Understanding Appeasement … and Media: Marshall McLuhan

C.P. Snow, reviewing a book of A.L. Rowse (The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 1961) on Appeasement and the road to Munich, describes the top level of British Brains and the experience in the 1930s.  “Their I.Q.’s were much higher than usual among political bosses.  Why were they such a disaster?” The view of Rowse, Snow approves: “They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear.” Being anti-Red made it impossible to read the message of Hitler.  But their failure was nothing compared to our present one.  The American stake at literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by electric technology.  The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external.  The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life is formed.  It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not been acknowledged to exist.  I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them.  Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.  For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.  The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content”.  The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.  The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.  The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.[1]

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

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[1] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Critical Edition, ed. W. Terence Gordon (Berkeley: Ginko Press, 2015), pp. 30,31. 

Putin as the New Leviathan: “nasty, brutish, and short”

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. FOR WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather.  For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclusion thereto of many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.  All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal.  In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[1]

Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

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[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 95,96. (See Part I, Chapter XIII).  Note how the first paragraph links “the nature of war” with “the nature of weather”.  Perhaps Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can be viewed through the lens of our looming climate crisis, as well.  With respect to Putin’s deficiency in height, he is in good company: Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and, of course, Mao were all short. 

Noam Chomsky on War Crimes: An Interview

[David Barsamian] This is a very different question on the nature of evil.  You’re an empiricist, a scientist working with objective material.  You’ve discussed US atrocities in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s.  For example, you’ve written about soldiers who throw babies up in the air and then bayonet them.  The question arises: Many of these soldiers are fathers and brothers who have held babies in their arms.  How could they be reduced to that? Also, as an addendum, you’ve said that individuals are not evil but that institutions are.  Isn’t that a cop-out?

[Noam Chomsky] First of all, I’ve very rarely talked about atrocities committed by soldiers.  I’ve explained why.  The reason is that soldiers, in a situation of conflict, are frightened.  The options open to them are very few.  They can be enraged.  These are situations in which people can’t use their normal human instincts.  You can find a few sentences in which I’ve quoted things of this sort from human rights groups, but I don’t harp on it and I almost never discuss it.

To take one case, I was asked by the New York Review to write an article about the My Lai incident when it broke, and I did write such an article, but I had about three sentences on My Lai in which I pointed out exactly these things, that the actions carried out by half-crazed GI’s in the field don’t tell you very much.  The much more serious question, I think, is how people who are subject to no threat, who are comfortable, educated and if they don’t know what’s going on it’s because of a conscious decision not to know what’s going on, how such people can, in the quiet of their living rooms, tolerate and support and back horrifying atrocities, and plan them in their well-appointed offices.  That’s the real evil, far worse than what’s being done by soldiers in the field.  As to how soldiers can do it: apart from the condition of combat, which are never very pretty and are in fact life-threatening, apart from that, you’re talking about young kids, teenagers, who in fact are easily indoctrinated and can be turned into killers.[1]

”Elite Power and the Responsibility of Intellectuals” (15 February 1988)

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[1] See Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent: Collected Interviews with David Barsamian, 1984-1996 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), p. 124. This interview first appeared in Chronicles of Dissent (1992).

On the unpreparedness for war: expect the unexpected

During the Second World War Germans would scoff at the Russians, and one of the jokes was of a Russian POW who came across a German soldier’s watch.  But it didn’t work.  In a moment of insight the Russian realized the problem exclaiming: “Ah! The mechanic is dead!” 

Yet there were real-life equivalencies to the Russian war experience, which posed problems for Stalin.  As Soviet troops advanced on Berlin, they discovered that the Western capitalist swine (so-called), be they Fascist or not, also had the benefits of flush toilets, something unknown to most, if not all, of ‘mother Russia’.  As a result, the invading troops also had to be ‘de-contaminated’ upon the war’s end.

Today, as Russian troops attack Ukraine, there are other psychological problems faced by Putin’s forces who are fighting an undeclared war.  In Russia, it is illegal to talk about the activity in Ukraine as a “war”, or as anything other than a “special military exercise” where Russian-language minorities in Eastern Ukraine might welcome Putin’s ‘help’.  This puts Russian troops at a tremendous psychological disadvantage, because they are not – or were not – anticipating full-on war as their tanks rolled towards Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.  In effect, Russia’s effort amounts to a kind of “Mission Impossible” writ large. We know Putin succeeded in the KGB, but can he effectively mobilize a nation over an official secret?

Perhaps this is why Russian troops are committing war crimes (if reason can be attributable to such atrocities), news of which is now surfacing in widespread media reports.   Possibly still thinking of the enemy as “Nazis”, Russians are not only fighting Ukranian soldiers, but find themselves pitted against an entire citizenry, who are prepared to defend their country to the death.  So the Russian forces appear to be either seeking vengeance at their own unanticipated war shock or wanting to settle “historical” scores, which is less likely. When making war, one should always expect the unexpected: what can go wrong, will, and this was the greatest lesson of the First World War, “the war to end all wars”. In August 1914 the British had no military plans, and of the European powers they fared better than others, precisely because they had no plans.  In February 2022, the Russians began to stall, then flail, simply because their forces did not know of any plans, although there was one, yet troops had not been prepared mentally for the actual grim combat of war against Ukraine.

It is also worth noting that according to the Gini Index, which ranks the income disparities of each nation across much of the globe, Ukraine (along with Finland, interestingly) is placed among the top ten countries where income disparity is least.  In other words, the Ukranian sense of  ‘solidarity’, ‘nationhood’ and perhaps ‘selflessness’ are well developed, as there is less social ‘envy’ or ‘conflict’ - and success against the Russians is not just attributable to Volodymyr Zelensky’s thespian oratory.  Put another way: the country was long primed for shared action, culturally, politically - and economically. Today Ukranians are still determined to defend themselves, and when coupled with military weapons from the West, their spirit becomes a beacon of hope against the powers of a bloodthirsty autocrat. 

A Tale of Two Genocides?

As China builds in Xinjiang region vast internment camps intended for Uyghur Muslims, and others, Putin’s military targets and bombs civilians in Ukraine - notably women, children, and schools.  Perhaps Russians find themselves forced to kill such opponents because they have neither the time nor resources to re-educate them.  In any event, the brutality of the Bolsheviks persists to this day. 

Looking Back - and maybe forward: The Declaration of the Independence of the Mind (1919)

Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly built than that which previously existed.

The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us for the future!

First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers, artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific, logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled, debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance) they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their access of mania—now, Thought, which has been entangled in their struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.

Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice; we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free, frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant—Mind, which is free, one and manifold, eternal.[1]

Romain Rolland in L’Humanité (26 June, 1919)

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[1] Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921 [Scholar Select reprint]), pp. 351-353.  Composed by Rolland, this manifesto was published on the same day the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed.  Individual signators to the Declaration from across the globe included: Rolland, Albert Einstein, Benedetto Croce, Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, and Bertrand Russell.

Putin is Making a New World

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918

Ukraine, 2022