"Nhà Nước là một cảnh giới (não trạng), chính tự bản thân nó, nó là não trạng bầy đàn. Vì như thế, nó chỉ có thể bị lật đổ trong trận chiến của não trạng" (The State is a state of mind; it is the herd mindset itself. As such, it can only be overthrown in the battleground of the mind. (Não Trạng Bầy Đàn- The Herd Mind))===
Quí vị có thể đồng ý hoặc không đồng ý về bất cứ một định nghĩa nào đó về bất cứ một sự vật, sự việc, hay một ý niệm, quan niệm nào đó. Vấn đề thuộc lãnh vực ẤN TƯỢNG CÁ NHÂN. Và quí vị cũng MONG muốn, thậm chí kêu gào lý giải, biểu tình v.v để mong tất cả mọi người đồng ý với mình khi một sự việc bất hạnh xảy ra cho bản thân của quí vị.
Chúng ta có vô số giới hạn để định nghĩa một thể chế, xã hội về tự do, hạnh phúc, nhân quyền v.v Nhưng quí vị nhận định như thế nào về một xã hội mà quân đội cảnh sát bắn giết 100 người thường dân vô tội chỉ trong một tháng, mà không ai chịu trách nhiệm hậu quả, trừ chính nạn nhân và gia đình thân nhân họ?
Dĩ nhiên câu trả lời thường nghe là: "tôi không biết hết chi tiết, chắc phải có vấn đề gì đó" và một cái nhún vai. Hợp lý thôi. Và cũng bình thường thôi. Nhưng khi những "hợp lý" và "bình thường" này xảy ra cho chính bản thân, gia đình quí vị, thì quí vị sẽ làm gì nghĩ gì? Có phải quí vị cũng mong muốn, thậm chí kêu gào lý giải , biểu tình v.v để mong tất cả mọi người đồng ý cùng phẫn nộ với "bất hạnh", "bất công" đã xảy ra cho chính quí vị?
Cuối cùng cái bảng giá trị đo lường nền tự do, dân chủ, nhân quyền, pháp trị v.v nó nằm ở đâu? Quí vị đánh giá mức độ tự do nhân phẩm con người của xã hộin quí vị ở danh từ tên hiệu hay bằng chính đời sống của quí vĩ? Quí vị có đánh giá xã hội theo những gì xảy ra không chỉ riêng trên bản thân mà còn xảy ra với mọi người khác không? Quí vị định nghĩa XÃ HỘI theo kinh nghiệm của riêng quí vị hay là của mọi người chung quanh?
Ngay từ ngữ XÃ HỘI, quí vị có thật sự hiểu nó là gì?
Một xã hội, một nền chính trị, mà cả trăm người dân bị bắn chết vô tội vạ, và cái nền chính trị đã để nó xảy ra ở một mức độ gần như thường trực không giải quyết, thì quí vị định nghĩa cơ chế tam quyền phân lập như thế nào? Ý niệm công lý ra sao?"
Và trên hết tất cả, NHÂN QUYỀN, NHÂN PHẨM là của riêng quí vị NHƯ LÀ ĐẶC QUYỀN của MỘT GIAI CẤP, GIỚI NGƯỜI, hay là của tất cả mọi người trong XÃ HỘI ?
Cái danh xưng CỘNG HÒA, CỘNG SẢN, DÂN CHỦ, PHÁP TRỊ v.v có ý nghĩa gì hơn thực trạng xảy ra cho bản thân quí vị, mọi người chung quanh trong XÃ HỘI QUÍ VỊ.
Tây ban Nha, vừa "thông qua" đạo luật phạt nặng những ai biểu tình, phát biểu phản đối nhà nước!
Việt Nam, Trung Quốc, Arap Seoud, Âu Mỹ Úc v.v cái tên khác nhau, nhưng cùng là ĐỊNH CHẾ QUYỀN CHÍNH, và người dân cũng khác nhau, nhưng đau khổ, tù tội, đàn áp, bức hại, bắn giết cũng chỉ là một mà thôi.
