Tag Archives: hannah arendt

“A Means of State Control” (Part Two)

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In the first part of this post I dismantled the consensus definition of propaganda, arguing that in part and in total “propaganda” is indistinguishable from any other form of political expression.  The only obvious distinguishing aspect between the two definitions is the essential subjectivity of favoring political expression I agree with and opposing propaganda I do not agree with.

This being the case, propaganda needs to be redefined.  I propose that propaganda be defined not as the product of a state’s political agenda but the control of the means of that agenda itself.  In effect, propaganda is not what you see, but how you see it.  States engage in propaganda as they seek to control and dominate communications between the government and the people as well as nations abroad as a tool to secure and extend their political power.

Joseph Goebbels, never a man anyone wishes to acknowledge, bluntly stated in a 1928 speech the true purpose of propaganda.  The key phrase is variously translated as “the forerunner,” or “means,” of state control, but it is easy to see how the various uses of propaganda can be caught up in this definition: it helps parties achieve government control, maintains authoritarian political control, and aids those governments’ needs to control both the population and foreign adversaries.  This was written before Hitler came to power but Goebbels’ emphasis on “seizing” and holding government power anticipates the totalitarian control they eventually exerted over all of Germany.

I recognize this is a departure from the conventional and academic definition of propaganda.  That is entirely the point.  In order both to recognize propaganda for what it truly is, and to protect legitimate political expression from repression, I must make the argument here that propaganda and legitimate political expression are opposites.

  1. All Political Speech Is Equal

This is a difficult point to argue primarily because the subjectivity of political expression is so deeply ingrained in most people.  It is impossible to argue that the speech of, say, Donald Trump, and that of Bernie Sanders, are effectively equal.  For all practical matters nobody would agree to this proposition.  So in order to make this argument, I need to break political expression down to its essence, that of thesis and antithesis.

As an example I will use an extraordinary piece of artwork I saw once more than 15 years ago.  During the Cold War a former Western European ambassador to the Soviet Union quietly collected the art made by prisoners of the Gulag.  One older artist had made his living restoring Russian Orthodox Church icons several hundreds of years old.  In his spare time he painted his own icons.  One of those this ambassador purchased:  at the center of a series of portraits of the saints of the orthodox church he painted Ronald Reagan.

The political meaning of this portrait could not be mistaken.  The artist canonized the American president with the holiest figures in the history of the church.  He risked his freedom or life to do so in a state that would treat this expression as a double heresy: an expression of faith in a power other than the Communist Party and the reification of the enemy of the Soviet Union.  The thesis would be “Ronald Reagan is a saint.”  The antithesis would be “Ronald Reagan is not a saint.”  As political propositions both require the other, in which case they are essentially equal.  It is impossible to argue the proposition without stating the fundamental basis of the argument and its opposite.

It can be argued that what separates this individual act of political expression from propaganda is the state in terms of both scale and legitimacy.  Yet if we acknowledge the right or duty of the state to express, exert, or defend its authority or principles – in the event of war, disease, or national emergency – then there is no fundamental difference between the two.  Even if we acknowledge state expression in the absence of a national emergency, we fall back on the thesis/antithesis dichotomy: the argument and its counterargument cannot exist in the public domain without each other.

2. Propaganda Is the Control of the Means of Political Expression

But it is within that dichotomy we find the essence of true propaganda: the elimination of the antithesis, an artificial state of affairs where no contradiction of a state-endorsed political statement may be contradicted.  The only way to accomplish this, in practice, is for the state to control the means of political expression and enforce compliance with that expression.  True propaganda cannot exist without both of these elements.

In this case we have multiple examples.  Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are defined as totalitarian because they controlled all aspects of individual life.  Both exerted a “party line” that was brutally enforced by the police state.  And yet, as the Holocaust Memorial’s catalogue of Nazi propaganda demonstrates, we are often distracted more by the product of that propaganda outlet than we are by the sheer ubiquity of it.

This control limits, in a concrete way, the public space for debate that Hannah Arendt outlines.  Politics and political freedom are healthy when the town commons is open to all to debate, argue, find consensus, form alliances.  The control of the means of political expression closes the commons, leaving behind only the state’s position with no method of counterargument.  This is why I argue that propaganda and political expression are opposites: a closed commons against an open one, censorship countering creativity, conformism versus diversity.

