid statements whose only consistent result is not of revealing the encompassing range of our visionary solution but of betraying that of our concrete abdication.
«On a few gravestones' inscriptions (you can guess) the confession that the good loved one hadn't been but a man with no scruples: which expeditiously dispatches the funeral cortege into the kingdom of truth.
When you praise the remarkable lack of prejudices of a man of age, what must be understood is that his life has been a succession of infamies. He has lost his ability to indignation. The breadth of a soul introduces itself like longanimity that forgives all, because it understood all even too well.
At the end of so long a life, who can tell any longer who has done something to someone? In the abstraction of universal injustice, vanishes any objective liability. Every brigand knows how to turn things as if he himself would have been the actual victim: "oh my boy, if you'd only know how life is (evil)" (...)
Some persons can't give any other expression to their love, but their hatred for those unfit to receive such love; others are, conversely, tolerant: their love for mankind as it is, sprang from the hatred for mankind as it ought to have been.»
(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, my translation)Not only any given individual can maximize and optimize his/her utility only within the arch of his/her personal
capabilities, often very modest ones indeed - and not at all within the stretch of a formally consummated rationality; and not only any given individual can come to
treasure misleading and often convenient visions about where his/her interest would be located; but most persons (which of course includes me and you) are invariably susceptible to be the passive hosts of
induced interests that are
not autochthonous in the least.
And thus any actor can unleash destructive forces, pursuing under the banners of unintentional ideological cover-ups, goals that have never belonged to him or to her: while we are saying we're doing
this because of
that, we're compelled by forces that are
beyond this and that at once.
Yet, if you could glimpse with a ravishing insight at the underlying forces the actor itself is unaware of hosting, the game reverts to some outstanding degree of formal obviousness: because an underlying driving force can afford to act out its interests with
more mechanical
inexorability than any overt drive you are aware of, exactly because a latent force is trammelled by less qualms; conscience has become but the
proxy of inoculated beliefs and intentions that never belonged to the actor in the first place; conscience has become subservient to a cruel play, endorsed elsewhere, that delivers of its own ethical burdens by discharging them onto the conscience as a moral dump, leaving to it the toil of the vain struggle against the engendered misgivings and riddles.
It is up to you to find a rationalization for what compels you
beyond reason, and if you can't find it, that's too bad for you, and not for what dominates you and pursues its objectives through you. This is why you find so many actors persuaded of what they never believed in and they never collected any credible record for: like
peace.
The apparent contradictions that get enacted in this clash when such a bipolar pattern is in action, patent and latent interests breaking asunder portions of the self, can all get recomposed as soon as you can see within rather than just without: everything then attains glaring clarity, because what couldn't be justified from without, couldn't be justified from without because it drew its justification from within.
Either you don't bargain with terrorists because you declare them such, and then you have
implicitly denied them any status of legitimate characters suitable to be admitted within the international
legality, and consequently you invoke no longer international legitimacy in order to cope with them, or you
accept to barter with your own blackmailers, and by doing so you have implicitly conferred them with the status of valid international legality-endowed characters; in this latter case you have acknowledged they are subjects susceptible to
arbitration, and thus you've qualified them as fully
responsible, acceptable components of an international legitimacy that is now made of such a fabric to be coexistent with them.
You can then
consistently invoke international legitimacy to deal with them: but only to discover that, truly, you didn't need it any longer, because you yourself had already compromised it.
But if you are in the throes of the
contradiction after which
on the one hand you refuse (rightly, I'd dare say?) to consecrate terrorists with
any legal status whatsoever,
and on the other hand you invoke the
restoration of the international
legality as
necessary to deal with them, then you're at a crossroad where you can't stand: either you are invoking such restoration as a task upon your
blackmailers, which patently makes
no sense because they raised as blackmailers precisely insofar as they proved impervious to the legality you invoke, or you're crying for the restoration of the international legality as a task committed upon yourself, who violated it
not, and then either you wield the weapons it takes to restore what you invoke
against your blackmailers, or you prove you've simply ushered yourself to the fore mentioned
abdication.
Between
collusion and
conciliation there is a third option: just accepting to
play, and thus
meeting the challenge on its
proper ground and with its own weapon of choice.
It is possible to argue that wielding the weapon chosen by your blackmailer would pollute the environment even more: yet if you don't, the environment is
still as polluted as before.
It is possible to argue you don't want to pollute it even more: yet if you don't
clean it too, it will just go on being polluted
more and more.
Between compromise and connivance, it is still
possible just to accept and play rather then bargain or collude.
And if the situation has come to the point where faith takes over, because so much your opponent has radicalized the variables that you are
impelled to coagulate upon your nec plus ultra, and only the outcome of the confrontation has grown out or has been implicitly declared as
fit to determine who's right and who's wrong,
then giving up the fight that lies before your eyes just because you can't believe the ominous symmetry you are gazing at, means you have simply already
lost the battle you fought
anyway, for you endorsed your defeat in such fight by defecting the battlefield.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem who kill the prophets!
Pacifism pacifism, who worked out well only when Gandhi used you against Great Britain, a civilized opponent, not against terrorism or barbarians!
International Legality, International Legality, who are like the United Nations who go to bring peace only "if the situation allows" namely where it is not challenged by war: you can be invoked only upon those who are capable of respecting you
already!
