In spite of the bad reviews, as a life-long geek I enjoyed Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. This doesn’t make the politics underlying any less fraught.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Even as a geek—or perhaps particularly as a geek—I didn’t like the pretext for the fight between the two supers. This is the way I read it:

* Batman is driven by a relentless egoistic conservatism of the sort that can’t tolerate risk—particularly anyone who might be more of a threat than he is (he is basically an up-armored Christian patriot militia guy, spouting constitutional gobbledygook while acting out his fantasy of sacrificial violence);

* Superman is a powerful but pathetic liberal who can’t use his strength to full advantage because of phony-baloney moral constraints (e.g. in the mode of the laments about the U.S. military always and uniquely being constrained by such niceties as international law and Geneva Conventions);

Batman is driven by a relentless egoistic conservatism of the sort that can’t tolerate risk—particularly anyone who might be more of a threat than he is (he is basically an up-armored Christian patriot militia guy, spouting constitutional gobbledygook while acting out his fantasy of sacrificial violence)

In Bat vs. Super, both supers have their politics challenged. Batman/Bruce Wayne is radicalized, becoming anti-Kryptonian, as he witnesses the fall out and collateral damage from Superman’s battle with an alien menace. One of his employees has his legs amputated by a falling girder. Bruce races to just barely pull a little girl from harms way as the air of Metropolis is filled with blowing dust—indexing the iconic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The irony, of course, is that the Bat’s path to radicalization—to a conclusion that Superman must die—is far closer to the lived reality people affected by U.S. bomb and drone attacks and comparatively helpless foreign cities, than the American experience of terrorism. The analogy ought to be between Superman and the Super Power. Superman must die if there is “even a one percent risk” he might decide to destroy the world is exactly equivalent to “America must die if there is even a one percent chance it will use its 7,000 nuclear weapons to destroy the world.”

In his radicalization, however, Batman sees himself as the only guarantee of democratic control over doomsday power: he will do what the American government won’t. Ever the vigilante, he will act outside of the power structure to save it from itself.

Meanwhile, Superman has his own growing doubts about Batman—a free agent who takes it on himself to do what the law cannot or will not do. The alien warns Bats to take an early retirement, reminding him that if he, Superman, had wanted Batman dead, he would be dead.

Super is also the victim of a frame-up orchestrated by Lex Luthor that makes him look like a self-interested monster, using his super powers to do as he pleases under the pretext of helping people. “I can’t save everyone,” he complains. Reference: the unfair protestations that U.S. interventions abroad are not really about human rights or democracy.

A movement to hold Superman accountable, at least partially orchestrated by Luthor, end in the Man of Steel being summoned to appear before a senate committee. Is it the echoes of McCarthyism we hear, or the people’s representatives going about their business looking after the public good. The question is will the alien demigod appear before such a committee?

Nodding to accountability—he does. Luthor intervenes yet again, to plant a bomb in the hearings, killing the committee and spectators, but of course leaving Superman unscathed, except with guilt by association. Bat’s becomes more determined than ever to end the alien menace and acquires kryptonite weapons to accomplish this task. Now the only problem is luring Superman into close quarters so Batman can do the deed.

Lex Luthor to the rescue. He sets the two supers up to fight when he kidnaps Clark Kent’s foster mother and orders Superman to bring him Batman’s head. Superman flies off to the battle space prepared by Batman, an “abandoned warehouse” in an industrial district that will prevent collateral damage—which is to say the death and maiming of noncombatants. Her again is the fantasy of efficacious violence, in which the killing can be limited to authorized bodies.

Superman attempts to negotiate, trying to get Batman/Bruce Wayne to work with him to stop Luthor, but Batman won’t hear it. He armors up and weakens the Man of Steel with kryptonite gas bombs and makes ready to run him through with a glowing kryptonite spear.

The conflict is resolved not through negotiation, but when Batman stands down from a fight Superman never wanted at all because… their mothers have the same name. Yet here again is a kind of unspeakable truth: in sharing Mother’s Names, Bat and Super reveal that rather than being opposites, they share an unavoidable whiteness–ironic since appearances notwithstanding no one can be more alien than Superman–that makes them potential allies.

