“Network” 40 Years Later: Capitalism in Retrospect and Prospect and Elite Politics Today

by BRUCE LERRO

Paddy Chayefsky’s extraordinary movie Network was made 40 years ago in 1976, just as the United States began its long economic descent.It may seem far-fetched to draw inspiration from a movie made about capitalism so long ago and, like any powerful film, some of Chayefsky’s predictions have been realized or even intensified since then, while others have been proven wrong. However, the boldness of the movie is more important than being right in all or even most of its predictions. As one scientist said about Julian Jaynes’ now discredited book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, “even if he got everything wrong he stimulated so much discussion that it was worth it.”

Network is a movie about the lengths to which a television network will go to make a profit, even when it undermines its own long-term self-interest. Unlike other movies, which try to “expose” the evils of corporate news, there are no romantic moralisms in this movie, no fall from previous “good times”. There are little (if any) villains or good guy characters. Chayefsky keeps the focus on the systemic dynamics of capitalism, not on the personal qualities of news anchors, entertainment directors or even capitalists themselves. I also think there are political implications for today. What I will suggest, by way of analogy, is that there is a relationship between the economic dynamics between two of the characters in Network and the economic forces represented by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton respectively.

What Network got right

Marx’s famous statement that under capitalism “everything’s for sale” is not only affirmed, but taken even further than Marx. Entertainment Director Diana Christensen wants “angry shows”. Under her direction, communists and terrorists are given their own programs and develop their own television followings. Even rebellion against the system can be bought and sold just like any other commodity. The leaders of both groups are reduced to quibbles over distribution and syndication rights. No individual and no movement can enter the television industry and not become fresh meat for capitalist accumulation.

Marx’s description of the fetishization of communities in the first volume of Capital is demonstrated throughout the film for me, most graphically, when born-again news anchor Howard Beale harangues his audience that “you people are the real thing and we (television) are the illusion.” On the one hand the audience was the real thing when they sent telegrams to the federal government after Howard’s on-air agitation, yet the same audience proceeds to clap as Howard faints on the air as if it were part of the show.

Most importantly for this article, this is a film in which Lenin’s famous quip that “capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with” comes to life. This is a contradiction between short-term and long-term interests of capitalists, which I will explore in more depth shortly.

My claim

Though the analogy I will make might seem far-fetched to some, there is an interesting similarity in the relationship between Howard Beale, the anchorman of the TV station, UBS, and Donald Trump. So too, there are similarities between the owner of the Western World Funding Corporation, Mr. Jensen and transnational elites, and their next-in-line selection, Hillary Clinton.

Myopic short-term capitalist self-interest

In the movie there are three television networks competing for “market share”. The network UBS has the worst ratings, without a hit series and with some of the worst ratings in television history. The show opens with news anchorman, Howard Beale, being told that he was fired. The next night he goes on the air and instead of announcing in a diplomatic way that he is leaving, declares he is going to kill himself on the air within the next few days. This, of course, creates chaos at the station and Howard is fired. But shortly thereafter, the person in charge of the entertainment division, Diana Christensen, notices that the ratings of UBS have gone up considerably. This is the beginning of a chronic contradiction that UBS finds itself in. What is UBS to do with Howard? If they take him off the air in the name of “television journalistic integrity”, they lose their ratings and sink further into the abyss. If they leave him on air, they violate journalist codes, might be sued and will likely become the laughing stock of the other networks.

Within the UBS station there are three levels of power. At the lowest level there is UBS itself – within it are a president, vice-presidents, news divisions, entertainment divisions and so on. But the Communications Corporation of America also owns the UBS network itself. At the highest level the CCA has a relationship with the Western World Funding Corporation.  

