From Hiroshima to Nazi doctors, Vietnam to the apocalyptic cult that
sarin-gassed the Tokyo subway system, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton
has explored many of the most extreme moments of our previous century of
excess and the people who lived through or enacted them. Now, in a
brief, thoughtful "intervention" of a book, he's brought his
experiences together and focused them on the first moments of our new
century -- trying to make some sense of al Qaeda, and ourselves.
We all know that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are apocalyptics,
focused on purifying the Islamic world in a sea of blood, but we seldom
think of the mind-set of our own leaders as apocalyptic, despite the
religious fundamentalism of a number of them. In Superpower
Syndrome, America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, Lifton
does just that, linking the two world-purifying, world-ending ways of
thinking. He writes:
In other words, the Bush administration has partnered up with, and in
its own fashion is dancing with, al Qaeda. They turn out to need each
other. In the piece below, which the Nation magazine adapted from
sections of Superpower Syndrome and has made its cover story this
week, Lifton explores the American side of the apocalypse. (In the book,
he also explores Islamist apocalyptics and various precursors of this
moment, including the Japanese Aum Shin Rikyo cult which first crossed
the apocalyptic threshold from praying for Armageddon to instigating it
via weapons of mass destruction.)
American Apocalypse
By Robert Jay Lifton
The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at
the beginning of the twenty-first century. We can, in fact, speak of a
worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the
service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular,
we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off
between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to
kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be
restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of
a cleansing warmaking and military power. Both sides are energized by
versions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a
mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and
both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that
purpose.
The war on Iraq--a country with longstanding aspirations toward
weapons of mass destruction but with no evident stockpiles of them and
no apparent connection to the assaults of September 11--was a
manifestation of that American visionary projection.
The religious fanaticism of Osama bin Laden and other Islamist
zealots has, by now, a certain familiarity to us as to others
elsewhere, for their violent demands for spiritual purification are
aimed as much at fellow Muslims as at American "infidels."
Their fierce attacks on the defilement that they believe they see
everywhere in contemporary life resemble those of past movements and
sects from all parts of the world; such sects, with end-of-the-world
prophecies and programmatic violence in the service of bringing those
prophecies about, flourished in Europe from the eleventh through the
sixteenth centuries. Similar sects like the fanatical Japanese cult
Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin gas into the Tokyo subways in
1995, have existed, even proliferated, in our own time.
The American apocalyptic entity is less familiar to us. Even if its
urges to power and domination seem historically recognizable, it
nonetheless represents a new constellation of forces bound up with
what I've come to think of as "superpower syndrome." By that
term I mean a national mindset--put forward strongly by a tight-knit
leadership group--that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique
standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all
other nations. The American superpower status derives from our
emergence from World War II as uniquely powerful in every respect,
still more so as the only superpower from the end of the cold war in
the early 1990s.
More than mere domination, the American superpower now seeks to
control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally
vast sense of entitlement--of special dispensation to pursue its aims.
That entitlement stems partly from historic claims to special
democratic virtue, but has much to do with an embrace of technological
power translated into military terms. That is, a superpower--the
world's only superpower--is entitled to dominate and control precisely
because it is a superpower.
The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as
nothing else could have. Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but
the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon rendered us an
aggrieved superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no
superpower can permit.
Indeed, at the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of
vulnerability. A superpower's victimization brings on both a sense of
humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or even extend, the
boundaries of a superpower-dominated world. Integral to superpower
syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their
world-destroying capacity.
In important ways, the "war on terrorism" has represented
an impulse to undo violently precisely the humiliation of 9/11. To be
sure, the acts of that day had a warlike aspect. They were certainly
committed by men convinced that they were at war with us. In
post-Nuremberg terms they could undoubtedly be considered a
"crime against humanity." Some kind of force used against
their perpetrators was inevitable and appropriate. The humiliation
caused, together with American world ambitions, however, precluded
dealing with the attacks as what they were--terrorism by a small group
of determined zealots, not war. A more focused, restrained,
internationalized response to Al Qaeda could have been far more
effective without being a stimulus to expanded terrorism.
Unfortunately, our response was inseparable from our superpower
status and the syndrome that goes with it. Any nation attacked in that
way would have felt itself humiliated. But for the United States, with
our national sense of being overwhelmingly powerful and
unchallengeable, to have its major institutions violently penetrated
created an intolerable breakdown of superpower invulnerability that
was never supposed to happen, a contradiction that fed our
humiliation.
