Glenn Greenwald: The Fun and Excitement of Civilization Wars (fought from afar)

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The Fun and Excitement of Civilization Wars (fought from afar)
Believing that one is waging paramount war against the Most Evil Enemy Ever is a garden-variety psychological need, not a political or ideological conviction.

Glenn Greenwald

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This is why our nation's faux-warriors can never be reasoned with. It's why their greatest fear is having the Threats from Our Enemies be put into rational perspective, alongside all the other garden-variety manageable threats we face. To argue that they are exaggerating and melodramatizing the Enemy and the threat is to take away from them that which is most personally important to them.

Just consider the grandiose, baroque rhetoric they employ. What they are defending -- today's U.S. -- is not merely good. It's not even great. It's not even the greatest thing there is on the Earth right now. No -- it's much more grand than that: it's the Greatest Country ever to exist on the Earth in all of human history. That's what they're defending; that's the magnitude of the burden they bear, the incomparable importance of the crusade they lead.

Conversely, the Enemy they are facing down (from a safe distance) is not merely threatening or evil or scary or formidable. No, it's much, much more than that. This is the greatest Enemy that exists on the planet, the most cunning and nefarious and evil force the world has ever seen -- not just now, but for all of human history. There is nothing remotely like the depravity and power of this particular Enemy -- and there never has been. Ever. Everything these faux-warriors face and defend is superlative; there has never, ever been a war like the one they are waging. None of the old rules apply. This is all unique, unknown, the first and most important of its kind.

What's most confounding about all of this is that they completely evade the most basic instruments of self-evaluation. All they have to do is look back and realize that every generation, in every country, has been plagued by factions suffering from the same self-glorifying delusions -- that they alone are the Brave Warriors willing to engage in the Most Important Battle for Civilization Ever. None of it's new. Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described exactly this psychological affliction in his famous Harper's essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics:

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point."

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Over the past couple decades, prior to the Bush Era, the people who needed the sort of psychological fulfillment that comes from prancing around as Hofstadterian faux-warriors waging Civilization Wars obtained their fulfillment from playing board and video games or, at worst, dressing up on the weekend in camouflage costumes and -- rather than playing golf or going fishing -- marched around in militia formations, primed to defend the nation from Janet Reno and her squadrons of hovering U.N. black helicopters. It was equally pathetic, but at least the damage was minimal.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/17/steyn/index.html