After much struggle between the two lower layers of the power network, Diana Christensen cuts a deal with her boss, Chairman of the Board of the UBS, Frank Hackett, and they decide to leave Howard on the air. What is frightening for the upper echelons of UBS and their corporate sponsors, are the topics Howard addresses while on the air. At first Howard’s ravings are limited to personal complaints about life in America, and what to do about the terrorists and the Russians. But then he begins to discuss the news industry itself and how “they will tell you any shit you want to hear”. The heads of UBS and CCA simply do not know what Howard is going to say next when the camera is rolling, but as long is his ratings are competitive, they leave him on. How far can Howard go? Is there a point at which the content of what is said is so subversive that UBS will refuse the profits Howard makes for them because the cost is too high?

Long-term capitalist self-interest 

However, for the highest echelons in the Western World Funding Corporation it doesn’t matter how much Howard Beale rants about life in America. Yet in the world of international capitalist dynamics, it’s a different story. Most threatening for those in the upper echelons is that Howard Beale is very patriotic. On one particular show he revealed that the Communications Corporation of America will be selling itself to the Western World Funding Corporation and Arabs own the Western World Funding Corporation. Howard pleads with his audience to “stop the CCA deal” because if the Western World Corporation controls UBS the country will be sold to the Arabs. Howard’s loyal legions respond to Howard’s appeal with thousands of postcards to the federal government to “stop the CCA deal”.

Howard Beale is then told that the head of WWFC, a “Mr. Jensen” wishes to see Howard in his office in New York. Howard flies to the east coast from Los Angeles to meet Mr. Jensen. Mr. Jensen invites Howard into a large, lushly decorated conference room, dims the lights and draws the curtains. Howard Beale sits at one end of a long, oval shaped table while Mr. Jensen stands at the other end. He launches into a saber-rattling speech that is worth quoting in full:

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no west. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality – one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale

Howard dutifully carries out Mr. Jensen’s wishes, but the ratings of UBS begin to plummet.

The Conflict between short-term and long-term capitalist interest    

There now develops a conflict between the wishes of Mr. Jensen, who represents the interest of the long-term capitalists, and the interests of the myopic short-term capitalists of UBS, over what Howard should be saying on the air.

Mr. Jensen, as a transnational capitalist, has his WWFC resources in many industries. He can afford for some industries to lose money if they serve other purposes. As paraphrased by Frank Hackett in the movie, Mr. Jensen doesn’t care about whether the Howard Beale showloses money. He wants the message delivered to the American public. Mr. Jensen expects Howard to tell his fans that democracy doesn’t exist, there is no America and the lives of individuals have no meaning. People don’t want to hear this and Howard’s ratings start to drop. When told of the impact of Howard’s message on the ratings, Jensen says that he does not like volatile industries and that volatile industries are a sign of bad management. But for relatively small potatoes like Diana Christensen and all the department heads at the network, a lowering of the ratings means the network goes under and they lose their jobs. From their point of view Howard has to go.

Frank Hackett, Chairman of the Board of UBS, is caught between Mr. Jensen of the Western World Funding Corporation and the network Entertainment Division head, Diana Christensen. Frank ultimately casts his fate with Diana and UBS, and together they get Howard off the air by having him assassinated on the air. Right to the end, Frank and Diana continue to blur the line between reality and television. In reality they get a real force (Howard) who is now opposed to their self-interests off the air, but they also kill him on the air because Howard’s assassination is likely to bring high ratings.

What Network (in the form of Mr. Jenson’s Speech) got wrong           

Before drawing my analogy between the contradictions of short-term and long-term capitalists in Network and elite politics in the United States, let me briefly pick out four areas where Mr. Jensen got capitalism wrong. First and most importantly, capitalism has proven to be anything but a smooth, linear, ever-expanding system with no instabilities. Chayefsky, like most leftists in the sixties and seventies, imagined that capitalism could go on forever. Secondly, while corporations may be the real “nation-states” of today, capitalists must use loyalty to countries (nationalism) to mobile their domestic workers to fight turf wars over natural resources for competing capitalists. Thirdly, capitalist crises have hardly anesthetized workers so “all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused”. Workers are hardly sinking into a contented stupor. The drugs Americans are using are in the service of holding themselves in one piece. Lastly, while Mr. Jensen is right that there is no democracy in the sense of an electoral democracy, it is hardly the case that there are no democratic impulses outside electoral politics. In addition to the Occupy Movement of four plus years ago, the very rebellion against electoral politics we are witnessing now both on the right with the Trumpsters and on the left with the Sandernistas, people rebelling against elite candidates, is a sign people are not going as quietly as Mr. Jensen expected.

