Curiously, the  state that the American empire more and more resembles is not the one described in early modern or classical political theory.

American empire is more like the notoriously spy-ridden empire of the 4th century (BC) Indian empire of the Mauryas.

“No-touch torture,” “silent airwar,” “shadow statistics,” “endless surveillance”: these resemble nothing more than the empire of Chandragupta Maurya, one of India’s most successful conquerors.

Chandragupta’s minister, Chanakya, (Kautilya is the Greek form), is a little known theorist in the West, where he is sometimes seen as a political realist because of his most famous dictum: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” sometimes called the Mandala theory of foreign policy.

But if by realism one means the “balance of power,” this isn’t what Chanakya wanted.

Chanakya saw the goal of politics not as maintaining peace but as augmenting power.

He advocated a ceaseless growth in power through concealed means, the strategy that seems to underlie such differing aspects of the American empire as the “white noise” of its air-power (see my piece, “America’s Downing Syndrome,”  Dissident Voice, 2006) and the increasing levels of electronic surveillance, propaganda and psyops (see another piece in 2006, “Kartoon-Krieg: War by Other Means,” Counter Currents, 2006)

Kautilya’s writing preceded by 2000 plus years the current theory of war of American empire – what some now call 5th Generation War.

5GWhas been described thus by one expert on it:

“Open source warfare. An ability to decentralize beyond the limits of a single group (way beyond cell structures) using new development and coordination methodologies. This new structure doesn’t only radically expand the number of potential participants, it shrinks the group size well below any normal measures of viability. This organizational structure creates a dynamic whereby new entrants can appear anywhere. In London, Madrid, Berlin, and New York.

Systems disruption. A method of sabotage that goes beyond the simple destruction of physical infrastructure. This method of warfare, which can burst onto the scene as a black swan, uses network dynamics (a new form of leveraged maneuver) to undermine and reorder global systems. It is through this Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that new environments favorable to opposition forces are built (often due to a descent into primary loyalties and pressure from global markets).

Virtual states (ala Philip Bobbitt). Unlike the guerrilla movements of the past, many of the 4GW forces we are fighting today have found a way to integrate their activities with global “crime.” No longer are guerrilla movements or terrorists aimed at taking control of the reigns of the state or merely proxies for states. A new form of economic sustenance has been found. This black globalization is already vast (a GDP of trillions per year), and gains momentum through weakening and disruption of states. This military/economic integration creates a virtuous feedback loop that allows groups to gain greater degrees of independence and financial wealth through the warfare they conduct.”

(more by blogger John Robb )

Robb describes 5GW as having been brewed in Iraq while Citizen Fouche at the Committee of Public Safety is blunt about the motives.

Time for the American people to quit “sleepwalking.”  Instead of clinging to the naive belief that civil society should be free of the tactics and goals of war (and that war should be open and conducted justly and legally),  the public should wise up.

5 WH proponents tell them what they need to wise up about:

War is not just violence and destruction. War is also anything you do to force someone to act against their will.

The first perspective is the perspective of Clausewitz, the second that of  pre-modern theorists like Sun Tzu and Kautilya.

All this sounds very deep and sophisticated until you strip off the jargon. Despite the exotic aura of eastern classical texts to it, I don’t see how the new strategy is anything more than a very old temptation gone one better. The temptation of power. Absolute power.

Under classical rules of engagement, in limited war, ones moral sense can remain intact.

The new varieties of total war – which is all 5GW amounts to – leave nothing intact, even among people who don’t know it exists —  because it creates a bubble of lies in which their minds are manipulated perpetually.

Turns out oriental despotism is whatso-called patriots admire.

Maybe someone should point out that America’s own republican tradition, despite all its follies, hypocrisies and failures, did at least pay lip-service  to truth and peace as the way of life proper to a society.

 An excerpt from a piece by Ryan Sayr Patrico in First Things about anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Magdalena Scholl (May 9, 1921–February 22, 1943):

 “New documents unearthed by German academics have revealed that the writings of the 19th-century English theologian were a direct influence on Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded for circulating leaflets urging students at Munich University to rise up against Nazi terror. . . .

But behind her heroism was the “theology of conscience” expounded by Cardinal Newman, according to Professor Günther Biemer, the leading German interpreter of Newman, and Jakob Knab, an expert on the life of Sophie Scholl, who will later this year publish research in Newman Studien on the White Rose resistance movement, to which she belonged. . . .

Newman taught that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in concrete situations. Christians, he argued, had a duty to obey a good conscience over and
above all other considerations. . . .

Under questioning from the Gestapo Scholl said she had been compelled by her Christian conscience to peacefully oppose Nazism.

