"V" for Vendetta

“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

[A junior police detective asking his boss about the potential for masses of citizens to defy a curfew and face off against heavily-armed troops] “What do you think will happen?” The response: “What usually happens when people without guns stand up to those who do.” [Implying that many will be killed]

The above quotations are from a surprisingly bold and thought-provoking movie called, “’V’ for Vendetta,” – a futuristic drama (not to thriller status) about England becoming a fascist state and one man’s quest to wreak vengeance on those who shattered his life and in the process stir the consciences of the people to throw off the shackles of the police state. To me the film hits painfully close to home because of its portrayal of a population frightened enough by a terrorist threat to willingly give up their civil rights in exchange for the illusion of security.

The movie is rated “R” for violence, a bit of foul language, and some “disturbing images,” but it is well worth the viewing if you wish to ponder how easily it might be to fall into such a state. In “V” the seminal events were poisoning of large numbers of citizens by chemical weapons. In Weimar Germany the last straw was the burning of the Reichstag – blamed on communists, which led very quickly to Hitler being named Chancellor and then receiving extraordinary power less than three weeks later.

How many more 9/11-type attacks would it take for Americans to willingly give up as many of our rights as the Germans gave up in the 1930s? The Brits and Canadians have already given up their firearms. They have done so in the expectation that their government will always be able to keep them safe. But what happens when the government itself is the threat?

One additional caveat about the movie – homosexuals are clearly portrayed as a persecuted class, subject to being dragged from their homes and “disappearing,” into the abyss of police detention. Such a portrayal is disturbing, but has really made me think. While I in no way condone any homosexual act, I shutter to think that anyone would have their lives ripped away from them by governmental decree for such activity. All governments in human history with that much power have abused it to abominable ends. Just as no country has ever taxed itself into prosperity, no government has ever been perfected by voluminous legislation. Human beings are fallible. Every government ever instituted among men is imperfect and must be subject to and subservient to its people.

Thomas Jefferson, an honored Founding Father in spite of his proven sexual indiscretions, penned the following, “The government which governs best, governs least.” I wish the American people would demand that their legislators and other elected officials pledge to govern less every year until, perhaps, we could get back to congressional sessions lasting only a few weeks each spring and fall – like they did before air conditioning was installed in the Capitol.

Anyhow, if you can stomach the tough parts and want to tackle the thought of how easy it would be for our government to become oppressive, watch “’V’ for Vendetta.” I fear it is much closer to reality than any of us would wish.

“Fly high & roar loudly!”

dirk

Extraordinary Aristocratic Leadership & The American Republic

GriffinScat #11-08 1/14/08

The story goes that in 1519 Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernán (not “Hernando”) Cortés sailed a small fleet of ships on an unauthorized expedition from Cuba to Mexico. Not long after landing, in order to forestall mutiny, he set fire to the ships in the harbor that would become known as Vera Cruz. By removing the easy escape, he forced his men to work together and focus on the needs of the situation. It was an unconventional but extremely effective tactic. Cortés ended up conquering the Aztecs and claiming Mexico for Spain. Shiploads of Mexican gold would eventually make their way to the Iberian Peninsula because of Cortés’ success.

That story is fairly well-known, but most people don’t think about the possibility that Cortés may have burned the ships so that he himself wouldn’t have the option of retreat, and would have to see the expedition through to the end. He put himself in a position where the only way he would ever see Spain again would be to succeed. How’s that for performance pressure?

Not too long ago I lived in South America for two years. Living in a third-world country and working with locals who would sell their mothers for a visa to the US gave me an opportunity to reflect on what makes our country different. One big question I asked was, “Why did the American Revolution produce a stable government that has withstood all the pressures of civilization when almost all other rebellions have only led to more tyrrany and the things against which the people revolted in the first place? What was so different about the American Revolution?

The significant difference was that the revolt against the British in North America was encouraged, fomented and financed by what could rightfully be described as members of the colonial aristocracy. What made our revolution unique was that it was started by the men who had the most to lose if it went bad. Most of the men refer to as our “Founding Fathers” were wealthy plantation owners or merchants. If they had been content to “just go along” with the British program, they might have been a bit inconvenienced, but they would have kept their spacious homes, servants and luxurious lifestyles. They had the time to spend reading, writing and then sitting around in taverns in Boston, Philadelphia and Williamsburg debating the continued erosion of their rights as British subjects because their employees and servants were literally taking care of their business for them.