What can we learn from the contradictions in Network about the American political scene for capitalists today?

Is Donald Trump Howard Beale?

Does Howard encouraging his audiences to scream out the window “I’m “mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore” have anything to do with Donald Trump? For purposes of this analogy I am going to accept as given that Donald Trump really does want to build walls around the United States, hates Mexicans and Muslims and wants to bring jobs back to the United States. Given this assumption, he is certainly very different from Howard Beale. Beale is closer to a New Deal Liberal who wants to bring back that old-time journalism as he harangues his audiences to stop watching television and read books.

However, Howard has three important commonalities with Trump. One is that Howard presents himself as very patriotic. Like Trump, he wants capitalism to stop at the borders. Secondly, like Trump’s tirades against Mexicans and Muslims, Howard has his scapegoats: the Arabs. Lastly, both he and Trump have demagogic appeal. Each knows how to rouse at least part of the American public. Howard has gotten people to scream out of their windows “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore”. He has also gotten the public to deluge the federal government with letters to stop the CCA deal. In the case of Trump, he has mobilized large public rallies and these rallies have outdrawn any Republican opposition.

Does Mr. Jensen embody the ideals of the transnational capitalist class?

From my readings of William Domhoff, political sociologist who defines and names elites and their power bases, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable are two of the most powerful capitalist associations in the United States. But above them stands The Council of Foreign Relations that seems to have the bigger say over who is selected to run for president and who is coronated. Whether it is the CFR in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group, their position is very close to that of Mr. Jensen. Like Mr. Jensen, these less-than-one-percenters have a long-term global policy for capitalism. Selecting and choosing candidates to represent their interests as heads-of-state are serious matters. Hillary Clinton has been chosen to best carry out the transnational class’ agenda in the United States. It’s Hillary’s turn. She’s waited eight years and fair is fair.

In short, Hillary represents the long-term interests of capitalism embodied in Mr. Jensen and Donald Trump represents short-term interests of the manic depressive capitalism of the UBS station of Howard Beale, Diana Christensen and the head of CCA, Frank Hackett.

Will The Council of Foreign Relations have a little talk with Donald Trump?

Given Bernie Sanders’ surprising numbers, this year’s elite political coronation has already been a rough ride for Hillary. If Donald Trump continues to make a lot of noise, most importantly if he continues to arouse the Trumpsters, the Council of Foreign Relations will have alittle talk with Donald Trump (if they haven’t already) similar to the talk Mr. Jensen had with Howard Beale. Mr. Trump will be told he needs to change his message. Just as Mr. Jensen told Howard that there are no Arabs, no Third World, so Mr. Trump will be told there are no Mexicans, Muslin terrorists or even Americans. There are only corporations. Trump will no longer be allowed to rabble rouse, just as Howard Beale stopped rabble rousing.

Will Donald Trump be made an offer he can’t refuse?

The American deep state – the NSA, the CIA and the FBI – may not always be on the same page about everything, but around heads of state they broadly support the wishes of the Council of Foreign Relations. At their worst, these forces manipulate media, make voting difficult and conduct assassinations – among many other “tricks”. We don’t have to imagine the most extreme cases of what might happen to Trump should he persist in rousing the Trumpsters. All we have to do is remember what happened to communists and socialists and their sympathizers in the early fifties. They were blacklisted. They couldn’t find work. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Trump’s present and future business connections could be jeopardized. He will need to be quiet, conduct his campaign civilly and bow out of it in November. Trump does not have to meet the same fate as Howard Beale to be controlled. After all, as the saying goes, “politics is war by other means”.

