“The Kind of War We Are in” and Our Cultural Vulneratbilities

by Professor Robert D. Hickson, 4 November 2002

In contradistinction to the phenomenon of love, if someone is at war with you—even if you don’t know it—you’re at war. If someone is in love with you, even if you don’t know it, you’re not necessarily in love. In both cases, however, reality is that which doesn’t go away, even when you stop thinking about it. If someone is designedly and resourcefully—as well as patiently and protractedly—at war with you, you are at war. No matter what the legal determination might imply, or the diplomatic evasions and political sophistries might say or bloviate[1], you are actually at war. Even when you are entirely uncomprehending of the nature of the war that you are in, you are thereby a provocative, indeed manifold, target.

The most important question to pose and answer, according to Carl von Clausewitz, before you enter into a war—or come to find yourself surprised by war and its grand-strategic protractedness and implications—is to understand “the kind of war” you are in. What do we mean, however, when we speak of a war on poverty, or crime, or drugs—and now a war on terrorism? Poverty, crime, drugs, and terrorism are all unspecified abstractions, often vague and always “open-ended,” thus implying a permanent condition of war against certain states of life or against certainmethods of pleasure, greed, and conflict. Even as we are now further and resourcefully preparing to go into a preëmptive (or “preventative” ) war with Iraq, we also find ourselves already immersed in the “global war on terrorism,” or “the GWOT,” at least by declaration of our Executive Branch of Government.

But, when we consider the deeper meaning and implications of the “GWOT” (which is more charmingly, hence preferably, pronounced as a monosyllablethat rhymes with SWAT!), how do we and how should we answer von Clausewitz’s own grand-strategically trenchant question? “What kind of war are we in in the GWOT?”

To what extent is the nature of “the war that we are now (protractedly) in” really much deeper and more significant than the global combat against a method of psychological and political warfare known as “terrorism” or “terror”? We are, I believe, in a long-range cultural-religious war. We are now inescapably involved in a cultural-religious war concerning intimate and ultimate things, things that both reject and transcend Western secularism and consumerism and “the cult of man.” Our adversaries in this deeper clash of world-views and psycho-cultural struggle have experienced, for example, the intimately dissolvent effects of secular, consumerist globalism upon their way of life and they react against it as if it were an epidemic or contagious plague. Indeed, the larger and protracted cultural and religious war that we are in might also be called “psycho-cultural warfare” and “psycho-biological warfare.”

For, in this protracted conflict, we are perceived as subverters and we shall be contending with the deep religious resistance of a deeply alien culture and with intimate matters of natural and spiritual life. For, the concept and reality of culture itself always implies some kind ofvital medium that is patiently cultivated and slowly fruitful, like the soil. As with the cultivation of the soil, so, too, with the cultivation of the soul. And, deep culture is, almost without exception, rooted in the public manifestations of religion and the sacred. Its deeper meanings are expressed through resonant symbols and language and the varied arts, and especially through the liturgy. That is to say, cultura is rooted in the cultus, the act of public worship. And perhaps even our increasingly secularized Western culture should also be seen as rooted in the cult of man, as distinct from the sacred cult of God. For, we now, for example, never speak of “the rights of God,” but, rather, of “the rights of Man,” even when we speak about the “abortion of pre-born children.” The Muslim world, for example, is strenuously opposed to our secularized “culture of death” and to our idols of the cult of man and to our further idolatry of “mercantile economic man” and high finance, and to our intimately subversive “system of usury” and manipulation of credit and the “debt bondage” of precariously vulnerable foreign nations.[2]

Moreover, given the nature of Muslim demography—i.e., their births, deaths, and migrations—our Western or “globalist” programs of “population control” and “sterilizing public health programs” and “condom curriculums” are perceived by Muslims (and others) to be an insidious form of biological warfare, or even a form of psycho-biological warfare, inasmuch as the mind and the soul of man are the real targets of these “development initiatives” and variously proposed “ecological efficiencies” and “schemes of progress and modernity.” The soul is the principle of life—as when we say someone is “animated,” as distinct from “inanimate.” (“anima” is the Latin word for “soul,” just as psychē is the Greek word for “soul,” from which we derive the word “psychology”). Therefore, when we are seen to attack the principle of life we are seen to attack the soul and sustaining human spirit. We are seen to be promoting an “apocalyptic nihilism” and “the culture of death.” It is just that simple.

