April 27, 2003

HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE APPLIED TO MEGALOMANIACAL TYRANTS: THE CASE OF NORTH KOREA

        Now that our vacation from history during the Clinton years has ended, it is worth noting the limits of the ex-President's Oxford bull session, therapeutic approach to the business of nations. Like, an old vinyl record stuck in a groove, Mr. Clinton continues, post 9-11, in his logorrheic insistence that we should empathically talk, talk, talk with foes and friends at the UN, recognize why we have caused ourselves to be disliked by so many, and demonstrate our willingness to acknowledge our guilt and express our heartfelt mea culpas. What if, however, built deeply into human nature is the capacity for irrational envy and hatred, and what if this is not subject to reasoned, empathic modification? What if all the talk merely feeds the belief that action will never be taken? We now know that the years and years of UN talk helped Saddam consolidate and expand his megalomaniacal criminal enterprise masquerading as a government. The UN is itself a huge fraud in which thugocracies assault democracies while demanding an equality they withold from their own peoples. Talk, followed by treaties, followed by Jimmy Carter, followed by more treaties has helped North Korea become a nuclear power.
        Horsefeathers believes the proper application of military force can serve as a sobering dose of reality, helping to destroy the shared utopian fantasies of fanatics, tyrants, thugs and liberals alike.
        Liberalism in its classical form was a philosophy that rested on a clear-eyed view of human nature. As late as the 1950's when Lionel Trilling wrote The Liberal Imagination, it had not yet become a utopian faith. Trilling's liberalism was rooted in Freud's view of human nature, which accorded full weight to irrationalism. The 1960's ushered in a new kind of liberalism for the Clinton generation, closer to John Lennon's philosophy--"all you need is love"-- than to Freud's. In this new feel-your-pain culture it was assumed that such primitive, destructive emotions and drives as envy, hatred and murderous rage would succumb to empathy. If people seem to harbor irrational grievances and seem to hate us, it is our task to understand the unfairness of their victimization and correct it. After all, rage can only be the product of social injustice and unfairness. Egalitarianism would eliminate irrationalism. In the words of the hoodlums in West Side Story: "We're depraved on account of we're deprived." Many of us--call us neo-conservatives--realized long ago that our classic liberalism was no longer the philosophy of the Democratic party. Liberalism had become a secular faith resting on a naive and utopian view of human nature. It was not subject to the kind of critical thinking Trilling brought to it in the supposedly conformist 1950's. The attacks of 9-11 seem to have dealt a blow to the liberal faith of many and awakened them from their utopian dreams. We are learning, as David Brooks recently wrote, that there are some people out there who are just plain "batshit crazy", and in their crazy envy and hatred simply want to destroy us. As in dealing with your average hospitalized violent psychotic, talking with such people, showing we care, only inflames their sense of grievance. The most effective way to deal with them seems to be to forcefully subdue them first, or as Dr. Johnson said to a friend who urged understanding as a way of dealing with violent attacks: "If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards."
        To put it simply, there are whole cultures, as well as individuals, who are stark, raving mad. And you don't have to be Arab to qualify. North Korea's current leader is one of them. Just dip into the official North Korean Central News Agency's publications to get a taste of this. You will learn that Kim Jong Il and his late father Kim Il Sung are the greatest figures in human history. The blood curdling, bellicose ravings and threats issuing from Kim Jong Il resemble nothing so much as the rantings of the late Iraqi Information Minister--Baghdad Bob.
        Psychotic individuals have one thing in common with wordsmith intellectuals and diplomats of the sort now counseling more talk, more effort to address North Korea's grievances: they both overvalue words. Many Arabs clearly believed the firebreathing words of defiance and threat issuing from their spokespersons--even as they were being destroyed by the U.S. military. Now they have been forced to give up their bizarre fantasies and begin the long painful task of accepting the reality of their failed cultures and polities.
        The Horsefeathers doctrine maintains 1)that the threat and the use of force is a better means for dealing with deranged individuals and nations than is talk. 2)When force is used, it should never be followed by apologies and promises not to use it again. Instead, Mr. Kim Jong Il should be shown a video of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, tracking down a car in the Libyan desert and placing a missile in its gas tank. Mr. Rumsfeld should send him (cc. Mr. Basher Assad) a personally autographed copy of the video we saw of an American guided missile flying under a bridge in Iraq to blow up a hidden military vehicle while sparing the bridge. And 3)with these videos Mr. Kim Jong Il should be informed that his natural allies, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are now, very likely, small dust particles being sifted by our scientists for traces of DNA. Even a megalomaniacal dictator will find his mind concentrated wonderfully by the very real prospect of being blown to smithereens in a fortnight.

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