Sunday, 6 January 2013
U.S. Military Leadership In Decline
Another one from Tom Ricks, this time on his book 'The Generals'. Q&A is as usual equally thought provoking.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
Designing Demons
EYE Magazine
Steven Heller, 2001
A dirty secret about graphic design is that it can promote hatred. The graphic language of loathing is every bit as pervasive as the International Style. While the aesthetic of enmity may not be rooted in any one particular typeface or composition, the rhetoric is consistent: verbal and visual hyperbole, caricature and stereotype, threat and agitation, all given concrete graphic form by designers and illustrators. Derogatory messages are not only the product of extremist and fringe groups: the vast majority of hate propaganda is government sanctioned and professionally produced.
Propaganda precedes technology as a means to soften otherwise rational minds into malleable clay. Hot and cold wars on a battlefield or in hearts and minds cannot be fought without the collaboration of people of conscience. Therefore, the process of demonic manufacture, wherein the object of abhorrence must be thoroughly stripped of its human characteristics is essential in securing mass hostility towards one group or another. ‘In the beginning we create the enemy,’ writes Sam Keen in Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (Harper and Row, 1986), about the art and psychology of state coercion. ‘We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to kill them.’
‘The war of icons, or the eroding of the collective countenance of one’s rivals,’ noted Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media in 1964, ‘has long been under way. Ink and photo are supplanting soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier than the sword.’
Since the sixteenth century when Martin Luther, the father of propaganda, was portrayed as the devil in church-sanctioned cautionary prints, the archetypes of visual terror have progressed unabated. Summoning the Prince of Darkness may now seem outdated, particularly since devil worship is accepted as pop style, yet Satan, say its adversaries, appears in numerous guises. Vilification is often accomplished in the twentieth century by references both banal and nefarious. Through the visual lexicon of hate artists and designers employ the devil as the main or sub-text in allegories, transforming individuals and groups into beasts, criminals, torturers, rapists, defilers, and even death itself. The clichéd predictability of these unnerving symbols is what gives them sustained power. Even those who believe that Lucifer is little more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo are somehow conditioned to revile deadly sins and sinners, in part, because they represent our repressed personal transgressions. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said: ‘We have seen the enemy, and he is us.’
Fear triggers hatred and inflames ignorance, which the skilled propagandist converts into manifestations of terror. Whether in picture or word, the spectre of unspeakable harm cannot help but wreak havoc on the psyche. When wed to a particularly repellent depiction of a foe it is impossible for the susceptible to avoid being dragged into a state of antipathy, much in the way that well crafted villainous literary or film characters evoke intense animosity. Repetition becomes the artist’s primary tool in this process. The more an image or epithet (or visual epithet) is repeated the more indelible it becomes. The big lie is synthetic truth.
Of course, real truth is necessary to bolster extreme exaggeration. Wicked political leaders are expedient and justifiable prototypes, and violent organisations beg to be exposed as such. But purveyors of hate imagery routinely latch on to the lowest denominator and over-generalise a particular people or nation on the basis of a characteristic or trait already lurking in the minds of the audience. In us propaganda of the 1950s, Joseph Stalin, a genuine scoundrel, represented all Soviets – not merely the regime over which he lorded – because the US was engaged in a cold war against the entire Soviet system and by extension its citizenry. Not surprisingly, in Soviet propaganda Americans were portrayed as corrupt, corpulent money-grabbers often given the composite features of ‘typical’ capitalists. In the litany of hate everyone is tarred with the same brush. When seen as a mass of faceless types the enemy becomes more terrifying. In the design of hate condemning the guilty demands slandering the innocent.
At the outset of World War II, US propagandists, including designers and illustrators from the advertising industry, were drafted into the paper war against Axis Germany, Japan, and Italy to create and propagate odious stereotypes that subverted tenets of peacetime civility. The Office of War Information in Washington DC helped define the parameters of the depictions being fed to civilians at home and soldiers overseas. The methods were similar but the goals were different. Civilians had to be reminded of the ruthlessness of the enemy, while soldiers had to be encouraged to kill them without remorse. This was only accomplished through relentless dehumanisation. Yet the harshness of caricature was insidiously different between German/Italian and Japanese representations.
While both approaches were justifiably harsh, the propaganda showing white Europeans was less vicious than that for yellow Asians who were depicted as having exaggerated sinister, racial features. The Nazis and fascists were alternately illustrated as buffoonish (Hitler and Mussolini as clowns) or menacing (sabre-rattling warriors), but the Japanese, whether presented as buffoon or menace, invariably appeared more sub-human. In war, racist depictions are more endemic to the rhetoric of hate than any other form – the more stomach-turning the better.
A postcard issued in 1942 by the US Forest Service cautioning campers against accidentally igniting forest fires was typical of how the racist approach was introduced in all manner of public media. In this textbook study of visual enmity, Smokey the Bear is replaced by the quintessential Japanese demon: he was a buck-toothed, four-eyed (as though thick lens glasses somehow indicated inferiority), low-browed and pointy-eared soldier threateningly holding a lighted match. When placed in a number of other cautionary scenarios this archetype underscored the duplicity and savagery ascribed to the ‘yellow’ race. The marriage of the grotesque to the immoral in this portrayal was as powerful as a planeload of bombs and left similar scars. The ‘Japs’ could not be made to look any more preternatural. But since war is hatred run amok it gives licence for pent-up atavistic animosities that surge like a shot of adrenaline through the body politic. Extreme caricatures of the Japanese plumbed the depths of fear.
Designers and artists who perpetrated these stereotypes were themselves caught up in mass hysteria and their work reflected prejudices born of indoctrination. Some were opportunists while others were patriots. Some worked to fight evil, some perpetuated it. When Arthur Szyk, a Polish-born illustrator working in the US, produced various horrifying caricatures of Japanese emperor Hirohito and war minister Tojo during World War ii for mass-market magazines such as Collier’s, he believed that he was justly attacking the principal scourges of war through ridicule and derision, for which racism was a tool. When Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, ordered his German Propaganda Studio to twist vulgar anti-Semitic stereotypes into sub-human [Untermensch] depictions his motive was to incite callous treatment and justify extermination.
A now infamous poster for the pseudo-documentary film Der Ewige Jude, [The Eternal Jew], directed by the Nazi’s ‘anti-Jewish expert,’ Dr Eberhard Taubert, portrays a heinous caricature of a generic Chasidic Jew in long coat and skull-cap (the garments that for centuries distinguished this devout sect from more assimilated Jews), presented as an avaricious, cowardly fiend poised to devour the world. When pitted against high German culture the obvious message was that the Jew was a defiler, and therefore the target of permissible malice. Hitler expounded, ‘The Jew has destroyed hundreds of cultures, but built none of his own.’ Goebbels’ (1) propagandists derived certain Jewish stereotypes from myths such as The Golem taken from Jewish lore, in the same way as many derogatory racial stereotypes were inspired by venerable and indigenous tales and stories elsewhere. The Jew was portrayed as barbarous and perverted in the most infamous of all Nazi hate propaganda: an SS booklet called The Subhuman, a manual of hatred and loathing that viewed its victims as vermin.