My purpose in stressing such seemingly recondite things is to prompt us to deeper reflection about how Western secularized science and technology and systems of manipulative finance—or Western “narco-culture,” advertisement, entertainment, music, movies, and television—are perceived by others (not just Muslims) as a subversive form of cultural aggression and even a form of anti-religious aggression conducted by impious and cunning and stifling Western idolaters whose materialism is suffocating to others as well as to themselves (and especially to our own increasingly drugged and despairing children).

It is for these reasons, among many others, that I think we are in a deeper and long-range cultural-religious war, in which the method of terrorism is only one part of the adversary’s “counter-Grand Strategy” against our perceived hubris and irreverence and inflictions of Empire and a subversive Cultural Hegemony.

Some have soberly said that we are even now in World War IV, on the premise that the so-called “Cold War” was really World War III. This concept of our now being in World War IV is not only important, but it also implicitly presupposes that World War III is actually “over” and that “we won,” and that we should be grateful for our “fruits of victory,” despite some of the troublesome and disordered aftermath.

However, this protracted struggle of the Cold War, along with its cumulative aftermath, has left us weakened and somewhat morally exhausted, and has rendered us thereby more vulnerable in the current grand-strategic, direct and indirectcultural-religious war we are in. Therefore, and a fortiori, we will also need to economize our own effort and energy, and we shall need an especially intelligent long-range grand-strategy amidst this deeper current conflict of Islam, Judaism, Jewish Zionism, “Christian Zionism,” and the remnants of historical (and vestigially orthodox) Christianity. And we must also be attentive to the revolutionary strategic resurgence the Trotskyite and Socialist Internationals, both of which stress the need for “permanent revolution.” George Orwell might say: “Permanent Revolution for Permanent Peace.”

With reference to the nature of World War III itself—i.e., “the Cold War” (“Guerra Fria”)—B. H. Liddell Hart made an illuminating strategic analysis back in 1967 which will still clarify our deeper understanding of the kind of war we are currently in. Moreover, Liddell Hart’s earlier strategic conceptualization of World War III, which was made in the longer light of military history and revealed his own discerning grasp of often subtle and altogether alien strategic cultures, will likewise convince us of the deeper resolve that we will require to sustain ourselves and to preserve the common good in the current protracted war we are in.

Liddell Hart preferred to speak of “the Cold War” as “a Camouflaged Subversive War” which used the “methods of erosion” and “deception” and “indirection” against a whole society and civilization, and especially, for him, against the foundations of Western Civilization as he understood them. His phrase “camouflaged subversive war” implied that the reality of the kind of war we were then really in was deceitfully concealed and deliberately so, so as to “lure and trap” the unsuspecting “capitalist” enemy. That is to say, to dislocate the mentality, as well as the logistics, of the “Liberal-Bourgeois” enemy, and to undermine (subvert) his moral and mental foundations unto his disorganization, demoralization, shock, and strategic paralysis. Liddell Hart saw such dialectic, strategic revolutionary warfare to be a kind of total war, or what some Chinese theorists are also now calling “Unrestricted Warfare in an Age of Globalization” and of “Borderless Economies.”

Liddell Hart’s British compatriot, General J.F.C. Fuller, also understood the deeper effects of the Bolshevik Revolution upon the conduct of modern war. Moreover, he studied how this unmistakably long-range and protracted “Soviet Revolutionary Warfare” and its “dialectic of dissolution”—to include Lenin’s “Soviet Strategy of Terror”—also implanted its seductions and anti-Western agitations deeply within the Middle East and within the modern Muslim World. Thus, we in the increasingly riven West must now also strategically confront this very dangerous aftermathof Marxist Revolutionary Warfare in the Mid-East, just as Europe had to confront the intimately destructive and bitter aftermath of the 1919 “Carthaginian Peace” of Versailles, which was inflicted by the victorious Allies upon the scorned and humiliated Germanic and Hungarian enemy in his defeat. (We may remember the title of a later book, Hitler Born at Versailles, which succinctly accentuates the point.)

