In a recent essay, Deep States and the Modern American Citizen, I addressed the ways in which members and gangs of members of the ruling class of the modern world, and many other ages of man, use crimes—even brutal and murderous crimes—as tools to gain control over other human beings or human communities.
In the United States, soft power, mostly the shaping of minds and attitudes along with some substantial sharing of wealth (perhaps now being reversed to some extent), has kept the ordinary citizens of past generations quiet, maybe unconsciously distracted by circuses and maybe consciously compliant with a sometimes criminal ruling class, while the power-holders committed various sorts of crimes in the political or economic realms. More recently, morally corrupt cultural products, such as James Bond books and movies and Rambo and Star Wars with its perversely adolescent depiction of good and evil, have gotten the masses off their seats at times, lining them up along the streets to cheer the troops going to or returning from another war against those who hate us for our freedoms including apparently hundreds of thousands of hateful children.
Soft power has been remarkably effective in turning the American mind into something like silly putty—see Unreliable Memories, Minds Like Silly Putty. Several of the most prominent aspects of American life have been spotlighted as factors contributing to this problem of the dumbing down of Americans. There is the hectic pace of life even when we’re neither having fun nor accomplishing much of anything. There is the related problem of constant communication and other sorts of electronic distractions. There are cars and lawns we care for as if fairways at the country club. There is a confusion of excessive information that some deal with by adopting unreasonable simplifications—such as the one about those Iranians and Iraqis and Syrians not being able to think as rationally as we Americans do.
All of this contributes to the major problem: we don’t fill our heads with good stuff. We don’t realize we shape our minds in response to what we perceive in physical terms (including our own bodily activities) and what we conceive in mental terms (including imagination). We think to watch Rambo, avoid the Bible, and somehow go to our deathbeds suited to life in Heaven.
We should put our energies into putting the good stuff into our heads and into our hearts and into our hands and feet. We should have thoughts which are drawn from those God revealed in the Bible and the thoughts He manifested in this world and its things and relationships and in all the abstractions from which this world was shaped. We should fill our heads with the stories of great men, good men, strong men, by reading serious, narrative histories and biographies or good historical novels or by recalling and retelling the story of our grandfather the fireman who entered burning buildings to save lives or our grandmother who went with a church group for part of each summer to work as a nurse’s assistant in a burnt-out coal district in West Virginia.
In that essay I referred to above, Deep States and the Modern American Citizen, I wrote something about E Howard Hunt, noting that he was a “CIA operative deeply involved in conspiracies against Castro, Watergate burglar, possibly—by his own macabre deathbed confession—a participant in the `project’ to murder JFK, and successful writer of thriller novels.” I was planning on writing in response to an essay posted on the Internet about a “shallow state”, but wasn’t impressed with that essay on a more careful reading. My thoughts and words turned instead to cultural soft power and how it helps to reinforce the deep-state. Rather than just sidelining the ordinary citizen with bread and circuses, soft cultural power has been used to recruit the ordinary citizen to the various programs, often criminal, of the ruling class, or classes, of the United States. The cultural angle is, in fact, more interesting, especially with the fascination of Americans over the previous 50 years with that elegant criminal and exploiter of young women, James Bond. And his ilk.
So, what about E Howard Hunt, most famous for being a seemingly incompetent burglar in the Watergate mess? It’s certainly interesting that Hunt was a prolific and, so far as I can tell, financially successful writer of spy novels. Even my smalltown library, missing all works of some major literary figures, has three of his novels on the shelves. This is what the wikipedia article says about Hunt the novelist:
Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. During and after the war, he wrote several novels under his own name—East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949), and The Violent Ones (1950)—and, more famously, several spy and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis and David St. John. Hunt won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing in 1946. [See article referenced above for footnotes.]
My very general impression is that the article, in its entirety, is very questionable based upon reading the works of serious, non-mainstream journalists such as Russ Baker who puts up some serious investigative research at Who What Why. I’ve written of Baker’s work in Are Serious Historians Conspiracy Nuts? and Who Are the American Elites and Are They Conspirators?. Baker has also published a readily available book about the dynasty founded by Prescott Bush, father of a president and grandfather of another president: Family of Secrets.
