Foreign Policy in a Nation Overrun by Gibberish
By Louis Rene Beres (Published in 1985)
The Iran-Contra crisis is nothing more than a symptom of a much more serious disorder in U.S. foreign policy. This disease is the militant theology of anti-Sovietism. Left unchecked, its virulence may turn everyone into a corpse.
America’s enemy is the Soviet Union. It is always the enemy. This is a doctrinal cornerstone of our state religion.
Not surprisingly, U.S. foreign policy is now deformed and incoherent. Blocked from the imperatives of a secular world politics, Washington defines every move in terms of its effects on Soviet power. As a result, America faces widening circles of terrorism and, ultimately, war.
In the Middle East the U.S. has meddled in the internal affairs of Iran, Lebanon and Libya. In Central America and South Africa it has sustained corrupt oligarchies and repressive regimes while fostering lawless interventions [the Reagan Doctrine] against pro-Soviet states. In Europe, ignoring the opportunities for arms control, the U.S. has deployed cruise and Pershing II missiles in five NATO countries, a deployment that degrades nuclear deterrence as it generates renewed spasms of anti-Americanism.
Worn threadbare, anti-Sovietism must cease being the central source of America’s national faith. Its replacement by an authentic and purposeful source of foreign policy, however, cannot take place amid the desolate networks of our current society. Imprisoned by a materialism that overrides all other goals, Americans stand in the ruins of consciousness, content to be casualties of endless manipulation.
In many respects, our oppression as Americans is greater than the oppression of many other peoples throughout history, including several of those we described as “enslaved.” Never before has a single society been more vulnerable to instant disappearance. Never before have individual members of a society been less effectual in producing a change that could bring survival.
Controlled by images that make thinking almost impossible, we Americans remain quiet in the world, living in it tentatively, as if democracy meant only obedience. George Orwell’s gloomy prophecy in “1984” described a world of sophisticated surveillance techniques and the disappearance of privacy, where Big Brother watched all but was himself invisible. Ironically, the homogenizing and socializing effect of TV and the electronic media now makes such control unnecessary. Americans don’t need to be kept in line by external political constraints. As we have already been baptized into a singular political theology from earliest childhood, the possibilities for dissent, for heresy, are removed in silence.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that the issues of nuclear war and human rights arouse substantially less interest among Americans than that of “Old Coke” versus “New Coke,” or that the imperatives of foreign policy are drawn less from the lessons of history than from “Rambo.” Living in a society where so few people read books, and where at least one in four of today’s school-age children won’t graduate from high school, it is easy for Americans to exchange their dreadful freedom for a stabilizing idolatry of conflict.
Television is the primal force in American “thought.” Small wonder, then, that our emperor wears no clothes or that our policies provide appropriate raw material for the theater of the absurd. How could it be otherwise? Overwhelmed by an illusory of pictures that is taken as truth, an entire nation is overrun by gibberish, engrossed and satisfied by lies that hurl us relentlessly toward necropolis.
From this social world a viable foreign policy can never emerge. Tantalized by bright packaging, jingles and ritualized coded messages, America finds its only solace in the mythical world of success and glamor. Today, intelligent college students want to be lobbyists.
To whom does this society belong? Let us be frank: It is to the characterless mass-man or woman, who epitomizes mediocrity, cowardice, thoughtlessness, compromise and servility; a creature of strong appetites but no taste, of surface confidence but no ideals, of great zeal and even diligence, but no meaningful aspirations. Our only hope for a new foreign policy — one that can save us from degradation and nuclear war — lies in those who brood and dream at the edge of this society, in those remaining creative dreamers who would reveal the desolation and fragility of a country directed by “solid citizens.”
Speaking of humankind as a whole, Rimbaud once complained that “we are not in the world.” So it is with America today. We stand, as a nation, outside the world, drawn to our final rendezvous with extinction because we have steadfastly refused to become persons. How much treasure, how much science, how much labor and planning, how many centuries have we ransacked to make possible the grotesque carnival of our current foreign policy?
The answers will cause pain. Our deference to fools, who have placed this nation on a disastrous course, flows from a society that celebrates falsehoods. But there is still time for a change in direction. To accomplish this change, America must first learn to differentiate between the reasonableness of secular political competition and the hopelessness of theological conflict in world affairs. And this, in turn, will require the rescue of individual Americans from a society that positively despises authentic thought.
