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The US
power-elite, as we have seen, gained extensive control over mass media and
Academia after WWII in order to deploy them as tools of psychological warfare
(Part
1). We have sought to describe how US psychological warfare
operates (Part 2). And to what end. Evidence of US
power-elite sponsorship of Nazis before WWII (Part
5), during WWII (Part
7), and immediately after (Part
6) challenges the ‘Establishment model’ of a basically
well-intentioned and democratically responsive—though error-prone—US power elite,
and supports an alternative model that has the US power elite as covert
enemies of democracy. Following a
process that is normative in science, we have subjected the model to
diagnostic tests in order to begin exploring whether it is generally explanatory
and predictive (Part 7 and Part
8), and we have furnished an overarching theory, anchored in
historical patterns, to support the alternative model’s plausibility (Part
9). Future installments will subject the model to further tests,
to see if it can explain our contemporary geopolitical context, writ large. Before we
do so, we make a brief parenthesis here to situate grammatical realism—the approach I recommend—in the context of
the academic traditions of geopolitics and international relations. A wide
variety of perspectives are commonly grouped by scholars into two contrasting
traditions: classical geopolitics
and critical geopolitics. After
describing them, I will explain how my own approach takes selectively from
both, with a view to making transparent the analytic method I will employ in
future articles. Classical geopolitics Despite
mutations, the common thread in classical geopolitics, which was born as an
academic field of study with the first light of the 20th c., has been that
States—the proposed units of analysis—seek to expand and control ever more
territory and resources and will thus of necessity come into conflict. The ‘geo’
comes from geography—from perceived
constraints, advantages, and opportunities inherent in the content (including
human content), location, and contours of the terrain. Since States are
assumed inexorably driven to expand power, the ambition of classical
geopolitics was to treat the structure of international relations as a
dependent variable—to predict it from the study of the terrain. Geography determines strategy. This method
requires an additional assumption: that decision-makers are ‘rational’ (as
neoclassical economists have defined the term). As such, classical
geopolitics “shares some elements of what has been called ‘realism’ in the
discipline of International Relations.” Realism “imagines space as the
chessboard [of]… international affairs.”[1] This is Kissinger’s realpolitik. To assume
rationality is to assume that behavior is consistent with maximization of
perceived ‘self-interest’ (which here equals ‘the interests of the State’).
More specifically, this means that decision-makers: 1)
have
transitive preferences (for outcomes A, B, C, if A > B, and B > C, then
A > C, where ‘>’ is read as ‘preferred to’); 2)
have
access to good information; 3)
calculate
costs and benefits; and 4)
carefully
plan many steps ahead (in game theory this is called ‘backward induction’). But such
scholars have never meant simply to purvey dispassionate study from the
academic sideline. From the beginning, “[classical] geopolitical theory has
[had] a common theme: the production of knowledge to aid the practice of
statecraft and further the power of the state.” Born as an arrow in the imperialist
quiver, the classical scholar’s approach “was always a highly ideological and
deeply politicized form of analysis.”[2] For those
interested in WWII, the German Friedrich Ratzel—a
student of Swedish pioneer Rudolf Kjellen—is
especially interesting. Borrowing loosely and distorting creatively from
Darwin, Ratzel “imagined each state as a species, which needs an ecological
niche that can support itself. A ‘thriving’ state will have Lebensraum, or ‘living space,’
sufficient to its needs. Indeed, it needs to grow, at the expense of other
states if necessary, in order to support a dynamic and successful
population.”[3]
Through Karl Haushofer, a WWI German major general bitter over Germany’s defeat and turned academic in the interwar years, these ideas lodged themselves in the mind of Rudolf Hess, Haushofer’s wartime aide-de-camp and later his student at the University of Munich. Hess would become Deputy Leader of the Nazi party and would essentially co-author Mein Kampf with Adolf Hitler.[4] In
Britain, the pioneers were Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder, whose work was
produced not as simple observation and analysis, but with a view to assist
British imperial policy. In the
United States, Henry Kissinger, geopolitical academic turned foreign-policy
decision-maker, was for a long time the dominant figure, and is emblematic,
once again, of how academics in this area were traditionally in the service
of power elites.