United Nations, United Nations, cover up for those who are left with nowhere to run and only political dreg to scrape from the bottom of the barrel!
«The trouble with these rights has
always been that they were invoked only
as a last resort by those who had
lost their normal rights as citizens.»
(Hannah Arendt)
The distinction outlined by Arendt was that between those (the French revolutionists) whose foremost concern was establishing the
purity of a set of ideals and of rights, and those (the American revolutionists) who
accompanied them with the
foremost concern for constituting the body political within which they could thrive.
The former are unsubstantial rights, for they are
unsubstantiated.
They abandon and neglect the effort for the substance, for they fear that
whatever political substance could be envisioned would eventually establish itself as a
new tradition, embodied in a Constitution: and how can a
Tradition go together with the purpose of a
Revolution, whose essence consists in trashing a tradition?
This is why many revolutionists call the Law "bourgeois": for them
every law is just the last threat sneaked in by a diehard Tradition.
As Hannah Arendt puts it, the most
striking feature that made of the American Revolution the
only revolution that was not followed by
terror and crime, and that made it so unique without ceasing being revolutionary was this, that:
«In no case was the course of the American Revolution ever followed or repeated:
constitution-making was
never again
understood as the
foremost and the
noblest of all
revolutionary deeds.»
It is not that revolutionists don't enact laws: it is that either their laws are meant for the revolutionary purpose and do not subsist
beyond its lifespan, for revolutions cannot have an afterlife but must endure
permanently, or they enact them and yet being enormously
wary of them: because law spells legality to them, and legality spells the doom of revolution in their conception because legality founds
authority: and Revolutions are such also insofar as they trample authority as a principle not only as a specific institution.
Thenceforth derive those legislative approaches where
arbitrary decisions are the true protagonists, because legality is secretly despised all the while it is announced, and the law must be only a cover up
subdued to revolutionary exigencies that do not really accept anything
above themselves. Revolution must be uber alles, and is
never sensed as
really compatible with the Law.
As for which men will have the venture of embodying the "true" revolutionary afflatus for the time being, and therefore will enjoy the arguably temporary privilege of relishing the enforcement of these abuses perpetrated by Laws that are not believed, this is a matter largely left to the decisions of the only tools left at hand: sedition, infighting, treachery, and civil strife.
This is the alternative lent as preferable to the bourgeois logrolling of the "free market". And yet a power absolved from law is only another
absolutism - precisely.
In fact, what is most hated by the
purist revolutionist: a constitution whose
traded frameset evokes the perils of the game of the interests that pollute revolutionary discipline and doctrine with potential egoism and that thwart idealism with suspicious pragmatism, or do they detest more that dealing implied with constitution-making which infringes upon the absolutism of the
only interest allowed: the
revolution itself?
This let alone that that constitution-making trading is not such, as eyes obfuscated by abosultism see, but is
balancing power with power so to produce more power:
«For Montesquieu (...) the discovery spells out the forgotten principle underlying the whole structure of separated powers: that only 'power arrests power', that is, we must add, without destroying it, without putting impotence in the place of power.
When Jhon Adams wrote "Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion"
he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.
(...) What the founders were afraid of in practice was not power but impotence.»
(Hannah Arendt)The unfettered quest for an
absolute good that Revolutions turned awry covet, and about which intransigent "idealistic"
pacifism is only another incarnation, leads only to absoultly unshackled
evil: the firm belief in a definitive good which
must manifest itself in its astounding innocence, leads only to an
endless pursuit where the more this absolute refuses to reveal itself (so absolute it is that we can't find it but in its
relative versions), the more we must devastate with our excavations to reach out for it even deeper.
And if we have not found it yet, it must be simply because there must be an endless
conspiracy: and how could you ever doubt such a conspiracy is not there from the mere fact you don't have
enough evidence about it, when you know all too well -don't you?- that it is in the nature of every
conspiration of being
hidden?
Thus it must be there
anyway!
If this
absoulte good has not been carried off yet, it must then simply be becasue we have not killed enough unbelievers
yet, because we have not "dug" enough
yet, till this absoulte principled good will finally spring in its expected absoluteness, that is:
never, because:
«The absurd hope that man, whom Christianity had held to be sinful and corrupt in his nature, might still be revealed to be an angel (...)
The great maxim of all civilized legal systems, that the burden of proof must always rest with the accuser,
sprang from the insight that only
guilt can be
irrefutably proved.»
Thus, whatever fight for a good which is not
absolute, is automatically perceived as an unacceptable betrayal of the Revolution, and it is implicitly
alleged that since what is sought for is not an absolutely pure and intransigent good, then it must be vile interest.
It is argued that what doesn't partake of the absolute good is tarnished with
interest. Yet who is him or her who draws these conclusions, if not somebody who has no clear ideas about what trading means and what
market categories imply? Who judges them badly, is often he or she who is deluded by his or her own personal misinterpretations of what a market is, and not by faults objectively perceived within it.
In fact, take an expression by a recent terrorist proclaim: «Your security is not in the hands of Mr Kerry or Mr Bush... Your security is in your own hands. Any (presidential) mandate which doesn't play havoc with our security would automatically ensure its own security».
He's
trying to trade, actually.
