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1253Nous présentons ci-dessous deux textes du site National Defense Interest, qu'on peut trouver sur ce site, dans leur forme originale. (Nos lecteurs connaissent le site National Defense Interest, auquel nous nous sommes déjà intéressés, et notamment le “Docteur Werther”, l'un des auteurs cités ici, que nous avons déjà présenté et lu sur ce site.) Il s'agit d'une réflexion, à partir du l’appréciation d'un texte du commentateur George F. Will, sur l'utilisation de l'analogie historique. L'analogie est aujourd’hui un moyen classique de l’utilisation de la référence historique dans l’activité politique et médiatique, et, peut-être, le moyen seul classique tant la pensée historique semble se réduire au minimum minimorum selon son utilisation immédiate dans le débat idéologique du jour. (A cet égard, le titre ci-dessous est parfaitement choisi, tant il s’agit effectivement d’un collapsus de la pensée historique : « The Third Reich Syndrome: George Will and the Collapse of Historical Knowledge. ») On l’a deviné, il s’agit de la référence Adolf Hitler et le reste, — le nazisme, l'“esprit de Munich”, etc.
Nous reprenons ces deux textes pour les soumettre à nos lecteurs parce qu’ils nous semblent être significatifs et utiles par la description qu’ils font d’une “méthode” de l’esprit postmoderne. En fait de méthode, il s’agit paradoxalement d’une dégradation de l’esprit méthodique au plus simple appareil : recourir à l’image la plus simple, la plus primaire possible, véritablement en guise de “réflexion” ; réduire la pensée aux bornes de cette imagerie ; faire reposer toute conviction possible sur cette imagerie. C’est la formule de ce que nous nommons le virtualisme, dans sa forme la plus sommaire.
La référence hitlérienne telle qu’elle est utilisée, — utilisée couramment depuis la fin du communisme, utilisée pour Saddam, utilisée pour Milosevic, etc — est une grossièreté considérable de l’esprit lorsqu’il s’agit d’établir par son biais une analogie de puissance ; c’est une escroquerie entière de l’esprit lorsque, par le biais du terrorisme intellectuel qu’elle implique (qui s’oppose à une référence à Hitler n’est-il pas, un peu disons mais c’est déjà beaucoup, Hitler lui-même ?), il s’agit d’imposer une image d’influence idéologique du poids de celle du nazisme. Bien sûr l’image de puissance stratégique et d’ampleur de l’influence idéologique ainsi obtenue n’a pas le moindre rapport avec la réalité ; aucun de ces dictateurs postmodernes n’est capable de la justifier au millième, voire au dix-millième de sa réalité historique. C’est à la fois un terrorisme de l’esprit et une escroquerie de l’esprit lorsqu’il s’agit d’imposer une équivalence générale dans le champ historique ; aucun des récipiendaires de l’image ne peut prétendre approcher l’organisation et le poids stratégique, l’influence idéologique, donc l’importance historique de Hitler pendant la période. Nous sommes dans une différence de substance. Comparer Saddam et Milosevic à Hitler relève du mépris de la connaissance et constitue une insulte à l’intelligence.
Mais on comprend de quoi il s’agit, — en haussant l’ennemi à cette mesure hitlérienne, on peut croire qu’on se hausse soi-même à ce niveau. Les Américains postmodernes et Tony Blair, qu’on a eu parfois l’étrange idée et l’idée publicitaire de baptiser “Churchill Mark-II”, ont l’illusion de la force et du courage en travestissant Saddam en Hitler avant de partir à l’attaque. Ils ont une arme de mobilisation pour pouvoir monter un argument virtualiste justifiant cette action qui manque si fortement de cohérence dans la perception intuitive qu’on en a, et qui n’a donc aucune évidence propre. Ils dissimulent tout ce que leurs conceptions et leurs jugements ont aujourd’hui de sophistique. Ils mettent de leur côté la force et le poids de cet argument moral absolu, tel qu’il a été forgé aujourd’hui lorsqu’il s’agit de Hitler. Ils créent de façon artificielle une façon d’être infiniment plus que ce qu’ils sont. L’analogie hitlérienne est un artifice à l’image de l’époque ; l’artifice d’un système virtualiste pour inventer une situation historique qui n’existe pas. L’“hitlérisation” est un moyen de s’inventer une existence de soi-même différente de ce qu’on est.
