Remora

The New Statesman, "rather provocatively" focuses, this week, on American Imperialism. Ah, that phrase! We at Limited Inc used to let it roll off our tongue with a certain jouissance (and we use to let jouissance roll off our tongue with a certain frisson, don't you know? and so we pleasantly descended, on angel wings, the sub-Barthesian ladder, full of grad school certainty and hot air). And it is still a useful phrase, but we can't but take issue with the New Statesman's take on the Cold War:

"In this issue (pages 18-19), we publish a map, showing US interventions overseas since 1945 and entitled, rather provocatively, "The original rogue state". It is not an exhaustive catalogue. It does not show some of the more recent examples such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq; it subsumes Cambodia and Laos into Vietnam; it has no room for El Salvador or Cyprus. A similar map, published to show Soviet interventions up to 1989, would have highlighted many of the same areas (Angola and Afghanistan, for example) but, where Latin America features heavily on our map, the Soviet version would focus more on eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

"Almost any New Statesman reader would prefer to live in a world where America, rather than the Soviet Union, won the cold war. We may think that, if the latter had won, Moscow, Leningrad (as it is no longer called) and Minsk would have been the victims of terrorist attacks, not New York and Washington. The truth is that a Soviet-dominated world would have been so tightly controlled as to make terrorism extremely difficult and, as the control would have extended to the media, much less rewarding in its psychological and propaganda effects."

The "truth" about the Soviet dominated world has been out for some time; far from being Orwell's vision of an anthive, it was a world of factory workers drinking the cleaning fluid and criminal clans making the economy work, when it worked. There is an odd prejudice afloat in the world, shared by left and right alike, that totalitarian regimes are somehow better at violence, better at "domination." And so it is thought that democracies, going to war, have to towel off the democratic mascara and really get top down and Patton-ish, censor the press, throw the thousand or so "foreigners" in jail (as is being done right now -- see earlier post), etc. Well, though dictatorships are more violent, it is a different thing to say they are better at violence. Sure, Eichman made the trains run on time, but the US won the war and held an election in the midst of it, as well as completing it with another president than the one who started it. In other words, success in politics has to be looked at in terms of social reproduction, and democracy has been pretty ace at that, even if, as in the election our present POTUS stole, it is imperfect. That Churchill could be defeated in the election right after the war is a possibility folded into the expectations of those who fought the war. The vicious, immoral Vietnam war affected the overthrow of those who designed it, in this country; the stupid Afghanistan war pretty much broke the whole design of the Soviet empire. The Cold War was a peculiar war in many ways, but none more than this -- it put the systems themselves in competition. It was the way the militaries were built up, rather than a military clash, which decided the "war." There is a random element in real war, military genius, which makes it problematic to identify victory with some sort of systematic superiority of the winning party. Napoleon could have prevailed at Waterloo, but it is much harder to envision Brezhnev prevailing with his gasping system over one that was opening up such a clear and increasing lead in all the technologies that counted.