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. Read more of his articles and get involved at Planning Beyond Capitalism He can be reached atmailto:goethe48@pacbell.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/31/network-40-years-later-capitalism-in-retrospect-and-prospect-and-elite-politics-today/

Rules for TV News Anchors, on Memorial Day and Every Day

by GARY LEUPP

Memo to staff:

These points should be obvious, but please observe the following basic conventions in your reporting.

* Always refer to U.S. soldiers using the possessive pronoun “our.”

* Always refer to all of our U.S. troops as “heroes.”

* Always refer to their actions in war as “service.”

* Always refer to their actions in war as “sacrifice” and their deaths in war the “ultimate sacrifice.”

* Always refer to their actions anywhere as “defending our country (or Homeland)” and fighting for “us.” Acknowledge our “debt” to them.

* Always, no matter what the cause or war theater, aver that the soldiers are always “defending our freedoms.”

*Always express gratitude and appreciation; always thank U.S. soldiers from commanders on down for their “service,” whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.

Sample model statement, following an interview with a retired general hired as a consultant: “Well, General, we’d like to thank you and all our heroes in the service for your sacrifice defending our freedoms.” Consider this basic etiquette.

Say this sort of thing so often that it gets rooted in the viewer’s mind as the correct default interpretation. The point is to unite people of all political persuasions to accept this correct mindset and show commercial sponsors that our network is appropriately patriotic.

Never affect a position that distances you from our patriotic audience, for example, referring to “the” soldiers (as opposed to “our” soldiers) or avoiding the terminology specified above.

Never suggest that the U.S. military has slaughtered millions of innocent people since 1945, or that this is un-heroic and does not serve the interests of the people of this country.

Never opine that tens of thousands of U.S. troops have in fact died in vain, for wrong or even criminal causes.

Never express empathy for the soldiers who come back from wars feeling anything but heroes, guilt-stricken about the suffering they were forced to inflict, driven to substance abuse and suicide-prone.

Be aware that exceptionalism is this and every other mainstream network’s official position. Never imply a moral equivalence between our troops and those of any other country, suggesting for example that Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s were heroes fighting for their country in the same way that U.S. forces had been heroes in Vietnam a decade before. Or compare them to the German troops who fought for their country by invading Russia in 1940. Indicate in all your coverage that U.S. troops are unlike all others good by definition.

And never, ever be so foolish as to quote Karl Marx to the effect that the working people in every country really “have no country” to defend—-until they acquire political supremacy.

Such departures from the rules will get you fired and your career will be over in this free country, kept free by our heroes’ sacrifice. Your cooperation is appreciated.

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Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/31/rules-for-tv-news-anchors-on-memorial-day-and-every-day/

The Sociology of War

Brought to light by an American journalist and an Austrian economist

by Dan Sanchez

The breakout of World War I upended many lives, including those of two great thinkers: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and the American journalist Randolph Bourne.

The young Mises had just revolutionized the economics of money and the business cycle. And he was on the verge still more breakthroughs when his career was interrupted by the Great War. Other economists in Austria were given cushy assignments in war planning offices. But Mises, who was radically out of step with prevailing politics, was sent to the front lines as an artillery officer.

Bourne had been pursuing independent study in Europe under Columbia University’s prestigious Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad. The continent-wide hostilities drove him back to the States where he resumed his previous career as a magazine writer. But Bourne was radically out of step with the militarism then sweeping America. His anti-war writing got him censored and shunned, both professionally and socially.

Both men deplored the Great War for upending, not only their own lives, but Western civilization itself. For Mises, it represented the end of an era. Mises called the century prior the “Age of Liberalism,” a time of rising economic freedom and integration, relative peace, and skyrocketing living standards. In 1914 that was all thrown away in favor of war, collectivism, and central planning.

Bourne saw the War as “a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces” that “devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation.”

Both subsequently worked to explain how such a calamity could come about. What is the fatal flaw in the soul of man that could yield such madness? What are the sociological factors that can drive a nation over the precipice of war and tyranny?