Bat and Super reveal that rather than being opposites, they share an unavoidable whiteness–ironic since appearances notwithstanding no one can be more alien than Superman–that makes them potential allies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government actually launches a nuke at Superman and the super ogre–and no one in the vast ocean of commentary has anything to say about that (at least that I’ve seen, I’m sure on the whole internet its been mentioned). The real, actual threat to human existence—nuclear warfare—is kind of a side issue. These cinematic nukes—e.g. in the Avengers movie—are becoming a new kind of exemplary violence, depicted as harmless (the nuke launched in the film under discussion kills neither Superman nor his opponent but supposedly detonates outside the atmosphere without detriment to anyone on Earth) or with the intervention of super friends even beneficial (as when Iron Man successfully redirects a nuclear missile aimed at Manhattan through an dimensional rift, thwarting an alien invasion).

In Bat v. Super there isn’t even the faintest of allusions to the risk inherent in launching a nuclear armed missile. The United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have narrowly missed nuclear war because of false alarms on a number of occasions. [1] One incident, on September 26, 1983, when the Soviet early warning system falsely detected a U.S. ICBM launch, only the caution of the officer in charge of monitoring the system, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, prevented the protocol-mandated launch of a massive counter attack and the almost certain onset of total nuclear war. This incident has particular resonance for me. I was deployed at the time in a Pershing II nuclear missile unit in Germany. It must have been difficult for Colonel Petrov to do anything other than launch as his orders demanded.

The biggest problem I have with this film is Batman’s fight first, talk later and only if your enemy’s mother has the same name as yours. My second issue: use of nukes without even notifying the Russians—who have, like the U.S., historically been on the cusp of launching a retaliatory strike when they even suspected the U.S. had launched a nuclear missile.

‘Nuff said.

1. < http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nuclear-false-alarms.html >.

Recently (March 11, 2016) the New York Times published an Op-Ed by novelist Aatish Taseer (“My Father’s Killer’s Funeral”), son of Salmaan Taseer, the former governor of the Pakistani Punjab who was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in the early days of 2011.

The killer, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero of sorts in Pakistan, a cause célèbre for a significant portion of the population—mortifying and infuriating to others. Many may remember that Governor Taseer was murdered because he came to the defense of a Christian woman, Asslya Noreen—or as she is often referred to, Asia, or Aasia, Bibi—who was convicted under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws and sentenced to hang.

Salmaan Taseer spoke in Noreen’s defense and more broadly questioned the blasphemy laws themselves. For this offense to the sensibilities of a vocal group of Pakistanis—no one really knows how large—he was despised, threatened, and eventually assassinated. Never denying his act, Qadri was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to hang as well. He attracted a substantial following for having done nothing remarkable either before or after murdering the man he had been contracted to protect. The size of the following became apparent at his funeral, when upwards of 100,000 people crowded the streets of Rawalpindi, making it the perhaps the largest funeral gathering for a private individual in the history of the country.

In his Op-Ed Aatish laments what this large turnout, in the wake of so much extremist bloodshed in the years that have intervened between his father’s murder and his murderer’s funeral, says about the radicalization of Pakistani society. Indeed the fact that Qadri could be convicted, that all appeals and requests for amnesty were denied, was considered by many to be a victory for sanity and the rule of law.

The whole series of events, from the original blasphemy accusations through to Qadri’s funeral, are dispiriting for anyone who cares about Pakistan. Having spent a year teaching and doing research in Lahore—an old and beautiful city barely 30 miles from the village where Noreen was accused of blasphemy—I count myself in that number.

That some people of whatever background are willing to take advantage of sketchy legal mechanisms to target an outsider is hardly surprising. Wherever you find yourself, there are vindictive persons willing to take such actions. (It’s one of the reasons why laws related to speech are so deeply troublesome, even setting aside the idea of “free” speech.)

That the governor of the most populous province in a nuclear-armed country of 200 million should be the target of an assassination for pointing out the likely spuriousness of the charge against Noreen—as well as the shaky ground of the Pakistani blasphemy laws—is also understandable. That is, so long as we imagine a lone fanatic.

That a man like Qadri became a hero to many? That is painful to accept.

The angry and alienated in every country flock to unlikely causes and make celebrities out of non-entities who happen to echo their rage back to them, allowing them to drown out their uncertainties and anxieties and bask in a feeling of superiority—no matter how bad things get in the as a result or what brutalities come to fruition.

Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani Prime Minister who was herself assassinated, reportedly once said that to be a politician in her country you have to be willing to risk your life. A reality she was more than intimately familiar with, since her own father Zulfikar Bhutto—also a Prime Minister in his time and the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party—was hanged by the military government of General Zia ul-Haq (who himself died while still in office).

In Pakistan, where trust in public institutions is virtually nonexistent, politics by murder, by pseudo-mob, by gang fights between the hired thugs of one boss or quasi-fuedal lordling or another are commonplaces. They are expected. Military intervention in the nominally democratic process is recurrent—and both dreaded and yet somehow also welcomed: the army is seen as the one institution able to bring order to a country that is almost ungovernable from the center.

And now I have to think about my own country—the United States of America—which if it is not quite ready to fall apart, is at least flirting with the kind of politics that leads down that road. Let me be clear—I am not talking about the Chicago protestors who shut down a Trump rally. Tactically some may argue that this “escalation” is bound to lead to more of the same—particularly with Trump egging his supporters on. The Chicago shutdown was not about violence, but about people making themselves heard over the voice of a megalomaniacal bully propped up with a personal fortune. Chicagoans showed they were not afraid—and they could in many ways afford to do this because their strength was real.

It would be a mistake, however, to reason by cliche in the naive hope that bully Trump will back down now that he’s been stood up to. Even if that worked on the playground—and frankly I wouldn’t give it better than 50-50 even there—it doesn’t work with a guy who can send other people to do his dirty work. There are so many ways this can get worse—and very few indeed for it to get better. The deeper issue is what Pakistan knows only too well: once the writ of the state, supported primarily not by guns and spies and drones but by the more-or-less willing consent of the governed, starts to break down, it’s very difficult to put on the brakes.

Herein I want to think not individual evil (or sociopathic self-aggrandizement), but the consequences of collective violence as implemented in and through state policy. The occasion for this is the new year, though in truth I’ve been looking for an excuse to publish a blog post on the topic. More specifically I want to look at a year end commentary on the Foreign Policy site (http://foreignpolicy.com/), “The GOP Plan to Bring Back a Unipolar World” by Gordon Adams and Richard Sokolsky (December 30, 2015), and read it in tandem with Jonathan Waverley’s important—though deeply flawed—book Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

I’ll start with the latter because it speaks so directly to the domestic politics of the critique made by Adams and Sokolsky. Waverley is a quantitatively-oriented political scientist who uses a version of rational choice theory to argue that the voting public in a contemporary “democracy” is primed to support costly, militaristic policies—fighting unnecessary wars, spending large amounts of money on aggressive, capital intensive “defense”—and that in some narrow sense this is a “rational” choice.

Waverley uses the insurance adjuster’s concept of “moral hazard”—indicating a situation in which a person has a perverse incentive to engage in risky or expensive behavior, for example utilizing “gold star” health insurance for unnecessary tests and procedures because there is no direct cost to the individual or parking a rental car with full coverage in an obviously high risk area for a trivial gain in convenience or even just for the thrill of “sticking it” to the insurance company.

So for the individual in a nominally democratic society such as the United States, there is a tendency(per Waverley)  to support expensive forms of militarism in which the costs are primarily capital (in the form of taxes that pay for expensive military equipment) rather than social (risk of death, injury or life chance that would result, for example, from a wide-spread mobilization that would directly impact most families). Waverley uses polling data to show that “average” (meaning median income) voters in democratic societies consistently support aggressive military strategies even when the potential for definitive victory is small and the benefits marginal as long as they can pass the relative cost to others. In Waverley’s words:

“This book argues that, if the contemporary United States serves as a poster child for democratic militarism, it is not the result of a set of uniquely American contingencies. Rather, the potential for this pathology exists in any system where the majority of citizens have an important influence on policy. A suboptimal, militaristic grand strategy can result from rational calculations on the part of the average voter, and no marketplace of ideas will cure it.” (p. 5, emphasis added)

It is important to understand that Waverley is not arguing that wealthy elites in certain categories of production do not benefit disproportionately from a heavily capitalized militarism. Nor is he arguing that politicians don’t manipulate foreign policy for domestic political advantage. Rather, what he is arguing is that from a certain point of view—albeit a point of view I personally consider to be literally insane—this process is driven by the rational preferences of average voters given two conditions:

(1) the system is relatively democratic—here meaning that elected officials actually have to run for office, over and over, and that failure to appease the average voter is likely to result in their being unelected;

(2) relative inequality in the system, such that average (meaning median income) voters pay less in taxes than well-to-do voters.