‘Civilisation is a constant struggle to hold back the forces of barbarism,’ writes Sam Keen. ‘. . . The barbarian, the giant running amok, the uncivilised enemy, symbolise power divorced from intelligence . . .’ So the graphic lexicon of hate abounds with metaphor and allegory in which the barbarism of any opponent is made concrete through images of vicious anthropomorphic beasts – polemical werewolves – the embodiment of bloodthirsty wickedness. Never mind that in wars, each side resorts to barbarism. Never mind that the vocabulary of hate invariably uses barbarism to ‘fight’ barbarism. In the propaganda war the victor is the nation that claims God is on its side and invents the most mnemonic and horrific image of its enemy. In World War I the US artists and designers under the watchful art direction of Charles Dana Gibson at the Committee on Public Information invented images (bolstered by rumours of German savagery against civilians) that depicted German troops as even more venal than those later in World War ii. The ‘Hun’, an ape-like beast with blood soaked canines clutching young female hostages (implying that rape was an instrument of policy), was the veritable poster child of hate. This model existed until the 1960s when, ironically, superhero cartoons such as X-Men turned similarly frightening creatures into sympathetic anti-heroes.
War is not the sole rationale for institutional, graphic hatred. In fact, there is no greater motivator than apprehension of ‘otherness’, and no more effective imagery, once again, than ethnic and racial stereotypes that exacerbate the suspicions of insecure people. Absurd racial stereotypes have historically been (and still are) used as benign commercial symbols in comics, advertisements and packages, even logos, but when similar caricatures are tweaked with just a hint of menace, such as a lustful gaze or dramatic shadow, they switch from benign comedy into vengeful attack. It takes very little effort on the part of designers to open the Pandora’s box of offensive graphics. In recent years, given oil crises and terrorist bombings, Arabs have been caricatured in the US in a manner recalling anti-Semitic cartoons of earlier times. Such images have doubtless influenced a common view of these people as a whole. The single derogatory picture often negates a thousand positive words.
‘Hate-driven imagery cannot, by definition, be produced by groups open to debate or transparency,’ says Dan Walsh, director of The Justice Project, which uses graphics to teach freedom and tolerance. Yet not all images designed to elicit hatred are lies or exaggerations. Though always odious, in certain paradoxical instances hate messages can expose reality in order to elicit protest against evil. Depending on where one stood along the ideological divide in the late 1960s for or against the Vietnam War, the graphics that offered evidence of US atrocities toward civilians provoked enmity towards American leaders (and sometimes even soldiers in the field). The famous news photograph by R. Haeberle of the aftermath of the massacre of 21 women and children in the remote hamlet of My Lai, vividly showing lifeless bodies lying in a ditch after troops led by Lt William Calley cut them down, was produced as an anti-war poster with the headline, ‘Q: And babies? A: And babies.’ Because it so totally contradicted the civilised image that Americans held of themselves, the poster became a call to pity the victims and hate the perpetrators of the war. Similarly, photographs coming from Vietnam and published in underground periodicals showing soldiers holding severed Viet Cong heads as trophies were intended to foster as the same rage as did the pictorial evidence of World War II atrocities. These visuals of demonic acts did not have to be designed or manipulated in any way – supposedly the camera did not lie. Yet designers had to intervene with the material so that there would be no ambiguity in the message.
‘Hate / rage / revolt imagery is often the most graphically charged because there is no operational code of conduct in place between the combatants – no taboos are recognised,’ argues Dan Walsh. Nor is there any mystery, allusion, or subtlety in this form of address. The language of hate leaves no room for interpretation. It is good or bad, black or white. It is never neutral. ‘Propaganda allows us to exteriorise the battle,’ writes Sam Keen, ‘project the struggle within the psyche into the realm of politics.’ The design of demonic representations is a battle rooted in obsession, and perhaps more insidious than what Marshall McLuhan had called ‘the old hot wars of industrial hardware.’
First published in Eye no. 41 vol. 11, 2001
Steven Heller, 2001
The rhetoric of hate provides \'a new kind of meaning\'
A dirty secret about graphic design is that it can promote hatred. The graphic language of loathing is every bit as pervasive as the International Style. While the aesthetic of enmity may not be rooted in any one particular typeface or composition, the rhetoric is consistent: verbal and visual hyperbole, caricature and stereotype, threat and agitation, all given concrete graphic form by designers and illustrators. Derogatory messages are not only the product of extremist and fringe groups: the vast majority of hate propaganda is government sanctioned and professionally produced.
Propaganda precedes technology as a means to soften otherwise rational minds into malleable clay. Hot and cold wars on a battlefield or in hearts and minds cannot be fought without the collaboration of people of conscience. Therefore, the process of demonic manufacture, wherein the object of abhorrence must be thoroughly stripped of its human characteristics is essential in securing mass hostility towards one group or another. ‘In the beginning we create the enemy,’ writes Sam Keen in Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (Harper and Row, 1986), about the art and psychology of state coercion. ‘We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to kill them.’
‘The war of icons, or the eroding of the collective countenance of one’s rivals,’ noted Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media in 1964, ‘has long been under way. Ink and photo are supplanting soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier than the sword.’
Since the sixteenth century when Martin Luther, the father of propaganda, was portrayed as the devil in church-sanctioned cautionary prints, the archetypes of visual terror have progressed unabated. Summoning the Prince of Darkness may now seem outdated, particularly since devil worship is accepted as pop style, yet Satan, say its adversaries, appears in numerous guises. Vilification is often accomplished in the twentieth century by references both banal and nefarious. Through the visual lexicon of hate artists and designers employ the devil as the main or sub-text in allegories, transforming individuals and groups into beasts, criminals, torturers, rapists, defilers, and even death itself. The clichéd predictability of these unnerving symbols is what gives them sustained power. Even those who believe that Lucifer is little more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo are somehow conditioned to revile deadly sins and sinners, in part, because they represent our repressed personal transgressions. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said: ‘We have seen the enemy, and he is us.’
Fear triggers hatred and inflames ignorance, which the skilled propagandist converts into manifestations of terror. Whether in picture or word, the spectre of unspeakable harm cannot help but wreak havoc on the psyche. When wed to a particularly repellent depiction of a foe it is impossible for the susceptible to avoid being dragged into a state of antipathy, much in the way that well crafted villainous literary or film characters evoke intense animosity. Repetition becomes the artist’s primary tool in this process. The more an image or epithet (or visual epithet) is repeated the more indelible it becomes. The big lie is synthetic truth.
Of course, real truth is necessary to bolster extreme exaggeration. Wicked political leaders are expedient and justifiable prototypes, and violent organisations beg to be exposed as such. But purveyors of hate imagery routinely latch on to the lowest denominator and over-generalise a particular people or nation on the basis of a characteristic or trait already lurking in the minds of the audience. In us propaganda of the 1950s, Joseph Stalin, a genuine scoundrel, represented all Soviets – not merely the regime over which he lorded – because the US was engaged in a cold war against the entire Soviet system and by extension its citizenry. Not surprisingly, in Soviet propaganda Americans were portrayed as corrupt, corpulent money-grabbers often given the composite features of ‘typical’ capitalists. In the litany of hate everyone is tarred with the same brush. When seen as a mass of faceless types the enemy becomes more terrifying. In the design of hate condemning the guilty demands slandering the innocent.