“In the
1990s critical geopolitics grew out of the body of thought known as
post-modernism and a specific reaction by geographers to reclaim geopolitics
from the state.”[5]
This was a reaction, in other
words, against the instrumental and advisory role of classical geopolitics to
power elites. This perspective
studies “language as the building blocks from which reality emerged”[6], and in so doing “shifts the attention of scholars of
geopolitics from ‘how geography shapes politics’ ”—which takes geography as
‘given’ in the ‘real world’—“to ‘how politics shapes geography,’ ” that is,
to how geographical reality is constructed
(or fabricated, manufactured) in the minds of millions of people through
political speech and its repetition in the media.[7] “Geopolitics, then, can be understood as a discourse through which the world is
made intelligible and therefore made amenable to foreign policy
intervention.”[8] “Discourse is the
fusion of power and authority into the content of language.”[9] (my
emphases) The
question here, then, becomes: How does
the representation of a place (including the people in it) justify foreign
policy? Take an
example. US
President Ronald Reagan publicly claimed that the Nicaraguan Contras and the
Afghan mujahideen—both recipients of massive US support—were “ ‘moral equivalents of the [US] founding Fathers.’ ”[10] This claim, in context, implied another: that the US Founding
Fathers were morally worthy. The point of these explicit and implied claims
was to make Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghan mujahideen
palatable to US citizens. That’s an example
of clever use of political discourse. To be good at it, you need to know the rules, akin to linguistic rules, that
govern it. It is the ambition of critical geopolitics to study these rules as
they infuse and constrain the apologetic discourses of power elites. “Discourses are... used by people in the construction of
meaning about their world and their activities. It is NOT simply speech or written
statements but the rules by which
verbal speech and written statements are made meaningful. ...The study of
geopolitics in discursive terms, therefore, is the study of the sociocultural
resources and rules by which geographies of international politics get
written.[11] Let us consider,
then, the structure of our Reagan example. The grand
geopolitical worldview that the US power elite sold to US citizens in the
postwar was that communism was bad: a communicable disease. It was thus imperative
to oppose communism everywhere and
‘contain’ it, lest it spread from country to country like a line of falling
dominos ( = the ‘Domino Theory’). Geographical
contiguity to a ‘communist’ state was held to produce political ‘contagion.’
In this alarming scenario, labeling any left-leaning government ‘communist’
triggered support for hostile action against it (this is an example of a
rule). And by implication (another rule), anybody opposing ‘communism’ was the
‘good guys.’ With his formidable
rhetorical powers, Reagan (the ‘Great Communicator’), daily reinforced that
the Soviet Union was ‘the Evil Empire.’ This made the ‘anti-communist’
Contras and the ‘anti-communist’ Afghan mujahedeen—both in fact terrorist
groups—the ‘good guys.’ Not content with that, Reagan compared these groups
to the US Founding Fathers, which, according to official US political discourse,
were quasi-holy freedom-loving revolutionaries. With all of that symbolism
recruited and articulated in a ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ opposition, many US citizens
could support action in favor of the Contras and the mujahideen. Was Reagan
consciously duping US citizens? Critical scholars
don’t want to go that far. The relationship between policy and discourse, to
them, is not quite Machiavellian. To understand their view, consider the three
categories they divide geopolitics into: formal geopolitics: produced by “academics and
researchers in think tanks” that exist to generate knowledge for statecraft. practical geopolitics: “the geopolitical discourse relayed
by politicians, military commanders, and others speaking from the perspective
of the state.” popular geopolitics: “the relay of geopolitical discourse
through popular media, such as movies, newspapers, radio, the Internet, and
so on.”[12] Importantly,
for critical scholars, worldviews do not simply trickle down from the formal
and practical to the popular, because the first two are already constrained
by media processes. “Popular geopolitics changes the way in which geopolitics
can be considered.”[13] This is simply a restatement of the traditional
observation that democratic rulers are constrained by public opinion. Or, if
you will, that ordinary people, in their multifarious acts of speech, help construct
the ‘discourse.’ Of course,
the power elite and the media also contribute to constructing the discourse.
