[Peace-discuss] Fun and Excitement of Civilization Wars

[Morton K. Brussel]

The psychology of our warriors, desk and otherwise:

Published on Sunday, February 17, 2008 by Salon
The Fun and Excitement of Civilization Wars (Fought from Afar)
by Glenn Greenwald
In response to my post on Friday pointing out that nobody outside of  
the handful of Muslim-obsessed faux-warriors is moved any longer by  
the Government’s endless exploitation of Terrorism to secure more and  
more unchecked power, National Review’s Mark Steyn said:

He may have a point: It’s psychologically exhausting being on  
permanent Orange Alert, especially as the reason for it recedes  
further and further in the rear-view mirror. A lot of Americans are  
“over” 9/11, and, while the event had a lingering emotional power,  
the strategic challenge it exposed has not been accepted by much of  
the electorate.

The truth is exactly the opposite. There is nothing more  
psychologically invigorating than the belief that you are staring  
down the Greatest and Most Evil Enemy Ever in History, courageously  
waging glorious war for all that is Good and Just in the world.  
Nothing produces more pulsating feelings of excitement and nobility  
like convincing yourself that you are a Warrior defending Western  
Civilization from the greatest threat it has ever faced, following in  
— even surpassing — the mighty footsteps of the Greatest Generation  
and the Warrior-Crusaders who came before them. For those who crave  
and glorify (though in their lives completely lack) acts of warrior  
courage, play-acting the role of the intrepid Warrior is uniquely  
satisfying. That’s why nothing can fill the bottomless spare time of  
bored, aimless adolescents like sitting in front of a computer  
commanding vast armies and destructive military weapons, deployed  
against cunning, scary and evil enemies. That’s why the Mark Steyns  
of every generation create such Enemies, becasue they are purposeless  
and aimless without them.

Steyn deeply flatters himself into believing that only he and his  
tragically small (and shrinking) band of warrior-comrades can bear  
the “psychologically exhausting” burden of defending The West and its  
freedoms. Sadly, most Americans — he says — are too weak, too  
brittle, just not up to the task of bearing the heavy burden of  
prosecuting the war against the omnipotent jihadi super-villains.

But not Steyn and friends. They are society’s freedom fighters, the  
Progeny of Churchill, Patten and Napoleon, bravely and tenaciously  
manning the barricades of Civilization itself. They’ll find a  
powerful and protective Warrior who leads them; advocate all sorts of  
fascinating technologies and complex spying schemes to wage the War;  
spend hour upon hour chatting about battles and tactics and  
strategies; and endlessly depict themselves as besieged though  
tenacious. Far from being “psychologically exhausting,” convincing  
yourself that you are all that — as Steyn and comrades explicitly do  
— is to bathe oneself in self-affirming and self-glorifying virtue.  
Nothing could ever compete with such glory when it comes to  
psychological fulfillment.

Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature  
And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described the fun, entertainment  
and deep psychological fulfillment which Wars against Supremely Evil  
Enemies provide to many who don’t have to fight them:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the  
provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce  
any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the  
amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own  
fleets and armies . . . . They are commonly dissatisfied with the  
return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a  
thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer  
continuance of the war.

One finds vivid illustrations of the twisted syndrome Smith  
identified in most of Steyn’s war cheerleading comrades, especially  
its leaders. From Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker profile of Joe  
Lieberman:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was  
in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his  
wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,”  
in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever  
the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his  
fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

Far from being “psychologically exhausting,” the Wars against the  
Most-Evil-Enemies-Ever that take place inside the head of the Mark  
Steyns and Joe Liebermans are exhilarating and fun, and they provide  
the weak, purposeless and powerless with their only opportunity to  
feel strong, purposeful and powerful. Here, for instance, was the  
response from Steyn’s warrior-comrade, Andy McCarthy to my post on  
Friday and his response to what Steyn wrote:

Glenn Greenwald? Yawn. Wake me up when he’s interviewed some of the  
people trying to kill us and spent a few weeks with people maimed in  
terrorist attacks (I’d have spoken with the dead, but they were  
unavailable).