Note that the argument here is not about one-percenters and corporate interests that may manage to shelter vast portions of their incomes, but a pitting of the relatively large number of tax-paying middle-income voters against relatively fewer “affluent” tax-payers who pay, in any system of income tax even if it were completely flat, more on a per capita basis.

By the way, Waverley is not arguing that aggressive militarism is efficient. Quite to the contrary he acknowledges that it is a net loss for the society taken as a whole, directing spending away from more useful public goods (health care, education, infrastructure) and often producing either no gain in security or a negative gain. Rather he is saying that from the point of view of the individual voter, acting in accord with his own interests, this is not irrational. The median voter is not being duped by political hawks or military contractors, it’s rather the other way around: political representatives pander to this self-interested choice and military contractors profit as a consequence—but a consequence they probably couldn’t conjure out of thin air.

Waverley’s argument, though he doesn’t always acknowledge as much, is contingent not just on a somewhat peculiar form of actuarial logic—what he calls “defense redistribution”—it also designates “security” as a preferential category of public good. He has little to say about this, but a key footnote is rather revealing:

“Even if we complicate the theory by allowing public funds to be spent on “butter” as well as guns, as long as the voter regards security as a normal good (i.e. more is better than less), no matter how much she may prefer other goods such as education, the book’s theory remains sound.” (p. 26)

That is, so long as we consider “security” to be the object-equivalent of, say income, education or longevity, his formulae still works. Except to think in such terms is rather obviously counterproductive (to say the least). Security is a notional, purely negative, good. There is no way to measure what didn’t happen—except of course in actuarial terms. But even actuarially calculations require some norm of occurrence. This is most obvious with life insurance—since everyone is guaranteed to die, the only question is when—but applies to every category. Such norms cannot be established for security unless we make the assumption that an increase in militarization (spending on the military and related “security” equipment and services) translates into an increase in security—and, in Waverley’s argument, it requires that median income voters routinely, as a matter of course, imagine that almost any war of choice will increase security.

This latter point—even if supported by polling data—constitutes a collective kind of insanity that emerges from individual “market” choices. Waverley’s argument about democratic militarism is important because it forces us to reconsider arguments—smacking of elitism—that average American voters tend to support an aggressive military policy and militarism because they are “dupes” (sheep, ignorant), and consider other motivations. Often, for example, average voters are said to be manipulated by fear narratives. Yet what Waverley shows is that such voters don’t think the threat level is higher than other voters (so says his analysis of the polling data), they are just willing to make military spending a higher priority.

I think that the assumption revealed in the footnote quoted above—that his conclusions require “security” to be considered a “normal” good when it is clearly a “threshold” good: an essential, sine qua non of social life that everyone wants, but one that is in reality is calibrated not just to cost, but to issues of convenience. In the real world people will ignore threats, even significant ones, to avoid inconvenience and are not particularly good at calculating actual threat levels—whereas they are very good at evaluating actual inconvenience levels.

This doesn’t necessarily undermine Waverley’s main point, which is about a situation of individual moral hazard, but here it is important to note that if security is adequate, then above a certain threshold, and people actually valued other public goods more, they would lean toward support of these other goods. The only consistent conclusion is that many voters do not actually value these other goods—eduction, infrastructure, healthcare—more highly than security.

But if anything like my contention that more security, above a certain level—you can call this the level of “white flight” if you like, where the relatively affluent, mostly white populations move away from urban centers to be ex-constituent and therefore not “vulnerable” to paying taxes that would support the public goods of the less affluent—is transparently absurd, then there must be some explanation why median income voters prefer security to these other public goods.

