Sunday, August 20, 2006
Peace, Inc.
Why not, when nations have already lost the monopoly of violence, consider creating volunteer mercenary forces organized by private corporations to fight wars on a contract-fee basis for the United Nations - the condottieri of yesterday armed with some of the weapons, including non-lethal weapons, of tomorrow?
Governments unwilling to send their own young men and women to die in combat against Serbian, Croat, or Bosnian irregulars, including rapists and genocidal thugs, might have had fewer reservations about allowing the UN to contract with a nonpolitical, professional fighting force made up of volunteers from many nations - a rapid-deployment unit for hire. Or one under contract to the UN alone.
Of course, to prevent such companies from becoming wild cards, strict international ground rules would have to be set - transnational boards of directors, public monitoring of their funds, perhaps special arrangements to lease them equipment for specific purposes, rather than allowing them to build up gigantic warstocks of their own. But if governments cannot directly do the job the world may well turn to corporations that can.
By contrast, one might also imagine the creation, someday, of internationally chartered 'Peace Corporations,' each of which is assigned some region of the globe. Instead of being paid for waging war, its sole source of profit would come from war limitation in its region. Its 'product' would be reduced casualty numbers as measured against some recent base-line period.
Special, internationally sanctioned rules could permit these companies wide military and moral latitude to conduct unorthodox peacekeeping operations - to do what it takes, ranging from legalized bribery to propaganda to limited military intervention, to the supply of peacemaking forces in the region. Private investors might be found to capitalize such firms if, say, the international community or regional groups greed to pay them a fee for services plus bonanza profits in years when casualties decline. And if this doesn't work, perhaps there are other ways to seed the world with highly motivated peace-preserving institutions. Why not make peace pay off?Governments unwilling to send their own young men and women to die in combat against Serbian, Croat, or Bosnian irregulars, including rapists and genocidal thugs, might have had fewer reservations about allowing the UN to contract with a nonpolitical, professional fighting force made up of volunteers from many nations - a rapid-deployment unit for hire. Or one under contract to the UN alone.
Of course, to prevent such companies from becoming wild cards, strict international ground rules would have to be set - transnational boards of directors, public monitoring of their funds, perhaps special arrangements to lease them equipment for specific purposes, rather than allowing them to build up gigantic warstocks of their own. But if governments cannot directly do the job the world may well turn to corporations that can.
By contrast, one might also imagine the creation, someday, of internationally chartered 'Peace Corporations,' each of which is assigned some region of the globe. Instead of being paid for waging war, its sole source of profit would come from war limitation in its region. Its 'product' would be reduced casualty numbers as measured against some recent base-line period.
from 'War and Anti-War' by Alvin & Heidi Toffler
A related article:
The United Nations dithers as genocide goes on in Darfur and the Congo. Private security firms can end the killing, if anyone will let them...
The United Nations dithers as genocide goes on in Darfur and the Congo. Private security firms can end the killing, if anyone will let them...
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Six Wrenches That Twist The Mind
Spin doctors have used six tools over and over again through the years.. These are like wrenches designed to twist the mind.
One of the most common is the atrocity accusation. When a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified before Congress during the Gulf War to the effect that Iraqi troops in Kuwait were killing premature babies and stealing incubators to take them back to Iraq, she twanged many a heartstring. The world was not told that she just happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington and a member of the royal family, or that her appearance was stage-managed by the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaitis.
Of course, propaganda need not be false. Widespread accounts of Iraqi brutality in Kuwait were confirmed when reporters arrived after the Iraqis were driven out. But atrocity stories, both true and false, have been a staple of war propaganda. In World War I, writes Taylor in his excellent history of war propaganda, Munitions of the Mind, Allied propagandists constantly invoked 'Images of the bloated Prussian "Ogre"... busily crucifying soldiers, violating women, mutilating babies, desecrating and looting churches.'
Half a century later, atrocity stories were important in the Vietnam War, during which accounts of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers disgusted wide sectors of the American public and fed the anti-war fervor. Atrocity stories, both true and false, filled the air during the Serb-Bosnian conflict.
A second common tool is hyperbolic inflation of the stakes involved in a battle or war. Soldiers and civilians are told that everything they hold dear is at risk. President Bush pictured the Gulf conflict as a war for a new and better world order. At stake was not simply the independence of Kuwait, the protection of the world's oil supply, or elimination of a potential nuclear threat from Saddam, but, supposedly, the fate of civilization itself. As for Saddam, the war was not about his failure to pay back billion of dollars borrowed from the Kuwaitis during the earlier Iran-Iraq war; it was - he claimed - about the entire future of the 'Arab Nation.'
A third mind-wrench in the military spin doctor's kit bag is demonization and/or dehumanization of the opponent. For Saddam as for his enemies in next-door Iran, America was the 'the Great Satan,' Bush was 'the Devil in the White House.' In turn, for Bush, Saddam was a 'Hitler.' Baghdad radio spoke of American pilots as 'rats' and 'predatory beasts' An American colonel described an air strike as 'almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying there, and were killing them.'