It was the best-educated, wealthiest and most respected men of the colonies literally putting their necks on the line when they signed their names to the Declaration of Independence that led the working and agricultural classes to join them in their revolt. This was “leadership by example,” to an extraordinary degree.

Sending the Declaration of Independence to Buckingham Palace was how our Founding Fathers “burned their ships.” They demonstrated their willingness to individually suffer the loss of everything they had in order to stand up for their principles, and shoved that arrogant piece of parchment right in the face of the king. They then had credibility to ask poor farmers, laborers and craftsmen to join them. In their eyes the “status quo” was no longer acceptable, and they proved their willingness to bear the burdens of leadership by taking the responsibility for the rebellion squarely on their own shoulders.

The last line of the Declaration of Independence reads, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,”

(full text here). Some of them, in fact, lost their lives. Many lost their fortunes, but none of them lost their honor.

Extraordinary leadership is uncommon and always unconventional. When people who have the most to lose risk everything to change the status quo, those around them sit up and take notice, and some will take the step to upset the status quo in their own lives. The question we should all ask ourselves is, “What part of “normal” in my life needs to change, and what ships do I need to burn, or what “king” do I need to defy in order to guarantee that I change “normal” forever.

“Fly high & roar loudly!”

dirk

The War on Terrorism - Part 5 of 5

Wrapping up the first GriffinScat series….today the last of five installments on the War on Terrorism.

Apart from the death of almost 3000 people and the destruction of several billion dollars worth of material, we, the people of the United States, in the aftermath of that day, did trillions of dollars worth of damage to our own economy. The human cost of terrorism is incalculable – even if only one person is injured or killed. It is not my intent to minimize the human cost of terrorism. However, we need to balance the human cost of terrorism with the human costs that we accept with nonchalance every day. Accidents, tragic diseases and criminal acts maim and kill thousands of Americans every day. We take those in stride because we know they won’t affect our day-to-day lives directly. Those directly affected by these tragedies deserve our sympathy and support. However, we do not make major changes in our lives because someone across town was killed in an auto accident or contracted some terrible disease. Such things have become routine, and we don’t change our lives because of them.

In order to make terrorist strikes ineffective and irrelevant we have to keep terrorism at the tactical level. How? By not giving our enemies the strategic reactions they desire. If their attacks don’t instill terror in the broad populace, then their actions do not rise above being large scale crimes. If we react to terrorist attacks on our soil the same way we react to a crime across town we win and they lose.

It has worked in the past. In 1940, in the face of daily bombings by the Luftwaffe, the British people stood strong and would not be cowed in spite of their greatest cities burning night after night. They supported each other, their government and the Royal Air Force through the terror. The bombings stopped because the Germans couldn’t achieve their goals (the capitulation or neutralization of Great Britain) through that means. We need to be as hard as the stalwart Brits were during the Blitz.

If our minds are the target, then our minds need to be strengthened in order to deflect the next attack. In conventional warfare, the side that gets to fight on ground of its own choosing usually wins. In unconventional warfare (to include anti-terrorism), the chosen ground is our hearts & minds. That is where the enemy plans to do battle, so that is where we must meet them. The elements of our national power (diplomatic, informational, military & economic) have significant supporting roles to play and can reinforce the futility of terrorist actions attempts. If terror strikes are costly to the perpetrators and don’t achieve any of their desired ends, they will eventually quit. The starring role in defeating terrorism, however, belongs to the faces you & I see in the mirror every day.

“Fly high & roar loudly”

dirk

(P. S. If you would like the entire series in a single .pdf document (95kb), please send an email to griffinscat@gmail.com. Your email address will not be shared with anyone else and will only be used for GriffinScat communications. If you want to receive an email when Griffin Trek is updated, ensure you ask to subscribe as well. - dvdk)

War on Terrorism - Part 4 of 5

How do we prepare for the next terrorist attack???

Rock steady – combat ready. We prepare to respond in the last way that Al Qaeda expects, and the way that neutralizes their terrorist actions. We keep living just like we were before. If we don’t react to terrorist violence the way they want us to, they will eventually seek other means of achieving their goals.

We, as individuals, must adopt the attitude that says, “The physical victims of this attack have truly suffered and should receive our help, but since neither I nor anyone I care about was directly affected by this attack, I’m going to go on with my life. I’m not going to stop living my life the way I had planned just because someone blew up a building more than 1000 miles away in a city I’ve never even visited.” Basically, we need to get hard. No more, “doom & gloom” apocalyptic fear-mongering, which is what the terrorists want and expect.

