Our Neo-Stalinists versus Their Neo-Stalinists
Assange is no saint. But Wikileaks did reveal something about our Neo-Stalinist nightmare.
I punched the terms “Afghanistan,” “2002,” “drone,” and “deference” into a search engine. This was a few months ago, and I was pleased to find the object of my search: a piece from the United Press International (UPI) about a drone strike in Afghanistan that took out a cluster of people who turned out not to be Osama bin Laden and his retainers.
From “Bin Laden thought hiding near strike” (UPI, February 15, 2002):
U.S. intelligence officers operating the drone aircraft fired its remote controlled missile when its video camera relayed images of a group of al Qaida suspects showing deference to a tall man getting into a 4X4 vehicle, Pentagon officials have said.
This passage got programmed into my deep memory when I had first read it in 2002. It was the bit about “deference” that stuck in my head. And what a striking passage this was. Not long after Al Qaeda’s strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the United States launched a campaign to take down the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The United States also launched an effort to run down bin Laden. The UPI’s passage appears to reveal that, in the effort to get bin Laden, the United States had virtually suspended any “rules of engagement”. And so, stick jockeys operating remotely were charged with taking out people that grainy drone images suggested might just kinda sorta possibly be bin Laden. In this specific case, some number of random Afghans seemed to be “showing deference” to some random, tall fellow. That was enough to drone these people. Alas, these people really did turn out to be merely some random people who, perhaps, might have been showing some deference to some random, tall fellow.
Was this really how we, the self-anointed keepers of Liberal Democracy, were going to stand up for … something liberal and democratic? It would be a few years yet before Julian Assange would inject himself into the news cycle, but this drone strike might strike one as the kind of thing that he and Wikileaks would have made a big point of revealing. The amazing thing is that the US military itself made a point of revealing this strike.
All that said, it is not obvious (to me, anyway) that Wikileaks really got around to revealing many such events. It would get a hold of content and leave it to others to report about it. Assange would make an ostentatious point of claiming that the content revealed much in the way of “war crimes”—he would liberally deploy the phrase “war crimes”—but, when it came to such document dumps as the dump of a quarter-million “diplomatic cables,” most content amounted to operational, diplomatic activity. At the same time, much of that content revealed personal details of potentially vulnerable parties. This fact invited a rebuke from Edward Snowden. Snowden suggested that Wikileaks should “take more care to curate its work.”
Not that there were no revelations of things that a casual viewer might be disposed to understand as a war crime. Exhibit A would have to be that video taken by an American Apache attack helicopter pilot as he gunned down a sizable group of Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. The scene featured a cluster of people casually standing around just before the attack helicopter opened up on them with what I will casually label its “Gatling gun.” There was no escape as the technology was good enough to pluck people up as they scattered across the square. It turned out that two of the Iraqis had been working with Reuters. They were not the intended targets of the strike, and this strike does raise more questions about “the rules of engagement.”
I am not aware of an Exhibit B or C or D, although it does not take any effort to find reports over the years in established news channels of drone strikes on wedding parties in Afghanistan. This kind of thing has happened more than once. Meanwhile, I have had the privilege of querying a US Airforce pilot about rules of engagement. The question was: How can stuff like that happen? Basically, when the US military would announce that it would tighten up the rules, would that amount to anything? And, the answer I got was that this business of tightening the rules or loosening the rules was all part of a very mature process. Tightening up the rules really would make a difference.
My friend’s job was to loiter over potential hot spots (in Iraq or Syria) in his A-10 “warthog.” Much like the Apache helicopter, the “Hog” is basically a flying tank. The pilot sits in a titanium tub, and much of the rest of the plane is armored so that it can resist projectiles from below. It was originally designed to provide close air support to troops on the ground in Vietnam, but it went on to have a long career in close air support up to the present. So, my friend would be charged with loitering over a hot space for 6 or 7 hours at a time and responding for calls to bring the heat—when and if such calls would come in.
Bringing the heat could involve unleashing quite an array of sophisticated, “precision” ordnance, but the Hog is surely most famous for its brute force capability. It’s fitted with a Gatling gun that can project a withering torrent of anti-tank projectiles. The Hog is an ugly, mean, survivable beast. It was made for flying low, slow and close to the action, taking a beating, and dishing out a worse beating, often as a way of supporting troops on the ground.
My friend explained that the rules of engagement could be very restrictive. He suggested, for example, that he might be tracking someone on the ground who might have been wearing an orange t-shirt. Were that person to enter a building—and thus break continuous visual contact—then the pilot would have to break off engagement. A person wearing an orange t-shirt might yet exit that same building from the same door, but the engagement was off.
It is reassuring to hear that service people behind the trigger take the rules of engagement seriously. But, again, startling is it not that the rules could sometimes make way for strikes that are not very discriminating and have a high likelihood of taking out people who have the very bad luck of straying into the target zone? Is that not kind of thing that should be the subject of serious consideration? Understatement.
* * *
It is not often that I find myself on the same side of an issue with people like Jeremy Corbyn, the new member of parliament from Rochdale (George Galloway), the entire crew at The Grayzone (Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Kit Klarenberg), John Cusak, and a cranky Irish contingent composed of Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.
