Pundita on Mexican Insurgency and Hollowing Out America
Blogfriend Pundita turns an eye to Mexico, which is currently entering free fall despite official US policy that the cartels are not an insurgency, and has extensive comments on how the transnationally oriented, strategically inept, elite mismanaging US foreign policy no longer think in terms of a “US foreign policy”. Or perhaps, a “US”:
“Hollowed out” Mexico and hollowed-out USA
….I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn’t know this because he doesn’t watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC – Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.I myself speak of the “country” of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.
As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.
(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner’s texting problem not because he’s a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton’s closest aide and they didn’t want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let’s examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.
One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn’t indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I’d be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.
Later this week or the next I’ll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I’ll just say that I think Mexico’s type of racism is the true “virus” that Dr Bunker talks about….
Good question regarding the effects of racism in Mexico on the evolution of the cartel wars. An important point. I know why employees of USG entities do not raise it; for the same reason they will not use the “i” word – Mexican officials would go ape.
Dr. Bunker reads ZP from time to time and he’s best placed to explain why none of the authors delved into that aspect of narcocultas folk religion or Mexican elite behavior. My recollection is that most of the contributors to Narcos Over the Border were security specialists rather than social historians or sociologists. Maybe David Ronfeldt, who also has a specialty in Mexican affairs, can also weigh in on this important point.
Hollowing out of the US requires a post of it’s own to consider.
June 15th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
American elites identify America with the world because they unconsciously expect that anywhere and everywhere they go will be in America, their America. Even if their current foreign peers are alien in their mannerisms, American elites expect their foreign peers to bring along a few underlings that are American educated, speak "American", act American, and surround themselves with American ephemera. The unspoken expectation is that it is inevitable that the strange foreign peer will eventually be replaced by this next generation Americanized version. A cargo cult Americanism descended on the world following American victory in World War I. The barest veneer of this cargo cult is often enough to delude an American into thinking that "they’re just like us". This is true of the stereotypical American tourist who finds a McDonalds in some foreign land and it’s true of the stereotypical American official who finds an Ivy League educated peer in some foreign capital. A few features intrinsic to American exceptionalism, even in its bastardized cargo cult version, are that Americans believe they are the rule, it’s others who are the exception; that deep in their hearts, foreigners greatest desire is to become American; that America is a moveable feast that can be easily transplanted everywhere; and that America is inevitable: everywhere, pole to pole, sea to sea, will become America in the end. Initial America, the actual America, is only a utility from which power can be drawn as needed until all the world becomes America, or at least the America that the deeply flawed provincial and parochial American elites think is America.
June 16th, 2011 at 1:58 am
Hi JF,
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"A cargo cult Americanism descended on the world following American victory in World War I. The barest veneer of this cargo cult is often enough to delude an American into thinking that "they’re just like us".
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Yes. And if the foreign gents and ladies in good suits or stylish fashions with the impeccable English *also* are fellow *alums* of Ivy League schools…well….they are far more part of the tribe than fellow citizens who went to big state U. Certainly moreso than those Americans who never graduated from college (i.e. – a majority of Americans). The wailing and gnashing of teeth over Benazir Bhutto’s death in Manhattan and Georgetown far exceeded the cries of mourning in Islamabad. Perhaps because her fellow Pakistanis knew her and her husband, Mr. 10 % for what they were.
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By contrast, the third world’s second tier, nominally presentable, torturers like Moussa Koussa have to scrape by with public Ivies
June 16th, 2011 at 2:18 am
JF, This may be one of the most prescient posts I’ve read here: "they’re just like us." My God, how this BS has poisoned the minds of too many! Hubris and ignorance are abundant..I attended a conference with the Federalist Society on religious liberty in other countries. I reminded one of the speakers that we’re in something of a pickle encouraging religious liberty abroad when Christianity has been forsaken by American elites. He agreed it was tragedy. Point is we can’t credibly challenge on this issue because we (the Elite) don’t take seriously the First Amendment or the religions it protects.
