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Creating a Manichaean Devil
to Justify Spending $6 Trillion for a Cold War

Ratcliffe: There is a very philosophical passage where you discuss the manifestation of the Manichaean devil in the nuclear age:

Those who believed that our only road to salvation lay in greater stockpiling of atomic bombs, those who argued that it must be the hydrogen bomb, and those few who said that it must be both, all perhaps without common intent, began to create the idea of the "enemy threat." It was coming. It was inevitable. The things that have been done since that period in the name of "anti-enemy" would make a list that in dollars alone would have paid for all the costs of civilization up to that time, with money to spare.

Such an enemy is not unknown. Man has feared this type of enemy before. It is a human, and more than that, it is a social trait, to dread the unknown enemy. This enemy is defined in one context as the Manichaean Devil. Norbert Weiner says, "The Manichaean devil is an opponent, like any other opponent, who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory. In particular, he will keep his policy of confusion secret, and if we show any signs of beginning to discover his policy, he will change it in order to keep us in the dark." The great truth about this type of enemy is that he is stronger when he is imagined and feared than when he is real. One of man's greatest sources of fear is lack of information. To live effectively one must have adequate information.

It was in this great conflict that the National Security Act of 1947 was brewed. And man's demand for information pervaded and surmounted almost every other move he made. Thus a great machine was created. All of the resources of this country were poured into a single Department of Defense -- defense against the great Manichaean Devil which was looming up over the steppes of Russia with the formula of the atomic bomb in one hand and the policy of World Communism in the other. Our statesman foresaw the Russian detonation of the atomic bomb in 1949 and the concurrent acceleration toward the hydrogen bomb as soon thereafter as possible; so they created the Atomic Energy Commission in January of 1947 and then the Defense Department in September 1947 and gave both of them the eyes and ears of the CIA to provide the essential information that at that time was really the paramount and highest priority. The AEC was ordered to achieve both goals -- the second to-none atomic bomb stockpile and the hydrogen bomb, and the DOD was ordered to create the global force that would defend this country against the giant of the Soviet Union and all other nuclear powers.[10] . . .

Prouty:

. . . The other side of this situation, the Manichaean devil, is simply another way to talk about the Cold War. You can't get Congress to appropriate money for an enormous war organization unless you can show a reason for it. We had to create the reason, we had to create this devil so we created Communism. Even the Soviets don't understand the communism we think about; it goes so far beyond their model. And we saw it in every closet, every country. We divided the entire world up into "us" and "them" and then began to create a military establishment that could counter, we thought, every move made by anybody. Every time India went a little bit pro Communist, India became our enemy. Every time India went a little bit toward us, they became our friend. Everybody was in that area; there were no neutrals, it was all "us" and "them."

This has resulted in the expenditure of $6 trillion for armaments, most of which can never be used effectively. There is no way to use them effectively. Even in Vietnam. We dumped two-and-a-half times as much bombardment onto the ground in Vietnam as we did in all of World War II -- to what effect? We killed a lot of people. We uprooted a lot of trees and so on. But there was no actual military effect of that. That's the way the rest of our establishment is. They could have used hydrogen bombs and in fact, we did have nuclear weapons in Indochina. Fortunately we didn't use them. But they were there.

On the other side of it, if you create this devil, and he's in every closet around the world, then you can justify having a 600-ship navy and a something-or-other wing air force, and an enormous army, because you keep telling the Congress and the American people that `My goodness, this great enormous devil is going to leap out of a closet any day at any time -- the war could start here or could start there -- we've got to be ready for the whole world.' And that's how you spend the money. Even though you can't prove what you're going to do with the money, you spend it.