What he sells is terror. But therefore there is
no trade any more, and the syllogism crumbles: he doesn't sell merchandise, he just says he would
not issue what you
would not buy anyway if he
gets something
he would buy anyway. Which
by all accounts is a non acceptable position for trading
anything,
anywhere.
Thus the questionable position is not that of the market, it is that of those who try to enter the market with conceptual categories that do not belong to
any market.
On these grounds, you can neither trade nor expect to issue any
credible critics of the market in which you don't belong.
It doesn't matter whether
interest is not as
innocent as the
pure good in whose name Auschwitz was raised as a cleansing vacuum of
impure races: it only matters whether it's not
criminal.
Trying to test
innocence is pointless, for innocence cannot be «
irrefutably proved»; and this either because it does not exist or because the stratified experience of millennia has persuaded us that it can't be conclusively or
positively found.
Only guilt can be
proved. And the way to prove it is not that of saying that you're guilty for you're not innocent
enough: in fact, how much innocence amounts to innocent
enough? Guilt is not measured abiding by
an ideal good, but assessing
facts. You could be delcared guilty
immediately otherwise,
depending on the arbitrary degree of
intransigent devotion to an absolute good in whose name all must live up to it, or perish in
merciless agony.
Thus, you do not define a gulag or a camp in the same fashion you would deal with a criminal episode of harassment or with a criminal beating in a prison, or with an exceptional measure for a special case (so called «special laws»).
Setting exceptions is exactly what an absolute good can not tolerate. Exceptions are precisely what is not allowed.
You define a gulag and a camp, and you discriminate it from an abuse, by the fact that a gulag and a camp are the systemic implementation by other means of a policy of innocence making (thence the expiatory nature of its torments, devised to impart a death slowly ground), that must necessarily be either a purgatory on mass scale - or be not.
You are not convicted after any guilt, you're convicted after an imperious necessity to purify the whole in the name of an absolute good, impersonated now by the race, now by the creed, now by the State, which are just the formal entities emptied of any substance of their own, designed to shelter the instructions percolating from the mystic Totem or to carry out and interpret the needs of the ideal absolute good in the same fashion a medium in a trance would deliver the spells warranted to him from an unfathomable afterlife.
In terrorist threaths you find exactly this type of expiatory language, that can never find any verbal furor slaughterous enough to placate the cravings of the absolute good it is intoxicated by.
Therefore, such a task doesn't require you to be really guilty of any crime at all.
Even if it occasionally declares you guilty of something, it puts on it such irreal an emphasis that it signifies it is hinting at something beyond guilt, for which words do not suffice:
«"You are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty," he says. "You are as guilty as Bush and Cheney. You're as guilty as Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Powell. After decades of American tyranny and oppression, now it's your turn to die."
» (source)
See: «Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty», namely you're not guilty at all: you're some cryptical exponential else.
It is an innocence -not a guilt- driven delirium.
Guilt is not required in order to find you fit as living fodder to be immolated in the name of the appeasement of the thirst of this gigantic, unyielding, impersonal, most pure Moloch uttering inscrutably mystical words. You can find yourself there simply because.
Terrorism, Gulag, Nazism: they are all mundane faces of the same belief that a principled good is innocent enough to devour all the rest with the impunity that becomes purity. Pacifists that destroy city malls in the name of peace and deliver speeches driveling with rage are precisely in this line, and what they lack is only the organization that the Gulag would afford:
«A pattern had set. Already, the Soviet Union had clearly developed two separate prison systems, with separate rules, separate traditions, separate ideologies. The 'regular' prison system, which dealt mainly with what the Soviet regime called 'criminals'. Although in practice the system was also chaotic, its prisoners were kept in traditional prisons. (...)
At the same time the Cheka controlled another prison system, one that at first was known as the system of 'special camps'. Although the Cheka would use some of the same 're-education' or 'reforging' rhetoric within them, these camps were not really meant to resemble ordinary penal institutions. The prisoners inside them had not been necessarily convicted. (...)
Set up as an emergency measure, they were ultimately to grow larger and larger and ever more powerful, as the definition of 'enemy' expanded and the power of the Cheka increased.
And when the two penal systems, the ordinary and the extraordinary, eventually united, they would unite under the rules of the latter.
The Cheka would devour its rivals.
(...) (...) (...) The resisters were labelled kulaks, or wealthy peasants, a term which was so vague that nearly anyone could qualify.
The possession of an extra cow, of an extra bedroom, was enough.
From one day to the next, trucks and wagons simply arrived in a village and picked up entire families. Some kulaks were shot, some were arrested and given camp sentences. In the end, however, the regime deported most of them. Between 1930 and 1933, over two million peasants were exiled to Siberia. A further 1,000,000 were arrested and wound up in the Gulags.As famine kicked in, more arrests followed. Those caught stealing tiny amounts, even to feed their children, also ended up in prison. A law of 7 August 1932 demanded the death penalty for all such crimes against state property.»
(Anne Applebaum, Gulag, a history)
And when we have killed all the unbelievers, all the anti revolutionists, and fraught ourselves with the burden of all the worst sins in the name of the purest good, we will start killing our former comrades, till only one being will be left, leaping on the deserted soil: we ourselves, finally alone, left wondering in puzzlement: Oh You Absolute Principled Good, You Great Heaving Peace Of Mankinde, why you don't show up yet now that I, undoubtedly your most firm believer and apostle, am the only one left? Where are you now that all of your hideous enemies have certainly been extinguished? "But You Oh Lord, till when.".