My best guess—and this is based on analogy with research done on “tax revolt” voting as it relates to changing demographics (see e.g. Alvarez and Bedroll 2004; Lee, Ottati and Hussain 2001; Wilson 2001)—is that an apparent  preference for security and aggressive military action over other goods is motivated by a kind of redistributive bigotry. A plurality of median income voters actively object to redistributive schemes in which someone who is worse off than they gets a higher proportion of the redistributed good. Median income voters prefer “security” spending not because they pay a lesser portion of it than affluent voters, but because they accrue one hundred percent of the benefits. While it is sometimes said that higher income voters have “more to lose”—this is fatuous when it comes to security against terror attacks or political violence, since at the most basic level everyone has exactly the same thing to lose: their lives and the lives of those they care about most.

This helps to explain the vast expansion of domestic policing and incarceration, at great cost, as well as spending on foreign military adventures and equipment. Again, this doesn’t negate Waverley’s point about moral hazard (and the rational choice of median voters in preferring “defense redistribution” to any other kind), it just complicates the reasons why median income voters have a preference for “security” over other potential redistributed goods and calls into question the presumptive (actuarial) rational choice motivations. It also points to, in my mind, a more compelling explanation of why such voters are willing to support wildly disproportionate spending on distant, implausible threats while spending much less on more immediate threats at home. It’s a sort of fallacy along the lines of looking for lost car keys under the street lamp, no matter where they were likely dropped, because “that’s where the light is.”

That is, hundreds of billions to take a shot at ousting a noxious dictator that poses only the most marginal “threat” to U.S. interests and virtually none to individual Americans seems like a good deal compared to the inconveniences that would be associated with trying to secure the homeland which in turn are preferred to redistribution types that might disproportionally benefit the less privileged (education, healthcare).

Which brings me to a look at Adam’s and Sokolsky’s Foreign Policy (30 Dec. 2015) article on the GOP longing for American hegemony. Relentlessly “realist” in their orientation, the authors provide a point-by-point critique of Republican aspirations to use military spending (and intervention) to “restore American greatness.”

The basic position of the leading Republican presidential candidates is that “Merika” should kick ass. Or as Adam and Sokolsky adumbrate it:

“To restore America’s strength, alliances, global standing, and leadership, the candidates have all, by and large (with the exception of Sen. Rand Paul), advocated greater use of force against IS, and an increased U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria. More broadly, almost all have called for a major priming of the Pentagon pump with billions of additional dollars to restore what they describe as our sapped military strength.”

But according to the consensus of the post-Cold War realists, this notion is misguided (which I am uncomfortably in agreement with). Why?

“…[B]ecause the world has changed in a fundamental way. The United States is simply no longer a global goliath bestriding a unipolar world. Turkey no longer jumps when America says frog. Putin is unmoved by U.S. demands. China is clearly expanding its own role, creating international economic organizations that include most of its closest allies but not the United States. The raw measures of military and economic power that are typically invoked to rebut the relative change in global power are not easily converted into the currency of diplomatic leverage.”

In other words, because a more aggressive foreign policy will not lead to America “calling the shots” but wasting money down a rat hole achieving nothing or worse, an increasingly insecure world. While stepping back and letting China and Russia waste their money on marginal interventions is a net gain in competitive terms–a key point for realists.

Yet the two FP authors understand the politics of the GOP. They write:

“…You can’t blame them for these public broadsides — Americans seem to be on their side. Recent polling shows that national security and terrorism concerns have become the most important election issue in the mind of the American public, rising from 21 percent in April to 40 percent in December, replacing jobs and the economy (which declined from 29 percent to 23 percent). According to a December 2015 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the public disapproves of Obama’s foreign policy by a ratio of 57 to 37 percent. Even before Paris and San Bernadino, Americans saw the GOP as more able to “protect the country from international terrorism and military threats,” by an advantage of 52 to 36 percent.”

Which makes perfect sense in Waverley’s thesis of the tendency of elected officials (or those seeking office) to pander to the “redistributive militarism” of the median income voter. But I would like, excuse me very much, to make a couple of points to the contrary.

First, Waverley’s contention that median income voters will prefer security as a public good to any other good is not completely stupid, but when he says “no marketplace of ideas will cure it” ( p. 6), he is indicating that contemporary GOP politics, so long as the the U.S. remains a representative (voter-influenced) “democracy” with fairly high levels of wealth inequality, is not only inevitable. This, to me, seems counter-intuitive. Not because of an idealized faith in democratic forms or “the people”—but for the purely empirical reason that “more belligerence” is not always seductive to median income voters–nor is it the key value for all such voters.

