For some reason, I get a cold, cold feeling...deep down inside...when I read something like this:
"'Unilateral, illegitimate actions have not managed to resolve any problems, but made them worse', Putin said. 'The wars, local and regional conflicts, have only grown in number'.
Arguing that the U.S. was ignoring international law in its use of military power, a clear reference to the invasion of Iraq, Putin said the legal constraints that once protected smaller, weaker nations were no longer viable.
'This is very dangerous', he said. 'Nobody feels secure anymore. No one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course, such a policy stimulates an arms race. The force's dominance inevitably encourages a number of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction'."
Putin is articulating what is already painfully evident to most of us: The failure of the Bush Doctrine is the failure to imagine a world that has moved past the Cold War paradigm. Cheney, Rumsfeld-cold warriors until the bitter end, can only conceive of the world in oppositional monoliths, and were thus unable to see the problem terrorism as discrete pockets of ideological action.
Putin's commentary here and your take on these Cold Warriors' reluctance, deliberate eschewing and/or inability to see beyond "oppositional monoliths" reminds me of Lyotard's "incredulity toward metanarratives" (though such a stance in itself could be viewed as a metanarrative), that what Marx contrued as grand narrative has become passe in our postmodern age.
ReplyDeleteAs with evil, Satan or Hell, if you don't have an enemy to fight (figuratively and literally), your raison d'etre of having a just cause or just war no longer is relevant.
And then . . . your stock in Halliburton and Shell Oil plumets.
Roaring,
Rintrah
Well said, friend, though I have to wonder with what veracity the proponents of this "monolithic" world view actually believe.
ReplyDeleteI get the sneaking suspicion that, perhaps, we assign these people too much integrity in regard to such a metanarrative.
It seems to be that there is much that is a cynical manipulation which appeals to the "mythic" America, something that harkens back to a idealogical distortion of the purpose of this country-The Captain America syndrome.
Captain America is useful as the sum totem of the whole of fetish capital panopticism, the one ideological state apparatus to rule them all, if you will. Captain America as a metaphysical object, like an ass kicking Jesus, a redeemer of the world in his own image. A pale rider.
Of course, Captain America is a metanarrative as well, and those who invoke him know this as well, but only utter it in the depths of their cold, oil pumping hearts, but it doesn't matter, because as long as nobody wants to admit the ontological shell game that is the ideological discourse, people will continue to cling the blue tights and hide behind the red white and blue shield.
To echo Goebbels; It's a useful piece of mythic propoganda.
A