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"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

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This cynical observation has stood since the day former Nazi Herman Goering made it in April of 1946, and both before and after has been the method followed by leaders around the world to lead their nations into wars both good and bad.

In the aftermath of the sales process for the current invasion of Iraq, this process was so obviously the one being employed by the neo-con cabal that the quote took on a new life and was circulated widely on the internet: this is how it got done.

What I mean to discuss, however, is the cracks that are beginning to appear in what I've decided to call Goering's Law. I'm going to argue that this sales process has only been partially effective, and that something has changed, permanently, in western democracies which will amount to the repeal of Goering's Law. Halleleu!

All wars have had their dissenters, of course. That's not new. What is new about non-believers in the current war is that a significant proportion of it is coming from second and third generation immigrants from the regions and religion under attack.

And they're not buying the reasons they're being told about why the war is necessary. In an extraordianry open letter addressed this week to Tony Blair and signed by a large number of prominent british Muslims*, the message was delivered that not even the moderates in the UK muslim population believe their government's stated reasons for the neccessity of going to war. According to one MP, "current policy on the Middle East is seen by almost everyone I speak to as unfair and unjust." That's an astonishingly sweeping and blunt statement, considering that the speaker is himself a member of the government enacting this policy

If dissent were the sole issue, it could be comfortably ignored or denounced as unpatriotic, just as Goering advised. It is, however, not the sole issue. The letter-writers develop the argument that, "it is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad." The "in the UK" portion of this sentence is code for the real subject of the letter, which is the stark warning that the rise in what's being called homegrown terrorism is directly associated with the skepticism or outright disbelief that the current war has engendered in the british muslim population.

The radicals are telling the people that "their country hates them" the MP writes, and he makes the implicit complaint that Blair's policy direction makes it difficult for him to tell his people that the radicals are wrong.

It is their own families--cousins and brothers, and childhood friends, as well as their culture that this war is being waged against, and a certain--almost certainly small--percentage of the population is willing to engage in some fourth generation warfare of their own in order to make their strong objections felt.

My point is that this is a new thing in the body politic of western democracies, and it may herald a sea change, a change in which no longer can the assent (or at the very minimum quiet discontent) of the population be counted upon by leaders eager to lead their nations into imperial adventures overseas.

It has long been observed by military and political historians that western democracies no longer wage war upon each other. A substantial institutional superstructure helps to make such wars no longer unnecessary, but the real obstructing force is the certainty that the public in each nation would refuse their consent. The American public may have been furious at France a year or so ago, but there was no circumstance in which they'd have accepted a war against France.

Bluntly, the french are white, european, westernized, and democratic. Going to war against them would be too much like going to war against ourselves. We'd refuse.

It's my contention that the presence of a substantial immigrant base of population in nations like Canada and the UK extends this identification to other nations which have until now not been afforded such protecion from our aggression. These are the third world and developing nations which have been the targets of our imperial urges for the past century or too. Until very recently, we have held differing standards for the worth of a life there compared to the worth of western lives. That situation, british muslims have declared, is no longer tolerable to them. "We urge the prime minister." the letter writers write, "to...change our foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion." This will combat homegrown terrorism, they add. "Such a move would make us all safer." Brown lives, they declare, must now be equal to white lives.

What does this change mean? I argue that the meaning of homegrown terrorism is this: that Goering's Law has been repealed--no longer can our leaders assume popular consent for old-style imperial or colonial wars against the homelands of our fellow citizens.

Tony Blair made a huge blunder when he decided to follow George Bush so slavishly into war, and Canada's new Prime Minister Stephen Harper is hurrying to belatedly make the same mistake. But the world has changed, and political reality is going to strike them hard. Unfortunately, just as in Lebanon or Iraq, it is always the ordinary citizens who really suffer for it.

*which includes 3 of 4 british Muslim MPs, 3 of 4 muslim members of the house of lords, and the leaders of 38 muslim organizations in the UK.

[ 14 August 2006: Message edited by: S1m0n ]

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Originally posted by S1m0n:

...Brown lives, they declare, must now be equal to white lives.