Người viết đã quan sát và chiêm nghiệm nhiều đàn vật, bầy thú, chưa có bầy nào, đàn nào căm ghét lẫn nhau, tàn sát bất kể thành phần trải dài xuyên suốt lịch sử không dứt, và nhất là hãnh diện, xiển dương, thích thú và thống khoái những hành xử thù nhau, tàn diệt nhau, càng ngày càng tinh vi tồi tệ như bầy người đã và đang tiến hành với chính họ!
Nguyên nhân từ đâu? Có lẽ Phật, Lão, Jesus lên tiếng vì biết và hiểu cái nguyên nhân này. Và hôm nay những Người Phi Quyền Chính đã hiểu thấu chăng?
Tùy quí vị vậy!
NHÂN CHỦ
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More Than 100 People Were Killed By Police In March Alone: State Terror w/in US Societyby Christina Coleman | April 6, 2015 7:00 pm
According to the website KilledByPolice.net[1], more than 1[2]00 people died at the hands of law enforcement[3] in the month of March.
The figure, which comes 31 days after the release of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing report, averages out to more than three people killed in America each day by police officers.
Out of the 111 people who died during police encounters, the majority have been unarmed men of color. Many of the victims were mentally ill. And a number were both, Think Progress[4] points out.
Despite an ongoing national conversation surrounding officer misconduct, racial profiling, and use of excessive force, the numbers seem to be steadily increasing.
In fact, March saw 36 more deaths at the hands of police than the previous month.
And if recently proposed legislation to withhold the identity of officers involved in a shooting[5] is any indication, the law is leaning away from citizens and aiding police departments in their historically non-transparent practices.
From the American Civil Liberties Union[6]:
The public needs legitimate data collection practices that promote transparency and accountability when police use unreasonable force. We need something a little more thoughtful than a Google search to give us the stats on the number of police shootings — fatal or nonfatal — in any given period of time.
As the ACLU explained to the task force, data collection and reporting is the easiest single thing any police department can do starting today. And it will offer the best depiction of what policing in the 21st century looks like.
Both the ACLU and the task force recommend data collection on a range of police and citizen encounters — from stops and arrests to nonfatal and fatal police shootings. “Policies on use of force,” the task force writes, “should also require agencies to collect, maintain, and report data to the Federal Government on all officer-involved shootings, whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death.” And data must be inclusive not just of race and gender but disability as well.As of April 2, two individuals have been killed by police — one in California and another in New York — according toKilledByPolice[7]. The circumstances surrounding the deaths was not specified.
For a list of those killed by law enforcement in the month of March, including Anthony Hill, Tony Robinson, andBrandon Jones, see here[8].
By Christina Coleman
http://chicagodefender.com/2015/04/02/more-than-100-people-were-killed-by-police-in-the-month-of-march/
Endnotes:
KilledByPolice.net: http://www.killedbypolice.net/
1: http://newsone.com/tag/police-brutality/
00 people died at the hands of law enforcement: http://newsone.com/tag/police-brutality/
Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/01/3641143/use-of-force-incidents-march/
withhold the identity of officers involved in a shooting: http://newsone.com/3103085/bill-postpone-releasing-identities-of-cops-who-shoot-people/
American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform-free-speech-racial-justice/over-100-people-were-killed-police-march-have-po
KilledByPolice: http://www.killedbypolice.net/
here: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/01/3641143/use-of-force-incidents-march/
Source URL: http://www.4thmedia.org/2015/04/more-than-100-people-were-killed-by-police-in-the-month-of-march/
==
Săn Bắn Người bằng Máy Từ Xa -Hunting Humans by Remote Control
Posted By Tom Engelhardt On April 7, 2015 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized |
No CommentsOriginally posted at
TomDispatch.
Drones seemed to come out of nowhere,
sexy as the latest iPhones and armed to kill. They were all-seeing eyes in the sky (“a constant stare,” as drone promoters liked to say) and surgically precise in their ability to deliver death to evildoers. Above all, without pilots in their cockpits, they were, in terms of the human price of war (at least when it came to the lives that mattered to us), cost free. They transformed battle into a video-game experience, leaving the “warriors” – from pilots to
generals – staring at screens. What could possibly go wrong?
