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Weapon
of War
By
Olavo de Carvalho
Since
the Algerian war (1954-1962), the idea of an “asymmetric war” became the
guiding principle of the anti-West strategy.
Inspired on the “indirect combat” of Sun-Tzu – whose “The Art of
War” already circulated in official editions in the
USSR
and its satellites in the 1950s –, the concept is
essentially that of a fight in which one of the contending parties does not
admit any kind of constraints to its actions. It may do whatever it pleases and
still use as a weapon the
moral
,
legal
and
social
commitments that tie the hands of its adversary. It is the
military expression of the adage formulated in 1792 by delegate Collot d'Herbois
at the French Convention: “Everything
is permitted to those who act in
favor
of the revolution.”
A
strategic analyst, Canadian navy commander Hugues Letourneau, remarks that the
Algerian National Liberation Front usually resorted to “
general
strikes, ambush,
terrorism against its own population and against other Algerian organizations of
liberation, assassination, torture, mutilation, appropriation of great amounts
of money from the
civil
population,
industrial
and agricultural
sabotage, destruction of public goods, intimidation and assassination of
presumed collaborationists, disinformation campaigns, etc.” Meanwhile,
the slightest illegal act on the part of occupation forces was used, by activist
intellectuals in
Paris
, as an instrument of
moral
blackmail designed to keep the French government paralyzed
by fear of a scandal.
In
order to achieve its goal, the asymmetry must impregnate itself deeply in the
judgment habits of people, so that public opinion does not detect the intrinsic
immorality of the supposedly
moral
demands that it exacts from one of the disputing parties,
while granting to the other the benefit of an indifferent or complicit
silence. One example is the unevenness in the treatment given to the
occupations in Iraq and Tibet, directed in a way to instill the public with the
impression that a temporary military operation − calculated as no other
before in history to avoid damages to the civilian population − is a more
serious
crime
than the continuous occupation, the premeditated destruction
of a 1000-year-old culture, and the permanent genocide that has already made one
million victims. The asymmetry, in
this case, has become so
normal
and obligatory that the simple suggestion of comparing the
American behavior to the Chinese already sounds not only extemporaneous, but
also in bad taste and suspect of some questionable connection with “shady
interests”, invariably “paid for by Wall Street” (this very article
obviously falling under this category!). Likewise,
half a dozen bloody abuses committed by American soldiers in Iraq − which
are
inevitable in any war, even under a strict oversight of the
troops – appear in the media as more heinous cruelties than the routine
practice of torture and the political assassination in
time
of peace, common in communist and Islamic countries, not to
mention the religious persecution (which is never reported in Brazil), that has
already killed over two million Christians in the past few decades.
Asymmetric
war is more easily carried out by revolutionary organizations, which
are
not accountable to the same
standards
applied to organized States.
But some States may also use that same strategy.
A recent book by two Chinese colonels, “The War beyond the Rules”,
published in 1999,
shows
that the Chinese government is deeply involved in the
anti-American asymmetric war. And
this war would not be asymmetric if, as soon as its concept fell into public
domain, the responsibility for the massive recourse to its dreadful techniques
was not blamed upon no other than its main victim. A few days after September
11, the French weekly Le Monde
Diplomatique, in undisguised hypocrisy, referred to “the official American
strategy of asymmetric war”. It
evidently failed to explain how could the U.S. engage in an asymmetric war while
being, at the same
time
, the country in the world most exposed to the judgment of
public opinion and one which does not count with an organized network of
supporters – in international or even in American media – as
the one available to leftist movements, which today
are
capable of imposing to the whole population of the planet,
in a few hours, their own version of events, thus simulating a sort of
spontaneous convergence. “The force of
terrorism is the media” says Jacques Baud, author of “Asymmetric War or
the Defeat of the Vanquisher” (“La
Guerre Asymétrique
ou
la Défaite du
Vainqueur”,
Paris
, 2003).
The
whole operation gains even more efficiency when carried out in a terrain which
has been previously prepared by the “occupation of spaces” preached by
Antonio Gramsci. By blocking some sources of information while selecting others,
it predisposes the public to accept as
natural
and innocent the most deceiving ideological manipulation in
news coverage.
In
Brazil
, for example, access to the opinion of American
conservatives has been banished. Their
books – thousands of titles, many of them classics of political thought –
are
never translated and cannot be found in any university
library. Their ideas
are
only available to public knowledge distorted as a caricature
in the official communist version, created in 1971 by Soviet historian V.
Nikitin in the book “The
Ultras
in the
USA
”. It is still submissively passed on today, from
generation to generation, in schools and in newspapers, by a bunch of knowing
sly militants and by a multitude of useful fools who do not have the least clue
as to the origin of their own opinions.
Who,
raised in this environment, can suspect that there is anything wrong with the
media onslaught that turns George W. Bush into a sort of right-wing Stalin?
The
challenge of tearing apart this blockade can be met only by hardworking and
learned
individuals
, through research efforts that lie outside the reach of the
average citizen. And the voice of
those
individuals
sounds ridiculously inaudible when they try to warn the
population against this frightening reality: since the advent of the asymmetric
strategy, disinformation − in the technical and
literal
meaning of the term − disinformation as a weapon of
war, has become the most constant and
regular
pursuit of big media, almost entirely supplanting the task
that used to be journalism.
The
danger to which the population is thereby submitted to is indeed monstrous. It
will not diminish while
civil
society does not take upon itself to exercise an “external
surveillance” of the media, taking to court all those who refuse to convey in
a faithful and quantitatively balanced way
the information and opinions coming from sources opposed to each other.
______________________
Brazilian
writer and philosopher, b. 1947, Olavo de Carvalho is the author of, among
others, “Literary Genres and Their Metaphysical Foundations”, 1996,
“Aristotle in a New Perspective”, 1997, “The Garden of Afflictions: An
Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion”, 1998, “The Future of Brazilian
Thought”, 1998, “The Collective Imbecile”, I and II. Presently in charge
of the Philosophical Seminar at the Centro Universitário da Cidade (
City
University
Center
) of
Rio de Janeiro
. Columnist
of the newspapers O Globo (Rio de
Janeiro), Jornal da Tarde (São
Paulo), Folha de São Paulo (São
Paulo) and Zero Hora (Porto Alegre). Website:
http://www.olavodecarvalho.org.
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Another
Fine Specimen