Unfortunately, our 24-hr news “infotainment” industry will not make this reaction easy. If a tiger attacking three people in San Francisco or a suicidal gunman killing eight people in Omaha both become national tragedies, we will have to work extremely hard to demonstrate our lack of intimidation when the news media will surely be pandering to the raw emotion of the event. Commodities traders and mutual fund managers won’t help either. They will react to the events by taking actions that make critical goods more expensive, pinching Americans who really don’t want to be affected by what is really an isolated event that should be irrelevant to 99% of the population. We can do it, but it takes clarity of thought and deliberate defiance of the fear which will sorely tempt all of us.

The other side of the coin is our corporate or national response. If terrorists think they can hit us without being targeted by all our elements of national power (diplomatic, informational, military and economic) they need to be reminded. Our military response should be calculated and unemotional. War is never a pleasant business. We must not continue to try to mollify our consciences by insisting that we couch all our military actions in terms of “nation-building” and “spreading democracy.” But military action is only a supporting effort in the Global War on Terrorism, not the main effort. The main effort must be to engage the hearts and minds of the American people to stand firm against any terrorist attack and keep right on living – in mocking defiance of those who think their criminal actions can change our way of life.

Unfortunately, we continue to regularly reinforce the terrorists’ assumptions that we will bow to their threats of violence. Do you remember the Danish political cartoons that mocked Islam & Mohammed in 2005 and the violent outcry around the Muslim world about them? Do you remember how many U. S. newspapers had the courage to run those cartoons? At least for newspapers with circulations of greater than 100,000, I believe the number was ZERO. The editors who chose to comment on why they didn’t run the cartoons stated that they didn’t want to contribute to religious intolerance. However, the routine printing of cartoons critical of both Christians and Jews belies their true motivations. They were petrified that they and their newspapers would be targeted for violent reprisals by Muslims in the U. S. Whammo! Score another one for intimidation through threat of violence – terrorism by definition.

Next – Wrapping it up!

“Fly high & roar loudly”

dirk

War on Terrorism - Part 3 of 5

The next attack is coming. If you have some worldly experience, you probably have a good idea how to protect yourself from common street crime. You lock the doors of your house, have outside lights on motion-detector switches, park in well-lighted areas when out in public, and maybe even use a steering-wheel lock and have a security system for your home. Good for you. You are probably doing enough to protect yourself and your family from 99% of the criminals who practice their trade no more than 5-10 hours per week. They are criminals simply because they are lazy and don’t want to work for a living. Lazy criminals always go for the easy target. All you have to do is make yourself a harder target and they’ll quickly take you off their list of potential victims. The other 1%, though, is your problem. If there is a burglar in the area who works 60-80 hours per week perfecting his technique and then making and rehearsing his plans, you’d better hope he doesn’t have his eye on your house or your car, because he’s probably got a 99% chance of success.

In the same way, we need to acknowledge and accept that we cannot, and, in some respects, should not, try to make the U. S. completely impervious to terrorist attack. The idea is absurd. If we can’t stop petty crime, how can we imagine that we can keep terrorists, who spend years planning a strike, from attacking within our borders? I, for one, do not want to live in a police state – and that is what would be required to even approach impermeability. Our security services have done a great job since 9/11, but expecting them to maintain perfection is unreasonable. The sad fact is that, though we will always have some degree of vulnerability because we are a free and open society, when the next attack occurs the focus will quickly shift to blaming one or more government agencies and many individuals for “allowing” the event to occur. House & Senate hearings will ensue and everyone will be talking about what “government” must do to keep America safe. We’ll probably even be treated to the Congressional chorus singing “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol again. Won’t that be a joy?

But, if we take the courageous but logical step to accept that we probably are going to be hit again, how do we prepare? What do we prepare? Find out in part 4 tomorrow.

The War on Terrorism - Part 2 of 5

Yesterday I started this series with a football analogy to describe the difference between tactics and strategy. Today I’ll continue with another football analogy.