Ludwig von Mises and Warfare Sociology

Mises managed to survive the Russian shells and the frigid cold of the eastern front. Immediately after the war, he set to work on a book explaining the Great War’s origins, his 1919 Nation, State, and Economy. Among other factors, he noted that the nationalists who drove their countries into war held a conviction that “between peoples irreconcilable oppositions” existed. He noted that socialists held a similar faith, but concerning classes instead of nations. Mises wrote that, “Marxism and Social Democracy see an irreconcilable opposition of conflicting class interests everywhere…” In his 1922 treatise Socialism, Mises wrote that “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”

Mises developed this theme further in his 1929 work A Critique of Interventionism, in which he wrote that Karl Marx,

“…denies that a solidarity of interest exists or has ever existed in society. A solidarity of interest, according to Marx, can exist only within each class. But a conflict of interest exists between the classes, which explains why the history of all societies has been a history of class wars.

Conflict is the moving force of social development to yet another group of social doctrines. For those doctrines the war of races and nations constitute the basic law of society.”

He then characterized both doctrines as variants of “warfare sociology.”

Mises had long struggled to intellectually combat the Marxist class warriors who sought to introduce Bolshevism to Austria. For example, his 1920 explication of the socialist calculation problem demonstrated the fatal flaw in Soviet-style planning. Soon Mises found himself also hounded by race warriors. As a Jewish liberal, he was compelled to flee the rise of the Nazis: first to Switzerland, and then to America.

The events of World War II proved to Mises that warfare sociology had won the hearts and minds of the west. In his 1945 paper “The Clash of Group Interests,” he wrote:

“It is a fact that the living philosophy of our age is a philosophy of irreconcilable conflict and dissociation. People value their party, class, linguistic group, or nation as supreme, believe that their own group cannot thrive but at the expense of other groups, and are not prepared to tolerate any measures which in their opinion would have to be considered as an abandonment of vital group interests. Thus a peaceful arrangement with other groups is out of the question.”

Mises added that this worldview was not limited to the extremism of the vanquished Nazis and victorious Soviets. It also drove the special interest “producers’ policies” then being embraced throughout the developed world.

In his 1949 magnum opus Human Action, Mises traced warfare sociology to the belief that, “the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by the loss of others.” This ancient fallacy was first restated in modern times by the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and so Mises dubbed it the Montaigne dogma. According to Mises:

“It is at the bottom of all modern doctrines teaching that there prevails, within the frame of the market economy, an irreconcilable conflict among the interests of various social classes within a nation and furthermore between the interests of any nation and those of all other nations.”

Mises warned that:

“As long as the peoples cling to the Montaigne dogma and think that they cannot prosper economically except at the expense of other nations, peace will never be anything other than a period of preparation for the next war.”

In his 1957 book Theory and History, Mises developed this analysis further, coining a new term for adherents of warfare sociology: “antiharmonists.”

“As the antiharmonists see it, community of interests exists only within the group among its members. The interests of each group and of each of its members are implacably opposed to those of all other groups and of each of their members. So it is “natural” there should be perpetual war among various groups. This natural state of war of each group against every other group may sometimes be interrupted by periods of armistice, falsely labeled periods of peace. It may also happen that sometimes in warfare a group cooperates in alliances with other groups. Such alliances are temporary makeshifts of politics. They do not in the long run affect the inexorable natural conflict of interests. Having, in cooperation with some allied groups, defeated several of the hostile groups, the leading group in the coalition turns against its previous allies in order to annihilate them too and to establish its own world supremacy.”

Mises then used this framework to explain why militarist societies become police states:

“As they see it, human conditions involve forever irreconcilable conflicts, first among the various groups fighting one another, later, after the final victory of the master group, between the latter and the enslaved rest of mankind. Hence this supreme elite group must always be ready to fight, first to crush the rival groups, then to quell rebellions of the slaves. The state of perpetual preparedness for war enjoins upon it the necessity of organizing society after the pattern of an army. The army is not an instrument destined to serve a body politic; it is rather the very essence of social cooperation, to which all other social institutions are subservient. The individuals are not citizens of a commonwealth; they are soldiers of a fighting force and as such bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the supreme commander. They have no civil rights, merely military duties.”