But to critical scholars these contributions are not especially important.
Rather, all of these contributions to
the discourse, by the elites, by the media, by ordinary people, are marginal
compared to the effect that the discourse itself has on everybody. The
discourse is a kind of all-powerful prism through which everybody sees the
world, enslaving everybody equally. The
linguistic analogy is again useful. All English speakers, in their daily
practice, affect the evolution of English grammar and meanings, but these are
marginal effects that pale next to the effect that the structure of English,
at any given time, has on them, forcing them to speak in a certain way. By this
analogy, Reagan, no more and no less than ordinary people, is ‘trapped,’ as
it were, in the discourse, which determines how he sees the world, how he talks
about the world, and therefore the policy
decisions he makes. Thus, we might say, because the discourse identified
communists as irredeemably antiliberal and ‘evil,’ anybody who fought
communists became for Reagan, by grammatical implication, a ‘good freedom
fighter,’ and deserving of US support.
Fig. 1. The arrows indicate influence. The power elite, the media /
Academia, and the citizens all influence the discourse, and each other, but
none of these influences are decisive, and they pale next to the influence
that the discourse itself has on everybody.
My own
perspective, which I call ‘grammatical realism,’ takes from both classical
and critical geopolitics. But it takes selectively, as it also criticizes
both. The
rational-actor model, I believe, has found in State-level decision-makers—as
opposed to ordinary human beings—its best possible case. For power elites
(and their retainers) marshal enormous resources with which to gather
information and calculate costs and benefits with exquisite precision in their
(perforce) relatively long-term planning. ‘Grammatical realism’ thus adopts
the rationality assumption in classical geopolitics/realism. But I point
out two important differences. First, I
reject the axiomatic status of the organic metaphor where decision-makers, as
the ‘head’ of the ‘body politic,’ supposedly feel themselves responsible for
that body, and hence their ‘self-interest’ must be considered as one and the
same as the interests of ‘the State’ (meaning the interests of everybody in the State). Perhaps power
elites behave this way. But perhaps they don’t. If we are not to prejudge the
issue, power elites—and not States!—must function as
the relevant actors and units of analysis (Part
4). The
empirical data, I believe, support the view that the US power elite, within
existing constraints, initiate policy with the aim to aggrandize and/or
preserve their own power at the
expense of ordinary people, including ordinary people in their own State (Part
3); their statements to the contrary I interpret as grammatically
obligated dissimulations (Part
2). Second, I
take the rational-actor model quite seriously—unlike scholars of classical
geopolitics. For these latter dispense with the rational-actor model whenever
policy outcomes radically contradict democratic values, at which point they
rush to weaken the assumptions of good information and proper calculation of
costs and benefits in order to claim some species of ‘error.’ I find this
flippant (Part 4). And, fatally, it abrogates method and
forsakes explanatory power, for the ‘error-prone’ model makes no clear
predictions. I shan’t
deny that power elites make mistakes (we all do). But they also try hard to learn (for learning serves their
self-interest). And they are better equipped to learn than anybody. So I
assume that power elites will not shoot themselves in the foot twice. That
is, they will not (or not typically) spend billions of dollars a second time
to make mistakes of the same magnitude and kind as the first. Much less a
third time. My approach
thus forces a dogged method that may be stated as three broad principles: 1)
Seek patterns. If a strong outcome-pattern is
available, one must allow it to imply intentions (if these appear
antidemocratic, so be it). 2)
Trust patterns. Whenever a detail seems discrepant to
the pattern, try first to think around it. Assume intelligence in the power
elite, and find a clever fit. 3)
Resist the ‘error hypothesis.’ This is the refuge of last resort. It
is the position we reluctantly back into when all our best efforts to fit a
particular event into an outcome-pattern have failed. This method
makes relatively clear predictions, because future policy is expected to be
consistent—qualitatively—with historically established outcome-patterns—it
won’t be ‘just one damn thing after another.’ My other
main disagreement with classical geopolitics is that I don’t believe power
elites are inexorably drawn to push
against each other in an (ultimately) zero-sum game. Sometimes they do that.