At the outset of World War II, US propagandists, including designers and illustrators from the advertising industry, were drafted into the paper war against Axis Germany, Japan, and Italy to create and propagate odious stereotypes that subverted tenets of peacetime civility. The Office of War Information in Washington DC helped define the parameters of the depictions being fed to civilians at home and soldiers overseas. The methods were similar but the goals were different. Civilians had to be reminded of the ruthlessness of the enemy, while soldiers had to be encouraged to kill them without remorse. This was only accomplished through relentless dehumanisation. Yet the harshness of caricature was insidiously different between German/Italian and Japanese representations.
While both approaches were justifiably harsh, the propaganda showing white Europeans was less vicious than that for yellow Asians who were depicted as having exaggerated sinister, racial features. The Nazis and fascists were alternately illustrated as buffoonish (Hitler and Mussolini as clowns) or menacing (sabre-rattling warriors), but the Japanese, whether presented as buffoon or menace, invariably appeared more sub-human. In war, racist depictions are more endemic to the rhetoric of hate than any other form – the more stomach-turning the better.
A postcard issued in 1942 by the US Forest Service cautioning campers against accidentally igniting forest fires was typical of how the racist approach was introduced in all manner of public media. In this textbook study of visual enmity, Smokey the Bear is replaced by the quintessential Japanese demon: he was a buck-toothed, four-eyed (as though thick lens glasses somehow indicated inferiority), low-browed and pointy-eared soldier threateningly holding a lighted match. When placed in a number of other cautionary scenarios this archetype underscored the duplicity and savagery ascribed to the ‘yellow’ race. The marriage of the grotesque to the immoral in this portrayal was as powerful as a planeload of bombs and left similar scars. The ‘Japs’ could not be made to look any more preternatural. But since war is hatred run amok it gives licence for pent-up atavistic animosities that surge like a shot of adrenaline through the body politic. Extreme caricatures of the Japanese plumbed the depths of fear.
Designers and artists who perpetrated these stereotypes were themselves caught up in mass hysteria and their work reflected prejudices born of indoctrination. Some were opportunists while others were patriots. Some worked to fight evil, some perpetuated it. When Arthur Szyk, a Polish-born illustrator working in the US, produced various horrifying caricatures of Japanese emperor Hirohito and war minister Tojo during World War ii for mass-market magazines such as Collier’s, he believed that he was justly attacking the principal scourges of war through ridicule and derision, for which racism was a tool. When Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, ordered his German Propaganda Studio to twist vulgar anti-Semitic stereotypes into sub-human [Untermensch] depictions his motive was to incite callous treatment and justify extermination.
A now infamous poster for the pseudo-documentary film Der Ewige Jude, [The Eternal Jew], directed by the Nazi’s ‘anti-Jewish expert,’ Dr Eberhard Taubert, portrays a heinous caricature of a generic Chasidic Jew in long coat and skull-cap (the garments that for centuries distinguished this devout sect from more assimilated Jews), presented as an avaricious, cowardly fiend poised to devour the world. When pitted against high German culture the obvious message was that the Jew was a defiler, and therefore the target of permissible malice. Hitler expounded, ‘The Jew has destroyed hundreds of cultures, but built none of his own.’ Goebbels’ (1) propagandists derived certain Jewish stereotypes from myths such as The Golem taken from Jewish lore, in the same way as many derogatory racial stereotypes were inspired by venerable and indigenous tales and stories elsewhere. The Jew was portrayed as barbarous and perverted in the most infamous of all Nazi hate propaganda: an SS booklet called The Subhuman, a manual of hatred and loathing that viewed its victims as vermin.
‘Civilisation is a constant struggle to hold back the forces of barbarism,’ writes Sam Keen. ‘. . . The barbarian, the giant running amok, the uncivilised enemy, symbolise power divorced from intelligence . . .’ So the graphic lexicon of hate abounds with metaphor and allegory in which the barbarism of any opponent is made concrete through images of vicious anthropomorphic beasts – polemical werewolves – the embodiment of bloodthirsty wickedness. Never mind that in wars, each side resorts to barbarism. Never mind that the vocabulary of hate invariably uses barbarism to ‘fight’ barbarism. In the propaganda war the victor is the nation that claims God is on its side and invents the most mnemonic and horrific image of its enemy. In World War I the US artists and designers under the watchful art direction of Charles Dana Gibson at the Committee on Public Information invented images (bolstered by rumours of German savagery against civilians) that depicted German troops as even more venal than those later in World War ii. The ‘Hun’, an ape-like beast with blood soaked canines clutching young female hostages (implying that rape was an instrument of policy), was the veritable poster child of hate. This model existed until the 1960s when, ironically, superhero cartoons such as X-Men turned similarly frightening creatures into sympathetic anti-heroes.
War is not the sole rationale for institutional, graphic hatred. In fact, there is no greater motivator than apprehension of ‘otherness’, and no more effective imagery, once again, than ethnic and racial stereotypes that exacerbate the suspicions of insecure people. Absurd racial stereotypes have historically been (and still are) used as benign commercial symbols in comics, advertisements and packages, even logos, but when similar caricatures are tweaked with just a hint of menace, such as a lustful gaze or dramatic shadow, they switch from benign comedy into vengeful attack. It takes very little effort on the part of designers to open the Pandora’s box of offensive graphics. In recent years, given oil crises and terrorist bombings, Arabs have been caricatured in the US in a manner recalling anti-Semitic cartoons of earlier times. Such images have doubtless influenced a common view of these people as a whole. The single derogatory picture often negates a thousand positive words.
‘Hate-driven imagery cannot, by definition, be produced by groups open to debate or transparency,’ says Dan Walsh, director of The Justice Project, which uses graphics to teach freedom and tolerance. Yet not all images designed to elicit hatred are lies or exaggerations. Though always odious, in certain paradoxical instances hate messages can expose reality in order to elicit protest against evil. Depending on where one stood along the ideological divide in the late 1960s for or against the Vietnam War, the graphics that offered evidence of US atrocities toward civilians provoked enmity towards American leaders (and sometimes even soldiers in the field). The famous news photograph by R. Haeberle of the aftermath of the massacre of 21 women and children in the remote hamlet of My Lai, vividly showing lifeless bodies lying in a ditch after troops led by Lt William Calley cut them down, was produced as an anti-war poster with the headline, ‘Q: And babies? A: And babies.’ Because it so totally contradicted the civilised image that Americans held of themselves, the poster became a call to pity the victims and hate the perpetrators of the war. Similarly, photographs coming from Vietnam and published in underground periodicals showing soldiers holding severed Viet Cong heads as trophies were intended to foster as the same rage as did the pictorial evidence of World War II atrocities. These visuals of demonic acts did not have to be designed or manipulated in any way – supposedly the camera did not lie. Yet designers had to intervene with the material so that there would be no ambiguity in the message.
‘Hate / rage / revolt imagery is often the most graphically charged because there is no operational code of conduct in place between the combatants – no taboos are recognised,’ argues Dan Walsh. Nor is there any mystery, allusion, or subtlety in this form of address. The language of hate leaves no room for interpretation. It is good or bad, black or white. It is never neutral. ‘Propaganda allows us to exteriorise the battle,’ writes Sam Keen, ‘project the struggle within the psyche into the realm of politics.’ The design of demonic representations is a battle rooted in obsession, and perhaps more insidious than what Marshall McLuhan had called ‘the old hot wars of industrial hardware.’