This is not a naive faith in human goodness on my part! Quite the contrary. If I am at least partially correct that a significant stratum of the medium income electorate votes not so much for redundant security, but against redistribution to those below the medium income level (often imagined as a proxy for race), then the hyper belligerence of the GOP is liable to be a losing game as compared to the relatively less bellicose policies of the Democrats. This accords with predictions related to the current election cycle—but even if a Republican is elected President it doesn’t undermine the basic critique of the idea of a hyper-positive valuation of redundant pseudo-security. If the swing is toward the GOP it might well be because of fear of a type of redistribution that is despised.

Second, I agree with Adam and Sokolsky when they say:

“In contrast to the Republican message, in today’s world, power is often “situational,” assembled by coalitions of like-minded countries with the capacity, resolve, and resources, to take effective action to advance shared interests. American leadership looks different in this world; it is most effective when the United States helps mobilizes these multilateral partnerships, and allows others to take ownership of the solution.”

But this is still a calculation which doesn’t take account of the real costs of war. The “effectiveness” of the United States or any country in real terms should factor the suffering of those who fight, those who become “collateral damage”, those who have to live with the aftermath of both—as well as the secondary and tertiary costs of providing for these direct and oblique victims of war and the “lost goods” possibilities of what could have been if the trillions currently being expended on notional security was redirected to other forms of the public good.

Finally, I think that Waverley overestimates the stupidity of the “median voter”. Yes—I think the “rational choice” impact of selecting security goods over other goods is real, but only because of the race-linked, class driven fear of “giving” to those with less. This fear is not, contra Waverley—and yes it is a hopeful assertion, not a research derived finding—not immune to discourse in the public sphere. Though… I would allow that it is resistant to glib manipulation and would be most impacted by a realization of a redistribution of wealth—most fundamentally a redistribution of income independent of labor—that would mitigate current levels of inequality and allow for a general perception of public spending and regulation that tends to benefit everyone.

References

Alvarez, Michael and Lisa Garcia Bedroll. 2004. “The Revolution against Affirmative Action in California: Racism, Economics and Proposition 209.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 4(1): 1-17.

Lee, Yeh-Ting, Victor Ottati and Imtiaz Hussain. 2001. “Attitudes toward ‘Illegal’ Immigration into the United States: Proposition 187.” Hispanic Journal of Behavior Sciences 23(4): 430-443.

Wilson, Thomas. 2001. “Americans’ Views on Immigration Policy: Testing the Role of Threatened Group Interests.” Sociological Perspectives 44(4): 485-501.

Here is a comment by Keith Hart summarizing the for sake of which:

The editors identify three inter-related themes. 1. The tension between mass organization and the party in charge of the armed force. Democratic centralism may lead to an inflexible inability to accommodate local conditions. 2. This raises the question of the relationship between democracy and emancipatory politics. The party sometimes becomes unaccountable to the people it claims to serve. 3. Analysis of the classes, issues and alliances involved in the struggle for emancipation is essential. The answers chosen often turn out to be wrong, but the cases presented here also provide many interesting solutions.

Within these key themes, perhaps the most important, and perennial, point is (again in a comment by Keith Hart):

The priority for any revolutionary, emancipatory transformation must be a burgeoning political and social movement, but then how should it defend itself and how should it seize state power (in order to transform it) without becoming commandist?

My own experience and reflection takes me back to endless discussions in left-political contexts pitting efficacy against ideals:

“It takes an army to fight an army.”

“If you take on the mode and method of the enemy, you become the enemy.”

“Refusal of armed struggle is complicity with state violence.”

“Once you take up arms, you can never really put them down again.”

All of those are faux quotes, but they capture the essence of things I heard stated and argued over and over again during my years doing anti-imperialist, left and related politics in the United States. As a veteran of the United States armed forces, presumably already compromised (infected? stigmatized?) by violence, I was often asked to comment.

This made me profoundly uncomfortable. My insights into the matter always felt cursory and unworthy, but such as they were (and are) they go like this:

The question can’t be answered in the abstract. State violence, so far as I can see, is almost never justified, but revolutionary (“emancipatory”) violence cannot so easily be set aside. Refusal of revolutionary violence, under conditions where state violence is endemic, effectively displaces both perpetration and victimization onto others. Yet no matter the justification, violent acts are never good for the perpetrator—much less the victim. David Graeber makes the point in one of the comments on this volume:

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a classic terrorist strategy (the use of violence against non-combatants to create terror by a formally non state actor) being pursued by organization that was internally democratic.”