I follow all of these people on X. And all of them belong to the “Free Assange” crowd. I belong to that crowd, too, although I don’t buy into the cultish hagiographies of Assange. More generally, I don’t see that any of these people genuinely believe in the institutions of actually liberal Liberal Democracy. They all strike me as neo-Stalinists. Let me explain.
After Joseph Stalin and his clique secured control in Soviet Union (about 1928), the Soviets proceeded to role out their First Five-Year Plan. The principal features of the Plan included the collectivization of the entire agricultural sector and an experiment with the economics of the “Big Push.” The post-war concept of the Big Push is that private parties interacting with each other in markets do not occupy a global perspective of the economy. They operate out of their parochial perspectives and pursue their parochial interests. Collectively, they end up under-investing in the economy. They thus end up collectively failing to exploit complementarities in investment. For example, it could make sense to build a hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine. That dam could power a steel mill. The steel from the mill could enable builders to procure steel at lower cost. Thus, potentially, everyone in the economy could end up building more stuff: high-rise buildings, railroads, ships and such. The costs of doing everything goes down. The economy “takes off” and launches itself into a high-activity equilibrium. But, absent centralized control, the economy does not, in fact, realize this take-off, because, again, private parties end up underinvesting in everything. Hence a role for the central authorities to swoop in and take over investment in the economy. The central authorities would have a global perspective of the economy and could see where all the bottlenecks were. Basically, they could identify all of the high-value investment projects and then realize them.
That was the theory … or, at least, that was the ex post theory of what the Five-Year Plan could have achieved after it became clear that, as Abba Lerner glibly observed, the Soviet experiment had yielded a “disastrous result.” That was Abba Lerner in The Economics of Control (1946).
Lerner, it seems, had been one of those many, many people “of the Left” who desperately, desperately wanted to see the Soviet experiment succeed. Success (by some measure) would have discredited the liberal democratic experiment in the West… specifically in the United States.
The cheerleaders of the Soviet experiment—people like Walter Duranty at the New York Times and George Bernard Shaw—continued to cheerlead even after evidence of the “disastrous result” became public knowledge. That public knowledge included understanding of the fact that the collectivization of the agricultural sector had destroyed agricultural productivity and disrupted the logistical networks that had delivered produce from farm to home. Hence the Holodomor, the famine of the early 1930’s that took away a few million Ukrainians… and Russian nationalists, readers of Alexander Dugin, wonder why Ukrainians can be so ornery.
A lot of observers in the West, comfortably ensconced in their sinecures and padded perches in academia, continued to desperately cling to the Soviet dream. But, some number of them finally peeled themselves away from the cult of Stalin after the Soviets and the Germans announced their non-aggression agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. For some reason, totalitarian freaks of the Stalinist variety could not abide dealing with totalitarian freaks of the German variety. Perhaps it was the nationalist bit in “Nationalist-Socialist Party” that they could not abide. Theirs was a more international model of totalitarianism.
Credit George Bernard Shaw with some integrity for sticking with the Soviets even after the Pact of 1939. But, I wonder that the kinds of people these days who tend to be pro-Russian, anti-American and anti-Israeli amount to the same kind of people who could not give up on the Stalinist dream even after that dream had revealed itself to be the genocidal nightmare that it was.
That has been my working hypothesis for some time: These people are the same kind of people who, when it really comes down to it, entertain democratic process only to the extent it furthers their own aims. They would dispense with the stuff of liberal democratic governance—basically, constitutional governance with its inconvenient separation of powers—and supplant it with their “whole-of-government” approaches to everything. Everything. We don’t call it “Totalitarianism” for nothing.
So. My own view is that Julian Assange had been—and, perhaps, still is—a totalitarian freak. He was just another one of these freaks who we now see recasting the atrocities and massacres of October 7 as something of a mostly peaceful protest.
I am thinking largely of The Grayzone here. These guys indulge in this Atrocity Olympics by which Israelis are bad and Hamas represents a noble resistance. But, to recount my own view of the Gaza war: Up until 2000, I myself was eager to see the latest “two-state” initiative take hold. But, seeing video of PLO chairman Yasir Arafat at Camp David with Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak started to shake my confidence. Arafat just seemed to be going through the motions. And, sure enough, the PLO ended up rejecting any deal. Even so, I still held out some hope. I still held out some hope even after Hamas secured control of Gaza in 2006. But, that hope was finally destroyed soon after those elections, for Hamas did not waste time in starting a campaign of shooting rockets into Israel. Hamas would shoot rockets. The Israelis would do something about it. And it turned out that, insofar as “doing something” involved anything that could look like retaliation, then Hamas could rely on the media in the “West” to blame the Israelis for the hostilities. Shoot rockets; blame the Israelis; wash-rinse-repeat. Hamas demonstrated that it really was never going to submit to good faith negotiations. About anything.
So, here we are. Assange and his supporters might be pro-Russian. And, why not? They favor the Stalinist vision of how the world could be made to work. And they’re anti-Israeli. And they may be anti-Israeli for the same reason that they have always been anti-American: “America” has represented an alternative—mostly, a decentralized system of governance and economics—to the Stalinist vision of the centralization of everything in the hands of the best-and-brightest.
Odd, it might be then, that the best-and-brightest in the West appear to have been intent for some time on imposing their own program of centralizing everything and subverting our liberal traditions in constitutional governance. Conflict in the world seems to have come down to a fight pitting our Stalinists against their Stalinists.
I still puzzle about this.