But sometimes they get wise and create syndicates in order better to join,
corporately, against ordinary people everywhere. This does not eliminate
conflict between power elites but does considerably reduce and constrain it.[13a] As for
critical geopolitics, I applaud their announced goal “to reclaim geopolitics
from the State,” that is, to do geopolitics as an academic activity
independent and autonomous of the power-elite’s demand for intellectual work
that will assist their projection of power. And I approve of the attention
they pay to the rules that make policy-relevant speech—‘political
discourse’—meaningful, and how that discourse constrains political behavior. However, I
prefer to break up ‘political discourse’ into two analytical components: political grammar and constructed reality. Western political grammar consists of: 1) our axioms, born
in the Enlightenment and established in 1848; and 2) the rules, derived
from those axioms, for how certain statements become socially forbidden or
else obligatory, and for how statements may be combined, in specific contexts,
making certain policies appear either thinkable or unthinkable, either
imperative or beyond the pale (Part
2). Constructed reality,
for its part, provides the context and
background against which particular statements and/or beliefs, and their
implications, are evaluated. Political grammar and constructed reality are both ‘discourse,’ but there is a big
payoff in keeping them analytically separate. Why? Because, where the first
is concerned, critical scholars are right that we are all equally enslaved by
it. But they are wrong about the second: the power elite is not constrained
by constructed reality. Why? Because
they construct it—to constrain us. Christopher
Simpson and others have documented how the US power elite appropriated the media
and domesticated Academia after WWII. In their hands, media and Academia
became tools of psychological warfare (Part
1). They are used, consciously, to create false realities for ordinary
people to inhabit. The power
elite could try, with their clandestine control of meaning-making
institutions, to modify the political grammar, but this is arduous and risky for them. Why? Because a lot of blood was shed
to construct the modern, post-revolutionary democratic West. People won’t
switch their fundamental grounding of right and wrong lightly or overnight (Part
2), and they will become violently suspicious if they detect attempts
to transform their core values. More
commonly, therefore, a meaning-making power elite will let the political
grammar be and will seek to modify
instead—through media and academic messages—the perception of reality. As in the Reagan example, the game is
like this: defend the values of the Enlightenment—e.g. freedom—but then lie
to the citizens about who fights for those values. The citizens will then take
sides and demand precisely those policies that the undemocratic power elite desire
(Part
2). In the
following diagram I represent the general structure:
Fig. 2. The arrows should be read as “constrains.” Hence,
the manner in which citizen perceptions constrain the grammar, and in which this
grammar in turn constrains the power elite—this is not easily changed. And
when it does change, it changes slowly. But the power elite constrains media
and academic knowledge production, which in turn constrains citizen
perceptions, which constrain the perception of reality, which, in turn,
constrains the power elite’s freedom of action. The power elite gains freedom
of action mostly by manipulating the construction of reality, and the more
such freedom it gains, the more it can influence media and Academia, in
positive feedback. If US
power-elite influence over media and academic production is as decisive as
one might expect from the investment made (Part
1), then we should expect that, in discussions of geopolitics, a proper examination
of US foreign policy is almost impossible. Is this the case? It is a
matter of historical record that the academic discipline of geography was
“mangled”—inextricably mixed up—with the State in what Barnes & Farish (2006) call the “military-industrial-academic
complex.” It should really be called the military-industrial-intelligence-academic complex, since
communication research emerged from WWII intelligence work (Part
1), and, as Barnes & Farish
themselves explain, so did postwar geography (as indeed did some other
postwar sciences).[14] What is the
consequence for public understanding? We have
seen above that classical geopolitics—or at least the portion of it that
citizens can publicly read and examine—does not take rational action