But the Lord is not there, and the absoultely good bolshevik neither.
Where are you, Adam? - a biblical, even protocanonical, phrase that justly impressed Heinrich Boll too, to the degree he used it to title a book of his. What Arendt didn't mention was that likewise we can have
void principled absolutes, left without the constitution of the body political to make them meddle with
reality, analogously we can have a
void body political whose purpose is not that of supporting our void principles, but that of representing our
inadequacy to pursue them, our definitive inability to pursue what was impossible since the beginning because we ourselves deprived it of all the real meanings it could have had in order to go after
that only absolute good we declared
uniquely fit to quench our despotic, unyielding thirst.
A void absolute that refuses all incarnations, is complemented by a void incarnation that ideally represents
all the absolutes.
I don't mean the UN was
meant to be this: but I mean that there exists a revolution uber alles expectation that
interprets it precisely this way, and sees in it precisely this old venerable type of messiah.
But you, real Statesman, we will tell you
simply by this:
first, you
just accept the game, and play.
What I am going to deal with here, is insanely an attempt to draw a definition of
National Interest, and then matching it with a definition for an entirely new construct never named before, which I am to name
International Interest: the
ideal is to focus these concepts leaving as little leeway as possible to disagreement.
The project appears ambitious enough, a miltonian flight.
I do
not personally contend that analytical efforts meant to define National Interest may exist. I only dare say that no such topic appears listed, devoting to it a
consistent amount of pages, in any
summary of any manual, book, or scholarship textbooks; it is conversely possible, if not certain, that such topic has been dealt with in a variety of articles or
casebooks already; yet the point I am arguing here is: to date the possible conclusions about these debates apparently never gained their way into the
consolidated epiphany of a full blown Chapter in an University
widespread schoolbook.
I set upon myself picking
this challenge.
I have no doubt whatsoever, with no complacent sarcasm in the least, that a great deal of persons could make a much better job than mine at coping with this issue. Yet since the ignorant are used to reject whole treatises with a remark, more typically the mere snub of a profane insult, I hope that all the ladies and gentlemen who are going to sift out my many faults when I tackle such ambitious a plane entirely alone, will also exhibit the courtesy to criticize me only
after they have done a job at least comparatively better than mine and not, as they normally do,
before they have done it. And since doing it is
so easy a commitment because my own is
so inferior, one more reason to knock the arrow after you're sure you have it in your quiver.
And of course, possibly, also without forgetting that if there are so many ways to do a much better job than mine, there were a great deal to do a much
worse one
too.
I am
stirring an huge pot here.
I will never delude myself into believing I will solve all such
powerful riddles as I present them here.
What I truly set upon myself is just to stir this pot; and to send living sparkles all around in the hope a few of them will prove fecund by falling on fertile, and not barren, mental soils; or that they will keep smouldering enough beneath the fallen leaves so to finally ignite the big fire of the resolving insights.
At times I may lack of clarity because I simply lack it and my vision is blurred; other times it will be sensed I don't miss it but I am just overflowing. This room is truly enormous, yet not infinite. The solution stalks among its walls.
We could wonder
why such a gap, namely the absence of chapters devoted to National Interest, has never been duly filled in.
The answer dwells with the delicate threshold upon which National Interest as a concept posits it Leaderships used to temper themselves at the mild latitudes of consolidated and affluent democracies, grow familiar with bargaining votes about basically minor issues (disregard the fuss that wants democracy being imperiled at every new electoral round, as all the contenders invariably decry), whereas National Interest affects
vital issues.
Populations, specular to such leaderships, beget generations for whom the nearly
immediate availability of an immense range of goods (sugar, salt, water, milk, meat, chocolate, bread, cellular phones, seasonal clothing, fashionable snickers) simply
on demand (entering the shop and purchasing them, picking from shelves of different prices) is a daily reality
from the cradle to the grave, and as such expeditiously regarded as a
granted reality too - which it is not. This shapes a mindset.
Luxury may not be for everybody, areas of indigence may certainly exist. And
yet when what we're opposing to our conception of
welfare is our personal regret that what we can't afford is
luxury, or when what we're complaining about is that a few choices have to be made so to square a monthly balance that allows for much or for enough but not for
whatever, or when we bemoan that we are left to deal with that temporary destitution named
physiological unemployment rate, when all of this happens we are already speaking of a population whose
criteria of social/economical outrage is lingering at
high stations: a bruise is enough to raise a debate, because democracy is quarrelsome.
Let me stress it now: I will
not neglect in this essay the reality that Democracies can fail and force into marginality also reasonably good talents: I am one of them, and I live on canned food. This to be clear where I stand: in a position where communism should have appealed to me.
In this context of such leaderships and populations, National Interest does not appear as a concept worth of being focused or elaborated, because National Interest implies a moment when
all that which was assumed as granted is on the verge of waving good bye.
I think this is why we have this doctrinal gap.
It will prove conducive to our enterprise to define the
political structural characters that a Democracy (autocracy provides no difficulty; this is why every serious political science has to deal with Democracy as its true paragon) must have to be such. I propose the following ones:
There must be
procedures for producing an elected government which are shared as legitimate by the near totality of the population: all political conflicts are regarded as fit to be
accommodated within this frameset, and thus the setting can
coexist unaltered with dissent.
