Here
is a fictional story that is out of my imagination. If you believe it bears
resemblance to anything you know, check with your shrink for, you may be
imagining things.
Once
upon a time, there was a man named Giddy Rose. He sat at the helm of a magazine
called The Affair of Foreigners. Enamored with a foreign entity called Misraebl
that wasn't doing well, he decided to cook up and execute a devilish scheme he
thought will bring relief to the hapless little thing. To that end, he
commissioned a number of people –– whose pacifist views may have been
contributing to the misery of Misraebl –– asking each of the people to write a
piece that would explain their pacifist stance.
At
the same time, however, Rose the Giddy had gone around everyone's back and
commissioned a mob of ghost writers to write a rebuttal to pacifism as a
general philosophy, as well as a rebuttal to what eventually would come in the
works of the pacifists. When done, Rose called on Herbert Raymond (HR) to sign
the piece that wasn't his. He then published the pacifists' pieces in the
March/April issue of his magazine, and the HR rebuttal in the July/August
issue. In Rose's mind, this completed his dirty little scheme because the
endgame all along was to create a phony excuse to publish views condemning
pacifism.
But
that wasn't the end of the story because what happened next, is that a previous
underling of HR, named Danidavi did not like what the ghost writers had
published in the name of Herbert Raymond. And so, he wrote a rebuttal to the HR
rebuttal. But guess what happened. Giddy Rose refused to publish the piece in
his magazine. And so, Danidavi shopped around for another publisher, and had
his piece printed in a magazine called Interest of the Nation. In his piece,
Danidavi makes the point that the people who think in terms like those in the
HR piece, are defending a failed status quo, and they should rethink their
stance.
Well,
my friend, I promised you a piece of fiction and I delivered. Let's get real
now and look at an actual piece that came under the title: “It's Time to Stop
Defending the Status Quo of Foreign Policy Failure,” and the subtitle: “Here is
a better way forward,” written by Daniel L. Davis and published on June 29,
2020 in The National Interest, having been rejected by Gideon Rose of Foreign
Affairs.
Daniel
Davis begins his discussion by introducing himself. He says that 30 years ago
he was a lieutenant who fought under the command of then Captain H.R. McMaster.
He is a good man, says Davis, but in all honesty, he must say that McMaster's
essay in Foreign Affairs was flawed thinking.
The
essay came under the title: “The Retrenchment Syndrome.” In it, H.R. McMaster
or whomever wrote the piece for him, say that it is a syndrome for America to
call off its military involvement abroad and come home, even if America is
needed at home more than ever before. In rebutting the arguments that McMaster
made, Daniel Davis made some very good arguments of his own, and they are there
to be read by anyone that's interested. There are also links in the article
that send the reader to the McMaster essay, if someone is interested to read
that piece as well.
What
should interest us at this time is the use of the word syndrome by H.R.
McMaster or whomever wrote the essay for him. That word refers to a combination
of symptoms which makes it difficult to properly diagnose the underlying
illness or illnesses responsible for the syndrome's manifestation. In other
words, a syndrome indicates that the situation causing it is an abnormal
occurrence, but we may not know what it is. This being the reality that rings
the bell in the mind of any well-adjusted normal person, we take note and make
the effort to understand what it entails.
The
McMaster piece says that to avoid getting involved in forever-wars away from
home, is an abnormal state. But if that should be abnormal for America, it
should also be abnormal for anyone that can wage war abroad, even if it's only
across their border. If that's the normal state of humanity, as claimed by
McMaster and his ghost writers, it is a recipe for the extinction of the human
race. We must, therefore, consider the proposition to be the messed-up logic of
a diseased mind.
From
this, we deduce that the generally peaceful state of coexistence among members
of the same species, including humans, has been the natural condition of all
the species that have survived to this day. But if this is the case, how did it
happen that someone reversed what is normal, and constructed an upside-down
logic whose consequence has the potential to extinguish not just the human
species but life on Earth –– and call this the normal state?
We
find the answer to this question by combing the writings done through the years
by the mob that wrote the HR piece. We discover the assertion that these people
think of themselves and of America as being the perfect specimen. They believe
they adhere to the most perfect system of governance. Thus, they are convinced
they have the Quixotic duty to impose their system on others.