As it happened, so much went wrong. It often proved hard for the drone operators to tell what exactly they were seeing on those video feeds of theirs and mistakes were regularly made. In addition, drones turned out to
kill with a remarkable
lack of discrimination, while putting
whole rural populations that fell under Washington’s robotic gaze into
a state of what, if they had been American soldiers, we would have called PTSD. Worse yet, as recent events in Yemen indicate, drones proved remarkably effective weapons not in staunching terror outfits but in spreading terror, and so became powerful recruitment tools for extremist groups. In rural societies repeatedly attacked by the grimly named Predators and Reapers, the urge for revenge was apparent.
Drones were, that is, terror instigators. Everywhere they were sent by the last two administrations to pursue campaigns of “targeted killing” (i.e. assassination) and “
signature strikes” (on suspicious patterns of “behavior” on the ground below, as judged by video from thousands of miles away), extremist groups have grown, societies have fragmented, and things have, from Washington’s point of view, gotten worse. In the process, they turned the White House with its secret “
kill list” and its “terror Tuesday” meetings into a den of assassins, the CIA into
assassination central, and the president into an
assassin-in-chief. The drones even took an
unexpected toll on their pilots waging a theoretically cost-free war.
From the point of view of drone proponents, one curious thing did go right, however – not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or Somalia, but here at home. Even though Americans in multiplexes had for years sided with human rebels against the inhuman gaze of
robots on the prowl, they now backed the robots, as
opinion polls showed, in part because their reputation here remained remarkably untarnished by their dismal and destructive track record in the distant backlands of the planet.
Now, another kind of “gaze,” another form of “constant stare,” has fallen on the drone and it comes from the least robotic of places. In his new book,
A Theory of the Drone, French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou has taken a fresh look at the radically new form of warfare wreaking havoc on fundamental human categories, whether of war, legality, or sovereignty. It’s a fascinating effort to deal with a weapons and surveillance system that turns out not to have arrived out of the blue at all. Today, TomDispatch offers a taste of Chamayou’s original approach, presenting two early chapters from his book on how the drone entered our world and transformed the classic “duel” between warriors into a “hunt” in which an all-seeing, lidless eye-in-the-sky searches out distant humans below as its “prey.” In the meantime, the warriors of the past are, as Chamayou writes, morphing into the executioners of the twenty-first century. It couldn’t be a grimmer tale of post-modernity. Tom
Manhunters, Inc.
How the Predator and Extra-Judicial Execution Became Washington’s Calling Cards
By Grégoire Chamayou
The following is slightly adapted from chapters two and three of Grégoire Chamayou’s new book,
A Theory of the Drone, with special thanks to his publisher, the New Press.
Initially, the English word “drone” meant both an insect and a sound. It was not until the outbreak of World War II that it began to take on another meaning. At that time, American artillery apprentices used the expression “target drones” to designate the small remotely controlled planes at which they aimed in training. The metaphor did not refer solely to the size of those machines or the brm-brm of their motors. Drones are male bees, without stingers, and eventually the other bees kill them. Classical tradition regarded them as emblems of all that is nongenuine and dispensable. That was precisely what a target drone was: just a dummy, made to be shot down.
However, it was a long time before drones were to be seen cruising above battlefields. To be sure, the idea dates back quite a while: there were the Curtiss-Sperry aerial torpedo and the Kettering Bug at the end of World War I, and then the Nazi V-1s and V-2s unleashed on London in 1944. But those old flying torpedoes may be considered more as the ancestors of cruise missiles than as those of present-day drones. The essential difference lies in the fact that while the former can be used only once, the latter are reusable. The drone is not a projectile, but a projectile-carrying machine.
It was during the Vietnam War that the U.S. Air Force, to counteract the Soviet surface-to-air missiles that had inflicted heavy casualties on it, invested in reconnaissance drones nicknamed “Lightning Bugs,” produced by Ryan Aeronautical. An American official explained that “these RPVs [remotely piloted vehicles] could help prevent aircrews from becoming casualties or prisoners… With RPVs, survival is not the driving factor.”