seriously and fails to investigate power-elite intentions, backing into the
‘error-prone’ model that in fact makes no useful predictions (Part
4). The media, moreover, is treated as a source of information rather than investigated as an organ of elite power. For its
part, critical geopolitics, though it is interested in describing the rules
of ‘discourse,’ also does not investigate the media as a tool of power. This
is because the critical approach—following Michel Foucault (who originated
the concept of ‘discourse’)—does not separate the political grammar and constructed
reality aspects of ‘discourse,’ and thus sees power as lying diffusely everywhere, concentrated nowhere, so
that the media, power elites, and even academics are themselves all equally
‘victims’ of discourse, every bit as much as the ordinary citizen.[15] The result is that critical scholars likewise back into the error-prone hypothesis, alleging that the
US power elite routinely makes costly mistakes because enslavement to the
discourse mars power-elite understanding of other countries and regions.[16] Both major traditions of geopolitics, it
turns out, interpret any policy outcome that conspicuously deviates from a pro-democracy
orientation as ‘error.’ I find that interesting. (And revealing.) Moreover, a
strong tradition in both media and Academia interprets any hypothesis of
Machiavellian design for undemocratic policy outcomes as ‘conspiracy theory,’
which inevitably carries connotations of paranoid lunacy and unscientific orientation.
This, too, is interesting and revealing. As for
geography, I believe it is quite important. But one must be able to
distinguish between real geographic
opportunities and constraints—which power elites must take into
account in their decision-making—and geographical ‘reality’ as discursively represented by power elites for public consumption, to make their
foreign policy adventures grammatically palatable. Here, much
can be accomplished by simple omission. For example, a secret study conducted
by the Pentagon in 1967, at the close of the Six Day War, determined that if
Israel ever allowed its enemies to control the territories of Judea, Samaria,
and Gaza it would be destroyed. Just a few years later, the US government
began agitating to force Israel to give those territories to its enemies (Part
8). The public didn’t learn about the 1967 study because it was
kept secret. And though it was declassified in the 1980s, it is still mostly
unknown because it has not appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and primetime CNN, and
elsewhere, as part of a saturation campaign, which is the only way that the
public really learns anything. In what
follows I will continue applying the grammatical realism method and subject
the model developed here to tests of generality. I will seek to find out just
how much contemporary US foreign policy can be made meaningful when viewed
through the model’s lens. As a first exercise, we will consider the history of US
foreign policy toward Iran, and will seek to show just how
consistent present developments are with historical outcome-patterns and with
strategic geographical considerations. Stay tuned. _____________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] Dittmer J. 2014. Introduction to Part
One. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New York: Routledge. (loc. 630-631) [2] Ó Tuathail G, Agnew J. 2014. Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy. Political Geography 11: 190-204 (p.192). [3] Dittmer, J. & Sharp, J. 2014.
General Introduction. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New
York: Routledge. (loc. 359-361) [4] Dittmer, J. 2014. Introduction to
Part One. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New
York: Routledge. (loc. 674-696). [5]
Flint C. 2011. Geopolitics: An Introduction. New York
& London: Routledge. (from the introduction) [6]
Dittmer J. 2014. Introduction to
Part One. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New
York: Routledge. (loc. 394-395) [7]
Dittmer, J. 2014. Introduction
to Part Two. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). (loc. 2976-2977) [8] Dittmer, J. & Sharp, J. 2014. General Introduction. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New York: Routledge. (loc. 394-395) [9] Flint C. 2011. Geopolitics: An Introduction. New York & London: Routledge. (from the introduction) [10]
Ó Tuathail
G, Agnew J. 2014. Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning
in American Foreign Policy. Political Geography 11: 190-204 (p.196). Sharp,
J. 2014. Introduction to Part Three. In Geopolitics: An Introductory
Reader (Kindle ed.).