A fourth tool is polarization. 'Those who are not with us are against us.'
A fifth is the claim of divine sanction. If Saddam draped his aggression in Islamic garb, President Bush also called upon God's support .... the phrase 'God Bless America' ran through American propaganda.
Finally, perhaps the most powerful mind-wrench of all is meta-propaganda - propaganda that discredits the other side's propaganda. Coalition spokespeople in the Gulf repeatedly and accurately pointed out that Saddam Hussein had total control of the Iraqi press and that, therefore, the people of Iraq were denied the truth and Iraqi airwaves were filled with lies. Meta-propaganda is particularly potent because, instead of challenging the veracity of a single story, it calls into question everything coming from the enemy. Its aim is to produce wholesale, as distinct from retail, disbelief.
One of the most common is the atrocity accusation. When a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified before Congress during the Gulf War to the effect that Iraqi troops in Kuwait were killing premature babies and stealing incubators to take them back to Iraq, she twanged many a heartstring. The world was not told that she just happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington and a member of the royal family, or that her appearance was stage-managed by the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaitis.
Of course, propaganda need not be false. Widespread accounts of Iraqi brutality in Kuwait were confirmed when reporters arrived after the Iraqis were driven out. But atrocity stories, both true and false, have been a staple of war propaganda. In World War I, writes Taylor in his excellent history of war propaganda, Munitions of the Mind, Allied propagandists constantly invoked 'Images of the bloated Prussian "Ogre"... busily crucifying soldiers, violating women, mutilating babies, desecrating and looting churches.'
Half a century later, atrocity stories were important in the Vietnam War, during which accounts of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers disgusted wide sectors of the American public and fed the anti-war fervor. Atrocity stories, both true and false, filled the air during the Serb-Bosnian conflict.
A second common tool is hyperbolic inflation of the stakes involved in a battle or war. Soldiers and civilians are told that everything they hold dear is at risk. President Bush pictured the Gulf conflict as a war for a new and better world order. At stake was not simply the independence of Kuwait, the protection of the world's oil supply, or elimination of a potential nuclear threat from Saddam, but, supposedly, the fate of civilization itself. As for Saddam, the war was not about his failure to pay back billion of dollars borrowed from the Kuwaitis during the earlier Iran-Iraq war; it was - he claimed - about the entire future of the 'Arab Nation.'
A third mind-wrench in the military spin doctor's kit bag is demonization and/or dehumanization of the opponent. For Saddam as for his enemies in next-door Iran, America was the 'the Great Satan,' Bush was 'the Devil in the White House.' In turn, for Bush, Saddam was a 'Hitler.' Baghdad radio spoke of American pilots as 'rats' and 'predatory beasts' An American colonel described an air strike as 'almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying there, and were killing them.'
A fourth tool is polarization. 'Those who are not with us are against us.'
A fifth is the claim of divine sanction. If Saddam draped his aggression in Islamic garb, President Bush also called upon God's support .... the phrase 'God Bless America' ran through American propaganda.
Finally, perhaps the most powerful mind-wrench of all is meta-propaganda - propaganda that discredits the other side's propaganda. Coalition spokespeople in the Gulf repeatedly and accurately pointed out that Saddam Hussein had total control of the Iraqi press and that, therefore, the people of Iraq were denied the truth and Iraqi airwaves were filled with lies. Meta-propaganda is particularly potent because, instead of challenging the veracity of a single story, it calls into question everything coming from the enemy. Its aim is to produce wholesale, as distinct from retail, disbelief.
from 'War and Anti-War' by Alvin & Heidi Toffler
International Obsolescence
This is the first of a series of excerpts from the book War and Anti-War by Alvin & Heidi Toffler. Published in 1993, the book provides thought-provoking insights into the nature of warfare and the forms it is likely to take in the future as well as strategies for dealing with warfare. According to them, as new forms of warfare emerge, the peace-form must evolve as well. Some of the issues which are discussed in the book seem chillingly familiar now.
The old tools of diplomacy will prove obsolete - along with the UN and many other international institutions.
Much foolishness has been written about a new, stronger United Nations. Unless it is dramatically restructured in ways not yet even under discussion, the UN may well play a less effective and smaller, not larger, role in world affairs in the decades to come.
This is because the UN remains what it originally was, a club of nation-states. Yet the flow of world events in the years ahead will be influenced by non-national players like global business, cross-border political movements like Greenpeace, religious movements like Islam, and burgeoning pan-ethnic groups who wish to reorganize the world along ethnic lines - the Pan-Slavs, for example or certain Turks who dream of a new Ottoman Empire that unites Turks and Turkic speakers from Cyprus in the Mediterranean to Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border.
International Organizations unable to incorporate, co-opt, enfeeble, or destroy the new nonnational sources of power will crumble into irrelevance.
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