By Chuck Spinney, December 31, 2002
Attached References:
[Ref. 1] George F. Will, ''A Retrospective On Disarmament,'' Washington Post. December 15, 2002, Pg. B7 Excerpts attached.]
The courtiers of Versailles on the Potomac and their wholly-owned subsidiaries in the chattering class love to promote their policies by invoking breathless analogies to superficially familiar events. The objective is to power boost their powers of ''persuasion'' by exploiting the general ignorance and gullibility of the booboisie, to borrow H. L. Mencken's label for those citizens exhibiting that insatiable American appetite for intellectual nonsense.
Reasoning by analogy is not necessarily bad, although it can be a very dangerous. Indeed, when disciplined by a real commitment to truth, it can a very powerful form of thinking. Analogies can liberate the mind and unleash new associations and thereby produce a burst of creativity. Sometimes, this kind of reasoning can even change our view of the universe.
Einstein's thought experiments are a case in point. In one of his most famous experiments, he imagined that he was sitting on a train riding away from a clock in a tower at the speed of light. He reasoned that if the time observed on that clock was being carried to him as information in a packet of light, his observation of time could never change. The information indicating the passage of time would be carried in later light packets, but those packets could not catch up with him, because he was moving away from that clock at the same speed as the packages of information. On the other hand, if he examined the watch in his pocket, the time on the watch would be observed to change. Therefore, he concluded, his power of observation was shaped by the relation of his position and velocity in space to the object of observation and the nature of the signal carrying the information. Out of this insight (and other efforts), he synthesized his special theory of relativity, and mankind's view of the universe— i.e., mind-time-space—changed irreversibly.
Einstein's analogies and mental gymnastics were the product of a highly disciplined mind. He continually tested his emergent flashes of insight against the harsh realities of experimental observations, scientific knowledge, and mathematical logic, not to mention common sense.
Such is decidedly not the case in Versailles. In the less disciplined minds of the chattering class, this type of reasoning would be laughable, were it not so downright dangerous. Time and again, polemicists and pseudo-intellectuals have used seductive analogies to capture the imagination, and shackle the mind, and thereby induce that mind to see what analogizer wants it to see, not what is. When this entrapment occurs in politics and foreign policy, the Orientation takes over and controls one's powers of Observation and produces an incestuously-amplifying Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action (OODA) loop, wherein decisions and actions become more and more disconnected from the actual environment that is claimed to be necessitating those actions.
The result is an emergent chaotic phenomenon known in the Pentagon as ''drinking your own bathwater,'' and it has, on too many occasions, created a foreign policy known as the ''March of Folly.''
The all time favorite analogy powering the March of Folly by Versailles on the Potomac is the hackneyed memory of Adolph Hitler, together with the associated subliminal images of Munich, appeasement, cowardice, the holocaust, etc. These images have also become feared labels to brand those who disagree with the invoker of the Hitler analogy. As we will see, it is a tactic that has been used over and over in the most bizarre of circumstances to justify the weirdest of adventures.
The chattering class LOVES the ''memory'' of Adolph Hitler like a junkie loves heroin, and no one is more addicted to the drug than the columnist George F. Will. Reference 1 below is Will's most recent injection into the body politic. I urge to read it now—before continuing. [DNI Editor's note: because of copyright limitations, only minor excerpts are attached.]
Will is apparently terrified that the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq will find nothing, and the lack of evidence will slow or, even worse, stop America's march to war. He invokes a ''memory'' of how weapons inspections failed to eliminate German militarism after World War I. He goes on to imply that this failure helped to pave the way for the rise of Hitler by invoking another if somewhat tortured memory of how the ''semi-senescent'' Paul von Hindenburg, Germany's president in January 1933, opened to door for Adolf Hitler's rise to the Chancellorship. Will makes his link up with the most amazing contortion—by juxtaposing Hindenberg's sleepy mental state of 1933 to a comment Hindenberg appears to have made around 1919!