Once the war was over, those machines were scrapped. By the late 1970s, the development of military drones had been practically abandoned in the United States. However, it continued elsewhere. Israel, which had inherited a few of these machines, recognized their potential tactical advantages.
In 1973, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), facing off against Egypt, ran up against the tactical problem of surface-to-air missiles. After losing around 30 planes in the first hours of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli aviation changed its tactics. They decided to send out a wave of drones in order to mislead enemy defenses: “After the Egyptians fired their initial salvo at the drones, the manned strikes were able to attack while the Egyptians were reloading.” This ruse enabled Israel to assume mastery of the skies. In 1982, similar tactics were employed against the Syrians in the Bekaa Valley. Having first deployed their fleet of Mastiff and Scout drones, the Israelis then sent out decoy planes that were picked up by enemy radar. The Syrians activated their surface-to-air missiles, to no effect whatsoever. The drones, which had been observing the scene from the sky, easily detected the positions of the antiaircraft batteries and relayed them to the Israeli fighter planes, which then proceeded to annihilate them.
The drones were used for other purposes as well:
“Two days after a terrorist bomb destroyed the [U.S.] Marine Barracks in Beirut in October 1983, Marine Commandant Gen. P.X. Kelley secretly flew to the scene. No word of his arrival was leaked. Yet, across the border, Israeli intelligence officers watched live television images of Kelley arriving and inspecting the barracks. They even zoomed the picture in tight, placing cross hairs directly on his head. Hours later, in Tel Aviv, the Israelis played back the tape for the shocked Marine general. The scene, they explained, was transmitted by a Mastiff RPV circling out of sight above the barracks.”This was just one of a series of minor events that combined to encourage the relaunch of American drone production in the 1980s. “All I did,” confessed Al Ellis, the father of the Israeli drones, “was take a model airplane, put a camera in it, and take the pictures… But that started an industry.”
At this point, however, the drones were simply machines for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. They were just eyes, not weapons. The metamorphosis came about almost by chance, between Kosovo and Afghanistan, as the new millennium began. As early as 1995, General Atomics had invented a new remote-controlled spy plane prototype, the Predator. Despite its disquieting name, the beast was not yet equipped with claws or teeth. In Kosovo, where it was deployed in 1999, the drone limited itself to filming targets and illuminating them by means of lasers, allowing the F-16 planes to strike.
But it would take a “‘different kind of war’ to make the Predator into a predator.” No more than a few months before September 11, 2001, officers who had seen the Predator at work in Kosovo had the idea of experimentally equipping it with an antitank missile. Writes Bill Yenne in his history of the drone, “On February 16, 2001, during tests at Nellis Air Force Base, a Predator successfully fired a Hellfire AGM114C into a target. The notion of turning the Predator into a predator had been realized. No one could imagine that, before the year was out, the Predator would be preying upon live targets in Afghanistan.”
Barely two months after the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan, George Bush was in a position to declare: “The conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums. The Predator is a good example… Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.”
The Principles of Manhunting
“Individual will research and incorporate current manhunting experiences and procedures in order to provide an educational forum for manhunting issues… Must possess a SECRET level clearance and be able to obtain a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance.”
– Job description for a special operations manhunting program analyst in an advertisement published by the military contractor SAI in 2006In 2004, John Lockwood set up a website called Live-Shot.com. The idea was at once simple and innovative. By subscribing online for a few dollars, the Internet surfer could become a “virtual hunter.” Thanks to a camera fixed to a mobile forearm, itself connected to a remote control device, one could, without stirring from home, shoot live animals let loose for the occasion on a ranch in Texas.
When it made the news, there was a rush to condemn it. The editor-in-chief of the magazine Outdoor Life, acknowledging the profound “ethical problems” that such a venture presented, set out a fine definition of what hunting meant for him: “To me, hunting isn’t just about pulling the trigger on an animal. It’s about the total experience… Hunting is about being out there, not about pulling the trigger with the click of a mouse.”