3)  Propaganda Is Coercive

As I noted in Part One, Nazi Germany’s control of the means of political expression was indeed totalitarianism: all church, universities, schools, radio, press, publishing, cinema, civic organizations, artistic and literary guilds, medicine, and sports were dominated by the government.  The Soviet Union also controlled all these means while destroying the church, suppressing minority languages and religious faiths, limiting travel both domestically and internationally, turning family and community members into informants, exiling or executing dissidents, and blocking foreign communications into the Soviet Union.

This is not mere censorship.  It is the active harnessing of the means of communication to broadcast a single political agenda.  But the pervasiveness of this propaganda is only one part of the apparatus for complete political control.  Both states combined total control with violent enforcement through a mammoth and powerful secret police.  In practice, these states told the people what to think and brutally punished anyone who did not think as they were told.  This is the essence of totalitarianism: they have more in common with the Thought Police than with the Office of Censorship.

The practice of total political control is often and mistakenly considered a fundamentally modern concept.  It is argued that totalitarianism and the mass organization and violence required for it to survive would not be possible without the tools available only in the 20th century.  This is not true: the aspect of totalitarian control of political expression has existed for hundreds of years.  As in many cases, we strangely miss this fact hiding in plain sight.  Most scholars of propaganda date the term to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, established by the Roman Catholic Church in the late 16th century.  The church established this office primarily to spread the Gospel among the newly discovered territories of the Americas but it was useful in the Counter-Reformation as well to oppose the spread of Lutheranism and other heretical ideas.

But what is regularly omitted from propaganda’s origin story is the Holy Inquisition.  The inquisition was developed in the late medieval period but made notorious during the Spanish and Roman periods of the 16th century.  The Spanish Inquisition imposed conversions on the Muslim and Jewish populations of the territories formerly ruled by the Andalus caliphate.  The Roman Inquisition attacked political heretics like Galileo Galilei.  The inquisition, then, acted as the enforcement mechanism of the church’s propaganda of the faith.  Hitler and Stalin would have immediately recognized the control and enforcement of political expression as the essence of their rule.  That essence is fundamentally coercive.  The Inquisition and the Congregation together are the origin for totalitarian propaganda as we know it.

This is the “means of state control” discussed earlier.  Totalitarian countries control the means of political expression primarily to maintain control the state itself and to achieve its political goals.   The ramifications of this understanding are obvious: it is difficult if impossible to communicate opposition within a regime when all the means to communicate are controlled by the state.  Today, authoritarian regimes use this kind of control, while short of being absolute, to dominate, distort, or close the political commons.  This may feel like a very contemporary tool, but hey are building on a tradition that has dates back hundreds of years to the earliest modern states.

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Plenums and Power (Power v. Force III)

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A plenum convened in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on February 9, 2014 (via Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso)

The past two weeks have been astounding to witness in Ukraine and Bosnia- Herzegovina. While I haven’t been able to follow quite as intimately what has happened in Ukraine, media reporting from that country has been very good. In Bosnia I have several friends, and I heard my colleague and friend Jasmin Mujanovic, a New York-based academic (and apparently inexhaustible tweeter), speak on a panel yesterday to a packed house at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs about the dynamic events in that country.

It’s been very interesting to note the similarities, as Jasmin’s co-panelist Janusz Bugajski did yesterday, between the two countries. In both countries, citizens took to the streets to protest a sclerotic and unresponsive political system, widespread and petty corruption, and a sluggish economy. In Ukraine and Bosnia, people want closer ties to Europe and the West (if not necessarily the European Union).  I would note, as Gene Sharp has noted, that initial protests were sparked — or helped organizers to consolidate demonstrations — around a singular provocative event. In Ukraine, it was President Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to proceed with closer ties with the European Union that brought thousands of people onto the street. In Bosnia, it was the federal parliament’s inability to issue identity papers and passports, effectively rendering a new generation of children identityless, that brought thousands of mothers out to demonstrate.

And critically, in both countries peaceful demonstrations were set upon by overreactive security services to which the protesters reacted violently. In Bosnia, protesters attacked municipal buildings in almost every major city in the country. In Ukraine, protesters stood their ground and fought back against the security services. In both cases, there were echoes of the first response against Egyptian security in Tahrir Square, when the people had just enough power to counter the force of the government to prevail. This is an important, if unsettling, development. Because in both cases, the government may still have the monopoly of force. It depends entirely on whether the military will side with the government or stay off the domestic battlefield.