Will's ominous lesson of history is the inference that Saddam Hussein is like Hitler and therefore must be stopped before he plunges the world into war. Yet all of this is done without mentioning Hussein or the American march to war.
Has Will gone over the top? Is he being too clever by a half? Or are his words and analysis the product of a deep intellectual effort to enlighten the booboisie.
Not trusting my own semi-senescent, overly-analogized mind to answer such questions, I asked my good friend Dr. Werther, an admirer of Goethe who is trained in the continental tradition, and a frequent contributor to the Blaster, for his analysis of Will's sense of history. What follows is his response—I urge you to read and compare it to the wisdom dispensed by Will.
Reference 1
Washington Post, December 15, 2002, Pg. B7 : “A Retrospective On Disarmament”, By George F. Will
Excerpts:
... The victors vowed to destroy German militarism using 337 inspectors in a country that then was about the size of today's Iraq ...
... The field marshal who was in command of all German armies at the end of the war agreed: ''Months would be necessary to prepare a new war, and do you think the French would look on with their hands in their pockets?'' The field marshal was Paul von Hindenburg, who as Germany's semi-senescent president in January 1933 appointed as chancellor a World War I corporal, Adolf Hitler.
by Dr. Werther*
*''Werther''s is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, ''the only thing men learn from history is to endlessly invoke Adolf Hitler.'' Although this pseudo-historical bugaboo had its roots in the cold war, the gratuitous invocation of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich has become epidemic over the past dozen years among the foreign policy elite and their hangers-on as an all-purpose justification for whatever foreign policy the elite wants to execute.
Beginning in 1989, the U.S. government justified its invasion of Panama and arrest of former CIA hirling Manuel Noriega with the excuse that he was like Hitler. On the eve of Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush decried erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein as ''worse than Hitler.'' With a change in administrations, the practice continued, this time to justify the overthrow of a ludicrously picayune rogue: to the Clinton administration, none other than Haiti's Raoul Cedras acquired the evil attributes of the long-dead Beast of Berlin.
The decade-long breakup of Yugoslavia also assumed the sinister characteristics—at least in the fevered minds of the half-educated Beltway literati—of Hitler's conquest of Europe. The elite gave no regard either to the circumstance that Yugoslavia was getting smaller, not larger, nor to the inconvenient fact that Yugoslavia was itself an artificial construct of Wilsonian idealism. Still less regard was paid to fact that the deaths in this civil war were hardly above the norm of killings practiced by U.S. allies like Turkey in Kurdistan or Indonesia in Timor (about the Sabra and Shatila massacres or My Lai the less said the better). In his speech justifying an attack on Serbia, President Clinton adverted to the alleged need for the United States to intervene in this conflict ''in the heart of Europe''—a clear attempt to link Yugoslavia (a mere backwater at the Southeast fringe of Europe ) with the Munich agreement and the origins of the Second World War.
Against this contemporary background of cardboard Führers and bogus crises, George F. Will has lately put all his mock erudition and tedious moral dudgeon at the service of the war party. His recent column [Reference 1] asserts that the defective and incomplete arms inspection regime of the Allied Control Commission after World War I permitted Weimar Germany to secretly rearm. Therefore, Mr. Will implies, the current arms inspection of Iraq is hopelessly futile, and its naive pursuit will inevitably beget a rampant and victorious military conqueror in the form of Saddam Hussein.
The reader also draws the inference that those who favor inspections over pre-emptive war are not merely fatuous optimists, but almost criminally negligent appeasers in the manner of Neville Chamberlain. This conclusion is reinforced by the melodramatic manner in which Mr. Will ends his piece: the final two words are ''Adolf Hitler,'' ending very much like a child's ''just so'' story, or, if you will, the urban legend which the teller dares the listener to doubt.
What is wrong with this historical analogy? One hardly knows where to begin. Mr. Will evidently means to suggest Iraq and Weimar Germany are equivalent threats by stating that the two countries are roughly the same size. By this measure, Chad or Outer Mongolia must have frightening military potential. Concrete comparison, rather than emotional suggestibility, yields the following data
Weimar Germany, despite the Versailles sanctions, comprised the second-largest industrial base on earth. In certain critical fields, such as chemistry, physics, and metallurgy, it led the world. By the early-twentieth century standards of industrial development - the production of coal, steel, or industrial chemicals - Germany was either first in the world or second behind the United States. No other country had as many Nobel Prize-winning scientists as Germany.