First published in Eye no. 41 vol. 11, 2001
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Thomas Ricks Talks at Pritzker Military Library: Iraq
Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: Fiasco 2006
Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: The Gamble 2009
Two incredibly illuminating talks by writer/journalist Thomas Ricks on his books Fiasco and The Gamble about the Iraq war. Q&A in the second half. I'm still digesting this.
Pritzker Military Library | Thomas Ricks: The Gamble 2009
Two incredibly illuminating talks by writer/journalist Thomas Ricks on his books Fiasco and The Gamble about the Iraq war. Q&A in the second half. I'm still digesting this.
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
Military Ethics & Leadership - Tom Ricks
Question: Why on earth did the phone-in have to divide people by their politics? Being a Brit, this is completely alien to me and would never have been done in the UK. It sets the tone of the whole discussion and invites division and encourages the extremists on both sides of the polarised coin. Both caller no.3 and 4, demonstrate this. Bad, bad CSpan. Ethics has nothing to do with your politics, or should not.
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Honoring the Warrior, Not the War
I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name,
commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the
holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war
to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In
America, Veterans Day is now associated with honoring US war dead and
remembering the sacrifices of veterans in all our conflicts. This is
good and very much in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday;
for remembering the terrible cost of war is the best way for us to
appreciate the peace we now enjoy. For me, Veterans Day embodies two
moods at once: somber reflection on the sacrifices of soldiers and
gratitude for the blessing of peace.Yet these days, Veterans Day often makes me sad. It seems that this holiday in particular almost can't help becoming politicized, particularly in the midst of a controversial war. This is a holiday about celebrating the end of war; I don't want to see it become something like a "Support the Troops" bumper-sticker. I want people to look at all the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans and draw the right lesson from them: that war is terrible and we must do everything we can to prevent it. In honoring the warrior, we should take care not to honor war in itself. Remember that beneath the memorials to individual soldiers, the laurels for their courage, there is a subtle message to the younger generation: you should grow up and become soldiers too. I don't think that's the message that should be sent on Veteran's Day. This should be a holiday about remembering the price of peace, for no soldier joins to perpetuate war. All veterans served and fought in the expectation of eventually regaining the peace, and enjoying a measure of it themselves. If we want to truly thank veterans, then we should not only honor them as individuals but honor the thing they fought and died for: the return to a peaceful society. We should remember that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day.
Thursday, 18 October 2012
Crosshair in the Crosshair
Like the arrow or the circle, the crosshair focuses our
attention and prepares us for a message. Unlike the arrow or the
circle, both of which focus our attention but without yet
suggesting why, the crosshair tells us exactly why: what's in
the crosshair is in mortal danger. Even those of us who have
never looked through a gun scope know from movies and magazines
exactly what the crosshair is and what it means. It means someone's
got a gun. Someone's aiming that gun. And someone else is gonna get
shot.
Aiming a crosshair at an object, even Photoshopping a crosshair
over a picture of someone's face, puts that object in jeopardy.
When the crosshair slides across the landscape until it locks onto
the victim, the crosshair tells us from whose perspective we are
looking. We are looking from the shooter's perspective. We too are
in the position of power. We too can pull the trigger.
By itself, the crosshair is just a tool, a type of reticle. Not unique to gun scopes, the crosshair is used in layout software, in cameras, telescopes and microscopes. The crosshair appears in goggles and scanners, in surgical lasers and land-surveying equipment. Yes, the shooter can disable, destroy or take out the target. But the shooter can also focus a lens, guide a laser and measure a distance.
The crosshair is a tool that guides our vision, but the arrow and the circle also guide our vision. The arrow might reveal and reward. The circle might accept and embrace. The crosshair, however, dominates the object, sneaks up and subdues the object in a precise two-dimensional location. There you are. And you don't even know I see you. The crosshair transforms the independent nature of the object into the conditional, dependent nature of the target, without that target ever knowing about its own transformation in the eye of the viewer. Its transformation occurs on the viewer's side of the crosshair, and so the viewer too is changed. The crosshair changes the viewer from spectator to participant. So now that we see it, what do we do next? Has the crosshair transformed us into snipers or scientists, photographers or trophy-hunters, creators or killers?
Shoot It. Sell It. Sex It. Slam It.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cross hair, or crosshair, as one of "two fine strands of wire crossed in the focus of the eyepiece of an optical instrument and used as a calibration or sighting reference." The word itself is metaphorical. The filaments that cross are not strands of hair but strands of wire, although the roots (sorry) of the word reach back to the earliest versions of the tool in which actual hair was used.
Literal uses of the crosshair signify a real tool being used, like a gun, camera or laser. In the artwork for The Bourne Identity (2002), the crosshair zeroes in on Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)—he's the prey. For the sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the crosshair appears in the rifle scope wielded by Jason Bourne—now he's the hunter. (So much depends upon what side of the sights you're on.) Crosshair is the name of a comic book (soon to be a movie) about an assassin. The crosshair as a name or symbol is used literally to denote actual gun scopes in the branding for Crosshair Safaris and Crosshair Consulting hunting outfitters. The crosshair logo for stem-cell researchers Cell Targeting Inc. suggests microscopes; the one for 4 Seasons Pest Control, an exterminator's spray nozzle; the logo for Crosshair Exploration and Mining Corporation, an explorer's viewpoint. First-person-shooter video games use the gun-scope crosshair, and several websites provide software that enables players to design their own crosshair icons.
Figurative uses of the word and symbol in branding include
Crosshair Oakley sunglasses, Crosshair Studios, Crosshair Golf,
Tactical Financial, Crosshairs Trader, Snitch Killer Apparel and
the Asus Crosshair motherboard. None of these uses refer to actual
tools relying on crosshair scopes. Instead, they seek to co-opt a
mood evoked by the crosshair: lethality, accuracy, technological
precision, militaristic bravado. The most abstract crosshair logo
is used by Dr. Reg Edward for his targeted, regional
anesthesia.
One of the more ubiquitous uses of the crosshair is in the logo for the rap group Public Enemy, targeting a silhouetted stand-in for the band. It's a complicated, artistic use of the crosshair as a symbol, because it puts the viewer in the position of the government, targeting the artists, while the viewer knows this particular use is controlled by the band itself. Public Enemy directs the crosshair at itself in an attempt to win sympathy from the viewer: the implicit message being that what the band has to say is so important that they may be killed for saying it. This use of the crosshair works well in context because Public Enemy does indeed take on urgent, anti-establishment political issues. Using the crosshair would amount to self-aggrandizing parody, however, if, say, Public Enemy were a boy band singing about a cafeteria romance thwarted by an evil lunch lady.