London & New York: Routledge. (loc. 5290-5293) [11]
Ó Tuathail
G, Agnew J. 2014. Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning
in American Foreign Policy. Political Geography 11: 190-204 (pp.192-93). [12] Dittmer,
J. & Sharp, J. 2014. General Introduction. In Geopolitics: An
Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.).
London & New York: Routledge. (loc. 412-459) [13] Dittmer,
J. 2014. Introduction to Part Two. In Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Kindle ed.). London & New
York: Routledge. (loc. 3017-3018). [13a] In Part 3 we
discussed an example of top-level collusion within a State. But this can also
happen internationally, at different levels of scale. Examples can be found
in classical Greece and Rome, in early modern Europe, in the Western
arrangements that led to WWII, in the erstwhile Soviet bloc, and, I believe,
in the current US-dominated world order. [14] Geographers
Trevor Barnes and Matthew Farish have given an
overview of the process that transformed American geography during and after
WWII, a process directly parallel to what happened with communication
research (see Part 1), and indeed with other sciences. “The traditional notion of science held by geographers arrived
from natural history, which was field-based, descriptive, rested on
scrupulously recorded observations of a lone scholar, and tended toward
classification, even the encyclopedic. Regions were portrayed
correspondingly. During the SecondWorldWar and
afterward, however, a different model of science emerged, one produced in the
crucible of war, both hot and cold, and forged through interaction among
scientists, the military, industry, and the state. This science happened at
the lab bench or at the writing desk, involved large sums of money and a team
of researchers (‘big science’), was theoretically abstract, mathematical,
often model- and machine-based, and geared toward meeting specific ends. We
argue that this conception of science made its way, albeit haltingly, into
postwar American human geography. Accordingly, it produced a very different
idea of region, conceived now as explanatory, theoretical, and instrumental,
a tool to achieve functional objectives.” (p.807) “... the hitherto
relatively distinct entities of the military and science were during the SecondWorldWar forced to engage one another, resulting in
what Pickering calls ‘mangling.’ Mangling is the dynamic, mutual
transformation of entities as they interact. In this case, science and the
military were mangled. Their very practices changed substantially as they
worked together, became quite different, and never returned to their
respective original forms.” (p.809) “...Mangling for Pickering provides a means for understanding
the changing form of science and social science during the War. In order to
meet military purposes, he argues, both became mission-focused, team-based
and interdisciplinary, hierarchically organized, state-funded,
machine-oriented, and, owing to reduced interest in pure theory and more
interest in application, model-based.” (p.809) “...a novel model of research—often dubbed “big science”— in
which enormous commitments of money and resources allowed a diverse range of
personnel and expertise, along with heterogeneous materials, to work on a
common problem , whether it was the construction of
an atomic weapon or the provision of military intelligence (see Galison and Hevly 1992).” This model became the template for carrying out research after
the war. Government and, increasingly, private funding brought together large
teams of varied researchers to work on specific problems most directly
connected to national security and military interests. Perhaps the best
example is the RAND Corporation, based in Santa Monica, California.” (p.810) “…Initially, the social sciences were also overwhelmingly
funded by the state , with the Office of Naval
Research (ONR) particularly important in the early postwar years (in 1949 the
