How a decade of war zone diplomacy taught me the danger of

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ing-215487

In Charlottesville on Saturday, I witnessed a brutal, calculated act of terror. A young man fueled by hatred drove into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the white supremacist groups that marched through our streets carrying lit torches and armed with assault weapons. As one life has been taken, and many more injured, I am grappling with the fact that the violence was deeply familiar—and should not have been surprising.

I spent most of the past 15 years representing the United States as a foreign service officer, primarily in conflict zones of Africa. I have been in dangerous situations before, and I have felt the eeriness of a usually peaceful city succumbing to racial violence.

Nothing I experienced overseas, however, prepared me to witness it happen in Virginia. I grew up in Lexington, a small town about an hour away from Saturday’s protests, attended the University of Virginia, and I now live in Charlottesville. When I was in the foreign service, I would return to my Virginia home and joke that it was “back to the Shire after adventures in Mordor.”

It turns out the joke was on me.

The turmoil began in the morning, when I joined a group protesting the white supremacists who were ostensibly demonstrating against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. But after hours of protests had produced multiple rounds of fights between the two sides, pepper spray attacks by the Nazis and eventually a declaration of a state of emergency by Governor Terry McAuliffe, the crowds dispersed and I walked with two friends down a narrow side street, thinking the worst was over. A group of anti-racist protesters, in a celebratory mood following what we hoped would be the expulsion of violent hate groups from our town, made their way up the street in the opposite direction, arms touching arms, carrying banners and chanting slogans. As I filmed them walk marching up the street, I suddenly heard the squeal of tires and an engine revving. Whipping around, I saw a car barreling toward the crowd, their faces stricken in terror. That’s when I had the heart-stopping realization that the day was about to get much worse.

What we witnessed Saturday was the terrifying but logical outcome of our escalating, toxic politics of hate. I’ve seen it happen before. Serving in the Central African Republic in 2012, I saw political leaders use hatred and “othering” as instruments to gain political power. As a result, within months, Christians and Muslims, peaceful neighbors for decades, turned against each other. I saw the same thing happen when I served in Burundi, where Hutus and Tutsis made giant strides toward reconciliation after a horrifying history of mass atrocities, only to be manipulated, divided and turned against one another yet again.

America is not Africa. But watching this past election cycle in the U.S., my stomach churned as I saw some of these themes repeating themselves. Looking back now, I can see it was leading toward a cycle of conflict that, once started, is hard to break.

Many Americans like to think that this kind of thing can’t happen here—that American exceptionalism immunizes us from the virulent racism and tribalism that tear apart other countries far, far away. But we’re more susceptible than we’d like to think.

Hey.
I'm European, but have worked in a third world country for a few months, and got to know and visited people from second world countries ... and this feeling of coming home to "the shire" is something I can relate to all too well.

actually, since returning from teaching at a university in a developing country, I'm trying to come to terms with what exactly happened in Europe over the past centuries for us to see the world so fundamentally different- I got into reading history and philosophy, a lot.

I mean, even compared to what I see in the news of the US, here, it feels like ... well, the shire is a great image.

I was wondering if you were familiar with the documentary films of Adam Curtis, particularly "All watched over by machines of loving grace" and his latest "Hypernormalisation" - botha are floating around on the internet, and in them Curtis tries to trace a recent history of the western world, and how we got to see the world the way we do - and why that might be an incorrect image of the world, one that doesn't help us make sense of what's going on....

I'd be interested in your opinion of these films...

I am not familiar with his films, but I will check them out.

One thing to remember about the Shire, the adventurers came home to find Saruman had worked his evil in their absence. I think that is what we are experiencing in the USA.

hmm. growing up in the nineties, I learned that this societiy was basically the best of all possible societies, and that the rest of the world would eventually catch up - it always felt wrong to me.
But I think that is how a lot of our generation, on both sides of the Atlantic grew up - without the acknowledgement, that it was fundamentally important for our aociety that the other parts of the world just will not catch up - imagine Congolese coltan-miners demanding fair wages, or the middle east getting their s**t together and actually set the price of oil themselves -

I think what's troubling me, and maybe you as well, is that history is not over, as Fukuyama wrote in the nineties, but that it has been held on pause in our part of the world, so that our generation now doesn't actually understand what's going on, because we're not used to thinking in terms of historical events, of nations falling apart and stock markets crashing leading to great depressions. And we're slowly catching up that what's going on in African countries has been the norm, for much of human history, and that our "exception" is not as stable as we were told it was, and possibly never was...

I'm really thinking we've been caught up in a certain cycle of arrogance regarding a perceived universality of enlightenment values. It's like we've been steeped in them so long that we can't imagine anyone not thinking the same way we do and when we see examples to the contrary it's easier for us to assume that it's due to a direct provocation - usually imperialism, colonialism, etc.. It's not that any of the later things helped, they clearly didn't, but they're also far from being the whole of the matter or even quite the core of it.

The two mistakes I think we need to reverse out of as soon as possible:

1) Teach formal logic in schools, even as early as elementary, regardless of whether capacity for independent thought makes the populace more difficult to steer or not from the top.

2) Free speech has to return to a sacrosanct status. Short of that whoever's the most brutal and least scrupulous will essentially take all when the presence of ideas in the public sphere start getting legislated.