Just as we must take a longer view to understand what kind of war the Cold War was—the Third World War—so, too, with the altogether likely Fourth World War that we are in. For, it is so much more than “a global war on terrorism.”

Our secular liberal culture has many grand-strategic vulnerabilities in the deeper cultural-religious war we are in, and not just because of our “porous borders” and immigration policy. James Burnham, for example, the acutely intelligent, strategic-minded former Trotskyite whose insights provoked George Orwell into writing 1984 and Animal Farm, will himself help us understand some of our vulnerabilities, by way of concluding this somewhat brief and foreshortened essay on the kind of war we are in.

In addition to writing such books asThe Machiavellians and The Managerial Revolution, Burnham also wrote Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964) and The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next (1967). In the Suicide of the West, Burnham analyzed the psychological and “ideological syndrome” of Liberalism and its view of man and human nature and power in history, and thereby concluded that Liberalism would eventually “hand the weapons over to its own assassins,” because it was unable to defend itself on its own premises, without betraying its own fundamental (but illusionary) premises about the nature of reality, war and peace. Burnham believed that a much deeper grand-strategic “course-correction” would be needed if the West were to prevail in the dialectically subversive war we then were in, and if we were not thus to come, increasingly and self-sabotagingly, to imitate the materialist revolutionary culture we were purportedly fighting against! Burnham saw Revolutionary Dialectical Communism as a Cultural System, and as an intimately destructive and powerfully suffocating Cultural System (and World-View) of historical and dialectical materialism, to include its advanced neuro-technologies of manipulative “semiotics” and “cybernetic DIAMAT” (an acronym which constitutes the coded “shorthand” for “dialecticalmaterialism” and for the intrinsic power of matter in motion—hence the psycho-tropic power of electrons in motion).

In his 1967 book The War We Are In, Burnham further clarifies our longer-range understanding of what may be our own kind of internecine “Peloponnesian War” (431-404 BC) or our own neo-religious “Thirty Years’ War” (1618-1648), or other forms of protracted conflict on the cultural and religious front within our current strategic context of “modern weapons” and “globalization.”

Burnham surprisingly begins his The War We Are In with the following spacious words, which are, I believe, worthy of our own deeper reflection and consideration of the current analogies to his historic strategic insights[3]. Thus, he said:

The first sentence of my book, The Struggle for the World, which was published early in 1947, reads: “The Third World War began in April 1944.” I summarized the defining incident: “The few ships of the remnant of the Greek Navy, operating as a unit under the British Mediterranean Command, were in harbor at Alexandria. The Greek sailors, joined by some Greek soldiers stationed near by, mutinied. It was not a serious revolt, in either numbers or spirit. A few shots were fired, a few lives lost. The British rounded up the mutineers and placed them, for a while, in concentration camps. A few leaders were punished; but soon the trouble was patched up and forgotten. It was recalled briefly when, later, a short, bitter civil war broke out in Greece proper….

The mutiny was led by members of an organization called ELAS. ELAS was the military arm of a Greek political grouping called EAM. EAM was a seemingly heterogeneous alliance of various Greeks with various political and social views. But EAM was directed by the Greek Communist Party. The Greek Communist Party…is a section of the international communist movement….

Politically understood, therefore, the Greek mutiny of April 1944, and the subsequent Greek Civil War, were armed skirmishes between the Soviet Union representing international communism, and the British Empire. (“This analysis was written before the United States [says Burnham in a footnote] took over from Britain the anti-communist side of the renewed Greek Civil War.”)