What does this change mean? I argue that the meaning of homegrown terrorism is this: that Goering's Law has been repealed--no longer can our leaders assume popular consent for old-style imperial or colonial wars against the homelands of our fellow citizens.

Tony Blair made a huge blunder when he decided to follow George Bush so slavishly into war, and Canada's new Prime Minister Stephen Harper is hurrying to belatedly make the same mistake. But the world has changed, and political reality is going to strike them hard. Unfortunately, just as in Lebanon or Iraq, it is always the ordinary citizens who really suffer for it...

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nicely articulated S1m0n. It is always somewat morbidly facinating to me to see how much of the psychology the Nazi's used, and Goering in particular, to manipulate thier citizenry to support such a horrendous political and war machine has been absorbed and is currently used, conciously or not i don't know, by governments and corporate interests of our day.

in relation to the above excerpt regarding popular consent, this is apparently so true in the US, that the last two presidential elections have been steamrolled by an administrative "team" that, in the absence of majority electoral support, co-opted the courts and the electoral system to gain power and implement thier imperialist style war agenda precicely because popular support was not implicit, and only manifested through heavy media and policy manipulation. Bush implemented "Goering's Law" nearly verbatim. He capitalised on the insular, anti-immigrant sentiment (one may even say anti-brown) seething below the surface in US society looking for a scapegoat for thier declining standard of living due to the greedy and wrongheaded national economic policies of profiteering through offshoring and outsourcing. A good portion of the US public was ripe for it.

Canada is guilty in this regard too, or should i say the Harper government, which, with it's minority 36% support of the electorate, has embraced the imperialist agenda of our southern neighbour in the absence of popular electoral support or the mandate that comes with that support. The serious error Harper has made is that unlike the US, so-called "brown" people are a huge part of our society and are not as invisible or disempowered as their peers in the US. Chirac in France recognised this implicitly by refusing to join the Iraq invasion. Spain also recognised this. Britain tried to kiss up to the US to snatch a piece of its former imperialist glory, only to be currently hammered domestically by it's own "brown" electorate.

As you point out, these so called "brown lives" are no longer the "other". They are us. Citizens of Canada, Britain, the US etc. No longer merely "immigrants" they are full members, often first generation members of our fine lands. And they (we!) don't want to see their ancestral homes destroyed by their own countries, not 'adopted' countries, but the countries of their birth, in the same fashion as your reference to the US not abiding a war against France, or Britain for that matter.

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after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

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to put this into the context of the quote above, given the increasing apathy of the voting public and declining voter participation, particularly at provincial and civic levels, and the very vocal comments from that public during the last fed. election about voter "fatigue", as in too much voting to do....i can see in a DD scenario, a few well organised voters or groups completely co-opting the voting process, and Goering's quote above would be even easier to achieve, and the marketing firms you rail against would have even more undue influence.

Replacing 'Goering's Law' with an equivalent penned by Neville Chamberlain, as suggested by this thread, has proved to have depressing consequences of its own.

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Originally posted by Cardy:
...Replacing 'Goering's Law' with an equivalent penned by Neville Chamberlain...

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Originally posted by Cardy:
Many of the conditions S1m0n mentions were extant after WWI, especially in the US.

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Can you identify any such community which could have objected to an american war on their homeland during that period, and didn't?

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essentially the public would be expected to vote on anything and everything. it simply would not work effectively on a large scale as you seem to hope it would and would be vulnerable to the very manipulation you oppose.

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All your concerns are mere conjectures with no substance in fact. Nor can there be since Canadians have never had the chance to try it. And so what if the public was involved in every political decision? All the apathetic voters i have talked to have the same complaint, namely that their vote does not matter. But they still have strong opinions on a variety of issues.

You asked "Can you identify any such community which could have objected to an american war on their homeland during that period, and didn't?"

I wrote based on your statement that "What is new about non-believers in the current war is that a significant proportion of it is coming from second and third generation immigrants from the regions and religion under attack."

I'm not sure if I have the connection between your two statements clear, but my intention was to note that many communities in the US - Germans, especially, led efforts to steer the US into its isolationist stance before Pearl Harbor.