There must be
division of powers: executive, legislative, judiciary.
There must be
free vote with
universal suffrage.
Such votes must
recur at regular intervals of time (a comparative study may set the vote for the legislative power no later than every 5 years and that for the executive no later than every 7 years).
Such votes must allow for
unfettered and valid access to the competition for
whomever wants to compete for whatever seat, provided as possible limits a maximum amount of mandates or norms for non cumulative mandates or roles (such as those who would infringe upon the above mentioned division of powers).
No constitutional body shares power officially or surreptitiously with
other bodies, whatever they are (instance: councils of "guardians" of the revolution and the alike).
All the constitutional bodies have full authority within their own branch to
produce new policies and to
exert their own powers.
No body who attained power can implement laws whose outcome is that any of the above applies
no longer, even if this last rule has to be enforced
against generalized popular will.
The last point is the most remarkable one for it
denies that sovereignty belongs to the People, to which as a matter of fact it belongs indeed; but it says it can't belong
to the extent that the People can dispose of it in such unlimited (or insane) a fashion that the People could decide to give up sovereignty and abolish any or all of the rules above.
This dangerous but existent terrain, where sovereignty escapes those who own it, is the only terrain that seems qualified to
host National Interest criteria too. This because National Interest is an interest beyond which no other interest exists any longer.
«By the easiness with which a spirit gets contented, you can measure the greatness of what it lost» (Hegel): the things that most matter are often susceptible to be given away with a sense of relief among cheering crowds.
National Interest is the entity that should be drafted to act as a rampart against such contingencies: no one can go beyond National Interest and forsake it, for it is the Alpha and the Omega.
The fact a dictatorship
too could envisage a similar National Interest conception by crushing a people wanting a sweeping change, does not invalidate the assumption: not only insofar as a tyranny lacks the element of regular checks of the popular consent with the procedures of the system (for we predicated a people could be
lunatic enough to wish exactly forsaking this), but insofar we are posed not like absolute conceptions where ours is better than any other, but like two concurrent conceptions and inconciliable systems, Democracy and Tyranny, that entertain
mutually exclusive (and
not at all relativistically similar) visions: it is not a hierarchy of innocences or of guilts, it is a fight.
And anyway a National Interest that coincides with one person's or one group's oligarchic
exclusive interest, is
no longer National.
This radical differentiation between Democracies and Tyrannies is why the radical party member Emma Bonino (also Commisioner of humanitarian affairs on behalf of the European Commission) recently proposed an
interesting reform of the UN (the third phoenix I might have dubbed it) where a new diagonal identity should line up the nations: the area of the Democracies and the area of the non-democracies.
As Emma Bonino says:
«It is exactly the lack of a (new) praxis what makes possible such clashes (between 'old' and 'new' Europe): The military actions that divide the public opinion, are the result of decades of mistakes: decades wherein all has been done but the only thing an international organization of Democracies ought to be meant for, namely the active defense of the international norms and of fundamental human freedoms. (...)
A victorious defence of the United Nations, I insist, is that one which seizes many of the arguments that its critics fling at it -particularly in these last times those of the United States- raising before itself the problem of overcoming them with pragmatic solutions (that acknowledge them). (...)
A sort of League of the Democracies acting under the Security Council mandate (...) It seems by now almost natural that nations under dictatorial regimes can have a voice within issues that affect human rights. So that the United Nations are today living an authentic paradox: they basically deliver the implementation of fundamental human rights to Countries which are themselves the main violators of such rights and that, as such, should no longer be accepted as members of the so called "international community". (...)
Admission and permanence should depend upon the respect of defined democratic standards. To provide an example, the countries that belonged to the ex soviet european bloc, had to rearrange their legislations to such standards to be allowed into the European Community. (...) The result is that for all the emphasis that the europeans put on the role of the United Nations, they eventually profile themselves as defenders of a static UN arrangement that clearly does not work.»
(excerpts from an Emma Bonino interview given at the quarterly Aspenia #22 - my translation)As a matter of fact, we're risking of seeing the United Nations dispensing
legitimacy as the Holy See dispensed indulgences. The United Nations are the vestals of a frigid legitimacy.
The United Nations are invoked to lend legitimacy, but whereas they provide the
formal requisite of this legitimacy, they abstain from
withdrawing this legitimacy too, and by accepting every country they seem to give the
patent of legality to
whoever just asks it, just to deny it later to the
United States when it forcibly overturns a
dictatorship that was accepted
without a peep as an
organic part of the United Nations themselves.
This is
objectively a paradox that Emma Bonino magnificently highlights.
Nothing is
undebatable. And yet there are things which are
necessary, though debatable.
When things which are necessary are presented as undebatable too, this is not because they are really regarded as not liable to be criticized, but because it is necessary to
consider them as if they would be undebatable, because you gain more by observing their necessity than by debating them.
When Russia was allowed to maintain its seat at the Security Council when it took over the legacy of the Soviet Union, this passage could have been debatable: in fact why leaving Russia enjoy this seat and Ukrainia, which belonged to the ex USSR that previously enjoyed it as well, had to forfeit it?