June 16th, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Mark — thank you for the link and comments. And I’ll take this opportunity to thank you for your many educational discussions about Mexico. Somewhere I have a couple articles that provide illuminating insights on racism in Mexico — an angle that needs to be understood by US defense planners/policymakers. I will try to dig up the links tonight and post them here.
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Joseph — Astute comments! Yet by ‘hollowing out’ of American society I was referring to what we’ve done to ourselves rather than how we’ve ‘operated’ on those outside our shores But there is one aspect of Washington’s interactions with peoples who are unfamiliar with American history that can’t be emphasized enough: yes, Washington thinks "they’re just like us" EXCEPT when it comes to assuming they’re human.
.Thus, Americans in Afghanistan can go on at great length to a Pashtun tribal leader about the need for rout out corruption in government but they can’t describe the Battle of Trenton or the Battle of Valley Forge. Yet they’re dealing with people whose lives are circumscribed by battles to maintain their independence — battles going back thousands of years and which they can describe in great detail.
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And Americans can talk endlessly about the importance of democracy, but they never thought to explain to the chiefs why they came back to Afghanistan. They arrived with suitcases full of cash to buy help — but they never told the chiefs that they were there because the way al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11 meant that many Americans couldn’t find so much as a fingernail of their massacred relatives to bury because the bodies were ground to dust.
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Not to be able to bury one’s dead or even a piece of one’s dead — knowing THAT would have meant a great deal to the chiefs and those in their tribes. But the Americans never explained, never even cried, never showed emotion. THEY NEVER ACTED HUMAN; they never interacted with the Afghans in ways that are the same for all — not only all humans but all mammalian creatures. In other words, they displayed not a whit of common sense.
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What do you talk about when you first sit down with a man whose life has been circumscribed by war and who knows nothing about you and your tribe? The answer is you tell me of your battles, I’ll tell you of mine and in this way we establish a commonality of experience.
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You transform the rug or patch of sand you’re sitting on into the terrain of the battle, and you use sticks and stones or teacups as place markers for the troops to show how the battle was fought. In this way, you demonstrate that the battle is truly in your heart, that it means enough to you that you can bring it alive for another.
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If you don’t show what’s in your heart, then you haven’t established a basis for developing a mutual understanding, so then there is no way to move off the dime. Only when you’ve demonstrated by your stories of war that your tribe also shed much blood for independence, can you move on to explaining stuff about government. You can explain that you were losing too many of your sons in battle so you devised a type of government that would help defend your freedoms and with less bloodshed. And so on.
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But the history of America is one that shows a great willingness to do battle if there seemed no other option to defend Americans’ freedom. So actually Americans do have much in common with the Afghans — and it’s a key commonality. Yet it’s one we never revealed to them.
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Well, I see I’ve gone on and never gotten to the part about the hollowing out. So in brief: All of Europe can fit 2-1/2 times into the continental United States. Yet one wouldn’t know that from listening to American foreign policy experts, who view the USA as if it’s a Mittel European country than can be traversed by car in an hour. Heck, one can’t even drive across Texas in a day.
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America is a giant dreaming it’s a midget — and here I’m speaking of land mass and population size, not ‘culture’ or ethnicity. Of course Americans owe a great deal to European civilization, but two world wars and NATO, along with a huge influx of Europeans to American universities and Washington’s defense/foreign policy establishment after WW1, meant that U.S. defense/foreign policy began to reflect the strategies and tactics of the middle child in a large family — which is how small European nations have had to survive each other.
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The upshot is that we have not created a distinctly American defense/foreign policy. For a generation we had a Natoist policy, but once the European Union rose up, we became a minority of one (the Canadians had the Commonwealth) at NATO despite our superior military power and wealth. So then the thinking of US policymakers came to reflect the views of the European Union, which is where we are today.
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I made a pass at discussing what I term ‘Euism’ in a recent post but the punch line is that when Americans talk of "we" in relation to the rest of the world — how can we do that, when we don’t know who we are? Who we are has been hollowed out — not by the Europeans or any other external factor but by our own thinking, by our refusal to see ourselves as we actually are. This, despite all our talk of American exceptionalism.