A Wisconsin lawmaker took up the theme, giving the definition a strangely environmentalist twist: “To me, hunting is being out in nature and becoming one with nature.” Even the extremely conservative National Rifle Association expressed its opposition, joining with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in an unusual alliance: “We believe that hunting should be outdoors and that sitting in front of a computer three states away doesn’t qualify as ‘hunting.’” A Houston police officer was even more adamant, saying, “It’s not hunting. It’s killing… Someone gets a computer and pushes a button and something dies for no reason.”
Lockwood protested, claiming that his foremost purpose had been to allow handicapped people who were passionate about hunting to indulge in their favorite pastime and mentioning an American soldier in Iraq who had thanked him for offering such a fine opportunity, saying that he had no idea when he might be able to go hunting again. But it was all in vain. Hunting online was forbidden. Lockwood, disappointed, tried to salvage his scheme by suggesting that his clients should fire at cardboard targets representing Osama bin Laden. However, his intended Internet audience shifted to other, no doubt more exciting, online pleasures, and the little venture that had seemed so promising collapsed.
The triggers of moral indignation are quite mysterious sometimes. While the virtual hunting of animals was almost universally condemned as scandalous, the remote-controlled hunting of human beings was at the same moment taking off without any of those same people making any objections.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, George W. Bush had predicted that the United States would embark upon a new kind of warfare, “a war that requires us to be on an international manhunt.” Something that initially sounded like nothing more than a catchy Texas cowboy slogan has since been converted into state doctrine, complete with experts, plans, and weapons. A single decade has seen the establishment of an unconventional form of state violence that combines the disparate characteristics of warfare and policing without really corresponding to either, finding conceptual and practical unity in the notion of a militarized manhunt.
Reaping the (Human) Prey
In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had become convinced that “the techniques used by the Israelis against the Palestinians could quite simply be deployed on a larger scale.” What he had in mind was Israel’s programs of “targeted assassinations,” the existence of which had recently been recognized by the Israeli leadership. As Eyal Weizman explains, the occupied territories had become “the world’s largest laboratory for airborne thanatotactics,” so it was not surprising that they would eventually be exported.
But one problem remained. “How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?” Rumsfeld asked. “We are obviously not well organized at the present time.” In the early 2000s, the U.S. military apparatus was not yet ready to roll out on a worldwide scale the sort of missions that normally are assigned to the police within a domestic framework: namely, the identification, tracking, location, and capture (but in actual fact the physical elimination) of suspect individuals.
Within the United States, not all the high-ranking officers who were informed of these plans greeted them with enthusiasm. At the time, journalist Seymour Hersh noted that many feared that the proposed type of operation – what one advisor to the Pentagon called “preemptive manhunting” – had the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program, the sinister secret program of murder and torture that had once been unleashed in Vietnam.
Of course, there was the additional problem of how to legally justify these hybrid operations, the enfants terribles of the police and the army. At the levels of both warfare theory and international law, they seemed to be conceptual monstrosities. But we shall be returning to this point.
In any case, a new strategic doctrine became necessary. Researchers set about defining the “manhunting theoretical principles” that could provide a framework for such operations. George A. Crawford produced a summary of these in a report published in 2009 by the Joint Special Operations University. This text, which set out to make “manhunting a foundation of U.S. national strategies,” in particular called for the creation of a “national manhunting agency,” which would be an indispensable instrument for “building a manhunting force for the future.”
The contemporary doctrine of hunting warfare breaks with the model of conventional warfare based on concepts of fronts and opposed battle lines facing up to each other. In 1916, General John J. Pershing launched a vast military offensive in Mexico in an unsuccessful attempt to lay hands on the revolutionary Pancho Villa. For American strategists who cite this historical precedent as a counterexample, it was a matter of reversing polarity: faced with the “asymmetrical threats” posed by small mobile groups of “nonstate actors,” they should use small, flexible units, either human or – preferably – remotely controlled, in a pattern of targeted attacks.