Yet it was so necessary to let the wider Russia, from which also the independence of Ukrainia depended, to strip its soviet robe and don the one of a growing Democracy, that this
necessity was enough to persuade us into considering the passage as undebatable though it was not. There was nothing to discuss, though it was
formally unjust because incomplete.
But it makes no sense holding as undebatable a
formality.
National Interest is that set of objectives that could also be debated, and yet are so necessary and substantial that debating them makes less sense than abiding by them: they thrive on a ground that spreads on pre-legitimacy concerns, because without such ground not even the concept of legitimacy can be envisioned anymore if not as an empty bag to cover a corpse: «
perished (, but) within the glory of the Lord».
As such the reason because National Interest has no contenders, is that it
cannot be contended.
If a conflict arises between the United Nations and National Interest only the vile hesitates, because Leaders are not elected by the World but by a localized community, and thus are -
must be- more responsible before the latter than before the former.
I can certainly argue that my National Interest coincides with improving the United Nations, provided this doesn't
conceal quite
another agenda as George Orwell's pacifists did: for National Interest does not lie; but if so do improve the United Nations, do not just invoke it: give it teeth, not tongue, and make it bite, not present condolences & complaints.
I define National Interest like that set of shared goals that persist unchanged regardless of the varying ideological embodiments and different vicissitudes that the governing placements (executives) may endure.
So National Interest is not that set of politics which are bipartisan, but that set of goals that just
are, independently of all the rest.
I have already provided an element about what they are: avoiding that whatever, popular will included, may put the nation in a condition where a legitimate or illegitimate access to power
may harm the possibilities to change the pro tempore elected rulers.
As such National Interest enlivens only insofar it gets
threatened: National Interest is that thing which can be threatened.
And
threatened is enough, because it implies you ought to act a little prior to the unfolding of the extreme factual consequences of the looming threat, and thus implicitly predicates a duty to act as soon as the threat has loomed.
So National Interest
self defines its own categories.
This is also why before National Interest, nations may occasionally seem so
lonely: National Interest is self sufficient.
Let me stress here a few things about the recent idea that the USA "are alone" or have gone to war "alone" or that a war "makes impossible to be loved".
Actually, you don't wage a war
in order to be loved: you wage a war as a consequence of the fact love between the two actors has been
already declared impossible.
And as for being many rather than alone, this has never been in the last two centuries a warrant about being right too: you don't define a great statesman/woman as he/she who makes sure you make friends out of as many guys in town as possible. There is a basic difference between genius, also political genius, and quantity or followers:
«(...) and he quotes half a dozen of egregious men that would currently embody this stream.
Half a dozen are too many. (Great men) are born one at a time, and often more than one generation elapses between them. It would have been better quoting just one name, provided that name had furnished something truly new to the doctrine and to the critics.
Unfortunately, that only one, in that field, is nowhere to be found, and are rather to be found precisely the half dozens, which pretty soon, with the blessings of the Almighty, will multiply themselves into the dozens and into the multiples of that dozens, and which none the less, summed up, will still amount to zero.»
(Benedetto Croce, Pensieri, my translation)But indeed in the Usa
unilateralism, as it has been recently and abundantly blamed, there is a far seeing background: the USA have gone for it lonely because they somewhat bravely
acknowledged they
are lonely.
And they are lonely for many reasons.
For technical reasons, because whoever wishes to deploy whatever peace military contingent, UN first of all the rest, deploys nothing without taking avail of US troops too. France can't, and the UK can at most fight for the Falkland atolls when it comes to go far away and spread over vast territories in a credible and effective way.
Even Europe as a whole has no means to undertake such a task.
But most of all the USA are alone because there is no Europe.
Setting up an European Union with an economical union first rather than with a political one, means that the priorities are reversed back to front and that the underlying belief is that we believe in an idyllic world where you can postpone the prussian concept of politics to attend that of economics first.
The "end of History" which Francis Fukuyama mentioned (a concept borrowed from Hegel, actually) means that in Europe we assumed that conflicts are over and that a phase where politics will no longer be grand politics but
mere ordinary administration has taken over; therefore you can
afford looking after the economy first.
Wrong.
We see today this presupposition was not true,
not yet at least. And as a consequence we find ourselves with an Europe that started with the wrong footage, and with the additional fault that the Maastricht Treaty provided economical parameters for the
capitals (public debt limitations) but no limit to the
allowed unemployment rate: namely the European Community, when having to decide what made a country European, arranged membership parameters designed to desert men for things, preferring
capitals to
talents.
The USA never went thus far with a socio-political
blunder: in fact whereas president Bill Clinton too shared the belief that "it is the economy, stupid!", he never was
so myopic to narrow that restricted scope even more to the point of believeing that such economy had also to be that economy which was electively unmindful of employment and identified with the
capital alone - which by the way is exactly the type of blunder that european communists praising Europe would expect having been committed by the USA and not by Europe as it was. Under Bill Clinton we had the stronger economy of the post cold war era and the higher employment rate as well.
Yet if the USA are alone, Europe is alone too. But without USA's broad shoulders. Al Qaeda got it, the USA too.
Only Europeans and Zapatero didn't, and the latter walks on maimed corpses sporting bright smiles for the "
Victory".