A summary indication of Iraq's military/industrial potential may be gleaned from the following passage: ''. . . Iraq's real gross domestic product (GDP)—that is, its GDP adjusted for inflation—fell by 75 percent from 1991 to 1999. In the late 1990s the country's real GDP was estimated at about what it was in the 1940s, [emphasis added] prior to the oil boom and the modernization of the country. As a result, per capita income and the people's calorie intake plunged from the levels of relatively better-off Third World countries to those of the desperately poor Fourth World states, such as Rwanda, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia.'' (2)
So the economic indicators of this alleged hegemon on the Euphrates are more nearly those of such basket cases as Rwanda than those of Weimar Germany or the Soviet menace.
Mr. Will refers in his column to the clandestine training methods of the Reichswehr as a basis for its subsequent expansion into the Wehrmacht. But what does the German Army of that time, almost universally acknowledged as the most professional officer and NCO corps in the world, have to do with a demoralized, robotic, and inept Iraqi officer corps leading a brutalized, unwilling conscript rabble? Does their lamentable performance in Desert Storm somehow evoke Operation Barbarossa or the Wehrmacht's conquest of France and the Low Countries?
Likewise Weimar Germany's relative strength vis-à-vis its potential adversaries compared with Iraq's current situation. As stated, Germany was the second largest industrial base in the world. The United States, its only industrial better in the 1920s, might as well have been on the moon for all that it was able to affect the contemporary balance of power in Europe. Post-Versailles America had an army that was well below the first rank, and behind such martial midgets as Sweden or Romania.
By contrast, today the United States alone comprises close to 50 percent of world military spending. Its putative rival Iraq spends about a tenth on the military compared to what it did a decade ago. Its remaining weapons are largely obsolete 1970s vintage Soviet bloc hardware (without spare parts or contractor support), and its delivery means of purported weapons of mass destruction are roughly a dozen SCUDs, themselves a derivative of 60-year old V-2 technology.
It is also hard to conceive of the history of the 1920s as being one where the Entente powers would have been able to designate half of Germany a no-fly zone and bomb German military installations at will. The Entente also lacked orbiting satellites, multi-billion dollar signals intelligence interception capabilities, and other technical means that the United States now routinely employs against Iraq. If the implication is that these technologies, developed to surveille the eight million square miles of the Soviet Union, are inadequate to handle Iraq, one can only conclude the U.S. taxpayer has been duped.
It is not surprising that crackpot analogies like Mr. Will's have gained traction in the United States anno 2002. A recent National Geographic survey found that in the dumbed-down post-literate age ''only about one in seven—13 percent—of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military warriors, could find Iraq'' on a world map. (3) The adage says that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Accordingly, a half-educated discourse on the Weimar Republic by a kennel-fed establishment literatus like George Will sounds like real erudition to people who can barely find Canada on a map.
As the conservative political scientist Michael Oakshott wrote, historical analogies must be drawn with sensitivity and attention to historical facts, because an analogy is not a mathematical proof or a logical syllogism:
There is no process of generalization by means of which the events, things and persons of history can be reduced to anything other than historical events, things and persons without at the same time being removed from the world of historical ideas … In history there are no ''general laws'' by means of which historical individuals can be reduced to instances of a principle, and least of all are there general laws of the character we find in the world of science.
Let us heed Mr. Oakshott's caution. Otherwise, a tendentious or partisan reading of history could derive any number of Third Reich analogies. For example, future generations of shallow and ill-educated people might conclude that since both Josef Göbbels and George Will never served in the military, and both wrote tirelessly in favor of war, and both practiced the lower forms of journalism, there must be a functional equivalence between the two. But who would now suggest such a far-fetched analogy?
(1) ''A Retrospective on Disarmament by George F. Will, The Washington Post, 15 December 2002.
(2) ''Iraq Economy,'' a country profile at Mapzones.com.
3)''Global Goofs: US Youth Can't Find Iraq,''
(4) Experience and Its Modes, Michael Oakshott, 1986.
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
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