One thing that I'd have to add, which seems quite germane to the topic, was a series of comments on a debate panel from Brendan O'Neill criticizing millennials as a self-avowed pro-free speech leftist. I think this just goes to show that our problems here are far less left vs. right and far more authoritarian vs. libertarian - the former, ie. authoritarian, side is what's really behind much of the mess that we're trying to find ways to figure out and resolve. What you can make ample note of is that, throughout history, authoritarians have made a game of destabilizing the self-sufficiency of those they aim to take power from. Giving up that power is easy, getting it back is a whole other matter.

I'm not sure if it is that we are not learning history or that so much of what is written is incorrect, false or lies.

I do think there is this strong yearning for stability and that yearning is taught to us as part of the mythology of Western civilization. When it is proven false we are faced with two options, and these are the option regularly faced by religious people when their faith is proven wrong: learn from it or deny it.

We have been living in the "deny it" option probably since the end of WWII.



"authoritarians have made a game of destabilizing the self-sufficiency of those they aim to take power from"

One of the first things colonizing powers had to do was convert the society from self sufficiency to dependency. They did this though instituting a tax payable only in the select currency. This forced the people into a market economy that favors short term profit or long term sustainability.

I know at least in the US our coverage of the WWII is pitifully understated. At the same time with respect to Nazi's as well as what swept across eastern Europe, central, southeast, and east Asia (thanks np) in the way of communist massacre really boggles the minds and imaginations of most people who weren't in it. Really our culture is built on enough frippery that by the time you can understand that sort of thing you aren't fluffy enough to fit in all that well. That last part is part of what scares me a bit, ie. it's culturally paid off for a long time not to think deeply enough to have the kinds of insight one needs to get a grasp on what sort of political problems are resurfacing in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, etc.. and aside from knowing how to call the other side fascist or communist it seems like people don't really have much experience with fleshing out their sociological thinking circuits. It's been bread and circus long enough that our critical thinking skills are a bit decayed.

^^agree.

the bread and circus bit has already been critized by heidegger, the frakfurt school, and then again by the situationists international. they call it "inauthentic" lives and "spectacle". I'd like to add that cultural marxism has had good ideas, that should be considered without prejudice.

The more I look at it - Marx was around to see capitalism at it's dirtiest and worst and to that end I think he himself is owed a degree of mercy. Things in the US like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, seem like some of the better ideas that may have been brought about as benign side effects of the concepts offered though I do find it fascinating that even people like Thomas Paine were suggesting ideas like UBI as early as the late 18th century.

What we have learned though is that the world is truly and insanely complex and our economies, even with boiler-plating for the poor, ultimately need self-correcting feedback loops at some level of their structure. Short of that death-spirals tend to occur that very few human beings can get a grip on (get ten economists in the room like MSNBC in the 2008 crisis for fifteen divergent opinions) and typically whatever sounds like a good response to the situation just pours fuel on the fire - add political obligations to such decisions and the results are even worse.

Marx' analysis of capitalism is great - his conclusion possibly not.
In a similar way, the "cultural marxists" made good points about the individual's alienation to life in a consumer society, and how this inauthentic relationship to the world the consumer inhabits, in which he himself is just a disposable part, manufacturing disposable parts, would drive him to seek a more authentic, less fake reality. .... some try to find it in extreme sports, some in fascism, some in conspiracy theories, some in joining ISIS, and some resort to nihilism.

actually, thinking about it, punk used to be an option, too, but then kt became a lifestyle, a fashion statement.
maybe that is an option: taking the promise of authenticity away from neonazism, by making it a fashion statement for middle-class teenagers- turning the radicalism into radical chique. .... sounds like it could work, but also like a dangerous gamble... and the neonazis would just turn to any of the other promises of authenticity.

Now it is cellphones and youtube.

Western civilization is about producing toxic substitutes. Inauthentic for authentic, as long as people are seeking an authentic experience, they can be sold the toxic substitute. Once some breaks through that, they have the opportunity to live. They are given social media in the place of socializing, music downloads instead of preforming and podcasts instead of real thinking.

There was study done looking at happiness and what they found is that people who seek experiences and knowledge instead of stuff are much happier.

yeah, of course. stuff is like nicotine: you crave a cigarette, while you're smoking a cigarette

here's some food for thought: up until a few hundred, or make that just one hundred years ago, a man learned his trade and then he knew all he needed to know to be able to get through his life.
then general education came along, then secondary, then tertiary, then specialization on top of that, and today, no one can fix the tools he's working with, barely anyone can make his own food, no one can repair his own clothing, because it's cheap disposable fabric and can't be sewn together again.... and at least in my corner of the world, a tax declaration is a weird form of obscure poetry.
so... the more we know, as a society, the more specialization is demanded from the individual, and the less the individual is capable of making decisions on anything outside his own specialization.

that's a problem for democracy.
One side argues option a) is right, the other argues option a) is wrong - and the voter is supposed to decide? the politicians don't know what they're saying themselves, either, - the rulers in this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots of a vast machine they are unable to understand, calling in experts for help.

that last sentence is william burroughs, but I probably quoted it poorly...
it's from this one here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3kz4AUHe1M