Hunt seems an interesting case of a man who provided part of the cultural foundations for the positive attitudes modern Americans have toward spies, assassins, and other criminals as well as having himself been a spy and involved in assassination conspiracies against Castro. Hunt wrote about the life and then lived it and continued to write about the life. Something of the sort can be said of Ian Fleming and David John Moore Cornwell who wrote under the pen name of John le Carré. A host of others have written about life in the intelligence or covert operations communities with less direct experience or perhaps none at all.
The sorts of books we read, and the sorts of movies we watch, have little to do with reality. Those books and movies of the thriller genres do have a lot to do with the actions of the leaders of the United States since the beginning of the Cold War and a lot to do with the American failures to deal with realities on the ground as opposed to inside of our heads—inside our heads, we’re still on top of some world if not the one created by God. We have strayed from God’s reality, trying to build a world with an excess of covert actions and a deficit of diplomatic or other peaceful actions. By default, we bribe officials in other governments and steal secrets through them or by other means. By default, we destroy entire countries which don’t bow to our every American whim—even when those countries are, in some clear sense, rising in social order and in prosperity and are at least moving toward the sorts of values Americans claim to hold dear.
We Americans know that goodness is to be defended and maybe even spread into evil regions by use of the same criminal methods and attitudes which were advocated by Nazis and Bolsheviks and Maoists. The Bolsheviks and Maoists (many anyway) targeted some true badness, such as ignorance and poverty. They used rifles and bombs and concentration camps where education and modern farming techniques and modern medicine would have been more appropriate. Those evil Bolsheviks and evil Maoists. If only they had been good enough to spread democracy and fight evil by the methods used by the United States in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and Somalia and Libya.
Whatever is true of the American elite, so wealthy and so powerful, the ordinary American has been convinced the negative wisdom of the Stalinists and Maoists is the appropriate way to defend our country and the values we claim to hold, but we have a strange blindness that leads us to think that what we did to Iraq was morally good and not at all similar to what the Maoists did to Tibet. In fact, we adopted many of the methods of Hitler and Stalin and Mao; in our efforts to defeat them, we became their disciples. (I believe it was C S Lewis who first expressed this insight but I don’t have a reference.)
But maybe I have it wrong. Maybe Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Mao and his followers learned from our grandparents the brutal and amoral ways described by Winston Churchill in a quote I provided in the essay, The Final Frontier of Our Modern Moral Journey:
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them… Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought would help them to win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals — often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered in the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared their bodies. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves, and they were of doubtful utility.
We Americans have added (often poorly) targeted murder by way of drones or special forces. We Americans have used, at least intermittently, torture which for all its “doubtful utility” seems to be a way for the righteous to inflict pain upon those evil creatures who hate us for our freedoms and for our goodness and probably for our golf courses.
To a large extent, this has been made possible by the crap we absorb from our trashy books and trashy movies and trashy songs. Disorder is us, it is in us, and we love it. So long as we feel good about ourselves, we must be doing what is right.
A Medieval theological joke:
Who will be saved?
Anyone who can enjoy Heaven.
We American Christians spurn the Bible and good poetry and we read books and watch movies about `heroic’ criminals of the elegant James Bond sort or the rather crude Rambo sort. We gather in front of the television to cheer as the missiles and bombs hit a heavily populated city, such as Baghdad.
Why would anyone think they would be happy in Heaven if they enjoy watching or even imagining the killing of any human being, no matter if he is an enemy? Why would they be happy in Heaven if they prefer Rambo to the Gospel of St John? Why would anyone who claims to be a Christian prefer the professional murderer and exploiter of young women, James Bond, to George Washington, that man who was a sinner but one who struggled his entire life to behave according to a strict code of public honor. I have to ask: was it just coincidence that the James Bond era corresponds with a period of very public denigration of George Washington? We honor a fictional character who was a coldblooded and hardhearted criminal and then spit upon the Father of our country.
In Washington: The Indispensable Man, the shorter biography by James Thomas Flexner, we can learn that Washington looked at the dead and horribly injured men being brought off the battlefields of the American Revolution and concluded that even just war isn’t glorious and is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary—though to be fought to the last ounce if necessary. He also showed in his refusal to allow reprisals against civilian populations who aided the British or the Royalists that he thought the best way to win hearts and pull together a country (or a world by extrapolation) is to treat human beings decently and maybe even better than they deserve from our viewpoint.
Perhaps we should spend more time with the Bible and with respectful biographies of men like George Washington and less time watching James Bond movies or—Lord, have mercy—Rambo movies.