But here the two countries diverge. In Bosnia, the initial violence almost immediately abated. It’s clear from those I’ve heard from that seeing the burning buildings reminded too many of the war from 20 years ago and peace was quickly restored. This is an extraordinary development. The Bosnian army or, for that matter, the small European Union force contingent in the country, was never called up.

In Ukraine, it appears that Western pressure — public calls by US civilian and military officials and their counterparts in the European Union and NATO, all of which have worked diligently during the past 20 years to build strong institutional and personal relationships with Ukraine’s military establishment — paid off by keeping the Ukrainian army (for now) out of the political power struggle. That kept bloodshed to a minimum, at least, and avoided the precedent we’ve seen in Egypt of making the military establishment a political kingmaker or outright ruler in the country.

Unfortunately, while the Ukrainians figured out a way to counter the initially violent response of the state, and in such a dramatic way, this essentially means there is no rulebook for the way forward in the country. The opposition, now in control of Kiev and, presumably, the western part of the country, could reach out to the Russian-leaning east  and Crimea. But if divisions in the country become acute there is no precedent for the peaceful sharing of power across the entire country. If Crimea wants to join Russia or parts of the country want to break away or become autonomous, it may require the army to enforce union. And why not? Kiev was defended with force and won fairly the same way — that is to say, violently.

But in Bosnia something more astonishing took place and continues to take place. People have abandoned violence entirely to assemble spontaneously in municipal “plenums” and issue collective demands to their own local authorities. This has led to the resignation of at least five cantonal governments. Bosnia’s “federal” government structure, imposed by the Dayton peace accords, is Byzantine and bloated to an extreme. Exhausted and exasperated by this internationally imposed, ethnically dominated, and thoroughly corrupt system, Bosnians are now asserting their own, direct, democratic axis of power to demand that their government respond to them and their needs.

It is important to note, particularly in the context of the regional and linguistic divide in Ukraine, that the protests in Bosnia have asserted themselves as Bosnian rather than ethnic, religious or linguistic. This is a critical development. While limited to the Federation, Bosniaks and Croats have reached out to Serbs in the Republika Serpska and have been rewarded by several individuals and organizations rallying to them in reaction to a political system that helps none of them and punishes all of them equally. While I’m sure there are some who are trying to make the same argument in Ukraine, I think the dividing line is far more stark in that country.

While the concept of the assembly is as old as democracy, it is amazing that the Bosnian plenum is so fresh and new to this wave of popular uprisings against thuggish and sclerotic regimes. De Tocqueville wrote admiringly of American civil society and our town hall culture. Hannah Arendt wrote about citizens’ assemblies (she unfortunately wrote about the early “soviets”) as a unique expression of democratic power and direct governance. She also wrote about the concept of politics as an open space where people could gather to discuss issues of common concern — the more open, the more free and dynamic a political space is. That is exactly what we are witnessing in the Bosnian plenums.

What makes them more extraordinary is that the plenums themselves are opening a political space between the people and their own, nominally democratic and elected governments. The Dayton constitution, exacerbated by ethnic chauvinism and sheer political myopia, had simply closed off politics to most Bosnians. The plenums have very effectively crowbarred open the political space again. Where once we saw Solidarity seated on one side of the round table from the Communist Party in Warsaw — forcing the political space open between the people and their government — today we see the Bosnian plenums assembling down the street from the governments that purport to represent them in Sarajevo, Tuzla,  Zenica and elsewhere.

As a result, I am more optimistic about events in Bosnia than I am in Ukraine. I am not fatalistic about what will happen on the Black Sea, but I am concerned that the recourse to violence there will beget more violence. The protesters in Bosnia recognize their power in the plenum.  That is an extraordinary, unique and genuine contribution to political and democratic development that, if successful, should be a model for us all to emulate.

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American Republic, Now Available from Amazon

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I’m pleased to announce that my book, American Republic: Essays on the Nature of Politics, is now available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon.com.

American Republic includes the original book, plus three essays that first appeared on this site: “The Plastics and the Political,” “Faith, Politics and ‘The West Wing,'” and “Democracy and Political Language”. 

The Kindle format retails at $6.95 and the paperback is also available for $12.99.

The paperback is also available direct through the publisher, and we hope to have it available through Barnes and Noble and in other book stores soon.