The devil scares you so bad that you don't think anymore. Take the Strategic Defense Initiative, this thing that was going to cost billions and billions: now we spend for a B-2 bomber which is supposed to be stealthy and they claim that radar cannot find that bomber as it approaches. Heck, it makes more noise than almost anything you ever heard. It's got huge engines and they're ducted out so that even the radar can't read the engine, but that doesn't mean it shuts the sound down. The first way we used to detect bombers coming during World War II was with noise devices. So they'll simply go back to noise devices -- the Stealth Bomber will be worthless. It's already worthless before it flies. The most expensive airplane ever built -- they spent $65 billion on an airplane they can't get in the air yet and when it does, all the enemy will have to do instead of using radar is use audio to listen for it and they'll know it's there. We don't even know what we're doing.

That's what this Manichaean devil does.

Predator War - project ahead to Enemy of the State combined with "nano" drones "which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window."

A person in Iraq or Afghanistan was relating how someone who has lost their family to Hellfire attacks or other killing arrives at the point where they feel their own life is now over and becoming a suicide bomber has vallue.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the biology of addiction?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: For sure. You see, if you look at the brain circuits involved in addiction – and that's true whether it's a shopping addiction like mine or an addiction to opiates like the heroin addict – we're looking for endorphins in our brains. Endorphins are the brain's feel good, reward, pleasure and pain relief chemicals. They also happen to be the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.

That circuitry in addicts doesn't function very well, as the circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn't function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as does extreme sports, as does workaholism and so on. . . .

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that's because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means – large head, narrow pelvis – we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren't that developed for two years. That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don't depend very much on environmental input. When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don't develop the way they ought to. It's that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook. . . .

AMY GOODMAN: Youve written a number of bestselling books. We won't get to talk about them all. I'm very interested in your one on how attention deficit disorder originates and what you can do about it. But about your own history, you were born in Nazi-occupied Hungary?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, ADD has a lot to do with that. I have attention deficit disorder myself. And again, most people see it as a genetic problem. I don't. It actually has to do with those factors of brain development, which in my case occurred as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in the ghetto of Budapest. And the day after the pediatrician – sorry, the day after the Nazis marched into Budapest in March of 1944, my mother called the pediatrician and says, Would you please come and see my son, because he's crying all the time? And the pediatrician says, Of course I'll come. But I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying. Now infants don't know anything about Nazis and genocide or war or Hitler. Theyre picking up on the stresses of their parents. And, of course, my mother was an intensely stressed person, her husband being away in forced labor, her parents shortly thereafter being departed and killed in Auschwitz. Under those conditions, I don't have the kind of conditions that I need for the proper development of my brain circuits. And particularly, how does an infant deal with that much stress? By tuning it out. That's the only way the brain can deal with it. And when you do that, that becomes programmed into the brain.

And so, if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they're really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that's why we're seeing such a preponderance.

So, in my case, that also set up this sense of never being soothed, of never having enough, because I was a starving infant. And that means, all my life, I have this propensity to soothe myself. How do I do that? Well, one way is to work a lot and to gets lots of admiration and lots of respect and people wanting me. If you get the impression early in life that the world doesn't want you, then you're going to make yourself wanted and indispensable. And people do that through work. I did it through being a medical doctor. I also have this propensity to soothe myself through shopping, especially when I'm stressed, and I happen to shop for classical compact music. But it goes back to this insatiable need of the infant who is not soothed, and they have to develop, or their brain develops, these self-soothing strategies.

And his own website is at: http://drgabormate.com/




GLENN GREENWALD: [E]very time we are targeted with some sort of terrorist attack, we seem to respond by escalating. And there's this sense that the Obama administration is less bellicose and less committed to war-mongering than the Bush administration was. Although that may be true on several levels, as Juan just suggested before I came on, we are escalating our military presence and our aggression in numerous parts of the world, Afghanistan being only one of those cases.

When we do that, not only can we expect that we are going to suffer the kinds of casualties that you just described, but we're going to be bringing the kinds of deaths, not only to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, but also to civilians, as just happened as well, according to Afghan officials, exactly the kind of death to civilians and to Muslims that cause and exacerbate the very threat that we're purportedly trying to undermine. And so, what we're doing is we're bringing this constant cycle, where we bring death to their part of the world, they then try and bring more death to our part of the world, as we saw with the attempted terrorist attack on the Northwest jet, and we continue to respond by doing exactly that which perpetuates the cycle. And I think the multiple horrible incidents over the past twenty-four hours in Afghanistan symbolizes what it is that we're doing. . . .

