Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly." Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise.
For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes.
Good analysis, but the best one I have seen yet is this one:
Don’t just sample the clip for 10 seconds. Watch to the end and drink in the full spectacle of grown men, prostrate, screaming in grief at the death of their subjugator. I take it state media beamed this out to show the world how unlikely a North Korean Spring is; it might be their first honest moment. Count me in with Michael Totten and Dan Foster in thinking these histrionics are more genuine than we’d like to believe. After all, lesser cult leaders like Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite have asked and gotten more from their followers than this; surely a few tears were in order in Pyongyang upon learning that God is dead. The whole point of totalitarian conditioning is to draw this reaction without needing soldiers to stand just out of frame pointing rifles at the crowd. Go figure that it actually works on some people.
You cannot reason someone out of something that they were never reasoned into.
The god is dead. Long live the new god!
Totalitarianism must evolve into a religion to survive. The cultic center of the religion must be the dictator. In Lenin's Russia, the religion was communism. Lenin and the party changed it to Marxism-Leninism, but Lenin did not live long enough to become a true cultic center.
Lenin's successor, Stalin, did, with all Stalinism's attendant horrors. After Stalin died in 1953, the Party determined that no general secretary would become a cultic figure again. Instead, they substituted a theology of an Ideal Time and a reformed humanity, the goal being formally announced in 1964 by GenSec Leonid Brezhnev as the attainment of True Communism.
Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.
This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.
That year, 1964, really marked the beginning of the long decline of Soviet communism because non-cultic True Communism required an exhaustively worked and intellectually rigorous theology founded on rationalistic, not cultic, bases. That eliminated Stalinism once for all and Brezhnevism never got started. But without a cultic figure the center would not hold. Brezhnev ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982. After his death, the USSR went through general secretaries like a kid eating candy until it dissolved in 1990-1991. Brezhnev's 18-year tenure is what made the USSR last as long as it did after Stalin's death.
The Party's problem with trying to remake the empire on a non-cultic, intellectual religion was that the state had to devote great efforts and resources into reasoning and educating its people into the religion, beginning the arduous process in pre-school and never ceasing it.
Cultic tyranny's major efforts are domestic, to maintain the regime and its supporting apparatus. Foreign and military endeavors by cultic dictators tend to do poorly because the apparatchiks are selected and elevated based on their loyalty to the leader, not their basic competence in their duties. So: for Stalin, the Great Patriotic War; for Saddam Hussein the Iran War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War - all bungled jobs by their cultic leaders.
It was not until the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ejected cultism from its ideology that the USSR became genuinely dangerous to the West. Brezhnev was never a cult figure, instead he was the leader of a triumphant, missionary religion. True Communism brought the USSR into nuclear-military-superpower status. It was under the banner of True communism that the USSR sponsored "wars of national liberation" in Asia and Africa and sought to subvert the governments of Europe and many others. Soviet-sponsored terrorist cells flourished in western Europe, such as the Rote Armee Fraktion in West Germany. Blessedly for the West and the world, Brezhnev was not succeeded by young, vigorous true believers but by aged Party-climbing apparatchiks who each had not long to live, until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary. Gorbachev, however, was no true believer and True Communism held no thrall over him. Even before the Berlin Wall was hammered down, he and almost the whole regime were mightily glad to be quit of it.
Intellectually and religiously both, True Communism simply sputtered out, having been built on foundations of sand to begin with. Having exhausted itself by reasoning the people into True Communism, the state never recognized that people who are reasoned into something can be reasoned out (or reason themselves out), and there were more than enough smart Russians to figure out the flaws and inherent, fatal contradictions of the whole, phony system. (The coerced member states of the USSR pretty much never bought into this Russian religion in the first place.)
And so the whole intellectual, rationlistic-but-fragile edifice of True Communism could be brought crashing to ruin by, for example, asking the very simple question, "Who will carry the sewage under communism?"
"Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order.
"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .
"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance, has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .
"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!"
North Korea decades ago ceased to be communist in any sense of the word. Kim Il Sung's objective was never communism, it was dictatorship, a goal he achieved brilliantly. Since then the overriding imperative of the regime has been simply stated and easily enforced: maintain the status quo for the regime no matter the cost in lives and treasure to the rest of the country.
What will change with the apparent succession to the throne of his grandson, Kim Jong Un? Let us hope nothing will. The country is making plenty of trouble in the world now. May its cultic religion remain, for if North Korea's dictator(s) ever get converted to a theology of True Communism, there will really be trouble, indeed.
Update: R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has more.
Dean Kalahar is a Sarasota, Florida high school economics teacher. On his blog, he says his guiding principles include private property rights, free market entrepreneurial capitalism and the U.S. Constitution.
Kalahar recently brought attention to the new Florida high school senior exit exam, which he says will “indoctrinate children into a progressive and revisionist model critical of America.”