We know from history that collective humiliation can be a goad to
various kinds of aggressive behavior--as has been true of bin Laden
and Al Qaeda. It was also true of the Nazis. Nazi doctors told me of
indelible scenes, which they either witnessed as young children or
were told about by their fathers, of German soldiers returning home
defeated after World War I. These beaten men, many of them wounded,
engendered feelings of pathos, loss and embarrassment, all amid
national misery and threatened revolution. Such scenes, associated
with strong feelings of humiliation, were seized upon by the Nazis to
the point where one could say that Hitler rose to power on the promise
of avenging them.
With both Al Qaeda and the Nazis, humiliation could, through
manipulation but also powerful self-conviction, be transformed into
exaggerated expressions of violence. That psychological transformation
of weakness and shame into a collective sense of pride and life-power,
as well as power over others, can release enormous amounts of
aggressive energy. Such dangerous potential has been present from the
beginning in the American "war" on terrorism.
Infinite War
War itself is an absolute, its violence unpredictable and always
containing apocalyptic possibilities. In this case, by militarizing
the problem of terrorism, our leaders have dangerously obfuscated its
political, social and historical dimensions. Terrorism has instead
been raised to the absolute level of war itself. And although American
leaders speak of this as being a "different kind of war,"
there is a drumbeat of ordinary war rhetoric and a clarion call to
total victory and to the crushing defeat of our terrorist enemies.
When President Bush declared that "this conflict was begun on the
timing and terms of others [but] will end in a way, and at an hour, of
our choosing," he was misleading both in suggesting a clear
beginning in Al Qaeda's acts and a decisive end in the
"battle" against terrorism. In that same speech, given at a
memorial service just three days after 9/11 at the National Cathedral
in Washington, he also asserted, "Our responsibility to history
is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of
evil." Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, not a man given to
irony, commented that "the president was casting his mission and
that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan."
At no time did Bush see his task as mounting a coordinated
international operation against terrorism, for which he could have
enlisted most of the governments of the world. Rather, upon hearing of
the second plane crashing into the second tower, he remembers
thinking: "They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at
that moment that we were going to war." Upon hearing of the plane
crashing into the Pentagon, he told Vice President Cheney, "We're
at war." Woodward thus calls his account of the President's first
hundred days following 9/11 Bush at War. Bush would later recall,
"I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in
chief that was going to do whatever it took to win." With world
leaders, he felt he had to "look them in the eye and say, 'You're
either with us or you're against us.'" Long before the invasion
of Iraq--indeed, even before the invasion of Afghanistan--Bush had
come to identify himself, and be identified by others, as a
"wartime president."
Warmaking can quickly become associated with "war fever,"
the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective
experience of transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a
task that must be carried out for the defense of one's nation, to
sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its
people. In this case, the growth of war fever came in several stages:
its beginnings, with Bush's personal declaration of war immediately
after September 11; a modest increase, with the successful invasion of
Afghanistan; and a wave of ultrapatriotic excesses--triumphalism and
labeling of critics as disloyal or treasonous--at the time of the
invasion of Iraq. War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to
disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related
less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or
against Americans abroad--and later to growing casualties in occupied
Iraq.
The scope of George Bush's war was suggested within days of 9/11
when the director of the CIA made a presentation to the President and
his inner circle, called "Worldwide Attack Matrix," that
described active or planned operations of various kinds in eighty
countries, or what Woodward calls "a secret global war on
terror." Early on, the President had the view that "this war
will be fought on many fronts" and that "we're going to rout
out terror wherever it may exist." Although envisaged long before
9/11, the invasion of Iraq could be seen as a direct continuation of
this unlimited war; all the more so because of the prevailing tone
among the President and his advisers, who were described as eager
"to emerge from the sea of words and pull the trigger."
The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is
militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and
has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite.
Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the
earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere
to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil. Bush
keeps what Woodward calls "his own personal scorecard for the
war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and
personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous
terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The
scorecard is always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office.
War and Reality
The amorphousness of the war on terrorism is such that a country
like Iraq--with a murderous dictator who had surely engaged in acts of
terrorism in the past--could, on that basis, be treated as if it had
major responsibility for 9/11. There was no evidence at all that it
did. But by means of false accusations, emphasis on the evil things
Saddam Hussein had done (for instance, the use of poison gas on his
Kurdish minority) and the belligerent atmosphere of the overall war on
terrorism, the Administration succeeded in convincing more than half
of all Americans that Saddam was a major player in 9/11.
The war on terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward
combating terror and used them as a pretext for realizing a prior
mission aimed at American global hegemony. The attack on Iraq
reflected the reach not only of the "war on terrorism" but
of deceptions and manipulations of reality that have accompanied it.