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Glenn, what about the situation in Yemen? We have the situation of this Christmas Day attempted bombing, apparently coming out of Yemen, and yet the American people are not well aware of how deeply already the United States is involved in this new front in Yemen in the fight against the so-called war on terror.

GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, I think that's the critical point, that what this really is is it's a covert war. The New York Times called it a covert front in the terror war. Whatever you want to call it, a front in the ongoing war or a new war. The reality is that we're involved in a war in a new country that most Americans have never even thought about or heard of, let alone given thought to whether we should be involved in war there.

And when you count the number of countries, of Muslim countries where we're actively engaged in some kind of warfare – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and now Yemen – that's five different Muslim countries where we are either occupying, invading or bombing. And that's to say nothing of the conflicts that our primary client state in the Middle East, Israel, has with a whole bunch of other Muslim countries and the other Muslim countries that we're threatening, such as Iran. So we are expanding the wars and aggression in the Muslim world.

Yemen is a prime example. And specifically with regard to Yemen, if you talk to virtually any expert in that country – and I interviewed one at Princeton last week – across the political spectrum what they will say is that when we shoot missiles into various sites in Yemen and kill civilians, as we did eight days ago – and there's no question about that – although there's some question about what exactly our involvement was because it's a covert war, there's no question we were involved heavily and enabled the attack. When we kill civilians or shoot missiles or drop Hellfire missiles into that country, and when we prop up the dictatorial oppressive regime that runs that country, we are unquestionably doing exactly that which al-Qaeda could wish for: we are helping al-Qaeda convert the population and bringing greater and greater sympathy to the cause of Islamic radicalism.

And so, here you saw a plot that quite likely had something to do with Yemen, and obviously there's a connection between what we are doing in Yemen, in terms of our military assault and interfering in their country and propping up an oppressive regime, and the desire on the part of people of that country to attack us and the willingness on the part of the population – not just al-Qaeda, but the normal population – to be supportive of those efforts, because they perceive that we are bringing death to their country, and it's only fair that they return those actions. . . .

[T]he myth, from the beginning, has been that there is a certain group of intrinsically evil people called "the terrorists," and the key to beating them is to just kill them all. And once you kill them all with bombs and other air attacks and the like, or if you lock them up forever, once you do that to the finite group known as "the terrorists," there will be no more terrorists, and we will have won the war on terror. And that's why we rely continuously and increasingly on acts of violence, with the idea that we're just going to eradicate the terrorists.

And, of course, what we actually have been doing over the last nine years – and we don't ever learn our lesson – is we're actually expanding the pool of terrorists. We're increasing rapidly the number of people who are sympathetic to Islamic radicalism and who are so angry at us that they're not only willing to kill innocent civilians, but they're willing to give up their own lives to do it. And if you look at all kinds of sources – you can go back to a 2004 task force that Donald Rumsfeld appointed; you can look at what David Rohde said, the New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban and held captive for eight months; you can look at the British reporter Johann Hari, who interviewed ex-jihadists – all of this evidence proves that the more we engage in these kind of air attacks in Muslim areas – and that certainly includes in these tribal regions of Pakistan – the more civilians we kill, the more terrorists we create. And we certainly – there almost certainly are far more terrorists now, people willing to do violence against us, than there were nine years ago, as a result of what we're doing.

And this covert action in Pakistanit, too, is a covert war; there's no congressional authorization for it, there's virtually no discussion of it by government officials – is having the same effect as our bombing campaigns in Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: [T]alk about the media coverage of the wars. Also, you wrote an interesting piece about the New York Times coverage of Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera reporter who was held at Guantanamo for about six years and then released without charge.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is what I find actually most interesting and most significant aspect of all of this. It's generally assumed that there is a significant disparity between how we, as Americans or Westerners, perceive all of these events and how the Muslim world perceives these events. And that is true. There is a very great disparity. But generally, what we assume is that the reason there's this great disparity is because we are rational and informed and educated and advanced and, most of all, free, and therefore we know the truth about what's going on. Whereas Muslims live in oppressive and primitive and backwards countries. They are consumed not by rationality but by religious fanaticism. And therefore they have very distorted and partial and propagandized views of the world, and that's what accounts for this disparity.