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An Assault on Joseph Nye, Part Two: “Power and Violence are Opposites”

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“Down with Milosevic!”, Belgrade, 1999 (via BBC)

In a previous discussion, I attacked Joseph Nye’s “soft power/hard power” theory at the level of language, effectively calling his terms unclear and mealy-mouthed substitutes for clearer, more precise terms we can use like force and coercion, sanctions or diplomacy. Nye has made international relations theory less clear and transparent for the application of his two terms and I tried to reverse that trend with my own replacements.

At the same time, Nye’s ideas don’t work as theory, either. Nye has offered a Hobson’s Dichotomy, a false choice that doesn’t exist in the real world. A Hobson’s Dichotomy poses us with two falsely opposed choices that may not offer a solution to the problem set. That is what soft and hard power effectively presents us. It is a trick of language that also gives us an untrue sense of mastering reality. The reality of international politics is far too complex for that. To put this simply: as a Hobson’s Dichotomy, Nye’s idea is a narrows that squeezes out rather than includes alternative or opposing means to achieve political change.

In political reality, decision-makers don’t choose from one quiver labeled “soft power” and another labeled “hard power” when taking action. If their judgment is keen, they look for the best tools available to them to achieve the most desirable outcome. If they are lucky, and their country is truly powerful (like ours), they will have a wide variety of means available to apply to what will be a unique, complicated, and dynamically evolving situation and environment.

Nye’s theoretical failure goes beyond the toolkit available to decision-makers. “Soft power” fails to take into account civil society, international movements, and faith groups. For Nye, there is nothing like the Roman Catholic Church, Islam, or Buddhism.  For Nye, there is nothing like the Freeze, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the Color Revolutions, or the Arab Spring.  Each of these has had profound international political effects – in other words, by his own definition they are powerful — but they simply can’t be accounted for by Nye’s political theory.

What makes these movements all the more interesting – and possible – is the flow of information, inspiration and support across borders. There would have been no revolution against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia without Solidarity, and there would have been no uprising in Tunisia without Serbia, and no Cairo without Tunisia. To Nye, this does not account for soft power, or any kind of power for that matter, because it is not enabled by a state — even though these movements peacefully changed the means of government and the norms for governing in more than a dozen countries.

Boston, April 15 (via The Telegraph)

Nye’s theory also fails to account for terrorism. He dispenses with terrorism as “depending on soft power” (my emphasis) without defining terrorism per se as either hard (force) or soft (as I have defined it before, power qua power). Reading between the lines, then, Nye’s theory cannot really accommodate terrorism: it simply does not belong in Nye’s universe.

If we take most observers’ understanding that terrorism is a tool of the weak – a meansof  the un-powerful – even if they are state-sponsored — then terrorism falls away from this discussion entirely. Nye may get partial credit for recognizing terrorism requires other tools to succeed, but it is not a tool of power or the powerful in and of itself. Nye’s theory of two “buckets” does not have enough room for either political movements or terrorism — which pretty much defines the political dynamism of the previous decade.

An effective theory of power will take into account terrorism and the power wielded by ordinary people through collective action, whether in faith groups, civil society, or international movements. Power, in the end, is mass, and mass can really be found in the minds of millions or billions of individual human beings. Only military theorists really understand the importance of this collective mind in political affairs, and even then the American military tradition has been slow or loath to understand the relationship of the public to the political.

Clausewitz for example wrote about the “moral forces” in war affecting public opinion as “among the most important”. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote about “the crowd in action,” dating the phenomenon back to ancient Greek warfare. David Galula, writing about insurgency, noted that the guerrilla could “still win” with “no positive policy” but “good propaganda” — that is, directly influencing the population. David Petraeus, drawing off all these shrewd observations, argued that military communications could be the “decisive logical line of operation” by communicating directly with the public in counterinsurgency operations.

We still struggle to understand the motivations and goals of terrorism. The attack on the Boston Marathon is the most recent expression of this ambivalence, but almost daily bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan should remind us of the continuing struggle as well. Theoretically we wrestle to understand whether terrorism is an effective political weapon.

Nonetheless as a theoretical matter it should be clear terrorism is violence, not force, and  as a practical measure it should be clear that terrorism is a tool of the weak, that it leverages political entities that are not as powerful when measured against the mass movements outlined above. Hannah Arendt has written precisely that “power and violence are opposites”. This is probably the most mordant indictment of Nye’s theory, since it quite simply excludes terrorism from any consideration by Nye. It fully supports my contention that Nye’s theory constitutes not an expansive analysis of power but an exclusive narrows.