The crosshair falters when used by marketing companies. Even though its use by companies such as Crosshair Marketing Services and Crosshairs Communication (there are many examples) is figurative (no one's using or selling a real scope), the crosshair derives from the literalization of the metaphor expressed by the phrase "target marketing." The use of the word target takes advantage of its associations with weapons. We are meant to think of marketing in a more serious, technical way. The metaphor falls flat, though, when marketing companies incorporate into their brands literal symbols like targets and missiles and the crosshair. The metaphor becomes literal, and we groan. We groan, too, at the machismo of trying to drape the world of the cubicle in the camouflage of the battlefield, especially when, taking the literal logos at their symbolic word, we might reasonably wonder why marketers are targeting consumers in the crosshair of a rifle scope.
In the branding for marketing companies, the crosshair means
"See it. Sell it." But the crosshair means "See it. Sex it" when
used on the cover for the Spanish book Sex Code (2007), a
guide for seducing women. There the crosshair targets a woman's
silhouette, specifically her hips. The woman appears to float, as
if she leapt like a deer. Meanwhile, a guy in a suit stands coolly,
hands in pockets. The crosshair quickly draws us into a world of
slippery idioms: we are hunting bucks, blasting bad guys and
bagging babes.
I find the crosshair is more successful when used figuratively, but the crosshair is busiest elsewhere: it seems to work 24/7 as an editorial and political symbol, referencing the sights on a gun scope. It's like the James Brown of op-ed clichés: the hardest-working symbol in the business. Slapped on anyone and anything, the crosshair is the lazy person's critique, meaning: there is no critique, just a crude graphic gesture meant to shock the viewer. See it. Slam it.
And the crosshair is used both ways. Recall the dual use in the artwork for the Bourne movies—the crosshair marks the hunter and hunted, prompting the viewer to identify with either, depending on context—and the sympathetic use by Public Enemy, in which the crosshair is a graphic strategy to gain sympathy. Used politically and editorially, the crosshair can attack someone who deserves it and elicit sympathy for someone who does not. (See how many books and articles are entitled "[Blankety Blank] in the Crosshair.") The user defines the context and plays to the prejudice of an audience. A baby in the crosshair illustrates a pro-life, anti-abortion article. The flag of Israel in the crosshair illustrates an article by a writer worried that Jews will be targeted by anti-Semitic forces. The crosshair represents an ideological viewpoint and implicates the viewer in that viewpoint. The crosshair is used so often in political imagery and op-ed illustration because the crosshair is so brutal an expression of an unyielding political or ideological allegiance. We are a god, or we are guilty. We judge righteously, or we have made a grave error. The crosshair divides us.
See It. Don't Slay It.
People are free to incorporate the crosshair into their graphic imagery nearly any way they want, thanks to the First Amendment (unless they directly incite violence), and I have no reservations about designers using the crosshair in figurative ways—the ways designers use the skull, for example, or images of pistols and daggers and the hangman's noose—on album covers and baseball caps and logos and skateboards. But as a viewer, I recoil from the crosshair as a graphic editorial tool.
Sure, I've played as a sniper in Call of Duty, but it's only a game reality. I win or lose with nothing but my own mood at stake. The graphic use of the crosshair is only a graphic reality, one of the page or website or whatever frame the crosshair is bisecting or quadrisecting—that is, when we look at crosshair imagery, we're not really using the crosshair in a rifle scope to aim a real bullet into a real forehead. But I resent being put into that position. As a viewer, I can ignore the lapel button or the website banner or the magazine illustration, but the designer or illustrator should worry that the crosshair might convey an unintended message. I see that crosshair, and, reflexively, I distrust the person who put it there.
As propaganda, the crosshair is a symbol of presumption, not persuasion. The crosshair narrows the world into a single viewpoint, into the x/y axes of lethal intent, and I refuse that Cartesian carnage. The crosshair can devolve into a tool of fanatic ideology, promoting a worldview so narrow that it contains nothing else but the object of derision. Someone who layers a crosshair over something or someone is basically shoving a scope in the viewer's eye and trying to say, "There is no outside world. There is only an object on the other side of the crosshair. See it. Shoot it."
Using the crosshair this way marks the end of thinking, not the beginning. The crosshair is the sentence, not the consideration. It's death, not deliberation, and so there's nothing to talk about. In this way, the crosshair backfires.
 |
| A commonly used registration mark. |
By itself, the crosshair is just a tool, a type of reticle. Not unique to gun scopes, the crosshair is used in layout software, in cameras, telescopes and microscopes. The crosshair appears in goggles and scanners, in surgical lasers and land-surveying equipment. Yes, the shooter can disable, destroy or take out the target. But the shooter can also focus a lens, guide a laser and measure a distance.
The crosshair is a tool that guides our vision, but the arrow and the circle also guide our vision. The arrow might reveal and reward. The circle might accept and embrace. The crosshair, however, dominates the object, sneaks up and subdues the object in a precise two-dimensional location. There you are. And you don't even know I see you. The crosshair transforms the independent nature of the object into the conditional, dependent nature of the target, without that target ever knowing about its own transformation in the eye of the viewer. Its transformation occurs on the viewer's side of the crosshair, and so the viewer too is changed. The crosshair changes the viewer from spectator to participant. So now that we see it, what do we do next? Has the crosshair transformed us into snipers or scientists, photographers or trophy-hunters, creators or killers?
 |
| Pop, pop culture: The crosshair appears in the artwork for movies, books, music and first-person-shooter video games like Halo and Call of Duty. |
Shoot It. Sell It. Sex It. Slam It.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cross hair, or crosshair, as one of "two fine strands of wire crossed in the focus of the eyepiece of an optical instrument and used as a calibration or sighting reference." The word itself is metaphorical. The filaments that cross are not strands of hair but strands of wire, although the roots (sorry) of the word reach back to the earliest versions of the tool in which actual hair was used.
Literal uses of the crosshair signify a real tool being used, like a gun, camera or laser. In the artwork for The Bourne Identity (2002), the crosshair zeroes in on Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)—he's the prey. For the sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), the crosshair appears in the rifle scope wielded by Jason Bourne—now he's the hunter. (So much depends upon what side of the sights you're on.) Crosshair is the name of a comic book (soon to be a movie) about an assassin. The crosshair as a name or symbol is used literally to denote actual gun scopes in the branding for Crosshair Safaris and Crosshair Consulting hunting outfitters. The crosshair logo for stem-cell researchers Cell Targeting Inc. suggests microscopes; the one for 4 Seasons Pest Control, an exterminator's spray nozzle; the logo for Crosshair Exploration and Mining Corporation, an explorer's viewpoint. First-person-shooter video games use the gun-scope crosshair, and several websites provide software that enables players to design their own crosshair icons.
 |
| Stay on target: The crosshair, as logo and brand, is as popular with target shooters as it is with target marketers. |
One of the more ubiquitous uses of the crosshair is in the logo for the rap group Public Enemy, targeting a silhouetted stand-in for the band. It's a complicated, artistic use of the crosshair as a symbol, because it puts the viewer in the position of the government, targeting the artists, while the viewer knows this particular use is controlled by the band itself. Public Enemy directs the crosshair at itself in an attempt to win sympathy from the viewer: the implicit message being that what the band has to say is so important that they may be killed for saying it. This use of the crosshair works well in context because Public Enemy does indeed take on urgent, anti-establishment political issues. Using the crosshair would amount to self-aggrandizing parody, however, if, say, Public Enemy were a boy band singing about a cafeteria romance thwarted by an evil lunch lady.