The reality is exactly the opposite. Because all of the things that we were just discussing about the effects of our air strikes in all of these Muslim countries, the fact that we are constantly waging war in an increasing number of their nations, and the fact that we routinely slaughter innocent men, women and children who are the victims of our air strikes – people in the Muslim world in those countries are very well aware of what we do, because the images are reported constantly. They're informed about what we're doing. And yet, if you look at American media coverage, it's virtually never the case that the victims of our actions, of our air strikes and our military assaults, are discussed. Those things are kept from us.

So they perceive that we are the aggressors because we are killing civilians, which we're doing. But Americans are propagandized. That information is basically kept away from their sight, and so they're unaware of what the actions are. So when there's anger and hostility and hatred in the Muslim world towards the United States, they understand why. But we are confused and bewildered. Because the facts about why that is are generally kept from us.

You mentioned the story of Sami al-Hajj, who was an Al Jazeera reporter. A reporter, a cameraman, who was covering the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States in late 2001, when he was abducted by the United States and shipped to Guantanamo, where he was kept for seven years, obviously without charges of any kind. He was interrogated almost exclusively, not about Osama bin Laden or about terrorism, but about the operations of Al Jazeera. He was clearly a prisoner because he was a journalist that worked for an outlet that the Bush administration perceived as being critical or hostile to its interests. Here was a journalist, a foreign journalist, that we imprisoned for seven years.

And if you go and research on Nexis or other media databases what the discussions were in the mainstream media about that incident, you can find almost nothing. So Americans were not informed that we, as a government, imprisoned journalists without charges. And there are lots of other foreign journalists who have been imprisoned the same way in Iraq and other places. Yet, when you have the case of, say, Roxana Saberi, the Iranian American journalist who was imprisoned in Iran for three months – not for seven years, but for three months – or the two journalists who were just in prison in North Korea, what you have is a media bonanza. So it gives the appearance that only foreign governments, but not our own, imprison journalists without charges. And this is what accounts for the disparity in perception. It's that we are being propagandized by our own media.




GROSS: So why is it, do you think, that Republicans are using this issue of trying alleged terrorists in the criminal courts? Why are they using this against the Obama administration when the fact is that the Bush administration did it too and the Bush administration had much, much, much more success in the criminal courts than through the military system?

Ms. MAYER: Well, I think it boils down to what works politically, basically. There is a serious policy argument underneath this, which is also true, that the which is that in the Bush years they tried to elevate the role of the military in dealing with terrorists, and as one of the people I interview in my story says, emasculate the Justice Department, have it play a much smaller role in dealing with terrorists.

And so there is a fight going on about the proper role for the U.S. courts in dealing with terrorism, but it's more symbolic than actual, and the problem for the Obama administration is that there's a fear factor here.

People who people are easily frightened about terrorism for obvious reasons, and the critics of the Obama administration are arguing that he, that Obama is weak because he's too legalistic.

So we have, for instance, Sarah Palin in her speech at the Tea Party convention saying we don't need a law professor fighting terrorism, we need a commander in chief.

So she's suggesting Obama, because he wants to work within the U.S. legal system, is somehow weak. The problem is, the president takes an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. He has to be both commander in chief and he has to uphold the laws, and it's not an either-or choice, and it's a false choice to make it sound otherwise. . . .