Randolph Bourne and the Herd Mind

The militarization of society was also the main theme of Randolph Bourne’s unfinished essay “The State.” The unpublished manuscript was found in his apartment after his death in 1918. Unlike Mises, Bourne did not fight in World War I. His extensive physical limitations (he was deformed, hunchbacked, and stunted) would have made it impossible even if his moral strictures had allowed it. But the disease-spreading ravages of the war reached him nonetheless. Impoverished and isolated due to his literary efforts against the war, he was struck down by the 1918-1919 flu epidemic that killed over 25 million people around the world, and 3 million in America. Randolph Bourne was a modern day Thersites: the hunchback in Homer’s Iliad who courageosly inveighed against the senselessness of the Trojan War and suffered greatly for it.

While Mises elaborated the ideological factors that drive people toward war, Bourne explored what happens to a society after war is declared. Especially he discussed how a state of war perpetuates itself by spiritually militarizing the citizenry.

The moment war is declared, the people undergo a radical psychological transformation. As Bourne writes from painful experience:

“They then, with the ex­cep­tion of a few mal­con­tents, 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.”

Bourne characterizes this transformation as essentially a reversion to bestial instincts: the regression of a society into a herd.

“An­i­mals crowd to­geth­er for pro­tec­tion, and men be­come most con­scious of their col­lec­tiv­i­ty at the threat of war. Con­scious­ness of col­lec­tiv­i­ty brings con­fi­dence and a feel­ing of massed strength, which in turn arous­es pu­gnac­i­ty and the bat­tle is on. In civ­i­lized man, the gre­gar­i­ous im­pulse acts not only to pro­duce con­cert­ed ac­tion for de­fense, but also to pro­duce iden­ti­ty of opin­ion. Since thought is a form of be­hav­ior, the gre­gar­i­ous im­pulse floods up into its realms and de­mands that sense of uni­form thought which wartime pro­duces so suc­cess­ful­ly.”

This collectivist herd spirit is what Bourne calls “the State.” In peacetime, the State is relegated to the background of national life. “With the shock of war, how­ev­er, the State comes into its own again.” Bourne continues:

“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.”

This is what Bourne means when he says, “war is the health of the State.” And the State is very health conscious. It will not readily countenance an end to the war that nourishes it. So anti-war sentiments and expressions will not be tolerated. Again, Bourne wearily speaks from experience:

“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.”

This is a very poignant passage considering that as he wrote it, Bourne himself was being crushed in just the way he described.

The Mises-Bourne Identity (Synthesis)

The analyses of Mises and Bourne are highly complementary. Warfare Sociology is what stimulates the wartime rise of the Herd. In Human Action, Mises wrote:

“The characteristic mark of the “state of nature” is irreconcilable conflict. Each specimen is the rival of all other specimens. The means of subsistence are scarce and do not grant survival to all.”

Under such conditions, the Montaigne Dogma is actually true: no specimen can gain except at the expense of another. And so “biological competition” unavoidably reigns in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

But humans are capable of recognizing the benefits that flow from extensive cooperation in almost all situations. And so they develop basic moral precepts, especially concerning property, that make such cooperation possible.

However, most will suspend those precepts when faced with “lifeboat scenarios”: situations that are so deprived and desperate that they negate the benefits of social cooperation.

When a government declares war, it basically convinces its subjects that they are in such dire straits: that a deadly attack is imminent, or that necessary resources (oil, leibensraum, etc) are dwindling dangerously. Under these exigencies, the story goes, survival demands suspending basic morality in relations with certain people outside the herd. The killing of innocent outsiders must be sanctioned in order to unleash the massive force necessary to eliminate the threat. Extracting resources from foreigners must be embraced lest the nation’s children go hungry. Social cooperation with those particular outsiders is no longer beneficial. Regarding the “enemy population,” the Montaigne dogma obtains: the country cannot gain except through the extermination or expropriation of foreigners.

