The Art of Strategic Forgetting

I read once again yesterday that “the West” finds Iran’s pursuit of nuclear power “unacceptable”. Indeed, every time I read the papers I receive the same message in one form or another. What I seldom, if ever, read is why this pursuit of nuclear power, which has been fully and continuously vetted by the IAEA, is “unacceptable” (and thus apparently deserving of imminent attack) when Israel, which is less than 1000 kilometers to the West, faces no opprobrium for having a large, fully-formed and completely uninspected nuclear arsenal. Search as I might (and believe me I regularly do!) in the US and Western European press, I never get an answer to this question. In fact, I never even see the question posed at press conferences, on op-ed pages or in interviews with leading politicians and so-called “strategic thinkers”.

When I ponder this situation, I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Kundera´s Unbearable Lightness of Being when members of Czechoslovakia´s leadership class disappear a from official photos as they fall out of favor with the Communist Party. By expunging the image of the person in question, the
Party leadership sought to control the public’s perception of the past. Why? Because they understood all too well that the ability to mobilize the population for large-scale social enterprises is rooted in “the people’s” understanding of ¨history”.

This management of the past can be exercised in two basic ways. The first is to actively provide narratives which exalt the heroic solidarity of the population in the face of a real or perceived external threat. The second is to disappear, or, more effectively still, relegate to the fringe of public consciousness, elements of the collective´s past which leadership class has deemed to be either indifferent or hostile (in terms of their psychic triggering effect) to the set of “forward-looking” goals they have prepared for the society.

Perhaps the most common -and all too often justified- critique of military planners that they tend to devise strategies based their comprehension (such as it is) of “the last war” rather than a an understanding of the challenges they are likely to face in the “next” conflict.

The same might be said of those whose job it is to study and explain the wherefores and whys of social and political thought.

The totalitarian systems of the mid-20th century awakened the US and Western Europan intellectual elites to the enormous (usually destructive) power of the first type of “memory management” referred to above. Though the great sectors of the population are (as we have seen in recent years) still quite from susceptible to the appeal of this proactive, binarily-conceived chauvinism, professional cultural analysts are generally pretty good at seeing this type of stuff for what it is.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the social upheavals that occurred between 1968 and 1974 in most Western nations were largely about the refusal of the rising elites to accept the rhetorical blunt instruments that had shaped their fathers’s view of the world. They understood all too well how proactive propaganda, that is, the type which openly exalts the intrinsic goodness of one tribe over the other, could make people do things they would very much regret the morning after. Imbued with this consciousness, they sent the message that they would were not willing to mimic and amplify the tropes provided their elders with a sense of ontological certainty

This resolve of the rising elites to “just say no” to the language and practice of ethnocentric dehumanization deeply alarmed the major social and political stakeholders of the Western world. Their first reaction was incredulity. (Think of the dazed and rageful countencances of both Nixon and DeGaulle at their respective nadirs).

But this this momentary punchdrunkenness soon gave way to careful long-term planning. the upshot of which was to shift the focal point of “consensus management” from a primary reliance on the active creation of memory” to the more “passive” practice of selectively eliminating factually or ideologically incompatible elements the past.

When it comes to detecting and denouncing this second type of memory management, the track record of progressive Western intellectuals has been considerably less stellar.

The success of the conservative counterattack upon the challenges posed to their hegemony--and the concommitant failure of intellectual wachdogs to detect it and defend against it—was, and is, their understanding of the essentially oedipical nature of much countercultural anger. That is, they understood that the real drive of most (though certainly not all) activists was (and is) not so much to change the relations of power in the world, but rather to have their “fathers”, survivors of the twin cataclysms of Depression and World War, challenges of a dimension they realized they would probably never face, take their ideas and their relatively frivolous lifestyles more seriously (Lest there be any doubt about the ongoing centrality of Daddy anxiety among those born between 1945 and 1965 consider just how much mileage the patently stupid and cruel Dick Cheney has gotten among the now baby boomer dominated press with his pasty impersonation mid-twentieth century gravitas)

This intuition led to a key change of tactics. We all know that one should not engage a rebellious teenager frontally. Why? Because to repeated invocation of our “adult” convictions is, to him or her, little more than an invitation to rebellious refutation. Skilled parents understand that what rebellious teenagers crave more than anything else is a sense of peer to peer dialogue. They also know that granting it to them will lead to a fateful loss of authority. The solution?