The crosshair falters when used by marketing companies. Even though its use by companies such as Crosshair Marketing Services and Crosshairs Communication (there are many examples) is figurative (no one's using or selling a real scope), the crosshair derives from the literalization of the metaphor expressed by the phrase "target marketing." The use of the word target takes advantage of its associations with weapons. We are meant to think of marketing in a more serious, technical way. The metaphor falls flat, though, when marketing companies incorporate into their brands literal symbols like targets and missiles and the crosshair. The metaphor becomes literal, and we groan. We groan, too, at the machismo of trying to drape the world of the cubicle in the camouflage of the battlefield, especially when, taking the literal logos at their symbolic word, we might reasonably wonder why marketers are targeting consumers in the crosshair of a rifle scope.
 |
| Fire! sale: The crosshair plays well on products from caps to cufflinks. |
I find the crosshair is more successful when used figuratively, but the crosshair is busiest elsewhere: it seems to work 24/7 as an editorial and political symbol, referencing the sights on a gun scope. It's like the James Brown of op-ed clichés: the hardest-working symbol in the business. Slapped on anyone and anything, the crosshair is the lazy person's critique, meaning: there is no critique, just a crude graphic gesture meant to shock the viewer. See it. Slam it.
And the crosshair is used both ways. Recall the dual use in the artwork for the Bourne movies—the crosshair marks the hunter and hunted, prompting the viewer to identify with either, depending on context—and the sympathetic use by Public Enemy, in which the crosshair is a graphic strategy to gain sympathy. Used politically and editorially, the crosshair can attack someone who deserves it and elicit sympathy for someone who does not. (See how many books and articles are entitled "[Blankety Blank] in the Crosshair.") The user defines the context and plays to the prejudice of an audience. A baby in the crosshair illustrates a pro-life, anti-abortion article. The flag of Israel in the crosshair illustrates an article by a writer worried that Jews will be targeted by anti-Semitic forces. The crosshair represents an ideological viewpoint and implicates the viewer in that viewpoint. The crosshair is used so often in political imagery and op-ed illustration because the crosshair is so brutal an expression of an unyielding political or ideological allegiance. We are a god, or we are guilty. We judge righteously, or we have made a grave error. The crosshair divides us.
 |
| Sniping and griping: The crosshair serves editorial and political propagandists with its divisive power. |
People are free to incorporate the crosshair into their graphic imagery nearly any way they want, thanks to the First Amendment (unless they directly incite violence), and I have no reservations about designers using the crosshair in figurative ways—the ways designers use the skull, for example, or images of pistols and daggers and the hangman's noose—on album covers and baseball caps and logos and skateboards. But as a viewer, I recoil from the crosshair as a graphic editorial tool.
Sure, I've played as a sniper in Call of Duty, but it's only a game reality. I win or lose with nothing but my own mood at stake. The graphic use of the crosshair is only a graphic reality, one of the page or website or whatever frame the crosshair is bisecting or quadrisecting—that is, when we look at crosshair imagery, we're not really using the crosshair in a rifle scope to aim a real bullet into a real forehead. But I resent being put into that position. As a viewer, I can ignore the lapel button or the website banner or the magazine illustration, but the designer or illustrator should worry that the crosshair might convey an unintended message. I see that crosshair, and, reflexively, I distrust the person who put it there.
As propaganda, the crosshair is a symbol of presumption, not persuasion. The crosshair narrows the world into a single viewpoint, into the x/y axes of lethal intent, and I refuse that Cartesian carnage. The crosshair can devolve into a tool of fanatic ideology, promoting a worldview so narrow that it contains nothing else but the object of derision. Someone who layers a crosshair over something or someone is basically shoving a scope in the viewer's eye and trying to say, "There is no outside world. There is only an object on the other side of the crosshair. See it. Shoot it."
Using the crosshair this way marks the end of thinking, not the beginning. The crosshair is the sentence, not the consideration. It's death, not deliberation, and so there's nothing to talk about. In this way, the crosshair backfires.
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
One Fate, Two Fates, Red States, Blue States
By Phil Patton September 24, 2004
One fate, two fates, red states, blue states—have red and blue replaced red white and blue as our national colors?
We refer to the red states and the blue states so regularly now that the association seems long established. But only the 2000 presidential election established the linkage of blue with Democrats and red with Republicans. In earlier years, the television networks and magazine maps had reversed the association. In 1984 rival networks associated red with Democrats and blue with Republicans. The Reagan sweep of that year was called "Lake Reagan" in one context.
In many ways the link goes against tradition. Red has long stood for the left and one has to suspect that the first usage of it to represent Republicans was inspired by an effort to seem non prejudicial.
The end of the cold war made red baiting and pinko artifacts of a time past; the critical mark of the change may have come when the old red baiter, Richard Nixon, visited "Red" China.
On the other hand, blue was the color of the Union army uniforms, by contrast to gray, and has a historical link to the party of Lincoln. But in the Revolutionary war blue was the color of the Continental army uniform: red that of the British, of course.
Wrapping the candidate in the flag is the hoariest cliché of bumper stickers and posters. Post 9/11, with every politician in the land sporting a flag lapel pin, even clothing seemed to aspire to flagdom: red tie, white shirt, blue suit became common.
The colors of the flag are more than ever the staples of campaign graphics. (And despite Nader in 2000, who today could imagine that Jimmy Carter in 1976 adopted green, a hue that these days is as likely to evoke Islam as environmentalism?) But this year's campaign graphics seem to have lost the traditional white of the trio. John Kerry's stickers show a hopeful sea of Democratic blue, with flailing strip/stripes of red and a single tiny white star. They recall the Bank of America's recent abbreviated flag logo.
It is as if in all the flag waving of the last few years the white in the red, white and blue had vanished. The blue-red opposition has come to stand for a wider sense of political and cultural polarization—between cultures, incomes and classes. Has white vanished out of fear of suggesting surrender? Does it mean all hope of truce or compromise has vanished?
Red and blue joins red and green—stop and go—and even Stendhal's red and black as a basic binary.
Each color has its associations. Blue is cool and dispassionate, red heated. But it is neither the red or blue alone where the meaning lies, it is in the combination.
It is a pairing with overtones of alarm. Light bars atop police cars strobe warnings in red and blue. Not long ago activists protesting gang violence in Irvington, New Jersey marched with mock coffins, alternately covered with red and blue representing the Bloods and Crips gangs.
Is our division into red and blue a new national emblem in itself, like Swedish blue and yellow? Usually it takes three colors to make a national color scheme: French tricolore, German black red and yellow, Jamaican green yellow black. Red and blue meet white in the Russian flag. Red and blue were the colors of Paris joined with the white of the King of France in the tricolor.
Any melding of blue and red suggests an impossible purple—the color of royalty, rich as the vain dream of national union hoped for by nation builders who bring shabby deposed kings back to conflicted nations—an early scenario for Afghanistan. But purple has also occasionally been used to indicate "toss up" states on this year's electoral map: the overtones of bruise are appropriate.
At best, red and blue might inspire a contemplative Rothko glow, a study of a wider and more profound opposition. The pairing was seen differently by the great blues singer Robert Johnson, who in his song "Love in Vain" considered a departing rail car and the loss it meant, rolling out of the station "with two lights on behind. The blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind."