The type, degree and context of violence matters. Stone throwing, even Molotov cocktails, do not equal bullets or bombs—or I would add prolonged incarceration and/or torture. The latter can never be compatible, in my view, with a movement of emancipation—which of course is not to say that no movement aimed at emancipation can ever engage in such tactics: human beings contradict themselves, even at the level of fundamental values, all the time.

The hinge around the argument, however, is not only the degree of violence employed. It is also the degree to which substitutionary logics become extended. That is, to what extent are people of certain ascriptive categories, as determined by the users of violence, considered interchangeable? War logics allow the widest possible extension, such that, say, a hospital run by an international NGO that happens to be “in the wrong place” might become collateral damage in a bombing campaign. Those who are unintentional casualties of such violence point up the plenitude of violence available to the perpetrator, but such “messaging” is nearly beside the point. In the end, it’s just easier to bomb indiscriminately—and what bombing is really discriminating?—than otherwise.

So where do I come down on the inevitability of violent means leading to a soul-deadening, hierarchically obnoxious organizational culture? I come down thinking armed struggle is a dreadful, awful, terrible idea that is, at times, very slightly less dreadful than the alternative—allowing the undefended, unarmed, and otherwise unprepared to become unacknowledged collateral damage. I come down with the notion that social substitution—the logic of war—should be avoided to the extent possible. You might shoot back at people shooting at you; you don’t shoot at their brothers, sisters, spouses, or children or bomb the cities in which they happen to live. It’s a higher standard than the perpetrators of state violence hold themselves to—but no lower standard is compatible with democratic (in the broadest sense) action.

Posted on January 19, 2013

My sabbatical semester-or the functional equivalent, a competitively-awarded research semester-is coming rapidly to a close. In a few days I will leave behind my laptop desk and comfortable chair at Garner Narrative in Louisville, Kentucky for a short visit with my family in (the vicinity of) Portland, Oregon and then return to a hectic teaching schedule in Abu Dhabi.

This is the first time since I completed my doctorate that I have had an extended period to read, write, and reflect. Though I have worked on a variety of things, the core project has been a book manuscript dealing with political identity formation in Pakistan and the ways in which many Pakistanis wield conspiracy theories as a tool for distancing themselves from a naïve political realism.

The approaching return to Abu Dhabi along with the on-going writing and reflection about Pakistan has put me in mind of a post I wrote back in early 2010 (An “Open Letter to President Obama,” January 7, 2010), which subsequently was incorporated into a work of art by my wife and partner Angie Reed Garner (Siren, 2010).

Because the older content on this blog is lost, I will reproduce the text of the original letter here, rescued from cyber-oblivion by its incorporation in Siren.

Open Letter to President Obama

7 January 2010

Dear Mr. President,

I am an American. My wife and I live in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where I teach anthropology at Zayed University. There is a large population of Pakistani expatriates living here. They work as laborers on construction projects, as tailors, running Laundromats and mom and pop stores, and famously as taxi drivers. Of this last group many are from the Pashtun ethnic group, from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Province [now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa]. As many of these Pashtun taxi drivers are eager to talk to anyone who will listen about the plight of their country, I end up in many en route conversations.

Today my wife and I got into an Arabian taxi just outside my university and immediately I could tell that the driver was distraught, on the verge of exhaustion or perhaps tears. As I got in he looked at me with wide eyes.

“Were you about ready to quit for the day?” I asked, sensing something was amiss, like he didn’t really want us in his cab.

“No, it’s okay, sir,” he said. “Just-good afternoon.”

I quickly negotiated for him to take us to the local shopping mall.

“Are you from London, sir?” he asked.

“United States,” I said.

“Ah, America.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “America.”

“Tell Obama, sir, to please stop the killing.”

“Yes, I’ll try,” I said.

The distance to destination was short, barely half a mile, but the traffic was heavy and the conversation continued.

“Too much,” he said. “It’s too much. Too much fighting. Too much bombing.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I know.”