In such emergency conditions, primal instincts take over, and people start acting bestially, not only toward foreigners, but toward their fellow citizens. For the herd to survive, it must be strong. And for the herd to be strong, it must be unified. In the stampede to war, every herd member must go with the flow, or be trampled underhoof.

For maximum unity, direction of the entire herd is largely yielded to the “herdsmen” in government. Thus, the government is interested in promoting ideologies of conflict among the public, in order to sow strife (both global and domestic) that will send the people clamoring for its untrammeled “leadership.”

Understanding Harmony is the Path to Peace

The first great intellectual victory against warfare sociology was won by the classical economists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their first adversaries were the mercantalists, who were the preeminent antiharmonists of the time, advocating war, protectionism, and monopoly privilege. The classical economists countered them by demonstrating that, with free trade and free markets, not a conflict, but a harmony of interests prevails: both between nations and between classes. Mises called the classical economists, and the classical liberals who followed them, the “harmonists.” As Mises wrote in A Critique of Interventionism:

“We proceed from the position that there are no insoluble conflicts of interest within the private property order, even to the recognition that warlike behavior becomes rarer as the scope and intensity of social association grows. Wars, foreign and domestic (revolutions, civil wars), are more likely to be avoided the closer the division of labor binds men. The belligerent creature, man, becomes industrial, the ‘hero’ becomes a ‘trader.’”

By winning the ideological battle, the harmonists paved the way for the rising peace, liberty, and prosperity of the Age of Liberalism and the Industrial Revolution. But in the late 19th century, new antiharmonist doctrines—Marxism and nationalism— began taking hold. They continued to rise into the new century. The World Wars and the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and Soviets marked their apogee.

Today, we are still afflicted by Warfare Sociology and the Herd Mind. But both can be dispelled by rediscovering what Mises called the “Classical Harmony Doctrine”: by understanding that, in spite of government lies to the contrary, we are not in a lifeboat scenario, and so there is no excuse to suspend basic human decency in our relations with other nations (or other classes, for that matter). And there is also no excuse for giving up our own freedoms and turning our own society into a garrison state. Cooperation (trade, investment, immigration, etc), and not conflict (invasions, occupations, bombings, puppet regimes, sanctions, tariffs, borders, etc), with people around the world is the surest path to our own prosperity.

Dan Sanchez is Digital Content Manager at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE.org), contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and an independent journalist for TheAntiMedia.org. Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or TinyLetter.

http://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Sanchez/2016/05/30/the-sociology-of-war/

Taliban Kills 57 Police as Afghan Province Nears Collapse

Provincial Council Chief: Helmand Could Fall Within 48 Hours

by Jason Ditz

US demands that Afghanistan withdraw much of its defensive force from the Helmand Province in favor of going on the offensive elsewhere has dramatically backfired, with provincial officials now warning that the Taliban are on the brink of capturing the entire province outright.

Around 57 police have been killed in a little over 24 hours around the outskirts of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, as Taliban forces continue to push deeper into the area. Residents inside the city reported the sound of artillery and machine gun fire throughout the night.

Provincial Council Chief Karim Khan Atal told reporters in the capital that the remaining security forces could not handle the situation, and that in the absence of reinforcements, he believes the province will fall under Taliban control within the next 48 hours.

Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry insisted that was not true, but they have repeatedly insisted they have the situation in Helmand well in hand, as the Taliban continues to seize district after district. With the capital itself now surrounded, their optimism seems less justified than ever.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/05/30/taliban-kills-50-police-as-afghan-province-nears-collapse/

Memorial Day Should Make Us Rethink Platitudes About the US Military

by Ivan Eland

As the nation once again honors American war dead on Memorial Day, instead of spouting the usual nationalistic platitudes that U.S. soldiers fought to keep the country "safe and free," perhaps we should analyze whether that is really true.