ONR funded 40 percent of the pure and academic research in the United States;
Mirowski 2002, 200). Later, the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations were increasingly active.” (p.811) “...The knowledge created out of the Second World War’s
destruction and the Cold War’s proxy conflicts and modernization projects was
not innocent, but was shaped within a peculiar institutional permutation—the
military-industrial-academic complex—that directly or indirectly promoted an
American geopolitical agenda.” (p.811) “...In September 1941, [geographer] Richard Hartshorne was
called to Washington, D.C., to form a geography branch within the
two-month-old Office of the Co-ordinator of
Information (OCI). In June 1942 the name was changed to Office of Strategic
Services (Martin 1994, 488), and this was the forerunner of the CIA. That
Office reported directly to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its
founding charter was “to collect and analyze all information and data which
may bear upon national security” (quoted in Troy 1981, 423). The subsequent
importance of the OSS was immense. According to Andrew Kirby (1994, 306), it
“created many of the blue prints for post-war US economic and military
hegemony … [as well as] presiding over the emergence of essentially new
conceptions of academic labor.” There were also smaller, more localized
effects, one of which was the beginning of a new conception of region,
propelling academic geography along a new intellectual arc.” (p.813) “...R&A was the key site within OSS, its “heart and soul”
(Winks 1987, 114), responsible for collecting and analyzing data and
information on every theater of the conflict.” (p.814) “...That R&A staff was extraordinary. That staff was
extraordinary. It consisted of three main groups: midcareer American
professors including Langer and Hartshorne, typically conservative, but
vigorously anti-fascist; young scholars, often graduate students, who
included Walter Rostow, Carl Schorske, Charles Kindelberger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and even the
Marxist Paul Sweezy , who collectively would later
reshape the postwar humanities and social sciences...” (p.814) SOURCE: Barnes TJ, Farish M.
2006. Between Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World
War to Cold War. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
96: 807-26 [15] Critical
geopolitics emerges from a body of intellectual work known as postmodernism.
There is some controversy as to whether Michel Foucault—the father of
‘discourse’ as a tool of analysis—should himself be considered a postmodernist.
But there is no question that Foucault has been terribly important to
postmodernists, and that his view of power has become dominant among them. In
a book on the history of science, two scholars comment as follows: “...postmodernists
reject the Enlightenment ideal of progress and human perfectibility.
Skeptical in the extreme, they repudiate all large-scale interpretations of
culture and history. The human condition is held hostage by vague, universal
forces called power relations… But ‘unlike the old notion of entrenched power
that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, postmodernists envisage forms of
power that have no central, single, fixed, discernible, controllable locus.
This kind of power is everywhere but concentrated nowhere.’ ” [Compare to fig. 1.] SOURCE:
Pyenson L, Sheets-Pyenson
S. 1999. Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions,
Enterprises, and Sensibilities. New York & London: WW Norton &
Company. (p.17) [16] Notice
what Tuathail and Agnew, easily the most
influential critical geopolitics scholars, write: “The
irony of practica1 geopolitical representations of place is that, in order to
succeed, they actually necessitate the abrogation of genuine geographical
knowledge about the diversity and complexity of places as social entities.
