Re: the Human Need for Love and Appreciation

Excellent post, Baldur!

Yes, it is true, all over-encompassing wars against anonymous enemies tend to go the same way.

Most of them seem good in principle, or at least seem good to those societies who decide to go on fighting them. (For instance, today's West wouldn't endorse the War on Alcohol. Also, few would endorse the War on Witches or the War on Heretics or the War on Jews, the three of which went rampant through Europe from the Middle Ages all the way to the 17-18th Centuries, both sides of the Reformation divide...)

On principle, it is easy to see why those "wars" would be popular, and why even supposedly rational people could see a valid argument in fighting them. Heretics turn good Christians into devil worshippers. Witches do Satan's job directly. Jews secretly plan to destroy Christianity... Bar-tenders turn good men into violent drunk bastards... Dealers make our children unhealthy and maybe delinquent. Poverty makes them uncompetitive in our complex society, and prone to crime too. Paedophiles traumatise them into sexual dysfunctionality. Terrorists plan to destroy Western Civilisation.

After this paragraph, I myself think maybe those wars are not that bad...

But they are. Of course the noblest intentions can be there - and even there the grounds for doubt are well established, historically as well as currently. And they certainly give the best grounds to oppose them when you realise the way they are fought.

All-encompassing wars against anonymous enemies (AEWAAEs, for short) target everyone by their very failure to target anyone specific. And I think I can give more than one example in each of the previous AEWAAEs mentioned. But by targetting everyone, they also make the innocent to be impossible to tell from the guilty (whether the "crime" itself is worth prosecuting is another point I hope to touch if I don't forget too easily). That way, while the innocent themselves can live in fear, the guilty know that the chance of prosecution is not so much different whether or not they abide by the thought police measures. And so they thrive and grow; maybe just up to a top limit, but still they grow. And all the while innocents are tried and executed, jailed and otherwise ostracised in a way or another. Montségur, La St-Barthélemy, Salem of an era... later it was the bathtub distillers and quite simultaneously, the compulsory Magen David over your clothes... Now the police branch with the most expenditure is drugs; everyone can tip off everyone of CP and get their house researched, or worse; airport controls are the tightest they have ever been...

But the failure to give a name to the enemy and keeping them lurking in the shadows dooms these wars to failure. Sooner or later the impression of security given by the stricter laws and unending funding to the police in charge faces a serious reality check: you are not stopping anything from happening. If anything, it gets worse. Is it the appeal of the forbidden? Is it just that one-timers are more easily caught? Is it that irrational super-structures (yes, I know the term...) bring about irrational behaviours in people? Is it that we are all so paranoid that most of those in jail are actually innocent? I don't know the answer, and I don't even adventure a hypothesis for the moment. But sooner or later someone in power, together with someone in the street, realises the foolishness of it all. It took the Governor of Massachusetts back in 1692. It took Louis XIV to see he preferred to spend in parties and palaces not in hunting down witches. It took FDR in the 1932-3. It took the liberation of the camps in 1944-5. Some countries have started to see the light in the drug field and surely some others will follow. It takes time, a lot of time, and I often wonder how much it will take, but someone someday will see the light in both the war on Terror and the war on Paedophilia. And tomorrow's historians will wonder what the hell went through the minds of the early-21st century people endorsing that...

The War on Poverty is different but shares many common points with the other AEWAAEs. No specific person or group is targeted, not in the sense of the aforementioned wars. Arguably, you'd win the war on Heresy / Wichcraft / Jews / Alcohol / Drugs / Paeds / Terror if you could locate all the people guilty of those... Poverty, however, is not a thought crime that you could fight by finding the guilty ones. Poverty is a real material (and materially measurable) situation and most people who are in it are not "trying" to be poor - not in the way you "try" to be a witch, a dealer or a paedo... But the methods used are not different. Anonymous enemy requires all-encompassing action regardless of any case-specific dynamics that rationally should effect the measures taken... There is a need then to reach all the society. There is a need then to build a specialised bureaucracy to deal with that and supervise the strategies and outcomes of the war - but since this war can't really be ever won, in reality this bureaucracy just tends to perpetuate itself and find ways to keep fighting - Oceania anyone??

And just as much as the other AEWAAEs, the measures taken speak more of the kind of society fighting the AEWAAE and endorsing it than of the real commitment to win it, or of the most effective tactics to win it. Markaba's quotes from the Tao Te King are excellent - because obviously generals and military staff are there to WIN battles and wars, not to brag about their recent arrests or to lecture civilians on the Clear and Present Dangers facing us the good citizens. But when you are to fight a battle and war, any competent military officer will tell you that you have to have an identifiable enemy, even inasmuch as it lurks in the shadows - yes, Iraq (as Vietnam before) have got more than a little messy from enemies lurking in the shadows, yet in principle there is an enemy, and it is identifiable, even if it happens to prefer to fight from their hideouts instead of (oh how lovely!) open battles... How do you fight poverty then? Shoot the poor is not an option... (though it was for the Romans - it's not gratuitous that the Realsozialismus countries considered Spartacus a national / world Proletariat hero)... Why not giving them aid so they're no longer poor?? Sounds good... Why not creating agencies specialised on that?? Sounds even better - specialists!! (but nobody tells people that specialists are going to be out of a job when the AEWAAE is won...) And of course, don't question their policies, or are you against fighting poverty? Don't even show how ineffective they are!! Don't show, either, the negative consequences for either the people you're supposed to help (as those you mention) or for society at large (greater income inequality, anyone? Should be very surprising, as the USA used to have much greater social mobility than any European country not that long ago...)

Questioning is very dangerous indeed... It might show the people the Truth, and who are they to know?? Prometheus did not lose his liver for no crime (double negative intended to show a positive).

Poverty should be fought, yes. And it can be fought, really. And there are many ways to fight it, historically. But assigning specialists to do it necessarily generates blind, all-encompassing measures that, while adequate in some instances, turn into ineffective and even counterproductive in most others - for not understanding the circumstances that are unique to each case, and that should be taken into account if we truly wish to have a policy that fights poverty...

Now, are the crimes themselves worth prosecting? I will give a short answer... They are never worth prosecuting... But it takes someone to live in the fear of being convicted for a "crime" of which they are "innocent" to realise that they are not worth prosecuting. If and when people are in danger of being labelled "witch", "Jew", "distiller", "paedophile", "terrorist", then they will see the light... only when it strikes close to home... which is why I was totally unsurprised when the Brazilian guy was shot down by London policemen - sooner or later it was bound to happen. And sooner or later people will realise that it can happen to anyone, of any nationality and creed and ethnicity - and then they will react.