So, how is that [the previous analogy] relevant with Al Qaeda? Let’s use another football analogy. Let’s pretend that Al Qaeda starts a football training camp, and 45 jihadis throw down their weapons and suicide vests and start training for football. After a year they announce that, with the help of Allah, they will be able to defeat the best team in the NFL. After the laughter subsides, an exhibition game is scheduled in Foxboro, MA against the New England Patriots, which is wholly appropriate. Even though the Al Qaeda Ragheads have some equipment, it looks like it was stolen from a Jr. high school. At the end of the first half the score is 175-0 and half of the Ragheads have been carted off on stretchers. However, during the half-time festivities, the huge screens at both ends of the stadium appear to malfunction and the glowering sneer of His Vileness, Osama bin Laden, appears on the screens. In slightly accented English (he does, apparently, speak English), he tells everyone to look at one of the end zones where a man jumps onto the field and blows himself up. Then he tells the crowd that many more suicide bombers are planted in the stands and that that if everyone doesn’t leave the stadium immediately, they will start detonating themselves. You can guess the rest. Panic ensues, dozens are killed and hundreds are injured in the stampede to the exits. An hour later Al Jazeera releases a video from bin Laden claiming a huge defeat of the infidel football team and the capture of Gillette Stadium by a handful of faithful warriors.

In this analogy, Al Qaeda couldn’t have cared less about winning the football game. Their goal was to capture the stadium (at least for a few hours) and to humiliate Americans into panicking, hurting and killing themselves and basically looking like a bunch of scared “Chicken Littles.” The strategy they used included the tactics of trying to play football, but it was only a ruse. The players they used were expendable. They met their objective by employing a strategy that targeted the spectators (the people) not the opposing football team. The fact that we had the best football team in the world on the field was irrelevant to the outcome of this contest, because the people themselves were the targets, and, running like screaming mimis all over Foxboro, they performed their roles perfectly.

That, my friends, is the difference between tactics and strategy, and why having the best military on the face of the earth may not have much effect on whether we stop Islamic terrorism in our lifetime. You and I, rather our hearts and minds, are the real targets of terrorism. Those they kill and maim are only tools to get at your mind. You, hundreds or thousands of miles away from the event, who are glued to your 24-hr news channel, are the target. How do you react? They expect you to curl up into a ball, cry for your mother and stop living your normal life the next time they blow up a building or hijack a plane in the U. S. They expect their threats to cause us to avoid air travel, shopping at the mall or from taking certain commuter routes.

We’ve got them by numbers. We are a nation of over 300 million people. They can’t kill and injure us all. They can’t even harm 1% of us, yet the psychological damage in the wake of 9/11 crippled our economy. Guess what, folks? We did that to ourselves. No one forced us to stop flying commercial airlines. No one forced us to scale back our investment plans. All the economic damage in late 2001 and 2002 was self-inflicted, and Al Qaeda is betting that we’ll react the same way next time.

Next time? Yes. Next time.

Wednesday – The Next Terrorist Attack

"Fly high & roar loudly"

dirk

The War on Terrorism - Part 1 of 5

The turning point in the movie “The 13^th Warrior” is when an old hag tells Buliwyf, “Wars are won in the will. Perhaps you’ve been fighting in the wrong field.” That’s exactly what the U. S. is doing in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). We’re fighting terrorist tactics when we should be fighting their strategy. The problem is that we cannot fight their strategy with military force. All wars, truly, are won in the will, and the will our enemy is fighting is the will of the common American citizen, not the will of our soldiers.

The Department of Defense (DoD) defines terrorism as, “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” In military terminology, a terrorist act is usually a tactical action intended to achieve strategic objectives. “Tactical actions” are usually very short – from a firefight that lasts a few hours, to a bombing that only lasts a moment. “Strategic objectives” relate directly to the endstate, or final goals of a government or non-state actor. Because terrorists know that they cannot defeat the US by military power alone, they carry out their tactical actions against civilian and infrastructure targets in order to cause enough of a public outcry to force the government to change its policies in accordance with their desires.

Let’s use American football as an analogy. Tactics are the individual plays and the blocking schemes, snapcounts, coverages, etc. that make up those plays. The strategy is the overall game plan that the coach has devised to win the game. Do you see the difference? The strategy is devised based on knowing your opponent and trying to make his strategy (game plan) irrelevant while keeping him from doing the same to you. For example, if I know that my opponent’s star tailback has a knee injury that keeps him from being able to cut left, my defensive strategy will be to bottle-up the right side and only give him the left as an option. Since he is hampered going that way, I will have an advantage. If I know the opponent’s right outside linebacker is a rookie making his first start, I’m going to run and throw right at him to intimidate him early in the game and get him frustrated, and then plan on working that weakness all game. My individual plays (tactics) will be based on my game plan (strategy). It is worthless to have a game plan and then run plays that don’t go coincide with that plan.

Tomorrow – Another Football analogy

“Fly high & roar loudly!”

dirk

All material ©MMVIII Dirk van de Kaap. The goal of GriffinScat is to bring some semblance of logic and intellectual rationality into discussions in the public forum. All opinions are those of the author unless otherwise stated.