Comments

John Hamilton (HappyJack) wrote:
There is an artistry to this interview that flows from the poetic to the profane, and back again. The poetic side is a quiet conversation between two women, speaking simply about the grisly subject of terrorism and the rule of law. In contrast to this quietness is the underlying force behind all the criminality - the "terrorism," the "wars," kidnapping, Guantanamo, torture, "tribunals," the fear of justice, and the political scheming that threatens to turn it all into a grand farce. That underlying force is nothing more or less than the egos of men, regardless of gender. The idea that the whole prospect for a sensible administration of justice rests on the ego of Lindsey Graham or Rahm Emanuel is an absurdity that Shakespeare or Aeschylus would find daunting. All the key "players" are men, and mostly men of the poseur variety - fake tough guys who posture as being "tough," when the toughness is always manipulating the toughness of others. This may also be the Jungian root of torture - the appearance of toughness, when it is actually cowardice. This energy will eventually break. It may be that the soft simplicity of Jane Mayer is just what is needed to speed up the process. Think of it as softening Cheney for interrogation.

gina vaughn (ginavinus) wrote:
Since Cheney profits from wars through Haliburton either by arrogance or money, why would anyone trust that he has the interests of justice or the American people at heart. I think it is past time for the majority of citizens who elected Obama to stand up and speak up about real solutions to very tough problems. We can't just react to the Sarah Palins who can say anything they want factual or not to rile people up and distract them. If you listened to what she said, as I did, you would know she gave no solutions to anything. Just a smiley barbie doll with a constant smile, abrasive voice and no content. If she is a voice of dissent, god forbid what these people would do if they were in charge.




Pershouse: I looked at the long list we had written up on the board and I said, "There is one thing that would solve everything we put up there." And everybody said, "What is that?"

I said, "If you took the profit out of the system, all these problems would go away. The problem with doctors being rushed, the problem of misinformation from drug companies trying to sell things; the problem of multi-tiered insurance programs; the problem of doctors being paid off by pharmaceutical companies, and care only being accessible to certain people: all that would go away."

I can say that because I have seen the model work in Cuba. If you want to call Cuba a dictatorship, you can do that, but for whatever reason, they got this opportunity to try something out, and guess what? It is working. So there may be other parts of what is going on in Cuba that you disagree with, but you cannot disagree with the model of health care that they are promoting. It is working so well that it is not just working for them. It is transforming health care in a whole bunch of other countries.

Speaking of tiers, one of the interesting things that Cuba has done, and is also being done in Venezuela which is modeling a lot of their development after Cuba, is that embedded in every community are these primary care doctors, who are both living and working right there, one for every 100 to 200 people. That takes care of all the preventive care, getting to know people in context, and middle of the night questions like do they need to go to the hospital or not? Then, a little bit more regionally they have diagnostic centers. So you don't have to travel that far to get an x-ray or an MRI, but there isn't one in every neighborhood. But it is accessible. And then even more spread out are the high-tech centers, with the super duper machinery and high tech surgeons – for open-heart surgery and other things. So everybody has access to all of them, but you don't need everything everywhere.

Bednarz: What you are describing, Didi, is this consolidation that will happen if medicine survives in this country. This is really what I have come to think about in the past year as I've thought more about peak oil's effect on the practice of medicine rather than just public health. As peak oil affects our economy and our resources, there are going to be fewer hospitals in America. And we're going to have problems transporting people. In a place like Pittsburgh, where I am, instead of there being 20 hospitals, in ten years there might only be five.

It's also going to be very hard as we go forward for insurance companies to make money, because their risk pools will become smaller and smaller. And in this economy, where are they going to invest the premium money? They might be afraid of losing it altogether rather than making something.

On my darker days I think: you know what? It might be better if the medical system would just collapse, which it really might, and then re-form over the long term, because, then you sort of break the stranglehold.

One of the things that will happen with diminishing oil supplies is that all these specialties, which make people oodles of money (and I understand why they go into it, because it costs so much to get the degree, the MD degree, and they want to make money as fast as they can) a lot of these specializations which grew out of abundance and the age of abundant energy are going to be reabsorbed back into general practice

All these things are in the mix. But I'm glad you've seen, in action, in another country, something that works. Those are the kinds of practices that I think are going to be exported to us.



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