Phantom Terror, by Adam Zamoyski (Basic Books, 2015).
Born in America and raised in Britain, Adam Zamoyski is not a tenured university professor devoted to obscure subjects that appeal only to audiences of academic guilds. Nor does he write for a small readership. That’s why his books sell and his prose excites; he can narrate a compelling account while carrying an insightful thesis. His latest book, Phantom Terror, bears a subtitle that will cause libertarian ears to perk up: “Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848.”
Challenging the validity of modern states and their various arms and agencies is the daily diet of committed libertarians, but Zamoyski is not, to my knowledge, a libertarian of any stripe. Yet he challenges the modern State and its various arms and agencies, whatever his intentions or beliefs, and he refuses to shut his eyes to the predatory behavior of government. To appreciate the goals of his book, one must first understand how he came to his subject.
The story is simple: While researching, Zamoyski uncovered data suggesting that governments in the decades following the French Revolution deliberately incited panic among their citizens to validate increasingly restrictive policies. The more governments regulated and circumscribed individual freedoms, the more they took on the shape of nation states: geopolitical entities that had their roots in 16th- and 17th- century Europe but had not fully centralized.
If there’s a main character here, it’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Zamoyski has written about Napoleon in previous books, including 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (2005) and Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (2008). Having escaped from exile in Elba in February 1815 and suffered defeat at the Battle of Waterloo later that year, Napoleon, once the Emperor of the French, had been reduced to the status of a prisoner, stripped of his dignity and rendered militarily ineffective, his health quickly declining.
Tsar Alexander of Russia, seeing the great Napoleon neutralized, called for a holy covenant with Emperor Francis I of Austria and King Frederick William III of Prussia. For Alexander, who envisioned the State as the realization of a divine idea, the three united rulers reflected the trinitarian Christian God from whom their autocratic, quasi-sacred powers derived. Alexander believed that the unsettling of tradition and order during the French Revolution could be counteracted or cured by the systematic institutionalization of despotic government. First, though, the masses needed to be instructed in the manifest nature of revolutionary threats lurking behind every corner, in every neighborhood, among friends and family, in unexpected places.
And then came the police, a new body of official agents vested with administrative powers and decorated with the symbols and insignias of authority. Until then the term “police,” or its rough equivalent in other European languages, designated minor officials with localized duties over small public spaces. European states lacked the administrative machinery of a centralized enforcement network besides the military, whose function was to conquer foreign territory or defend the homeland, not to guard the comfort, health, and morals of communities in disparate towns and villages. The latter task was for parochial institutions, custom, churches, nobility, and other configurations of local leadership.
In the wake of the French Revolution, with its ritualistic brutality, mass hysteria, and spectacular regicide, sovereigns and subjects began to accept and support the power of centralized governments to deploy political agents, including spies and informers. According to Zamoyski, the growing police force”secret agents and all”was less interested in basic hygiene, sanitation, and safety and more interested in subverting the political clout and conspiratorial tendencies of local nobility.
To maximize their power, emperors and government ministers gave color to grand falsehoods about their weakness. Only in their exaggerated vulnerability, catalyzed by true and imagined Jacobins, Freemasons, Illuminati, and other such bugaboos, could they exercise their strength. Seizing upon anxieties about civil unrest, rulers cultivated in their subjects a desire for police protection, supervision, and surveillance. Conspiracy theories worked in their favor. Francis ordered his police to be vigilant about the spread of Enlightenment ideas; he enacted censorship measures by which people disciplined themselves into obedience, leaving the police to serve, often, as mere symbols of control.
Zamoyski does not focus on any one state but moves from city to city, leader to leader, depicting how European governments staged rebellion for their own benefit. Several individuals figure prominently for their different roles during this turbulent time: Edmund Burke; Empress Catharine II of Russia; William Pitt; Klemens von Metternich; King Ferdinand VII of Spain; King Louis Philippe; Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington; Charles Maurice de Talleyrand; Robert Steward, Viscount Castlereagh; Joseph Fouché, and marginal characters both stupid and intelligent, of high and low station.
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The news abounds with references to “rights,” “diversity,” and “justice.” But what do these terms signify? Allegations of Libyan “rights” abuses were powerful enough to justify a more widespread and large-scale Western version of what Gaddafi did—namely, demolishing an existing government and then oppressing and killing a lot of people.
In more local news, one of my alma maters has received over $19,000 for a “diversity initiative” program. It’s unclear what a diversity initiative program is, because university spokespeople have explained it in vague terms about “providing ongoing assistance and guidance to newly admitted international students,” “supporting travel,” “developing leadership and community service,” “promoting team building and unity,” and “assisting in breaking down barriers in communication.” In short, a diversity initiative is so vague that it can mean anything—hence nothing—at all.