So, the USA is an empire? Empires are characterized by exploiting the conquered or dominated, by the imperium enriching itself at the expense of the subjects, if not in absolute terms then in relative.
Well, some empire we turned out to be. Seems that everyone else is getting rich at our expense. This chart shows the balances and nature of American imports compared to exports.
"Everything going out is raw goods. Everything coming in is finished" (source). So the US exports raw materials that our imperial subjects use to make things we want to buy. That is, they take relatively low-value American products, add value and then sell them back to us at a higher price. More of our money flows to the "empire" than flows in. The rest of the world gets rich at our expense. Yet we are the seat of empire!
Stupid Americans - don't even know how to run an empire....
An "extrajudicial execution," that's what many in the international community are now calling the killing of Osama bin Laden. The U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation. According to a U.N. special rapporteur, if the U.S. commandos were under shoot-to-kill orders and did so without offering Bin Laden a "meaningful prospect of surrender," his killing could have been a "cold-blooded execution." ...
What Prof. Rubenfeld surely realizes, though he didn't write, is that the intention of the U.N.'s "investigation" is not actually to determine whether double tapping OBL met some legal criteria. It is to hamstring American might and hamper our efforts against Islamist terrorists. It is to put the United States into a box.
As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, there is no existing international treaty or Convention on warfare that says that an enemy combatant must be given a "meaningful prospect of surrender," or any opportunity at all. Says the professor,
It is pure foolishness to suggest that by going in on the ground, the U.S. turned its soldiers into policemen required to give Bin Laden "due process," place him "under arrest" and read him his Miranda rights.
I remember very well an incident during 1991's Gulf War in which American media excoriated US forces who observed Iraqi tanks heading toward their position and destroyed them with anti-tank missiles. Why the media fury? Because in the breathless words of a reporter whose face I remember well but can't put a name to it, the tanks were moving toward the American position "with their turrets reversed," that is, pointing toward the tanks' rear. So, the reporter continued, "the tanks were surrendering!" She claimed as well that a reversed tank's turret was a recognized sign of surrender.
Which is just stuck on stupid. First, tanks cannot surrender at all, turrets reversed or not. Only soldiers can surrender. If the crews wanted to surrender, all they had to do was dismount their tanks, casts away arms and raise a white flag (an undershirt would do - so many Iraqis used white undershirts to surrender during that war that Saddam finally made it a capital offense in the army even to possess one). Second, because tanks cannot surrender, it does not matter where the main gun is pointing. You just shoot the tank.
There was a later incident involving Saudi troops who accepted the surrender of a small group of Iraqi soldiers, including a handful of Iraqi officers, who did raise a white ensign and proceed on foot toward Saudi soldiers. When the Saudis went out to meet them, the Iraqis raised weapons and shot the Saudis down. Other Saudis immediately gunned down the Iraqis, of course, but several Saudi men lost their lives. From that day on, that unit of Saudis took no prisoners - any Iraqi showing a white flag was shot. And that was both entirely reasonable and legal. Perfidy of surrender is explicitly forbidden in the international conventions, and once perfidy is done, it is justifiable to expect it will be practiced again.
As Prof. Rubenfeld explains, perfidy has been the hallmark of bin Laden's acolytes. They are,
... enemies who flagrantly violate the laws of war, targeting civilians for death, hiding bombs behind burkas, using children as shields or — yes — faking a Red Cross, upraised hands or other symbolic white flags to perpetrate lethal attacks. ... Even if we imagine Bin Laden actually waving a little white sock on a stick in Abbottabad, there would have been no reason for our soldiers to credit these statements. No soldier had a duty to take the slightest risk to his own life because Osama bin Laden promised to be good from now on.
The SEALs were never under any obligation to do anything to bin Laden except shoot him on sight. As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, "If Bin Laden wanted to surrender, he could and should have done it sometime in the last decade. He could not do it by raising his hands during an attack on his compound."
Here are a couple of photos of the two Libyan air force Mirage fighter jets whose pilots landed in Malta Monday rather than obey orders to attack Libyan protesters.
The second photo tells a story. It is a closeup of the rear of an antipersonnel rocket pod. The pod used by the Mirage fighter is the SNEB pod, the name being the acronym of its manufacturer. Each SNEB pod holds either 18 or 19 rockets, depending on the type.
However, blowing up this image reveals rocket-exhaust nozzles in the mid-twenties count; a better view is in this image. So this appears not to be a SNEB pod. But it is an air-to-ground weapon, which only shows how lethal Qaddafi is willing to be against his own people.
And that means he does not consider them his own people at all.
Endnote: STRATFOR's George Friedman says it is "the military and police coming over to the side of the demonstrators, that makes or breaks a revolution." The problem is that in Libya, the military (the soldiers on the ground, anyway) is not an important player.