In the Second World War, however, which had still at that time more than a year to run, Britain and the Soviet Union were allies against a common enemy. We have been recording, we thus see,another war.[4]

In his 1967 text, twenty years after his earlier and above-cited book on The Struggle for the World, Burnham looks back with an even deeper reflectiveness and says:

Although the choice of “April 1944” may have seemed a bit arbitrary, facts that have subsequently become known tend to confirm the view that a decisive turn took place in the spring of 1944. It was in the winter of 1943-44 that the Soviet leadership [after the Battle of Stalingrad] reached the conclusion that the war against Hitler had been won. From that point on Soviet strategy was redirected from concentration on the military fight against the Wehrmacht toward maximum communist exploitationof the inevitable Nazi collapse. Inside the Soviet lines, the National Committee for a Free Germany and cadres of East European communists were activated in preparation for the politicaltakeover of Germany and the East European nations. Tito (at that time still loyal to Moscow) virtually ceased operations against the Nazis, and turned his full energy against his rival for postwar domestic power, Draja Mihailovitch. Analogously in China, the communists in late 1943 and early 1944 were shifting from the united front with the Kuomintang against Japan to anti-Kuomintang policy and action: that is to say, were launching their drive, completed successfully in 1949, to seize state power in China.[5]

Burnham’s immediately subsequent comments to this above strategic analysis may also aid us in understanding our still-abiding cultural vulnerabilities in dealing with any designedly long-range strategic conflict or protracted war, especially of a religious kind. Speaking of a few far-sighted Air Corps (Air Force) officers, Burnham notes:

Interestingly enough, there were few persons in the United States leadership who at the time reached the same conclusion that Hitler had been defeated, and on that basis advocated a corresponding turn in United States strategy. General Muir S. Fairchild, for example [after whom the Main Academic Building at the U.S. Air Force Academy was later named], a member of the powerful Joint Strategic Survey Committee, proposed in December 1943 to end all Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union, on the ground that they were no longer necessary to assure Hitler’s defeat and would serve only to bolster Soviet power for uses contrary to United States and Western interest. As a result of this indiscreet recommendation General Fairchild was OUSTED from the Committee and sent abroad.[6]

Moreover, Burnham cites the book of another far-sighted (future) Air Force Officer, General Nathan Twining whose 1966 book, entitled Neither Liberty Nor Safety, gives his own “insider” account of what had unjustly and unstrategically happened in the case of General Fairchild himself. As was true at that turning point back in early 1944, we are certainly in need of such far-sighed, grand-strategic-minded senior military officers today to help us take a larger measure of the kind of war we are in.

Then, after citing another 1966 book by a respected, strategic-minded French thinker, André Fontaine, entitled History of the Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Korean War (Histoire de la guerre froide: De la Révolution d’Octobre à la guerre de Corée), Burnham leads us to some even deeper considerations which are applicable today in our efforts to understand the kind of war we are in, and especially about how this war may eventually come to be “periodized” (or divided into its strategic “time phases”) by its purposive design and by its cumulative effect. Therefore, Burnham asks us to take a longer view of “the Cold War,” or what he prefers to call the Third World War:

In a more basic sense, however, what began in the spring of 1944 was not so much a “new” Third World War as a new phase of a continuing war that started in November 1917, with the Bolshevik conquest of power in Russia, that might indeed be dated most significantly from Lenin’s organization of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903: the protracted war of the communist enterprise for a monopoly of world power. On the coordinates of this longer-term scale, the protracted war is seen as the dominant theme of twentieth-century history, with its major phases fairly well marked, thought overlapping: (1) formation and training of the cadres of the revolutionary army (1903-1917); (2) seizure of the initial base or beachhead (1917); (3) failure of the firstdirect attack on the advanced Western powers (1917-1923); (4)consolidation and defense of the base (1917-1944); (5)enlargement of the base (1944-1949 explosively, andirregularly in the years following); (6) indirectattack on the Western powers through support of decolonialization and of anti-Western nationalism in the underdeveloped regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (1944-); (7) recognition of the United States as the main enemy, and consequent direction of the main effort to the weakening, isolation, and ultimate defeat of the United States (1944-). On this same scale the first two “world wars” as well as the post-1956 “Sino-Soviet split” appear as subthemes: disputes within one or the other of the two major camps. [7]

James Burnham’s analysis of Soviet Revolutionary Warfare may be usefully and analogously applied, I think, to our current strategic context, in the strategic analysis of Revolutionary Islam, and also of Revolutionary Zionism (both Jewish Zionism and its allied “Christian Zionism”), and their own “Fifth Column Activities” within the United States, so as either to sabotage and disrupt, or to co-opt and guide, the growing American Hegemony (or Empire) and spreading Imperium, or what Irving Kristol himself approvingly and explicitly calls “theEmerging American Imperium.”

