Decent Cannibals: On the Situation in Ukraine
In this essay, Roberts take a look at the situation in Ukraine, the reminder of nuclear apocalypse, and the decent cannibals who advocate for it.
When asked his opinion on the atomic bomb, H.L. Mencken responded with heavy sarcasm:
"The atom bomb, I have long preached, is the greatest invention that Yahweh has made since leprosy. Certainly it has given great glory to the Christian physicists of this country. Try to imagine a decent cannibal throwing it on a town full of women and children."
I, too, welcome back Yaweh's greatest invention, and I warn the public to stay away from liberals; they've all become decent cannibals, and they're in search of a town to throw our nukes into.
The return of 'the bomb' seems to have had little effect on the world, except to excite the nihilists, and there is little more ridiculous than an excited nihilist. Aside from tickling these people pink, the return of the bomb seems to have become fodder for our political peanut gallery. The decent cannibal asks for a no-fly zone for the recently lionized Ukraine, while their opponent, the Klueless Klux Klanners have decided this is a worldwide race war. Ambrose Bierce once quipped that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography--proxy wars seem to be the way He teaches them hypocrisy. This situation makes me thankful, at the moment, for our elites. Incompetent as they can be, at least they are not launching us head first into nuclear war.
In the mix of hot takes, 'analyses', and declaration propaganda, I was able to find the best take of the lot of them. This take was provided by Will Self, a favorite English writer of mine and someone who still uses the English language to its fullest extent. In his audio monograph, titled Return of the Bomb for BBC, Self brings our situation in touch with the conditions that made it possible. He begins this with the best framing of our situation I have yet heard:
"Many people think of this as the two thousand and twenty-second year of the Christian era – I’m more inclined to view it as the sixtieth of the Arkhipov one…"
He notes that we are being reminded that nuclear weapons, and our place in the M.A.D. doctrine is not only not a Pax Americana--as the right wing still believes--but built on a paradox. Note, for example, the expounding by many--a lot of them friends of mine--that statement that we need to judge nations as acting in their own interest. As Self points out, however:
"One of the curious things about the [M.A.D.] doctrine is that it assumes nation-states and even empires behave as rational, self-interested individuals while the Arkhipov incident tells us that, in fact, Armageddon is often only averted by actual individuals who will rebel against groupthink. Another paradox of M.A.D., besides its worrying acronym, is that it relies on hostile powers' motivations and dispensations being transparent to one another. However, what we know from the record, the possibility of nuclear war and its avoidance during the Cuban [Missile] Crisis were a function of ignorance and misreading of intelligence."
This is how he approaches the situation; that the Ukraine crisis has returned dormant anxieties, repressed or distorted by 'post-nuclear fictions' like Neville Shute's On the Beach, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and the Mad Max films. Using his own formulations, like the idea that the nation-state is a 'double-bind' relation and that our technology acts as a bubble that distorts and disorients us, Self considers the fact that these realizations have turned over the idea that our 'peace dividend' since the beginning of our Arkhipov Era has not been changed from, but built on the doctrine of M.A.D. and Cold War sentiments. The Russia we face today is a Russia built upon the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. The America we see today continued Cold War style 'conflicts' even after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Nothing actually changed; there was no clean break, only a mutation of former anxieties and idiocies. And as Self says at the end, our generation may be the first to not know, by direct experience, a world that did not live under this repressive regime, a regime we call M.A.D., that is built on "a singular Arkhipov and universal anxiety." We might become aliens to a world built on a knife’s edge.
***
Finding Self's take was like finding a hundred dollar bill in your pocket when you're starving. We are not finding anything new, in a sense. Our illusions are merely being popped, one by one.
We will never let our illusions be destroyed, though. Not without a fight. Every time you go onto a social media platform, you see people re-asserting their beloved 'beliefs', appealing to whichever God or ideology is most appealing. It is a tragedy, truly, when humans forget they are mere animals. Ours is a porcine race, rooting among the stars, as Vidal would put it. Under the returning heaviness of repressed truths, we watch people scurry about, like frightened chickens without heads.
To continue stealing from Will Self, he once noted that, "We are probably the first culture that absolutely understands that narrative takes away as much as it delivers." I would have to disagree with Self here, slightly; I do not think this generation absolutely understands anything, but perhaps instinctively acts out things that are obvious from those outside of the activities. We are still creating narratives we believe have some claim to absolute truth, all too happy with the fact that the narrative has taken a lot from us, in order to deliver us our illusions.