Provide them with simulacrum of peer-to-peer comity, that is, engage them in “free” dialogue, but on only after one has carefully and pre-emptively delimited parameters of the discussion. Doing so well, requires one to master the art of disuasory rhetoric, verbal codes which insistently but unobtrusively inform the interlocutor he or she is approaching the outer limits of the accepted semantic field and is thus in danger of falling into the abyss. Faced with the persistent application of this discursive method, the young person, avid to preserve his tenuous status as a burgeoning “person-in-the-culture” and the remaing reserves of parental affection, eventually begins to self-police his previously unbridled challenges to authority.

All of which brings us back to the Middle East and the strange invisibility of the Israeli nuclear program in our daily chronicles. The last thing that Israeli elites and the American political and social establishment that supports them with undying fealty want is a free and logical (in the sense of adhering to basic canons of distributive justice) discussion of the nuclear balance of power in the region. They know is that it is a discussion they cannot win. How could anyone with a minimal sense of fairness say that it is okay for one country which has repeatedly invaded its neighbors and appropriated considerable amounts of their territory to maintain a large and completely unregulated nuclear program while another in close proximity who has never invaded anyone and who has, moreover submitted their very nascent program to unstinting international scrutiny, cannot?

The solution? Engage in a putatively “free” discussion while taking great care to establish and enforce through disuasory rhetoric the parameters of “thinkable thought” on the issue. This campaign has been carried out with such efficacy and thoroughness by Israel and its US-based propaganda infrastructure that most reporters in the US and Western Europe, fearful of of losing your hard earned reputations as “culturally serious” people, no longer even engage the question. Leaving aside what this tells us about the intellectual intrepidness and collective emotional development of the press corps, this means that, for the effective purposes of public debate, Israel’s nuclear weapons do not exist!

An example of Post-‘68 consensus management at its best! Don’t engage, ignore... Ignore with a menacing passion that makes your enemies ( both real and potential) abandon the drive to affirm what they once knew to be palpably true

Depressing? Yes indeed. But if there is one thing but that Kundera’s masterful novel teaches us, or at least me, is that officially and semi-officially-induced acts of disappearance are never as final as their intellectual authors assume them to be. Though no longer the prestigious physician he once was, the book’s protagonist continues in a to make love and dream, and in his hedonistic way, seek to engender solidarity. His acts did not magically right the wrongs of his time. But they did offer the suggestion that tyrannically induced absurdities can also be worn down by those that refuse to accept the perverse “logic” that undergirds them.

We may not “see” Israeli nuclear weapons, but those living in their brutal shadow certainly do. And guess what? They could care less about being viewed as being “unserious” or “anti-semitic” by our opinion-making class. They are thus free in a way most of our pundits cannot even begin to fathom. No amount of oedipal shaming wil make Hasran Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah or his counterparts in Hamas, or for that matter, Hugo Chavez, go away. And this failure to cede in the face of pressure from their “elders” in the first world actively inspires millions of others with nothing left to lose to do begin doing the same.

This presents a huge problem for the US leadership class. The question now is what will they do as they realize (as the more enlightened among them already have) that “strategic forgetting”, the Plan B of the post World War II consensus management apparatus, has also apparently reached the end of its effective life cycle. Wilth no plan C in sight, what will happen? Will they go even further down the road than they already have in the last seven years with the use of raw violence?

Much will depend on the on the extent to which Obama has resolved his wn oedipal anxieties. So far, the returns are not terribly encouraging. While some of his rhetoric hs given us reason to believe he wants to break once and for all with mentality of the Post-War imperial structure, his actions say something very different. He still seems to a considerable need (so typical our generation) to seek approval of the “wise men” of the establishment, the very fools who in the last quarter century torn apart our social fabric and run the ship of state into the ground.