Source
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Original Sin
New York Times Essay
Sept 18, 2005
Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the American Presidency."
Sept 18, 2005
Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.
THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a
most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe
grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the
most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American
conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore
regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in
national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and
crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in
Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over
the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air
Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers'
dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years
before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of
the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.
In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most
influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears -
Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the
religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal.
But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly
ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for
example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice,
and only in passing.
Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born
minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was
trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at
the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial
Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's
sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist
Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by
the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for
its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in
1971.
Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American
theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious
discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's
death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus
Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out
of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence.
Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the
time.
Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a
delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the
Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved
black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of
a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are
completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are
insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of
innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between
good (us) and evil (our critics).
Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and
Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a
stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological
work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943).
The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three
influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children
of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a
Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).
In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent
character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive
impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will
to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to
history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of
Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his
political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for
justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice
makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used
"man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")
The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had
been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human
perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of
an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith
when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he
declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection."
In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of
American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New
Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the
perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the
French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with
increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions
remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education
of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such
obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of
original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that
should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.
Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for
my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most
terrible century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility
had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the
gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of
man is obviously not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history
came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of
accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to
them. Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and
resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940.
Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's
distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally
invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join
the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists
for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about
his religious views. "I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About
the concept of 'original sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in 1960, "I now realize
that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe
that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red
rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined
to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation
are identical."
The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the
world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension.
Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans
for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes,
Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in
cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of
innocence and infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to
the present moment," Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of
messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we
would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that
matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would
suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history."
For messianism - carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened
to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human
sinners.
Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic.
According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a
fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts
iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the
mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who
has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A
democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit
preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth
of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when
they try to play the role of God to history."
Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of
absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and
imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr
insisted on the "relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on
the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions.
He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in
the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or
principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H.
Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is
so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently
dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into
the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of
error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not
a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst
corruption is a corrupt religion."
One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the
president of the United States and the last pope - who have private
lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the
message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war
against Iraq; John Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent
champion of capital punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital
punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and
incompatible communications from the Almighty?
The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great
national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model
statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute
religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded
over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the
divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin.
He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered
in the fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he
said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked
God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let
us fight on with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the
right." But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in
memorable words, "The Almighty has His own purposes."
Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York,
sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is
not immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by
being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the
Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that
there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed
to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls
directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."
"The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues,"
Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious
awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded
as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of
remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free
society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point
over the struggle."
Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the
temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we
most fervently desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we
need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available
to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and
foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our
vanities." None of the insights of religious faith contradict "our
purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact,
prerequisites for saving it."
The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952,
resound more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the
ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the
disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation
was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle;
and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or
history but by hatred and vainglory."
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the American Presidency."
Monday, 1 October 2012
Brothers & Sisters of War
Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for
Afghan/Iraq war veterans is multiple times the numbers that die in the
war, now about twenty-four a day. Time heals. Give yourself time. Avoid
impulsiveness. Impulsiveness gives no time. Get the guns out of the
house. If you have a noose ready, get rid of it. A stash of pills, get
rid of them. A stripped electric line? Get rid of the readiness. When
you hear that train a comin', it ain’t your train. Stay off the tracks.
No bridge has your name on it. No bridge. When you are suicidal, you are
distraught. Distraught does not make for clear thinking. Impulsiveness
compounds the problem, leads to mistakes. Mistakes may be worse than
death.
You need time, more time, much more time, maybe a lifetime. Post-traumatic stress speeds things up. You need to slow down. One of the best ways to give yourself more time is to give your time away. Start with your family. Little children can really slow you down. Their presence to the moment, their curiosity, their imagination, their playfulness can all rub off on you if you slow down with them. Learn to identify ten trees in your neighborhood with your children and their friends. Learn the names of ten birds, ten insects. Then learn ten more of each. Pick some wild grapes and make jelly. Gather some hickory nuts and make cookies. Learn the natural world with them.
Men, learn to cook. Learn to feed yourself and your family. Your children would love to work with you in the kitchen. It will strengthen your marriage. Nurture her. Learn good nutrition. Bake bread. It’s great fun punching down the dough. Sit with your family at the table. Just for the fun of it, chew each mouthful 25 times. Slow down. Feed friends and neighbors. It’s healing. Go to the Farmers Market. Visit their farms. Grow something. Grow herbs and some flowers. Your children would love to grow something with you. Grow it and eat it. I learned how to make a simple red pasta sauce in Vietnam. Do it from scratch. It’s simple and it builds confidence. Then do variations. Don’t eat standing up, out of the pot. Slow down.
Volunteer your time. Help a neighbor, cut grass, rake leaves, shovel snow. Help the elderly. Visit a shut-in. Helping others helps you. It can help get you out of yourself, and getting out of yourself helps. Self can be toxic. Being concerned about others helps. Self needs time to heal. The healing is up to you but taking care of others heals you. The trauma in post-traumatic stress begins with violence, war, and rape. Military sexual trauma — rape — currently affects one-third to one-half of all women. The trauma begins with horrible violence. Life wants to live. It is as simple as that. Life wants to live. Violence can pervert that very simple truth. It can twist it, create doubt, create ambivalence. There can be only two responses to violence. One is to return the violence. The other is to return love. Love is a long, slow, hard, painful path. No one coming out of war or rape is prepared to be loving but P.T.S. is a sign that you can love. P.T.S. is a sign of the love in you.
Post-traumatic stress is not a “disorder." It is a natural response to what you have been through. It is a response to a terribly unnatural and unhealthy trauma. It is a sign that deep inside you understand that life wants to live. That is the starting point for your new life, the post-trauma life. It is a gift and a blessing if you let it be.
By Everett Cox, Vietnam veteran.
Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-8255
Source
You need time, more time, much more time, maybe a lifetime. Post-traumatic stress speeds things up. You need to slow down. One of the best ways to give yourself more time is to give your time away. Start with your family. Little children can really slow you down. Their presence to the moment, their curiosity, their imagination, their playfulness can all rub off on you if you slow down with them. Learn to identify ten trees in your neighborhood with your children and their friends. Learn the names of ten birds, ten insects. Then learn ten more of each. Pick some wild grapes and make jelly. Gather some hickory nuts and make cookies. Learn the natural world with them.
Men, learn to cook. Learn to feed yourself and your family. Your children would love to work with you in the kitchen. It will strengthen your marriage. Nurture her. Learn good nutrition. Bake bread. It’s great fun punching down the dough. Sit with your family at the table. Just for the fun of it, chew each mouthful 25 times. Slow down. Feed friends and neighbors. It’s healing. Go to the Farmers Market. Visit their farms. Grow something. Grow herbs and some flowers. Your children would love to grow something with you. Grow it and eat it. I learned how to make a simple red pasta sauce in Vietnam. Do it from scratch. It’s simple and it builds confidence. Then do variations. Don’t eat standing up, out of the pot. Slow down.