One of the many illusions that we still very much believe in, but is a relic of the Cold War, is our notion of propaganda. As our repressed fears of nuclear war--or lack of fear from our village idiots--become more prominent, people begin to beat the drum about 'propagandists', 'agents', and 'psy-ops'. Blaming either governments or corporations, they will assert the Orwellian view that some 'Big Brother' is promoting a 'big lie', which is meant to blind 'the people' from the truth.
The truth is, propaganda is not a big lie; it is a little lie, told many times, in a game of telephone. As far as I can tell, we either overdose on our own delusions, or we are very eager to get these delusions from others. Propaganda seems to be a series of idiots dosing each other with their opinions; villages of idiots, looking for which one of them is the idiot. It seems that the government or the corporation or academe spends their time grappling with and fanning, rather than creating, these prejudices and biases. Often, we find them submitting to them in order to get people to act the way they want. As Gore Vidal maintained, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
What chafes us so, and thus pushes us to craft nightmares like 1984, is that this propaganda is hijacked by larger organizations. We do not mind being deluded, mislead, or stupid. We get ticked when someone else diverts this to another purpose. Propaganda is, first and foremost, a democratic activity. As I like to say, propaganda is like murder; it is more likely to be committed by those we trust. As Sartre would say, the newspaper--or, in our case, social media--is a mediation between us and ourselves.
***
Speaking of Sartre, in Self's monograph, and the events of the world, there seems to be something of a vindication for Sartre. Every time I think Sartre's flame might be snuffed out, he lights up again; a phoenix lighting his smokes on his fiery feathers.
In his Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre wrote this:
"If the future is conceived starting from the lived situation with its limits and if its future is denied by the true future, itself defined by technological revolutions, then the future outlined by Marx with revolution as its end is precisely denied by the "atomic" revolution. In the first place, revolution has become impossible and replaced by war. Next, there is a bureaucratic and technical dictatorship gradually replacing capitalist oppression. Finally, general man becomes a historical factor as general demands generality; that is, the equal dictatorship for everyone of an abstract State, and freedom and equality in terms of total interchangeability. These three threatening sanders are new forms of oppression. Man may be alienated by abstraction and universality as well as by a concrete category of oppressors. The latter carrying through the mediation between the abstraction and the oppressed. At present, oppression by the abstract without mediation."
The nuclear pact that our world is so precariously built on seems, I think, to have shifted our situation. And we, odd species that we are, refuse to shift with it; we keep trying to follow our illusions and assume it will lead to the right destination. It seems to me that the last thirty or so years, since the 'end' of the Cold War, we have followed the counter-revolution of the Reaganites and their redneck publicists in going backwards in search of an answer. Where the age of Arkhipov began with a sharp reminder that we were in the nuclear age and could not go back, the assumption of M.A.D. or the Faux-Pas Americana of American 'peace' has let us relax. The past has become what we desire, even as the material conditions speed by.
I think, along with Self and Sartre, that the atomic age has put a lot of 'universalist' ideologies and their visions of utopia (and dystopia--you never have one without the other) to bed. Marxism and its goal of revolution, liberalism and its desire to ride the coattails of capitalism, conservatism and its idealized past, fascism and its dream of social Darwinist superiority--all of these have been put out by the existence of nuclear weapons that solidify and protect the nation-state against inner changes. They are visions without solutions. The dropping of the atomic bomb not only ended World War II, it ended the ideologies that had carried it out. As we moved away from 1962 and especially when Reagan's publicity stunt of 'winning' the Cold War came about, these ideologies returned to us. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, they urged us towards revenge for their most foul, unnatural murders.
If the situation in Ukraine means anything, beyond a proxy war between nation-states, striving for their interests under a nuclear sky, it means a return of a sharp reminder. But it is a reminder I doubt we will feel or recognize; Gore Vidal characterized America as 'a funhouse, with laughing gas being pumped in.' The only difference now is we have added speakers, playing circus music loudly. One can only hope we have not gone deaf yet. We must hope it will turn over the table our seance is taking place at, the smoke billowed out by a technology that, as my friend Dr. Dwayne Monroe likes to remind me, only produces smoke and the machine that makes it, even as it offers us the supernatural.
Until then, or until the end, we are in the hands of an incompetent elite and their decent cannibals.
"Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?" Quholet - a man who knew his limitations.
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” --Dostoevsky