AN IDEA FIRMLY PLANTED

by J. R. Nyquist

“A great proportion of the thoughts with which we live are not thought out by us with the evidence in hand.”
-- José Ortega y Gasset

In a book titled Man and Crisis, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega discussed the inner-workings of historical crisis. Through most of history, he said, the world changes gradually from generation to generation. The change is such that continuity is not disrupted. “An historical crisis,” wrote Ortega, “is a world change which differs from the normal change….” The system of convictions belonging to a previous generation “gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions, and therefore without a world. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to think about the world. Therefore the change swells to a crisis and takes on the character of a catastrophe.” This is where we are today, in the United States and Europe. Look around and consider the prevailing cynicism. As Ortega noted, “One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is that there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones.” In a recent book titled Suicide of the West, authors Richard Koch and Chris Smith lament the collapse of Western optimism and positive belief. According to Koch and Smith, “Some Americans and some Europeans have betrayed or drifted away from the ideas and ideals that have made Western civilization so attractive and successful.” They further noted: “The West has gained hugely in economic unity, prosperity and military force, but declined markedly in social cohesion, moral force, certainty of purpose and mutual support and sympathy between America and Europe….” An historical crisis has begun. The old convictions have collapsed, and new ones have yet to appear.

With the end of the Cold War, America’s enemies have seemingly evaporated and new enemies have appeared. We are so confused by events, so uncertain in our interpretation, that we no longer properly identify the players or the plays. We no longer identify treason with those who advocate the defeat of their own country. We no longer identify sabotage with those who are attempting to destroy national industries (like timber, oil or agriculture). People on all sides invent their own convictions, ideologies and theologies. More often than not, these convictions merely reflect personal vanity, wishful thinking or neurotic fear. Through a gradual process, institutions are destabilized. The ground is always shifting as one ugly controversy gives way to the next. The scandal now brought forward by George Tenet, former Director of Central Intelligence, is a case in point. The public and the pundits are attracted to the sensation of a former U.S. government official blaming other government officials. What they miss entirely is the vital intelligence that Tenet off-handedly presents. Since they lack a solid foundation in what is what, in who is who, they cannot see what has remained through thick and thin; that is, the rightness of old convictions. Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, touches on al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. Tenet claims that al Qaeda leaders, including Ayman al-Zawahri and Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri, negotiated for three Russian nuclear devices in the 1990s. It is curious, indeed, that Zawahri and Masri were allegedly trained by Russia. In other words, they are likely to be Russian agents, working for Russian strategists. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, Zawahri has been named as a long-time KGB agent. And the man who fingered him was poisoned with polonium-210 last November, and died.

This is very serious business, and we need to pay attention. We should not assume that al Qaeda has Russian nuclear weapons. In fact, such weapons cannot be used without state sponsorship. Nuclear weapons built in Russia require permissive action codes to detonate. President Vladimir Putin has the codes, and his top general has the codes. Therefore, Russian nuclear weapons acquired on the black market cannot be used to attack anyone, unless Moscow gives away the codes. Anyone attempting to acquire Russian nuclear weapons would know this in advance, and would realize the futility of paying good money for nothing. It is more likely, in this case, that Russian strategists want us to believe that Arab terrorists have acquired nuclear weapons. And the reason for this should not be far to find. If we dared return to our Cold War convictions, we would see that something deadly is being set up (but not as advertised). If Russia decided to initiate a war with the United States, or conduct false flag terrorist operations, the American side would tend to misidentify the source of the attack. The United States would not retaliate against the attacking country because the United States would misidentify the attacker. This would lead to further errors in terms of national deployment, overall preparedness and strategic orientation.

The fact that Americans have lost their base of conviction, their firm foundation in recognizing hostile countries like Russia and China, plays into this scenario. We have been told again and again since 9/11 that Arab terrorists are the main threat to American security. But the main threat to the United States is from those countries that seek to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading power. According to José Ortega y Gasset, “With some shame we recognize that the greater part of the things we say we do not understand very well; and if we ask ourselves why we say them, why we think them, we will observe that we say them only for this reason: that we have heard them said, that other people say them. We have never tried to rethink them on our own account, or to find the evidence for them. On the contrary, the reason we do not think about them is not that they are evident to us, but that other people say them. We have abandoned ourselves to other people and we live in a state of otherness, constantly deceiving and defrauding ourselves.”

When asked by CBS journalist Scott Pelley whether al Qaeda has nuclear weapons, Tenet said he didn’t know. But he was worried, and he added that thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons might be rendered “irrelevant” by a terrorist nuclear arsenal because terrorists aren’t state actors and you cannot retaliate against them. Imagine how cunning this is: A clandestine formation appears out of Afghanistan and makes war on the United States. It is armed with Soviet weapons but somehow unconnected to Russia. Our old concepts are gone. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is gone. The old Soviet enemy is gone. Or was that, in itself, another instance of saying that “we do not understand very well” something that we never “tried to rethink” on our own account? Americans never seriously thought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. We rushed to take that collapse at face value. “We have abandoned ourselves to other people,” said Ortega, “and we live in a state of otherness, constantly deceiving and defrauding ourselves.”

In October 1990 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was confronted by a journalist who asked about Lenin’s New Economic Policy [NEP], in which Soviet leaders deceived the West about the ultimate direction of the Soviet system in the 1920s. Gorbachev replied in a curious way, stating that “many people … failed to grasp the depth of Lenin’s design, perceiving the NEP at best as a tactical move.” It was, in fact, a strategic move. Gorbachev went on to explain that communism was not dying. It was in the process of reinventing itself. “This last is very important,” explained Ortega. “During periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common.”

Men live by conviction, or else – in the words of Ortega – they become “null and void.” Whether we like it or not, we must have convictions. Ideally, we ought to believe what is objectively true. And we should not allow our beliefs to be influenced by enemies. We cannot be so thoughtless, or drift so mindlessly, that we uncritically swallow questionable information about a future terrorist attack. This warning cannot be given enough, and should circulate throughout the United States of America and Europe. We are so accustomed to the collapse of old ideas that we look back with scorn at the mentality of the Cold War, at the mentality of Ronald Reagan. What if the Soviet Union was, indeed, a lethal threat? What if it continues, in changed form, to threaten the United States? Is this idea so strange, so bizarre, as to receive no hearing whatsoever

Let us give it a hearing, then.

© 2007 Jeffrey R. Nyquist