One of us has spent a great
deal of time at elite universities and observed closely how foreign policy experts there are ‘trained’, which is exactly the right verb. Like Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops supposedly carried Field Marshal batons in their dusty packs as an incentive, these eager folks seem to lug Henry Kissinger’s nameplate in their tote bags, for he is their model. Kissinger is an academic who attained access to intoxicating power, even if it was under the disgraced Richard Nixon. Some well-trained stooges, we observed, appear in the news today. Academic life, at its best, urges bright young minds fearlessly to question received wisdoms, and some bold spirits still do. ‘Training’ though, is what is needed to perform obedient tricks, not to upset groupthink shibboleths. But for avid careerists it is the safety of orthodoxies they hanker for, hide behind, and zealously defend. Ambition of this low cunning kind is a threat to democracy because it smothers all other values.
So these dedicated, if stunted, personnel grimly persecute Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and just about every potential dissident in the US, despite trampling civil liberties they are sworn to uphold. At the very top rungs, such as cabinet posts or NSA director, they lie brazenly to Congress about domestic surveillance or threats abroad. In the middle rungs, as petty managers, they dream up soothing tales to camouflage brutal and illegal activities. In the bottom rungs, as cops or soldiers or spooks, they harass, bully, torture, and kill. Recall those gleeful soldiers in the leaked Apache helicopter guffawing as they sprayed high calibre shells at scattering civilians. Think of records we have of money manipulators sneering at ordinary citizens they swindled in California or Ireland. Why not? No one is stopping them, at least as yet.
All these self-selecting mediocrities for all their outward swagger lust for approved frameworks suited to serving sociopathic bosses in the Pentagon and Wall Street. They believe that they — born wisely into the right social class — are entitled to rule or, if less luckily born, to be proudly obsequious sidekicks to power. You can’t get into trouble doing the boss’s bidding, or so they (and Nuremburg defendants before them) reckoned. These folks would get incandescently indignant if you actually called them cynical. They see themselves as realists, even if they must grossly distort or deny reality abroad and at home to accomplish their ends. Their twin credo is that might makes right (realism) and the market is just (neoliberalism). If their government chief is violating the US Constitution, then the Constitution goes overboard. If their bank or brokerage firm recklessly is blowing economic bubbles, these functionaries go along like prized team players. Anyway, they know their victims will be forced to bail them out. The game is rigged and it is only realistic to play by the real rules. So they can hardly believe it when anybody anywhere fights back. It is outrageous to resist and must therefore be treason. So they reason.
These connivers populate Obama’s administration, run the intelligence (secret police) agencies and pour into security and police forces. You see, the first thing any aspiring cop learns is not to mess with influential people, who have means of eluding justice and punishing mere mortals who annoy them. The better part of valour is to pick instead on people lacking resources, to roust the ‘lower’ 80 percent of Americans who own only seven percent of American wealth, and better yet hound the 40 percent who own nothing or are in debt ‘in the land of the free and the home of the brave’.
Nothing is as bitterly amusing to hear as high-placed flacks talk about the virtue of being realistic when the whole point of acquiring power for them is to escape reality. Power trumps reality and morality, at least in the short term. This is what a smug Bush administration official meant a decade ago when he burbled that Bush and his aides were brash “reality-makers”. That maniacal regime led the US into a heinous needless war in Iraq that benefited cronies, and no one else. They adore ‘might is right’ realism because it allows them to dispense with any trouble from their already featherweight consciences.
Democracy is rightly cherished because when it works it enables ordinary citizens to get their needs met, their rights enforced, and to check the otherwise boundless greed of scheming elites. Power, unchecked, is a Dorian Gray portrait putrefying in the locked attic. Power is stunningly ugly viewed up close without rosy lenses. Power renders anyone ugly who has too much of it, which is a truth Tolkien got right in Lord of the Rings. Elites never cease angling for unhampered power, which they have nearly achieved in the US over the last four decades. Power then recruits public relations flacks and compliant reporters to conceal its real features, to apply cosmetics.
The NSA revelations mean that controllers of information can blackmail anyone to do their bidding: you, your neighbour, political representatives, even presidents. Total surveillance is the charnel house of democracy. The ambitious mediocrities in charge of public and private sectors are all too inclined to abuse this information unless they are stopped in their tracking by mass organized opposition. This fight is winnable. These modern apparatchiks can switch views overnight when the wind blows the other way, and even take credit for it. Much of the notorious police force in Spain during the Civil War, for example, served the left wing Republican government (and as smoothly readjusted to Francisco Franco). Yes, there are shortfalls and hypocritical masks in any democracy. The problem is dangerously out of hand when elites no longer care when the mask slips.
The writers are authors of No Clean Hands and Parables of Permanent War