The real pain extracted from bombings or mass attacks can mitigate that inherent weakness. Violence can, on a macabre balance sheet, equate to political power but only if state authorities or the public mind are willing to allow it. Still, as violence, terrorism is only relegated to simply another tool – like economic sanctions, or diplomacy – which states or non-state actors use to affect international affairs.  This by no means justifies terrorism, but it does account for the practice. So far, that is more than what Joseph Nye can do.

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The Problem of Propaganda

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Hoang Nhat Thong (left) and Viet Khang (via http://www.nguoi-viet.com)

Last week, the Vietnamese government sentenced two musicians on the charge of “anti-state propaganda,” apparently the first case in recent memory that Hanoi imprisoned artists under the charge. But within the month the government put on trial three writers on the same charge of “anti-state propaganda,” so the accusation is clearly not a new one.  Vietnam is still a one-party state in the Chinese mold; while similarly opening up its economy, the government still maintains tight control over all communications and the arts.

The artists (pictured above) and writers were engaged in direct political protest against the state and it is important to assert, again, that is their right. Vietnam is a signatory to the United Nations Charter on Human Rights, which grants them the liberty to criticize their own government. Particularly in the United States, we enjoy exceptionally broad latitude to attack and criticize our government and our leaders, and it is important to remember that not everyone enjoys this freedom.
This leads me to the particular charge of “anti-state propaganda,” an Orwellian construction which is common in Communist or post-Communist states such as Vietnam. It may seem peculiar to attack this particular epithet when the larger concern is for these artists’ and writers’ human rights. But when the charge for the “crime” involved includes the incendiary and imprecise word propaganda I think it is important to get involved in the semantics.The artists (pictured above) and writers were engaged in direct political protest against the state and it is important to assert, again, that is their right. Vietnam is a signatory to the United Nations Charter on Human Rights, which grants them the liberty to criticize their own government. Particularly in the United States, we enjoy exceptionally broad latitude to attack and criticize our government and our leaders, and it is important to remember that not everyone enjoys this freedom.

Propaganda, like terrorism, is one of those post-modern words that has been used so often by so many to have lost any concrete popular meaning. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t insist that it does have some real definition, especially when it is being abused to send people to prison by repressive governments.

We could begin by looking at its roots, which my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary notes dates to the 17th century, when Pope Gregory XV instituted a committee of Cardinals called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the congregation for the propagation of the faith. Commentators on propaganda often point to these origins and forget perhaps two critical aspects of the congregation. The first is the most obvious: the evangelical nature of the Church, which was dealing with the challenge of the Protestant Reformation at that time.

But most easily forgotten in our more secular age is the fact that even as late as the early 17th century the Catholic Church directly and indirectly ruled as a temporal power in Europe.  That is, the Church was a state.  This is important to my argument which will follow.

However, if you forget or choose to ignore that the Church was a state, then the roots of propaganda in state-mandated ideological propagation starts you on an entirely unproductive semantic path leading to today, when anybody or anything can be engaged in — or, more precisely, be accused of — propaganda.

It is distressing that the otherwise wholly moral scholarship of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which held a massive and disturbing exhibit for several years (ending in 2011) on Nazi propaganda, could not be more precise when it came to defining what propaganda is. Here is what they have on their exhibit web site:

“Scholars, journalists, and politicians have long argued about how to properly define propaganda and distinguish it from other forms of mass communication. Propaganda is biased information designed to shape public opinion and behavior.”

(Bold in the original.)  In this definition there may be lost on the visitor to the exhibit or the site an insight made by Hannah Arendt during one of the war crimes trials after World War II: this definition fails to take into account the particularly warped reality of the Third Reich. The Nazis not only controlled every aspect of communications, but every aspect of those communications were used to serve the state. “Bias,” in that context, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how the Nazis approached propaganda.

But outside the Nazi context the definition could very easily be applied to any other form of “mass communication,” from legitimate advertising, to social marketing, to newspaper editorials, to political communications. “Bias” is the key word here. It is the essence of any practical choice we face, especially in politics.  More specifically, when we attempt to persuade the public on any important matter — childhood vaccination, for example — aren’t we engaged in an inherently biased activity? (Do we give opponents of vaccination equal time?)  Or to put this more precisely: I am sure those Vietnamese musicians and writers demonstrated ample bias in their attempt to shape domestic public opinion and behavior against the government. (If they didn’t before, I’m doubly sure they do now.) Does that justify their trial and imprisonment on charges of “anti-state propaganda”?