Look at how personally vital — how indispensable — the War of  
Civilizations is to McCarthy, to his identity and sense of purpose.  
He doesn’t even need to go anywhere near combat, or fight in the Wars  
he cheers on. He still gets to be on the front line — a gruff, hard- 
nosed, no-nonsense veteran-warrior who has been in the trenches, who  
has stared down the ugly realities of the Civilization Wars and —  
despite it all — still soldiers on. Think of the emptiness and loss  
of purpose if the Threat from the Enemy were exaggerated and all of  
that faded away. This is why our nation’s faux-warriors can never be  
reasoned with. It’s why their greatest fear is having the Threats  
from Our Enemies be put into rational perspective, alongside all the  
other garden-variety manageable threats we face. To argue that they  
are exaggerating and melodramatizing the Enemy and the threat is to  
take away from them that which is most personally important to them.

Just consider the grandiose, baroque rhetoric they employ. What they  
are defending — today’s U.S. — is not merely good. It’s not even  
great. It’s not even the greatest thing there is on the Earth right  
now. No — it’s much more grand than that: it’s the Greatest Country  
ever to exist on the Earth in all of human history. That’s what  
they’re defending; that’s the magnitude of the burden they bear, the  
incomparable importance of the crusade they lead.

Conversely, the Enemy they are facing down (from a safe distance) is  
not merely threatening or evil or scary or formidable. No, it’s much,  
much more than that. This is the greatest Enemy that exists on the  
planet, the most cunning and nefarious and evil force the world has  
ever seen — not just now, but for all of human history. There is  
nothing remotely like the depravity and power of this particular  
Enemy — and there never has been. Ever. Everything these faux- 
warriors face and defend is superlative; there has never, ever been a  
war like the one they are waging. None of the old rules apply. This  
is all unique, unknown, the first and most important of its kind.

What’s most confounding about all of this is that they completely  
evade the most basic instruments of self-evaluation. All they have to  
do is look back and realize that every generation, in every country,  
is plagued by factions suffering from the same self-glorifying  
delusions — that they alone are the Brave Warriors willing to engage  
in the Most Important Battle for Civilization Ever. None of it’s new.  
Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described exactly this psychological  
affliction in his famous Harper’s essay, The Paranoid Style in  
American Politics:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic  
terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole  
political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning  
the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.

Shouldn’t basic self-awareness compel the faux-warriors who read that  
to at least entertain the thought: “Maybe my belief that I’m waging  
an apocalyptic War of Civilization against The Uniquely Evil Enemy is  
grounded in a psychological need, one that is extremely common if I  
look to the past, rather than an objective assessment or any sort of  
political belief or ideological conviction. Maybe I’m exaggerating  
the threat posed in order to inflate my own importance and give  
myself a sense of purpose and power as I convince myself that I’m  
waging all-important (though risk-free) war.” Over the past couple  
decades, prior to the Bush Era, the people who needed the sort of  
psychological fulfillment that comes from prancing around as  
Hofstadterian faux-warriors waging Civilization Wars obtained their  
fulfillment from playing board and video games or, at worst, dressing  
up on the weekend in camouflage costumes and — rather than playing  
golf or going fishing — marched around in militia formations, primed  
to defend the nation from Janet Reno and her squadrons of hovering  
U.N. black helicopters. It was equally pathetic, but at least the  
damage was minimal.

But the 9/11 attacks and ensuing events catapulted their paranoia and  
powerlessness syndromes from clownish sideshow to dominant political  
faction. And their fevered, self-serving fantasies have empowered the  
Federal Government beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, created a  
completely out-of-control domestic surveillance state, subordinated  
even the rule of law to the lawless dictates of Security State  
officials, and dismantled long-standing constitutional protections  
and political values so basic that they were previously beyond debate.

All of that is bad enough. But listening to the authors of these  
events martyr themselves by claiming that their crusades are  
“psychologically exhausting” is really too much to bear. The reason  
they pursue those crusades endlessly, and will continue to pursue  
them until stopped, is precisely because the only thing they find  
“psychologically exhausting” is the prospect of having to live  
without their Supreme War of Civilization, whereby they defend the  
greatest things ever, under siege from the most Evil villains ever,  
with them — and only them — courageous and tough enough to “do what  
needs to be done” to triumph.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights  
litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times  
Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush  
administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His  
second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.
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