But this kind of leaders are not
leaders, they are
actually followers, for they are not opinion
makers, they are opinion
followers: searching for votes persuaded them into the delusion that they must
always pursue rather than
create, and that the task of
the default politician (which probably they are) and
all of its
cunning would have consisted in foxily spotting an
available electoral basin and exploiting it to the dregs (when not awaiting that it rains in their arms), rather than in
making one accordingly to what
they deem the fair or the most far reaching solutions to the issues of our time.
A nation that cannot
stand against all foes, has no National Interest
worth the name.
There are persons that seem to conclude, when they ear a patriotic proud sentence like "We are America", that the predicated complement would have been: "and you are
not". This inference can be made, but cannot be positively ascribed but to the inferrer.
Upon this basis they differentiate themselves, because they seem to read the latter which has not been said rather than the former which has been stated.
An absence of National Interest relies upon a lack of identity, and who has no indentity to be sure about can afford claiming victory continuously - thence those practices of fundamentalists (and as a matter of fact typical by
latin cultures too, which I can cite being a latin myself) that portray even the most tragic events and failures, or even the most hideous crimes, as outstanding triumphs to strut around.
These mental framesets, also when compelled to admit a defeat, are unable to rest on this consideration and thus
metabolize the frustration and go beyond it: perpetually haunted by it, they immediately envision a forthcoming victory that must be infallibly in store and ensue - and in this you will certainly recognize a well known
bolshevik pattern (for communist doctrines, defeats are never such, but they are just a «
strategical withdrawal», as they are dubbed by bolsheviks themselves), as if there were a world compass that subsumes in one embrace of shared mental attitudes latin, slav, and arab cultures.
This happens because these groups have a
messianic seed in them. To be sure, if we consider studies like Taubes Jacob's «Western Eschatology», this has been also a legacy of anglo saxon environments (think of Oliver Cromwell) in the past, which of course doesn't make them
any better.
Messianic groups in the 21st century live in a perpetual wake for an apocalyptic event, be it a revelation an advent or a doom; as such they are out of history, and actual men and women are seen as chattels of duress that hinder the vision of an imminent rescue from the wreckage; a
salvation which may well never come, especially because there is something
deeply wrong when the bugfix to a banal mistake has to be a
theophany (
*), but that none the less the group
keeps announcing: therefore
facts do not matter any longer.
So:
«The function of literature is that of delivering the next man, a new comer, from the danger of falling into an old trap; or to help him understand, if he had the venture to fall in that trap anyway, that he has been hit by a tautology. He will be thus less alarmed, and somehow more free. Understanding the rules of the play, the meaning of what life has in store for us, of understanding what's happening to you, has effects that set free. (...)However, if we want to have a more important share, the share of a free man, then we must be ready to accept, or at least to imitate, the way a free man is defeated. A free man, when he is defeated, blames no body.»
(Iosif Brodskij -nobel prize for literature 1987- my translation)Self criticism is a good thing, yet in the interest of the good thing we want to discuss, we ought to criticize in order to rescue the good thing not in order to deface it. And there comes a time when, if we are capable of National Interest, we are also able to assume
our own responsibilities, even at risk of going for it alone, without finding
external entities to blame. That the fate of one's job in Middle East is decided in Idaho, or that a local and probably legitimate grievance in arabia has its root causes in Nebraska, is only an illusion.
«Avidity is an imperious and insatiable wish that goes beyond the needs of the subject and beyond what the object can give both.
Unconsciously, avidity mostly mean to completely empty and drain the breast and swallow it: its goal is destructive introjection; on the contrary envy not only seeks to rob, but also to put what is bad in oneself inside the object itself so to destroy it by discharging one's bad parts: which in the deepest sense means destroying one's own creativity and power of enjoyment. (...) Avidity is connected with introjection, envy with projection. (...)
As for jealousy, it is a transposed envy. (...)
A failure of one's aspirations is often given by a conflict between the impelling (guilty) need to refund the object destroyed by envy, and an upsurge of envy it The envied object, often the penis, must be destroyed and those who own it deprived of it. (...)
A kid who under the impetus of envy grew unable to discern between hate and love, unable to keep them duly separated and therefore discriminate between the good object from the bad one, is liable to feel confused whenever he is called upon judging what is good and what is evil. (...)
When this envy is intense, it is likely it will emerge in all subsequent objectual relationships (...) Whenever the destructive impulses, envy and paranoiac anguish, are too intense, the child grossly alterates and exasperates every frustration coming from the external world; the breast becomes a persecutor. So that even real gratifications are no longer suitable to soothe the persecuting anguish.»
(Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude, my translation)The last passages by Klein are very fit to define when something can be defined as having attained intensity: when it invests
all the
external objectual relations, deeply contaminating
all of them in
various degrees with the
same misunderstanding.
Whenever we are permanently "
already dissatisfied with whatever solution is lent" (Virginia Woolf), and we always deem someone
other than ourselves is intent on fostering our grudges, it is the very same attainment of our longed for goal, what we deem our most implacable enemy. Thus
nothing, simply
nothing, will
ever satisfy us.
By the way, I have to record an
objective anecdote: I have never witnessed in my
whole life a Middle East or North African citizen who was not complaining about something: they seem to be
perpetually ungratified,
perennially unsatisfied with everything,
continuously outraged,
constantly disappointed, and I have never seen anybody from those fair geographical areas appearing on a Tv and saying he is finally satisfied and happy with whatever: it is as if there is something that impels them to bar
enjoyment itself as an allowed option.