The Memorial isn’t alone in its imprecision. This site includes a standard list derived from a ground-breaking work from the Institute for Propaganda Analysis done in the 1930s.  It includes some of the usual suspects — bandwagoning, plain folks appeals, fear, testimonial — and provides some examples of propaganda that includes Enron, Newt Gingrich, the John Birch Society and the Office of Strategic Information.

All of this makes me extremely uneasy, mostly because you could apply most, if not all, of these critiques to a series of highly effective vaccination public service announcements that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a few years ago. (Unfortunately, my combination of key word searches failed to pull them up.) They featured a series (bandwagoning) of grandparents (plain folks) with their grandchildren on their knees, talking about (testimonial) what it was like when they were children, losing friends and family to the diseases that ravaged kids at that time (fear). But then there was hope (glittering generalities): vaccines were developed to protect children, vaccines that protect their own grandchildren.  Is this propaganda?

The other list includes only one government agency (the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Information), with the possible exception of the Maoist International Movement which may be funded by the Chinese government. This, too, is disturbing. We may not like what Newt Gingrich has to say or the way he says it, but how does that make what he says propaganda?

This is the core of my argument and why I mentioned the crucial distinction that propaganda had its root in the Church as state. If a musician can be imprisoned for engaging in “anti-state propaganda” — and a definition provided by the Holocaust Memorial seems to support the government’s case, then our understanding of this word is corrupted.  Let me define propaganda down.

Propaganda is defined as:

Communications by a state or its directly control agents.

That deliberately and substantially distorts, misleads or lies,

Against a material or corporeal enemy.

There may be concerns about what we do about the “communications” of terrorist or quasi-state entities, or the lies that are admitted by political enemies. As with my argument about terrorism, we have other words for them. They are terrorists, or liars, or engage in libel or defamation. (Some of these are legal causes of action in their own right; propaganda is not.) These words may not be as satisfactory as propaganda, but we need to hold propaganda in reserve against those states that maintain a monopoly over communications to real effect — and, as we have seen with Hoang Nhat Thong and Viet Khang, to direct detrimental effect over individuals.

It goes without saying that these musicians and their writer cousins are not propagandists. But many in their country may not know anything else because only their government tells them what to think. We can change the way we think about what governments tell us, and the way we think about propaganda, and this is a good place to start.

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In Syria, Power vs. Force

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Sen. John McCain speaks to France 24  April 12. (France 24)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been a vociferous advocate for action against the Syrian regime’s brutality against its opposition, as his recent interview with French national television amply demonstrates. To his credit, McCain has been a consistent voice for measured, forceful intervention, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. He has become an extraordinary voice for the obligation to protect (O2P), comparing the moral imperative facing the international community in Syria to the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. While a cease-fire appears to be holding, opposition demonstrations are ongoing and the regime of Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated extraordinary willingness to wield violence in order to maintain control over the country.

McCain recently returned from Turkey where he visited camps filled with Syrian refugees fleeing the regime’s repression. This is perhaps an important reminder of the necessity for finer judgment in these matters, as similar camps filled up after the invasion of Iraq and refugees poured into Syria and Jordan fleeing the violence and chaos of sectarian anarchy in the wake of invasion. The Syrian regime’s collapse would no doubt benefit American interests in the region, depriving Iran of a proxy and Hezbollah and Hamas of a paymaster. But it’s much harder to anticipate the unforeseen outcomes of centrifugal forces cut loose  in the event of the regime’s demise.

Nonetheless, McCain’s intriguing and clearly genuine and heartfelt appeal not to allow al-Assad his waltz of death over a yearning opposition reveals the tensions inherent to an age-old theoretical question, particularly in the wake of a series of violent and non-violent, successful and unsuccessful revolutions in the Islamic world. I am writing about the relationship between power and force, which for too long have been roughly and lazily equated.

The point of departure is McCain’s insistence that a multinational intervention against the Syrian regime, likely led by NATO, could effectively level the tools of force between the opposition and the government.  This is quite a practical assessment. The regime retains the monopoly of force, McCain notes, with heavy weapons, including tanks and helicopter gunships. The Free Syrian Army is fighting mostly with firearms and video cameras. “Right now it’s artillery and tanks against Kalashnikovs,” McCain told France 24. “This is not a fair fight.”