Contrary to Carl von Clausewitz’s classical definition, the fundamental structure of this type of warfare is no longer that of a duel, of two fighters facing each other. The paradigm is quite different: a hunter advancing on a prey that flees or hides from him. The rules of the game are not the same. “In the competition between two enemy combatants,” wrote Crawford, “the goal is to win the battle by defeating the adversary: both combatants must confront to win. However, a manhunt scenario differs in that each player’s strategy is different. The fugitive always wants to avoid capture; the pursuer must confront to win, whereas the fugitive must evade to win.” The hostile relationship now boils down, as in a game of hide-and-seek, to “a competition between the hiders and the seekers.”
The primary task is no longer to immobilize the enemy but to identify and locate it. This implies all the labor of detection. The modern art of tracking is based on an intensive use of new technologies, combining aerial video surveillance, the interception of signals, and cartographic tracking. The profession of manhunters now has its own technocratic jargon: “Nexus Topography is an extension of the common practice of Social Network Analysis (SNA) used to develop profiles of HVIs… Nexus Topography maps social forums or environments, which bind individuals together.”
In this model the enemy individual is no longer seen as a link in a hierarchical chain of command: he is a knot or “node” inserted into a number of social networks. Based on the concepts of “network-centric warfare” and “effects-based operations,” the idea is that by successfully targeting its key nodes, an enemy network can be disorganized to the point of being practically wiped out. The masterminds of this methodology declare that “targeting a single key node in a battlefield system has second, third, n-order effects, and that these effects can be accurately calculated to ensure maximum success.”
This claim to predictive calculation is the foundation of the policy of prophylactic elimination, for which the hunter-killer drones are the main instruments. For the strategy of militarized manhunting is essentially preventive. It is not so much a matter of responding to actual attacks but rather of preventing the development of emerging threats by the early elimination of their potential agents – “to detect, deter, disrupt, detain or destroy networks before they can harm” – and to do this in the absence of any direct, imminent threat.
The political rationale that underlies this type of practice is that of social defense. Its classic instrument is the security measure, which is “not designed to punish but only to preserve society from the danger presented by the presence of dangerous beings in its midst.” In the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, “warfare” takes the form of vast campaigns of extra-judiciary executions. The names given to the drones – Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death) – are certainly well chosen.
Grégoire Chamayou is a research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is the author of
A Theory of the Drone (excerpted above) and Manhunts: A Philosophical History. He lives in Paris.
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Não Trạng Bầy Đàn- The Herd Mind
Posted By Dan Sanchez On April 7, 2015 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized |
No Comments
“Hunting Buffalo” (1858-1860) by Alfred Jacob MillerRandolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State.” This has long been the byword for anti-war, anti-state libertarians, and rightly so. But Bourne did not mean exactly what most libertarians take this phrase to mean. To understand the maxim’s original meaning, as Bourne used it in his great unfinished essay “
The State,” one must understand his distinctions among three concepts that are often conflated: Country, State, and Government.
For Bourne, a Country (or Nation) is a group of individuals bound together by cultural affinity. A State is a Country/Nation collectively mobilized for attack or protection. As he distinguished between the two:
“Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects.”And Government, according to Bourne, “is the machinery by which the Nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions” and “a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.”
What libertarians commonly refer to as “the State,” Bourne termed “the Government” instead. So, the way libertarians often interpret his famous aphorism is what Bourne would have expressed if he had written, “War is the health of theGovernment.” This also happens to be true, but it is not what he meant.
For Bourne, the State is not a distinct ruling body subsisting extractively on the ruled, i.e., a “gang of thieves writ large,” as the great Murray Rothbard incisively conceived it. Rather, he saw it as a certain orientation of a whole people: a spiritual phenomenon pervading an entire populace that animates and empowers such a ruling body. As Bourne expressed it:
“Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.”In peacetime, Bourne explained, the State is largely relegated to the background; individuals are then more concerned with their own affairs and purposes. But during the build-up to war, and especially following its breakout, the foreign enemy looms large in the public imagination. Hence, the Country is overtaken by war fever and develops what Garet Garett called a “complex of vaunting and fear.” This hybrid mania of boastful belligerence and timorous terror (“fight-or-flight”) causes the populace to regress from a civilization to a herd. The people seek safety in numbers: in a multitude unified for a single purpose (a “great end”) and directed by a single agency. The varied dance of individuals gives way to the uniform huddle and stampede of the unitary drove, with the Government as drover.