At these stages, National Interest can't be defined because National Interest can't be in conflict with itself: its goal is clear, its goal
exists; and so its satisfaction is not open to moot interpretations. National Interest is
not greedy. When all is equally bad, National Interest has vanished already.
So National Interest is the gravitational fulcrum that can summarize and maintain the cohesiveness of all the elements making up a nation, preserving the nation from all the factional or tribal or ideological
centrifugal drives.
Linda Polman, her book on the United Nations We did nothing; excerpt from chapter "The UN in Somalia": «The italians pay Aideed protection money to leave them alone, only they won't admit it. Our suspicions were confirmed when a nigerian unit had to take over an italian post in the city. Aideed's men promptly arrived to collect their money but the nigerians sent them away, arguing the United Nations is neutral and can't justify deals with individual clans. Whereupon they were attacked and seven nigerians were killed.»All nations that failed finding or defining their own National Interest, or found only a temporary one that was unfit to recapitulate a persisting identity
against all transient chances and challenges so that it was just a
contingent communality of goals with the intention to deal with a civil war at a second time, are all invariably failed nations.
A nation uncapable of feeling the love and urge that National Interest inspires can't stand, so that a failure in National Interest is basically a
sentimental failure.
The theorem accordingly to which what is decided at the United Nations must have priority upon what is decided at your homeland and upon what affects your homeland, means you're
committing prerogatives that are up to you to someone else.
Speculating that this type of approaches can contemplate or include National Interests is threading on
immensely disputable ground. See how much.
Consider Zapatero, and consider I do
not contend the decision in itself but the amazing stream of
contradictions that consequentially have been put forth to justify his early politics: first he says he is to withdraw spanish troops from Iraq if no coverage of the United Nations is provided within June 30. Then he actually withdraws spanish troops much earlier declaring he has no "confidence" that any such agreement can be reached within that deadline - a mere personal assumption at that time. Then he says he is withdrawing them because that is part of his electoral mandate. Then he says he is withdrawing his troops to put "political pressure" on the United States.
Quixotic Zapatero: he needed
none of these excuses because he was
already elected, so
one version would have
sufficed.
National Interest hasn't manifold contradictory versions of it
Perhaps you may argue these contradictions can coexist, but indeed there is only one element that they all share:
contempt for the United Nations they allege they highly regard.
Formal statements
exploiting international legality do not make international legality any stronger but
actively contribute to trash it:
«If I enter a shop and I pay for some merchandise, of course this is a way of giving as well.
But I am not paying the merchandise for the pleasure of paying. If I could have had the merchandise without paying, I would be satisfied as well. So paying is the means not the end.
Munificence that wants to be acknowledged as such, a benefit that awaits its thanks, a sacrifice that awaits its reward, these are just like any other business (...) Giving in this way means taking. (...)
Benefiting others it is not giving to the others what we assume they believe they want; alms to the poor, healing the sick, providing with food, quenching thirst, clothing: this is letting the others take; it is not giving but enduring.»
(Carlo Michelstaedter, La Persuasione e la Retorica, my translation)We often speak of International Legality as a game that we can
raid, if only we make it hypocritically enough pretending a disinterest we don't harbour.
I prefer a National Interest well defined in its goals, that if necessary can prescind from international legality, rather than a confused one that conceals its contradictions behind the rags it throws at International Legality saying it is
serving it while it is
using it.
An
International Interest can exist, but there is no
predefined body that can embody it without variations, by default.
When a convergence of National Interests meet in a point, that is International Interest.
Upon that basis you can build a
multilateral institution, and not vice versa; first comes the
factual convergence,
then the institution that embodies it.
In fact we witness that multilateral institutions work better if they are finely tuned around specific interests, not around all encompassing concepts still void of factual contents: International Interest cannot be
predicated, it must be picked as a fact.
This is why NATO worked so well for so many decades: it never laid any claim to embody the National Interests of the members
wholesome and by default, but only to incarnate them as far as a well limited and
specified set of issues were concerned: military defense.
If you have National Interest, you're ready to go for it
alone:
«Whatever the goal towards which the world is headed may be, that goal is going to be repleted with men, and is going to be for real only in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of men, and will be endowed with that reality that we will provide it with. Do not worry, therefore, about where the world is going, but only about where it is necessary that you set off for. (...)
Those busy with forecasts, sociologists, so called unconcerned observers, cold critics, or whatever you may want to name them, all of them gained their proper name during the war: defeatists.
What does it mean ascribing to an individual or to a People a strength of 100 and to its adversary that of 80 or of 120?
What does it mean, after such measurements, drawing conclusions about victory or defeat, when these forces only in the act of battling unfold themselves, and the predicated 100 can drop to 50 or to zero and the imagined 80 can dilate so that it can prevent the others from popping up?
This is why the fearful, the egoists, and the inert and the inept, are always attempting to make forecasts, whereas men of ethical conscience have more simply just faith in their own cause, namely rely upon themselves alone.»
(Benedetto Croce, Pensieri, my translation) A
free man
just plays, and all the while
blames nobody.
To the Second Part
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