Sophie and Hans both asked to be received into the Catholic Church an hour before they were executed but were dissuaded by their pastor who argued that such a decision would upset their mother, a Lutheran lay preacher.

Fr Dermot Fenlon, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory who was given excerpts of Mr Knab’s findings to include in a speech on Newman in Milan last week, said the originality of the research was that it
showed the clear “centrality” of Newman to Hans and Sophie Scholl.

He said: “Knab has identified the presence of Newman in correspondence, in diaries and in the analysis of correspondence, particularly between Sophie and Hartnagel. He has shown how that
influence became operative at a critical moment.”

He added: “The religious question at the heart of the White Rose has not been adequately acknowledged and it is only through the work of Guenter Biemer and Jakob Knab that Newman’s influence . . . can be identified as highly significant.”

The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Die letzten Tage)  shows Sophie’s adherence to a higher law than the one imposed by the state. The law of her conscience, brought out beautifully in this confrontation with Herr Mohr, the police agent who interrogates her and finds in himself an unwilling connection to her:

“Mohr: You may have used false slogans but you used peaceful means.

Sophie: So why do you want to punish us?

Mohr: Because it is the law. Without the law there is no order.

Sophie: The law you are referring to protected free speech before the Nazis came to power in 1933. Someone who speaks freely now is imprisoned or put to death. Is that order?

Mohr: What can we rely on if not the law? No matter who wrote it.

Sophie: Our conscience.

Mohr: Nonsense! [Grabbing two books, one in each hand, as though weighing them against each other.] Here is the law and here are the people. As a criminologist, it is my duty to find out if they coincide and, if not, to find the rotten spot.

Sophie: The law changes. Conscience doesn’t.”

My Comment:

As Wendy McElroy notes in this review at iFeminists.com, Sophie’s very existence is a reproach to the way of life of those around her because it forces them to confront their own responsibility for the way things have become. Ultimately that is the real reason she must be killed.

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:5)

In “Transit of Venus” (“Mobs,” Chapter 3), we cite Sophie Scholl as one of the heroes who truly bring change. The messiahs of  the state, on the other hand, don’t change anything, however much they may mean to.

They simply play out their assigned parts, driven by mass emotions and mass slogans.

“In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is “mass” or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself — good or ill — based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to motions born in the café. I doubt whether there have been other periods of history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than in our own.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

It is illusory to imagine that the mass-man of to-day will be able to control, by himself, the process of civilization. I say process, and not progress. The simple process of preserving our present civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers. Ill-fitted to direct it is this average man who has learned to use much of the machinery of civilization, but who is characterized by root-ignorance of the very principles of that civilization.

The command over the public life exercised today by the intellectually vulgar is perhaps the factor of the present situation which is most novel, least assimilable to anything in the past. At least in European history up to the present, the vulgar had never believed itself to have “ideas” on things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs, mental habits, but it never imagine itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be. To-day, on the other hand, the average man has the most mathematical “ideas” on all that happens or ought to happen in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his “opinions.”

But, is this not an advantage? Is it not a sign of immense progress that the masses should have “ideas,” that is to say, should be cultured? By no means. The “ideas” of the average man are not genuine ideas, nor is their possession culture. Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it. It is no use speaking of ideas when there is no acceptance of a higher authority to regulate them, a series of standards to which it is possible to appeal in a discussion. These standards are the principles on which culture rests. I am not concerned with the form they take. What I affirm is that there is no culture where there are no standards to which our fellow-man can have recourse. There is no culture where there are no principles of legality to which to appeal. There is no culture where there is no acceptance of certain final intellectual positions to which a dispute may be referred. There is no culture where economic relations are not subject to a regulating principle to protect interests involved. There is no culture where aesthetic controversy does not recognize the necessity of justifying the work of art.

When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveler knows that in the territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

Under Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the “reason of unreason.” Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so. In their political conduct the structure of the new mentality is revealed in the rawest, most convincing manner. The average man finds himself with “ideas” in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation. He has no conception even of the rare atmosphere in which ideals live. He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words….”

Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

By being themselves. By being true to themselves. By cultivating themselves and their abilities.

And by being bigger people than the snide folk  on American Idol, who were shocked by just how well one frumpy, middle-aged woman without any Hollywood glam could sing.

I’d rather listen to Susan Boyle anyday than some of the no-talents whom nobody would listen to without the hype, glitz, skin, and sensation accompanying them.

Individualism has many faces. Ayn Rand’s isn’t the only one… or the truest one.Don’t let misinterpreted words or misunderstood theories scare you away from the one approach that has a chance of succeeding in the political climate today.