Moreover, it is significant for the current U. S. Special Operations Command and for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as well, that Burnham’s 1947 book, The Struggle for the World, was, in part, a declassified version of an earlier classified study for General William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the parent organization of both of our institutions.[8]

Finally, even William Donovan himself—who was still then a Colonel—had written a candid strategic essay earlier in 1941 (with co-author Edgar Mowrer, and with an Introduction by the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Cox) concerning the German enemy’s use of “interior lines” on the strategic “inner front” of the United States. Colonel Donovan’s little-known 16-page strategic pamphlet was entitled: Fifth Column—Lessons for America (1941).

Although Donovan’s strategic analysis focuses on National-Socialist Germany (and not at allupon the Soviet Union!) as the sole enemy under examination, his final words in his pamphlet could—and should—be applied to other groups today, such as strategic-minded Muslims, Zionists, and Chinese strategic thinkers and their own explicit writings. Donovan concluded his analysis and promotion of the strategic defense-in-depth of the United States in 1941, as follows:

Hitler’s final weapon in this country [i.e. the USA] would, he specifically told Rauschning, be the creation of a revolution.

“Do you believe, my Fuehrer, that America will again interfere in European affairs?”

“Certainly we shall prevent it from trying again,” Hitler answered. “There are new weapons which are effective in such cases. America is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts in the United States, so that these gentry will have their hands full with their own affairs.”

Most of the horror that is contemporary Europe [1941] would have been avoided if the leaders there had found time to read Adolph Hitler’s own multiple statements of his intentions—and taken him at his word.[9]

The current U.S. counter-strategy in the larger cultural-religious war will also have to take careful account of both the domestic defense and the overseas defense--the “over here” as well as the “over there--and not only in the “GWOT,” but especially in the larger,protracted cultural-religious war we are in. If, therefore, we do not first develop an unflinchingly honest and humble assessment of the kind of war we are in and the kind of “course correction” that we shall require, as a nation, we will become, I believe, increasingly centrifugal, over-extended, and dissipated by our own unintelligently self-sabotaging actions. For, as is the case now, we still do not even have a clear definition of the enemy—or even a focused “enemy image” (“Feindbild”)! Even moreso, we will require a subtler counter-strategy—a true grand-strategy—based on a sober analysis of reality, whole and entire, to include an analysis of our own self-inflicted cultural vulnerabilities and disorders, and thus an analysis of our own incipient cultural “Balkanization” (or “Lebanonization”) of immiscible religious cultures and promiscuousimmigration. Moreover, the immigration comes through the “porous borders,” both northern and southern borders, of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement and Association), which makes it easier for the permeating influx of those who would do us harm. “Terrorists” could easily come in with theun-inspected new marijuana shipments from British Columbia, Canada, for example, where a much more potent variety of these drugs is now even home grown, not imported!

Given that the U.S. Special Operations Forces are being given an increasingly long-range set of missions in the “GWOT,” we must cultivate our own strategic-minded thinkers and leaders who can take a more adequate measure of reality, and thus of the kind of war we are in , and to understand all of this in the longer light of history and of strategic, protracted revolutionary warfare, especially grand-strategic, indirect, psycho-cultural warfare and the underlying religious issues which animate it and sustain it.

The Spanish “Ré-Conquista” lasted 770 years, from 722-1492 AD, from Pelayo’s initial strategic resistance up in the Asturias at Covadonga, to the Muslim defeat in Andalusia at Grenada in 1492. However, many Muslims resolutely say and write that they will “get Granada back” and “undo 1492”—with a “Ré-Ré-Conquistaof Spain” and the West. There are others too, not just Muslims, as we saw in 1992 (the 500th Anniversary of the Christian Ré-Conquista), who would, if they could, still punitively “undo 1492” altogether and defeat their common enemy: the Catholic Church and Christendom and the historic reality of Christian culture. Should we take them at their word? And now what?