Volunteer your time. Help a neighbor, cut grass, rake leaves, shovel snow. Help the elderly. Visit a shut-in. Helping others helps you. It can help get you out of yourself, and getting out of yourself helps. Self can be toxic. Being concerned about others helps. Self needs time to heal. The healing is up to you but taking care of others heals you. The trauma in post-traumatic stress begins with violence, war, and rape. Military sexual trauma — rape — currently affects one-third to one-half of all women. The trauma begins with horrible violence. Life wants to live. It is as simple as that. Life wants to live. Violence can pervert that very simple truth. It can twist it, create doubt, create ambivalence. There can be only two responses to violence. One is to return the violence. The other is to return love. Love is a long, slow, hard, painful path. No one coming out of war or rape is prepared to be loving but P.T.S. is a sign that you can love. P.T.S. is a sign of the love in you.
Post-traumatic stress is not a “disorder." It is a natural response to what you have been through. It is a response to a terribly unnatural and unhealthy trauma. It is a sign that deep inside you understand that life wants to live. That is the starting point for your new life, the post-trauma life. It is a gift and a blessing if you let it be.
By Everett Cox, Vietnam veteran.
Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline 1-800-273-8255
Source
Thursday, 27 September 2012
Eisenhower's Farewell Address Forum: Civil-Military Relations
Cato Institute
More than a talk about Eisenhower and the industrial military complex, but illuminating commentary and questions about todays relationship between the military, general public and the civilians in charge.
The Cato Institute held a forum in honor of the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address in which he spoke to about the military-industrial complex. President Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan Eisenhower made opening remarks about the discovery of new materials related to the address and said that the issues raised in the speech are still relevant. Then a panel of former government officials talked about relations between the civilian sector and the military, and ways the relationship had changed since President Eisenhower's time. After their discussion panelists answered questions from audience members.
"The Wars Within: Thoughts on the State of Civil-Military Relations in 2011" was the first panel of the Cato Institute program on January 13, 2011, "The Military-Industrial Complex at 50: Assessing the Meaning and Impact of Eisenhower's Farewell Address."
Speakers:
Eisenhower, Susan Chair Emeritus - Eisenhower Institute
Dunlap, Charles J. Jr. (Maj. Gen. RET.) Associate Director - Duke University, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security
Korb, Lawrence J. Senior Fellow - Center for American Progress
Wilkerson, Lawrence B. (Col. RET.) Adjunct Proffessor - College of William & Mary, Govt. Dept.
Preble, Christopher A. Director - Cato Institute, Foreign Policy Studies
More than a talk about Eisenhower and the industrial military complex, but illuminating commentary and questions about todays relationship between the military, general public and the civilians in charge.
The Cato Institute held a forum in honor of the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address in which he spoke to about the military-industrial complex. President Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan Eisenhower made opening remarks about the discovery of new materials related to the address and said that the issues raised in the speech are still relevant. Then a panel of former government officials talked about relations between the civilian sector and the military, and ways the relationship had changed since President Eisenhower's time. After their discussion panelists answered questions from audience members.
"The Wars Within: Thoughts on the State of Civil-Military Relations in 2011" was the first panel of the Cato Institute program on January 13, 2011, "The Military-Industrial Complex at 50: Assessing the Meaning and Impact of Eisenhower's Farewell Address."
Speakers:
Eisenhower, Susan Chair Emeritus - Eisenhower Institute
Dunlap, Charles J. Jr. (Maj. Gen. RET.) Associate Director - Duke University, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security
Korb, Lawrence J. Senior Fellow - Center for American Progress
Wilkerson, Lawrence B. (Col. RET.) Adjunct Proffessor - College of William & Mary, Govt. Dept.
Preble, Christopher A. Director - Cato Institute, Foreign Policy Studies
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Dispatches: Iraq's Secret War Files
I saw this program a while ago and have never forgotten it. Although I was initially quite skeptical because of the 'conspiracy-esque' title of the program, the work to bring all the data together to give us a very real picture on what was happening in Iraq at this time, could not be doubted. Facts and firgures can always be interpreted in different ways, but the human cost, again, can not be doubted.
Originally aired on 25 Oct 2010, Channel 4
Dispatches exposes the full and unreported horror of the Iraqi conflict and its aftermath. The programme reveals the true scale of civilian casualties, and allegations that after the scandal of Abu Ghraib, American soldiers continued to abuse prisoners; and that US forces did not systematically intervene in the torture and murder of detainees by the Iraqi security services.
The programme also features previously unreported material of insurgents being killed while trying to surrender.
Channel 4 is the only UK broadcaster to have been given access to nearly 400,000 secret military significant activities reports (SIGACTS) logged by the US military in Iraq between 2004 and 2009. These reports tell the story of the war and occupation which the US military did not want the world to know.
Initially, the Americans claimed that they were not recording casualty figures and President Bush stated that America would do its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. In the files, Dispatches found details of over 109,000 deaths; 66,000 of these were civilians; 176,000 civilians and others were reported as wounded.
Under rules of engagement, known as escalation of force, anyone approaching the US military was warned to slow down and stop. The analysis reveals more than 800 people were killed in escalation of force incidents: 681 (80%) of these were civilians; a further 2,200 were wounded. Thirteen coalition troops were killed during these incidents. Dispatches found 30 children had been killed when shots were fired near civilians by US troops at checkpoints.
Over a six-year period, the data records the imprisonment of 180,000 Iraqis: one in 50 of the adult male population. Dispatches found more than 300 reports alleging abuse by US forces on Iraqi prisoners after April 2004.
The Americans effectively ignored the torture and murder of many detainees by Iraqi security forces. Dispatches has found evidence of more than 1,300 individual cases of the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqis in police stations and army bases: witnessed or reported on by American troops. Dispatches reveals that US troops were ordered not to investigate Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.
The data shows that the Americans were aware of the horrific level of violence inflicted by Iraqi sectarian militias: over 32,500 murders; more than 10,000 shot in the head; nearly 450 decapitated; over 160 were children.
One of the reasons given for the invasion of Iraq was the suggestion of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The US told the UN Security Council in 2003 that Iraq 'harboured' the terrorist network. However, in the leaked data there are only seven reports mentioning Al Qaeda in 2004, and none of these refer to Al Qaeda killing anyone. By 2008, there are 8,208 reports mentioning Al Qaeda attributing to it the deaths of 45 coalition soldiers, 486 members of the Iraqi Security Services and 1,291 civilians.
Sunday, 23 September 2012
Senate Commitee Hearing: Soldiers Stories from the Afghan War
April 2009
Veterans of combat operations in Afghanistan testified about their experiences and offered advice from the perspective of soldiers and junior officers in the field. Most said that U.S. forces had done an insufficient job of reaching out to local villagers and presenting a viable alternative to cooperation with anti-Western fundamentalists. They were divided, however, on the usefulness of the Obama administrations plans to increase U.S. military presence in the region.
Veterans of combat operations in Afghanistan testified about their experiences and offered advice from the perspective of soldiers and junior officers in the field. Most said that U.S. forces had done an insufficient job of reaching out to local villagers and presenting a viable alternative to cooperation with anti-Western fundamentalists. They were divided, however, on the usefulness of the Obama administrations plans to increase U.S. military presence in the region.
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Saturday, 1 September 2012
Ethics with Brian Orend: Justice & Responsibility After War
Brian Orend, Director of International Studies, Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Canada.
Talk at US Naval War College
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