Libya serves as the model in McCain’s thinking. There, NATO aircraft leveled the fight by eliminating the Libyan air force and “tank plinking” — a practice derided over Kosovo — destroying Libyan armor with precision strike.  I’m not an operator so I hesitate to assert that the NATO campaign was carried out easily and with few civilian casualties. But by eliminating the monopoly of force, the Libyan army was put on the same footing as the armed Libyan opposition forces, making it “a fair fight”.

Perhaps most importantly in Libya — and this more closely serves my point — once heavy armor and attack aircraft were swept away, the full power of the population was liberated.  Whole cities rose up against the regime and the regime found itself outmatched. Guns are little use against the masses, especially when fear is no longer a factor.

McCain didn’t allude to this, but it must have informed his thinking.  Armor and aircraft make repression and killing a distant, impersonal, impervious thing. Civilians and fighters alike flee in terror from the rumble of tanks and the roar of jet engines and rotor wash. It is much harder — although the Iranian regime did its level best — to instill that kind of fear over a mass of human beings from the end of a gun.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians jam Tahrir Square to bring down the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, early 2011 (Getty Images via The Guardian)

The armed revolution aside, we saw precisely this triumph of power over force in Egypt and Tunisia. Masses of people cowed and then overthrew their dictatorships. In Tunisia, the revolution moved too quickly for the regime to react, but in Egypt the important factor was the neutrality of the Army. The people could face down the relatively lightly armed police and internal security forces. Confronted with a million people in Tahrir Square in Cairo (and hundreds of thousands gathered in other cities), the security forces — used to dealing with individuals or dozens of people at most — no longer could assert authority in any meaningful way.  It was only a matter of time before the regime would collapse.

This was in large strokes a replay of actions that took place in Central Europe during the Velvet Revolution.  Poland lived for 10 years under martial law — the rule of armor in the streets — but even this was no match for the growing power of the Polish people. Once the rest of the enslaved states of Central Europe were unable or unwilling to roll down their people as they began to march en masse — and the Center in Moscow importantly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention as it had in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to put down popular rebellion — the state revealed itself to be made of matchwood. The power of the powerless was let loose on the world.

So power and force are not the same thing. I should emphasize that force can trump power, as we have seen in Iran and elsewhere. And power can dissipate, as we saw in Ukraine. But this does not alter the fundamental difference between them.  Power is a moral concept and that is why it is inherent to politics. As a moral concept, power resides exclusively in the mind of men and women. Power is infinitely scalable, as we saw mobilizing by the millions across middle Europe and the Mahgreb.

Hannah Arendt wrote very clearly in On Violence that violence and power were not one and the same but opposites.  She also wrote that war (that is, applied force) was not the result of some primal human urge toward self-destruction but, finally, the ultimate means to resolve dispute. To illuminate her insight more, I would argue that force and power are not opposites but opposing means to the same end: to change political behavior. Force is mobilized by a state (or quasi-state); power requires mobilization by something other than the state for legitimacy (although in many societies state structures are regularly put to work creating those non-state mobilizations). Force is legitimate when it is wielded by the accepted state (or quasi-state) authority; power is legitimate when it is given freely and without coercion.

The Syrian regime has learned well from the examples of both its neighbors and from history.  As seen in Homs and Hama, force can trump power. Murder dismembers the political opposition.  Guns and Tanks terrorize the ordinary and the innocent. But I also know that this is only a temporary terror. Whether the horror in Syria continues is a prediction someone better informed can make. Real power ultimately prevails because it is found in the minds and morals of millions of men and women.  The leaders in Damascus, Moscow, and Minsk, and in Pyongyang, Tehran, Beijing, and Havana must know this.

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Who Really Loses if Iran Gets the Bomb

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Iran’s nuclear reactor complex at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. (Wikimedia Commons)

Unequivocal statements by President Barack Obama and visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron today about Iranian nuclear ambitions leave small doubt about the perilous path facing the West. The President was right to chide more hawkish supporters of military action against Iran and for choosing a variety of diplomatic and economic tools to isolate Tehran, but that may leave the country to embark on a crash course for the ultimate weapon.

I have little doubt Iran is pursuing that weapon (although that is a political judgment, not based on intelligence analysis or IAEA reporting) but it is not for the purposes that the doom-sayers — usually those who think this can be resolved with a well-placed BLU-109 — claim. While Iran’s rulers may be fanatical, they are not insane. The same rules of deterrence and mutual assured destruction that governed the Cold War and govern the balance of power among nuclear-armed nations would still apply to Tehran in a showdown with Israel. Moreover, attacking an Israeli city with nuclear weapons would isolate the already pariah state and would invite a terrible response the regime could never survive.