“One bomb,” he said, holding up a finger, “two hundred and fifty people. Children. Women. Too much.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Peshawar,” he said.

“Too many killed. My house bombed. Taliban. We don’t know Taliban.”

“Mujay ahpsohs hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Do you say you’re welcome to someone who thanks you for an expression of sympathy under such circumstances?

“I was cutting the trees,” he continued. “You know? I was with my father, my family, and then it came, huge, huge, a mortar, a bomb, right there. The Pakistan army. And the fathers, the parents, they don’t think of themselves, but of their children. They say, ‘This here is dangerous, come away.’ But I said to my father, ‘It’s danger everywhere. Everywhere.’”

“Too much money,” he said. “Everyone cares too much about the money, not about people. Everyone wants money. America has too much money. But in the end we all go back to God. With my own eyes I have seen nine killed.”

He said this as we pulled up to the taxi stand at the mall. I paid him, tipped the usual amount.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Shukria,” I said, “Thank you.”

The complications, of course, are immense. But the human plea to stop the killing is hard to turn away from. In my more pragmatic moments, for example in a recent conversation I had with a retired UAE general, I recognized that it isn’t so easy to do.

General O.: “Do you think it will be a disaster if the U.S. stays in Afghanistan?”

Me: “Yes.”

General O.: “Do you think it will be a disaster if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan?”

Me: “Yes.”

General O.: “That is the definition of a quagmire.”

* * * * * *

A recent New York Times editorial (January 6, 2013, “Choices on Afghanistan,” http://tinyurl.com/b8ubtqw ) suggests that:

“If Mr. Obama cannot find a way to go to zero troops, he should approve only the minimum number needed, of mostly Special Operations commandos, to hunt down insurgents and serve as a deterrent against the Taliban retaking Kabul and Al Qaeda re-establishing a safe haven in Afghanistan.”

The Times in its editorials is as close to a consensus of the “liberal-realist elite” as exists. It is another gloss on the conversation I had with my Emirati friend back in early 2010, saying essentially that in an ideal world the United States would leave Afghanistan; in the real world leaving might turn out to be as bad or worse as staying.

In truth, I don’t know what will happen in Afghanistan if the US pulls every last soldier, sailor, marine, covert operative, private military contractor, and drone operator out of the country. The most likely scenario may be a reversion to the pre-Taliban, post-Soviet state of regionally ensconced dueling warlords. What I do know is that the presence of a relative handful of Special Ops troops will not prevent that from happening. The remnant of the American invasion of Afghanistan President Obama is ready to impose will not be a deterrent force, but the bones of a hit squad.

When the upshot of a decade-long occupation is that the US will leave behind a crew of high tech hit men, there is something seriously, fatally wrong with our policies. To review some of the costs of the war thus far:

In Treasure: American tax payers have spent about $641 billion thus far (see the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report, or go to the http://costofwar.com/ ), though the real costs, when long-term treatment of veterans injured physically or psychologically, replacement of military materials, and so on is factored in will likely be much higher (see Linda Bilmes blog @ http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/ for an ongoing discussion of the complex issues around estimating the full costs of these wars).

In American casualties: 2,176 American fatalities ( http://icasualties.org/oef/ or see Congressional Research Office reports as they are released, e.g. for 2012), and 17,674 wounded ( http://icasualties.org/OEF/USCasualtiesByState.aspx ). Of course the “wounded” figure does not include those who will later be diagnosed (or simply suffer from) Traumatic Brain Injury (the result of the brain sloshing about in the brain-case even when the head is protected by the latest gee-whiz helmets or Post Traumatic Stress).

In civilian deaths: At 15,000 Afghan civilian deaths ( http://costsofwar.org/article/afghan-civilians ), according to United Nations estimates.

The case remains complex, but an open-ended, large-scale occupation of Afghanistan is not on the table–nor would I support such an occupation. Not only because such a quixotic endeavor would surely break the United States, later if not sooner, the same way it was the catalyst that broke the (far more anemic) Soviet economy and prestige of its military, but because the project was, from the start, morally and strategically flawed. At this point the continuation of the current project in Afghanistan has become a folly, grounded in little more than sunk cost fallacy and wishful thinking.

A couple of recent, thoughtful articles on the Forever War:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/11/drone-strikes/

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