The Libyan army is one of the poorest and most neglected security sectors in the government. They are poorly fed , equipped, trained and paid. They are mostly ceremonial and Qaddafi does not trust them. So what we have here are private battalions with each of his sons owning the one named for him. So for example his son Khamees has a battalion belonging to him calling it “Kateebit Khamees.” Each is placed in private super huge barracks situated strategically around Tripoli for situations like these. These battalions are well-equipped, trained and paid and are extremely loyal not to the country but to the leader of their battalion.
So to answer your question the regular army is non-compliant and has mostly sided with the people. Remember they are poorly-equipped and so can be of only limited help. However, the battalions belonging to the regime itself are very much in the fight and are killing people wholesale. Still their numbers are not so great to cover this huge country so it seems they are complemented by mercenaries.
Qaddafi & Sons are protected by their own, private army and mercenaries imported from Africa's southern regions. The national army is unlikely to be a major factor in the outcome.
"What we are witnessing today is unimaginable. Warplanes and helicopters are indiscriminately bombing one area after another. There are many, many dead," Adel Mohamed Saleh said.
Saleh, who called himself a political activist, said the bombings had initially targeted a funeral procession.
"Our people are dying. It is the policy of scorched earth." he said. "Every 20 minutes they are bombing."
Asked if the attacks were still happening he said: "It is continuing, it is continuing. Anyone who moves, even if they are in their car they will hit you."
Two high-ranking Libyan air force pilots have who fled to Malta in their aircraft are reported to have told officials they escaped rather than carry out orders to bomb civilians. ...
The two Mirage F1 jets touched down in Malta after the pilots said they urgently needed to refuel and sought emergency clearance to land. The Times of Malta reported on its website the pilots had told officials they flew to the island after being ordered to bomb protesters occupying Libya's second-biggest city of Benghazi.
One report said they had also brought with them two other members of the Libyan armed forces. The pilots – both colonels – said that, after taking off from Okba Ben Nafi base, they flew low through Libyan air space to avoid radar detection.
So some of Qaddafi's fellow rats are fleeing his sinking ship. Well, I suppose a late change of heart is better than none, especially when the changed heart decides not to mass murder its fellow subjects.
Since the demonstrations against Qaddafi began, there are hundreds killed in the streets by Libyan security thugs.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has fled Libya and may be heading for Venezuela, William Hague said today.
The [British] Foreign Secretary said he had seen 'information' that suggests Gaddafi is on his way to the South American country - as Libya was up in flames amid increasingly bloody battles between protesters and security forces.
If true, Qaddafi has left the country in the on-so-tender hands of his son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who "warns of "rivers of blood" in Libya."
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's son warned early Monday that the country faces a bloody civil war if protesters refuse to accept reform offers, in a speech broadcast as gunfire rang out in the capital, saying that his father remained in charge with the army's backing and would "fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet."
But don't worry, Libyans! President Barack Obama, who was so daily vocal about the Cairo demonstrators, is on top of the situation! Uh, right?,
President Obama urged restraint in a written statement Friday on Libya and two other countries, but he hasn't appeared on television to talk about the crisis.
So what does "restraint" mean? "Please, Mr. Qaddafi, don't escalate to killing thousands instead of hundreds?" Or maybe, "Don't kill hundreds, kill only dozens."
So pusillanimous is Obama's statement that Libya's own ambassador to the United States attacked it (same link):
Now here's a situation pretty much without precedent: The Libyan Ambassador to the U.S. just called on the Untied [sic] States to denounce his country's leaders -- and his employers -- more forcefully.
"I want the U.S. to tell the world and to work with the countries who love peace...they have to stop this," Ambassador Ali Ojli said, suggesting that he had resigned his post, in an interview with Al Jazeera English.
"I would never ask us to intervene physically in Libya," he said, but called on the Obama Administration to "take a strong position that what's happening in libya must be stopped now...and to avoid giving the impression to the Arab world that the West "has only a materialist mind -- they don't care about human rights...except when it comes to their own interest."
Mr. Ojli vastly overestimates this administration's capability to understand what is in the United States' interests.
Update: The WaPo finally wades in. It's a pretty good piece, actually, but shrinks from the whole truth here:
Tribal and religious leaders condemned Gaddafi for the attacks against civilians; some urged all Muslims to rise against him. Influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi told al-Jazeera television that he urged any Libyan soldier who has the opportunity to kill Gaddafi - and issued a religious decree to that effect.
"I am issuing a fatwa now to kill Gaddafi," the cleric said. "To any army soldier, to any man who can pull the trigger and kill this man to do so."
Managed to miss mentioning that al-Qaradawi is the public face of the Muslim Brotherhood and that he was cheered by a million Egyptians Feb. 18 in Cairo's Tahrir Square for promising Islamist rule in Egypt.