And regime survival is the dirty little secret motivating development of the weapon.  There is an important theoretical argument to make here which comes from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence.  She notes that weak or repressive regimes feel threatened by only two sources: war and revolution. It is no surprise, then, that these regimes invest so much in their armed forces and security services. And it should be no surprise that the countries that feel most threatened and can afford it — usually at the expense of the people’s needs — seek the ultimate weapon to stay the hand of intervention while they cudgel their people with another. We’ve seen this in Libya, Iraq, China, the Soviet Union, and to some extent other countries.

Decommissioned casings from South Africa’s nuclear weapons program. (Wikimedia Commons)

Iran’s situation today is similar to South Africa’s position in the late 1970s when Pretoria secretly built six nuclear weapons. Isolated by the international community for the crimes of Apartheid, surrounded by enemies (Soviet-backed post-colonial regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, all of which were harboring or sponsoring anti-Apartheid partisans) and suppressing a population in revolt, South Africa  wanted the ultimate weapon to hold the outside world at bay and therefore contain turmoil at home.  (Fortunately, the country emerged under remarkable political leadership from the African National Congress and Pretoria, and the nuclear program was abandoned.)

Another analogy is the slow-motion tragedy of North Korea. Having held control for three generations and repressed all dissent, the Kim dynasty now brandishes its nuclear deterrent at its enemies: South Korea (reinforced by the United States), China, and Japan. The result has been isolation, poverty, and starvation since the end of the Korean War, an abject humanitarian horror we are now unwilling to risk nuclear war to avert.

But in both cases — I would argue in the case of the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent, Israel, India and Pakistan as well — the bomb’s domestic political consequences have been ignored or simply missed for the far more exciting security ramifications.  Given concerns about escalation, rivals simply backed away. As a result, the bomb froze these countries in place and left unresolved fundamental political questions.  The Soviet Union and North Korea took complete advantage of that state of affairs to consolidate control.

Iran’s leaders are not irrational. They no doubt see similar outcomes if they develop the same wonder weapon. Beset at home by a restive population, isolated abroad, losing proxies against their enemies and surrounded by suspicious powers, it seems all but inevitable that the regime would pursue the bomb.

And because of the history of the Soviet Union and North Korea, we already know who will really lose if that happens: the Iranians themselves. Trapped in isolation, unable to call on friends abroad who fear provoking incidents and escalation, they will be left alone to face the cruel caprice of their rulers.

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Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics

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Hannah Arendt: “The meaning of politics is freedom.” (Library of Congress via the World Bank)

I have worked in politics at virtually every level — local, state, federal and international — for nearly my entire career. For much of my adult life I have been unable to shake the intuition that the common conception of politics and political life is basically and fundamentally flawed and that we have been ill-served by this understanding for too long.  For the past ten years or so I have tried to build a better theoretical understanding of politics and the political while writing about what I have thought about, learned and discovered.

Unfortunately I haven’t published much beyond this review of two books published during the last decade anthologizing some of the previously unpublished, uncollected and untranslated works by Hannah Arendt.  I found her to be among the very few to have taken politics at all seriously (Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt are some of her unexpected companions), although these explorations rank among her peripheral works. Nonetheless, they were, for me, the beginning of an understanding of my own experience — and the foundation for a more faithful theory of politics that Western political philosophy and political theory, too my reading, got wrong from the start.

I was thrilled to find Arendt shared by view and alarmed to see where she took it: by simple steps from Plato to Marx to the Gulag. Communism was not an aberration of Marx’s political theories but the very apotheosis of it.  He envisioned a society without politics — only an “administration of things” — which of course is very nice to think about until you confront its horrible, practical realities. An apolitical society meant no petitions, no elections, no parliaments, no assembly, no speech, no press — no protections and no rights.

This article is all the more important to me because, as with some of my other essays and reporting, it has since disappeared from the original host.  First published in the English-language edition of the German Internationale Politik, I can no longer find it online. (Correction Mar. 24: The article has since reappeared here.)

Arendt also wrote compellingly about justice in extremis, drawing on her experience in Germany and the controversy over the Eichmann trial. This is especially important reading for the purposes of transitional justice. Modern concepts of justice in democratic societies, she argues persuasively, simply do not exist in repressive and totalitarian societies. So how does international law apply to those countries? There is no simple answer, but she seems to be the only one asking the cutting questions.

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