In this context, the word "war" came to combine metaphor (as
in the "war on poverty" or "war on drugs"),
conventional military combat, justification for
"pre-emptive" attack and assertion of superpower domination.
Behind such planning and manipulation can lie dreams and fantasies
hardly less apocalyptic or world-purifying than those of Al Qaeda's
leaders, or of Aum Shinrikyo's guru. For instance, former Director of
Central Intelligence James Woolsey, a close associate of Donald
Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the
Pentagon, spoke of the war against terrorism as a Fourth World War
(the Third being the cold war between the United States and the Soviet
Union). In addressing a group of college students, he declared,
"This Fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer
than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full
four-plus decades of the cold war."
That kind of apocalyptic impulse in warmaking has hardly proved
conducive to a shared international approach. Indeed, in its essence,
it precludes genuine sharing. While Bush has frequently said that he
prefers to have allies in taking on terrorism and terrorist states
worldwide, he has also made it clear that he does not want other
countries to have any policy-making power on this issue. In one
revealing statement, he declared: "At some point, we may be the
only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America." In such
declarations, he has all but claimed that Americans are the globe's
anointed ones and that the sacred mission of purifying the earth is
ours alone.
The amorphousness of the war on terrorism carries with it a
paranoid edge, the suspicion that terrorists and their supporters are
everywhere and must be "pre-emptively" attacked lest they
emerge and attack us. Since such a war is limitless and
infinite--extending from the farthest reaches of Indonesia or
Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany, or New York City, and from immediate
combat to battles that continue into the unending future--it
inevitably becomes associated with a degree of megalomania as well. As
the world's greatest military power replaces the complexities of the
world with its own imagined stripped-down, us-versus-them version of
it, our distorted national self becomes the world.
Despite the constant invocation by the Bush Administration of the
theme of "security," the war on terrorism has created the
very opposite--a sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which
is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans in the
extension of the larger "war." What results is a vicious
circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our excessive response
to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists and more terrorist
attacks, which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism,
and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of
aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending "Fourth
World War" and a mythic cleansing--of terrorists, of evil, of our
own fear. The American military apocalyptic can then be said to
partner and act in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic.
Off the Treadmill
We can do better. America is capable of wiser, more measured
approaches, more humane applications of our considerable power and
influence in the world. These may not be as far away as they now seem,
and can be brought closer by bringing our imaginations to bear on
them. Change must be political, of course, but certain psychological
contours seem necessary to it.
As a start, we do not have to partition the world into two
contending apocalyptic forces. We are capable instead of reclaiming
our moral compass, of finding further balance in our national
behavior. So intensely have we embraced superpower syndrome that
emerging from it is not an easy task. Yet in doing so we would relieve
ourselves of a burden of our own creation--the burden of insistent
illusion. For there is no greater weight than that which one takes on
when pursuing total power.
We need to take a new and different lesson from Lord Acton's
nineteenth-century assertion: "Power tends to corrupt and
absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton was not quite right.
The corruption begins not with the acquisition of power but with the
quest for and claim to absolute power. Ever susceptible to the
seductive promise that twenty-first-century technology can achieve
world control, the superpower (or would-be superpower) can best resist
that temptation by recognizing the corruption that follows upon its
illusion.
To renounce the claim to total power would bring relief not only to
everyone else but, soon enough, to the leaders and followers of the
superpower itself. For to live out superpower syndrome is to place
oneself on a treadmill that eventually has to break down. In its
efforts to rule the world and to determine history, the superpower is,
in fact, working against itself, subjecting itself to constant
failure. It becomes a Sisyphus with bombs, able to set off explosions
but unable to cope with its own burden, unable to roll its heavy stone
to the top of the hill in Hades. Perhaps the crucial step in ridding
ourselves of the syndrome is recognizing that history cannot be
controlled, fluidly or otherwise.
Stepping off the superpower treadmill would also enable us to cease
being a nation ruled by fear. Renouncing omnipotence would make our
leaders themselves less fearful of weakness, and diminish their
inclination to instill fear in their people as a means of enlisting
them for illusory military efforts at world hegemony. Without the need
for invulnerability, everyone would have much less to be afraid of.
Robert Jay Lifton is the author, among other works, of Death in
Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won a National Book Award, The
Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Destroying
the World to Save It: Aum Shin Rikyo and the New Global Terrorism,
and Superpower Syndrome.
This article appeared originally in the December 22, 2003 issue of The
Nation. For info, go to: www.thenation.com
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