“Justice” is another matter. Families of 9/11 victims recently told reporters that justice has not been served because no one has produced a public timetable for trying suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Family members lamented everything from “the years I’ve got left” to see justice done, to looking “pretty weak” for not bringing “these people” to trial, to sending a “terrible message” to people of the “free world” and to “those who are out to harm us.” Still, these cries don’t do much to clarify what is meant by “justice.”
If we can’t settle on the above terms’ meanings, perhaps we can glean insights about their purpose—that is, why people employ them and their intended effects.
In his recent article about politically correct orthodoxy on university campuses, Professor Paul Gottfried recalled accusing a colleague of embodying what Nietzsche called “slave morality.” Nietzsche’s slave morality is tied to Christianity, Platonism, and Enlightenment idealism: philosophies that celebrate weakness and mildness as virtues, champion mankind’s unremitting progression, and emphasize self-negation at the expense of self-actualization. Slave morality is, in short, sickly.
Aristocratic morality, by contrast, is virile and noble—so much that envious slaves seek to undercut it. Nietzsche used the French word ressentiment to refer to slaves’ contempt for the aristocracy. Slaves convince aristocrats that it is virtuous to deny the self and to pity others. Slaves use pathos to bring about a revolt in morals: the outright reversal of good and bad, valued and devalued. As a result, aristocrats actively seek to minimize their power through self-sacrifice and compassion: bad things that slaves recast as good. Eventually, with the help of the priestly caste—made up of those who belong among aristocrats but force aristocrats to internalize guilt and shame—slaves succeed in redefining morality as immorality. Aristocrats exhaust their power by suppressing it in the pursuit of what they think is goodness. At length, aristocrats become indistinguishable from slaves, and selflessness becomes the dominant criterion for determining what’s good.
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Washington officials continue to ignore the residents of Okinawa, a small island south of Japan. A poll from last summer revealed that over 70% of Okinawans want America’s Futenma military base relocated off the island entirely. Although Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had promised to thwart US efforts to relocate the base to another part of the island, he was forced to resign in June of last year after failing to persuade the Obama Administration.
Hatoyama, who studied engineering at Stanford, was no enemy of the United States. He met regularly with American officials and personally voiced his concerns about Futenma to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. His rapid rise in popularity reversed quickly when news came out about his administration’s financial scandals and when he failed to follow through with his promises to relocate Futenma outside Okinawa, if not outside Japan entirely.
Hatoyama insisted he would stake his career on the Futenma issue, and he did. His political career is over. The only high-ranking Japanese or South Korean leader who openly challenged Obama and his military plans for the region is now gone.
Hatoyama’s successor, Prime Minister Naoto Kan, sought to ease tensions over the Futenma issue that Obama and Hatoyama had supposedly resolved. In late December, he purportedly told Okinawa governor Hirokazu Nakaima”an anti-Futenma activist”that he wanted to lower taxes and promote tourism in Okinawa. He explained that Japan’s central government would implement subsidies and raise funds to assist Okinawa during her time of political unrest.
On New Year’s Day, however, the Japanese government told Okinawans it would not entertain local residents” opinions about Futenma’s relocation. With this announcement, Kan, Japan’s fifth prime minister in four years, undermined his already waning popularity and called into question his ability to appease Okinawans.
Japan began discussions with South Korea last week to address a possible Japan-South Korea alliance to share military goods and services. The mere appearance of cooperation between these two nations could validate their leadership by giving the impression that America is not in charge. Both nations host US military facilities and have foreign-policy agendas that, in Asia at least, are in lockstep with Obama’s.
The hundreds of islands comprising the Okinawa Prefecture are not that close to the Japanese mainland. Okinawa Island is nearly 1000 miles from Tokyo. The Japan Self-Defense Forces (calling them a “military” is inaccurate since the Japanese Constitution forbids the use of military force) would likely be the first responders to any act of military aggression against Japan.
Although the US claims its presence in Okinawa deters conflict in Asia, it is just as likely that its presence provokes conflict. Despite the US military presence in Okinawa and nearby South Korea, Chinese submarines and warships have continued and will continue to harass the Japanese over the Senkaku Islands. North Korea will continue to harass South Korea and to lob missiles over Japan and into the Pacific. The US presence has not prevented these events from happening in the past, nor have US forces done anything that South Korean or Japanese forces could not do on their own.
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