Farnival, I don't have a link but there is a book, released five or so years ago, of declassified documents from the British and German side leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939. If anyone's interested let me know and I'll dig it up and provide the citation.

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Originally posted by Cardy:
Finally, Fidel, your assertion that 'the complex' launched an unprovoked war on North Korea is incorrect. North Korea attacked the South, on the instigation of Mao. For a fascinating but depressing account read the Chang and Halliday biography of the Chinese dictator.

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Actually it was Stalin who was worried about an attack from the south via the N. Korean border with Russia. Stalin tried to prevent a North Korean attack on the south until such time as they could build up military capability. The Kremlin cited military weaknesses of N. Korea and the USSR-USA agreement on the 38th. Eventually, south Korean police and military incursions across the 38 parallel gave Pyongyang the evidence it needed to convince the Kremlin that peaceful re-unification was impossible. N. Korea attacked.

And of course Mao had something to say about 50 thousand U.S. troops camped on the Yalu River and staring across the way at China. It was their front doorstep at the time, if I'm not mistaken.

Korea was divided by outside intervention in 1945 and was in the midst of civil war when UN forces intervened in the 1950's. Like Vietnam was none of their business, so was the Korean conflict none of the Pentagon's or cosmetic government in Washington's business. Mao warned MacArthur not to cross the Yalu River. In North and South, three million Koreans were killed, wounded or missing. Another five million were left homeless. There were accusations from Pyongyang and Beijing of chemical and biological warfare waged by the U.S. on troops and civilians. There was even a USAF bombing run on Russian soil to the North.

MacArthur wanted to "unleash Chiang Kai Chek from Formosa." MacArthur also proposed to nuke N. Korea in drawing China and Russia into nuclear war. Hundreds of millions of human beings would have been incinerated in order to kill an idea. The UN demanded Truman give him the hook. Land war in Asia was discovered to be infeasible.

The U.S. aided and abetted some of the most brutal dictatorships in Korean history, from Syngman Rhee to General Park Jung Hee. College students who skipped classes or criticized the Apostle of Love were imprisoned and executed. And given little press coverage by the west at the time, over 2000 students were massacred at Kwangju for protesting U.S. military presence in 1980.

In fact, South Korean's are more afraid of the U.S. and the unwanted U.S. military occupation than they are of North Korea. The U.S. military, an ever-present menace to North Korea, is still the largest threat to peace in that region of the world - a mainly mountainous half of the country the size of the state of Mississippi. With almost 900 military installations around the world, the U.S. is the largest threat to peace and security everywhere in the world. Off and on for 35 years but especially during Stalin's time, the U.S. threatened a then non-nuclear North Korea with use of nuclear weapons. The Yanks need to get the hell out of Korea once and for all.

[ 19 August 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

His geopolitical analysis was bang on of course. Stalin as can be seen in his quivering response to the 1941 invasion of Russia by Germany was incapable of confronting anyone other than countries like Estonia, Lithuania, Lativia, and Finland. The latter of which gave the Red Army a resounding drubbing.

Stalin was dragged kicking and screaming into the peninsular war, largely due to Mao's intelligent appraisal of the startegic situation, and his agressive conviction that the US could be defeated in Asia.

He was more or less right, and US expansion was halted on several fronts.

[ 21 August 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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It is implied by Chang and Halliday that Chiang Kai-shek was defeated because of “poor judgement” of personalities, of weakness in his “character”, and not for economic and social reasons. On the contrary, Mao defeated Chiang because of the bankruptcy of Chinese landlordism and capitalism, the rottenness and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime – detailed in part by the authors. There was mass support for the programme of the CCP to “confiscate bureaucrat capital”, code for taking over capitalism – nationalisation of the capital controlled by imperialism, the tops of the KMT and their supporters, and a thoroughgoing land reform. A massive inflation also rotted any of the lingering foundations of the KMT, particularly amongst the middle class.

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Chiang was a deliberate mass murderer of over ten million Chinese and aided and abetted by the west. C&H sound like your run of the mill apologists for imperialism/feudalism/colonialism/capitalism. Consequently, I have no desire to read Chang and Halliday's tripe.

[ 21 August 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]