Since the 9/11 attacks, more than double the number of Americans killed in those terrorist attacks have been sent to their deaths in the war on terror (for example, in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), not to mention the US government’s killing of an order of magnitude more people in many Islamic countries using conventional military forces and drone attacks. Yet during this 15-year period, Americans have been in denial about why Islamist terrorists attack or threaten US targets at home and overseas. US politicians don’t want to discuss the unpleasant reality, because it might anger some voters and threaten their all-important chances for reelection. The American media – putting on what the public wants to see, hear, and read to get big advertising revenues – overhypes coverage of Islamist groups like ISIS, because sensationalist coverage of diabolical villains doing heinous acts sells, but astutely buries the reasons these groups attack the United States.

American media coverage of Islamist terror groups has focused on their proliferation and their increasing savagery – for example, ISIS’s beheadings of hostages, its brutal methods of rule, and its barbarous destruction of archeological treasures – but never examines the question of how much of a threat many of these groups pose to US targets at home and abroad and why these groups would want to attack a country so far away.

In fact, fundamentalist Islam has been around for centuries, just as radical branches of other religions have been, and most radical Islamist groups have local or regional grievances – for example, ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and now Libya; Boko Haram in Nigeria and surrounding countries; Al Shabab in Somalia; and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in the region of West Africa. Jenifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies was recently quoted in aNew York Times article about the US military giving assistance to various governments across Africa to fight such groups. She made a very telling, if understated comment, "Some of the threats, whether it’s Al Shabab, ISIL[ISIS], Boko Haram, or AQIM, pose a more direct and sophisticated threat to African states, to European allies, and potentially to the United States." The last phrase is used as a euphemism by experts on terrorism to acknowledge that the United States is harder (but not impossible) for such groups to attack, because it is more distant across oceans and it doesn’t have as many radicalized sympathizers to shelter prospective "evildoers."

The fact is that most of these groups would have no reason to attack the United States if it didn’t assist local governments in attacking them or attack them directly. For example, even ISIS didn’t start beheading Western journalists and trying to attack European targets until a U.S.-led coalition, which included European countries, started bombing ISIS in the Middle East.

The US government has used the "Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 led to a snowballing threat" rationale as the excuse for excessive US military action during and after the Cold War to address any threat, no matter how remote, so that it didn’t multiply into something worse. This simplistic Munich analogy led to many needless overseas overt and covert interventions; to quagmires, such as the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq; and is now leading to blowback terrorism.

In recent CNN program, "Why Do They Hate Us," Fareed Zakaria does mention US foreign policy, but then quickly skips on to the question of whether Islam is an inherently violent religion and asks why the Vietnamese (Buddhists) didn’t use terrorism against the United States. One reason might be that they were not as weak as the Muslims are against US power – terrorism is used by the weak against the strong when no other means are available – and the second might be that the US government has focused most of its post-World War II military interventions on the Middle East rather than Southeast Asia, including attacking or invading at least seven Muslim countries since 9/11.

Most Americans do not focus on the fact that their country has statistically been the most aggressive country in the world after World War II and that some people don’t like the US government meddling in their affairs using armed force. This rage does not excuse heinous behavior or attacking civilians, as al Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups have done, but it does at least explain their behavior.

Since World War II, the US military has been used for imperial policing, not defending the country as the Constitution stipulates. Unfortunately, many of the recent military deaths that we are mourning have been unnecessary and even counterproductive – as new more radical groups are spawned from the ones US intervention helped create in the first place – al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. Some would say that not running an activist foreign policy is naïve and dangerous. What is naïve is that many Americans seem to think that the 9/11 and other terror attacks just arise out of thin air, with no cause except perhaps pure evil in the perpetrators’ hearts. Terrorists are evil, but the ones that threaten the United States (and the ones that don’t should be left alone) are doing so for reasons that the American people and their politicians and media don’t care to examine – at their own peril.

http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2016/05/30/memorial-day-make-us-rethink-platitudes-us-military/