Describing the USSR then (or Iraq today) as Orientalist, is a work of
geographical abstractionism. A complex, diverse and heterogeneous social
mosaic of places is hypostatized into a singular, overdetermined and
predictable actor. As a consequence, therefore, the United States was put in
the ironic situation of being simultaneously tremendously geographically
ignorant of the USSR (and today Iraq) yet fetishistically
preoccupied with that state and its influence in world politics.” SOURCE:
Ó Tuathail G, Agnew J. 2014. Geopolitics and
Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy. Political
Geography 11: 190-204 (pp.202). |
█ 0. Introduction The
present series of articles amounts to a primer. It contains strategic
historical knowledge minimally sufficient to abandon the ‘Establishment
model’ of geopolitical processes and to begin constructing an alternative
model that will explain and
predict the world of international relations. The alternative model
agrees with the Establishment model that the Middle East ‘Peace Process’
is important, but disagrees about almost everything else. In the
alternative model, the US-Iran nuclear deal makes perfect sense. It
may or may not agree with you, but it will no longer surprise you. █ 1. Psychological
warfare, communication research, and the media PSYOPs originally refers to psychological warfare operations conducted by the
military against the enemy. But PSYOPs have domestic applications as
well. We review here historian Christopher Simpson’s documentation of how
social science was corrupted in the United States so that power elites could
bend ‘democracy’ to their will using psychological warfare. █ 2. Political grammar
: ¿How does psychological warfare work? Psychological
warfare is governed by grammatical rules. Power elites with a good
command of such rules can deploy psychological warfare to manipulate citizens
into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t—even into destroying their own
liberties. We here explain the basic operation of Western political
grammar, created in 1848, and how it may be manipulated. █ 3. Principal-Agent Theory
(PAT), the citizen, and the State Principal-agent theory (PAT) examines how
‘principals’ can manipulate ‘agents’ to do their bidding. It has been applied
to political behavior but, perhaps not too surprisingly, in such a manner
that it will not challenge the perception that Western States are functioning
democracies whose governments are duly responsive to the citizenries. Here we
explore an alternative picture that takes into account what power elites can
do through psychological (or political) warfare. █ 4. Is US geopolitics meant to
strengthen or weaken democracy? The study
of geopolitics is meant to account for the foreign policy behaviors of
the various States. However, geopolitical scholars have certain taboos about
which kinds of hypotheses may or may not be entertained. In particular, the
prevailing political grammar in the Western media and academic system appears
to rigorously forbid that anybody question the purity of intention of
those making foreign policy decisions in Western states. Why? █ 5. The goals of the US power
elite in historical perspective The US
power elite’s most important players were responsible for setting up the
US psychological warfare regime after World War II (Part 1). These same
players had a major hand in precipitating the onset of World War II.
This information is of some importance in evaluating the probable aims of US
power-elite geopolitics today. But it is next to impossible to pursue this
analysis because the US power elite role in causing World War II has been
almost completely expunged from historical education.. █ 6. US postwar
policy toward Nazi war criminals Few people are aware that the US government recruited Nazis after
WWII. And most of the aware believe this was just a handful of Nazi
scientists employed in rocket development (Operation Paperclip). In fact, the
US government shielded from justice a giant multitude of Nazis—including many
war criminals who had bathed themselves in innocent blood—and used them to
create the postwar US intelligence infrastructure. This affected both
domestic and foreign policy. The self-imposed silence of the Western media
on this topic is diagnostic of the psychological warfare regime that
dominates. █ 7. The aims of the
US power elite in WWII Certain important events surrounding the causes and aftermath of World
War II may be recruited to defend a model of the US power elite as
pro-Nazi. This model naturally needs to provide satisfactory special
reasons for important behaviors of the same power elite that appear
anti-Nazi. But the same applies to the Establishment model: it must provide
satisfactory special reasons to explain why, if the US power elite has been
anti-Nazi, it involved itself so intensely with sponsorship and then
recruitment of Nazis. We examine these issues here. █ 8. US foreign
policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict Given US power elite’s sponsorship of the eugenics movement, which
became German Nazism, and the same US power elite’s creation of the
postwar psychological warfare regime, it is reasonable to ask whether US
postwar foreign policy has been consistent with the aims of the
eugenicists and the German Nazis, namely, to destroy democracy and to kill
Jews. That is the question we ask here. █ 9. Why do enemies
of democracy attack the Jews? Shoa (‘the Holocaust’) was a horrific slaughter and a Crime Against Humanity, but it was not
an historical aberration. As Western historical processes go, the
mass-killing of Jews may be the most recurrent and stable. Those who killed
the Jews in World War II were enemies of human liberty. This, too, is not
new. In the history of the West, whenever the Jews are under attack,
everybody’s liberties are in danger. What explains this? One simple fact: for
2500 years, Jewish thought has been the engine of Western political
liberation, and Western enemies of liberty have always understood this. |
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