As Bourne wrote:
“The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.”And in wartime, the “mystical conception” of the State “comes into its own” as the “herd-sense” becomes dominant in the Country and the “aggressive aspects” of the group come to the fore. This is what Bourne meant by, “War is the health of the State.” The dictum speaks to the flourishing of an ideal and the resulting transformation of a whole society, not merely the aggrandizement of a Government.
Yet, war is also the health of the Government, which is the single directing agency to whose banner the State-minded masses flock. Under the perceived exigencies of war, the people:
“…proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.”Economically, this means that the manpower and resources of the Country undergo “mobilization”: a vast redirection away from the provision of individual consumer wants and toward the all-important war effort. In this way too, the Government swells in power and grandeur, as the consumer-directed market economy is supplanted by the Government-directed “War Economy,” or even “War Socialism” (Kriegssozialismus, as the Germans called it in World War I).
In the fever of war, the individual will is sacrificed for the “General Will,” which ostensibly expresses itself through the Government. Individuals renounce their identities for the sake of uniting Voltron-like into a State, like the gestalt “Leviathan” pictured on the cover Thomas Hobbes’s book by that name.
E pluribus unum.As Bourne put it:
“War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest levels of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.”The herd is mobilized, not only against the foreign foe, but against any dissidents within the group who resist assimilation into the Borg-like hive- or herd-mind and who refuse to join the swarm or stampede into war: in other words, against “enemies foreign and domestic.”
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.As Bourne explained:
“The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade everyone and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling. (…) In this great herd-machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push towards military unity. Any interference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse towards crushing it.”The State crushes dissent through Government policies restricting civil liberties, but also through private citizens acting as “amateur agents” of the Government: who berate skeptics into silence, report critics to the authorities for “disloyalty,” or even take the security of Herd and Homeland into their own violent hands. Remember that in Bourne’s framework, the Government is by no means identical with the State. As such, the State can animate a private citizen even more than it does an officeholder. As Bourne remarked:
“In every country we have seen groups that were more loyal than the King—more patriotic than the Government—the Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l’Action Francaise in France, our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the steering wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from ever veering very far from the State ideal.”This an extremely apt description of the Fox News types who castigate Barack Obama for his lack of “patriotism” and the insufficiency of his war-making. The spirit of the State dwells within Sean Hannity even more so than it dwells within the President of the United States. What is ironic is that a war-drumming jingo like Hannity usually imagines himself a paragon of manhood; yet his dull, stampeding herd mindset marks him out as less of a man, and more of a beast.
Randolph Bourne was not a libertarian, but a dissident progressive. Still, we libertarians can learn a great deal from him. For instance, perhaps our terminology, as penetrating and illuminating as it is, has led us to focus too much on the herdsmen in office who drive, shear, milk, and butcher us, and not enough on the more fundamental problem: our society’s bovine propensity to become a manipulable herd in the first place, especially when spooked. Occasionally thinking in terms of Bourne’s typology can be a useful corrective in this regard.
Bourne’s terminology and analysis also shed light on the all-important question of how to achieve liberation. The State
lives in the minds of the Government’s victims. Simply overthrowing a Government will only spook the herd even worse. The State will not only survive such an overthrow, but it will likely even feed off of it, as the panicked herd acts even more herd-like in the crisis, granting new herdsmen even more tyrannical power than the old ones had.
The State is a state of mind; it is the herd mindset itself. As such, it can only be overthrown in the battleground of the mind. Once the State is spiritually dethroned and the populace fully transfigures from herd to civilization, the “Government,” like a shepherd without a flock, will no longer even merit its designation. It will then merely be a heavily armed, but even more heavily outnumbered, gang of rustlers writ small.
Accomplishing this becomes ever more urgent as Americans are driven into ever more calamitous wars, even after electing a “peace” candidate as President. It is increasingly apparent that breaking the spell of the State that turns men into beasts may be the only way we can avoid being driven to self-destruction by alarmist warmongers and their terrorist
symbionts, like buffalo being stampeded off a cliff by herd-spooking hunters.