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The best explanation of American exceptionalism I ever heard came from a Japanese. He asked for a leave of absence from work after he was picked to head a Japanese plant in the USA. He’d been raised on American movies but he had never been to America; he wanted to see for himself what it was like so he could better interact with his American employees. So he rented a car and drove the length and breadth of the continental USA.
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He returned to Japan in a state of shock. All he could say for days was, "America is so big. It’s so big."
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Yeah. But don’t tell that to Fareed Zakaria, who ended a segment on his recent CNN show about how to stimulate innovation in America by saying, "In the next part we’ll see how America measures up to other countries in terms of negotiation."
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It’s unfair to other countries to measure America against them. That’s because we’re so big. Even on our knees, we’re such a giant that if we sneeze the rest of the world catches a cold.
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We’re a giant not only in terms of land mass but also population size. Americans are one of the very few peoples in the world who could maintain a good standard of living if we only traded with each other. That’s a dirty little secret that Brussels and Whitehall would rather the American bumpkins didn’t know. That’s because it works to their advantage to have a giant dreaming it’s a midget at their beck and call.
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But the "you gotta have a gang" mentality that led to Washington creating the United Nations and other multilateral institutions that came back to bite us was never necessary for the United States. That’s because we’re so big we’re a gang unto ourselves. And it’s from that exceptional fact of our lives that we should conduct our foreign relations and build our defense policy. We should lead the world by example, not by forming gangs. At the end of WW2 the vast majority of peoples in the world saw America in the role of The Perfect Son, not the role of The Boss. Since then we’ve done everything to spurn the role we were given — a role, I might add, that is the highest honor that can be bestowed by men. It’s saying, ‘I am so proud of you I see you as my son.’ Yet wisdom in foreign relations, as in one’s personal life, is knowing one’s role and playing it to the hilt.
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All right; I am going to decamp before I wear out my welcome at Zenpundit but in defense of the length of this comment — it does double duty as my reply to Major Few.
:-)) And thanks to all for patience with this old woman’s ramblings and what has been called her very old ways of thinking.
June 16th, 2011 at 11:18 pm
Pundita!
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You rock. Everyone here rocks.
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One thing you have helped me with is understanding that there is something special in the way I grew up, before multicultalism, with Indian parents, and in the heartland.
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I took the trip you talk about (the Japanese gentleman) lots and lots of times. It was called my childhood and assimilation.
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And somehow I forgot what that taught me in favor of lots of theories in books. Books are lovely. Theories are lovely. So is experience. Real life experience.
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Once I started looking back it occurred to me that Americans really don’t understand that part of the world very well because it is a European culture. So they turn to the experts you talk about when talking about themselves would work very well.
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Well, I don’t know. Now I am rambling 🙂
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– Madhu
June 16th, 2011 at 11:19 pm
….multiculturalism….
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– Madhu
June 17th, 2011 at 5:24 am
[…] Committee comment at Zenpundit: American elites identify America with the world because they unconsciously expect that anywhere and everywhere they go will be in America, their America. Even if their current foreign peers are alien in their mannerisms, American elites expect their foreign peers to bring along a few underlings that are American educated, speak “American”, act American, and surround themselves with American ephemera. The unspoken expectation is that it is inevitable that the strange foreign peer will eventually be replaced by this next generation Americanized version. […]
June 18th, 2011 at 6:02 pm
thanks for the plug, zen. thanks to you too, pundita, including for noting my material on “camarillas” in that earlier post on mexico at your blog.
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as for racism: i’m familiar with the point that it exists in mexico, as well as in u.s. views about mexico. but in my past years as a policy analyst, i never saw racism get much traction as an explanation for how, what, and why stuff happens down there. the base of mexico’s population is of course mestizo (a mix of indio/indian and criollo/spanish-european bloodlines). the racism arises mainly between the more criollo and more indio types. but in my experience, it’s usually been subtle and subdued, not institutionalized. but perhaps i am missing something.
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here’s an added thought: what about racism within the dtos/tcos? judging from news photos i see, most leaders who have been captured or killed look far more criollo than indio to my eyes. but the gangster street thugs often look more indio. and i would suppose that itinerant guatemalans and other migrants who are being seized and pressed into service are of a more indio strain. could it be that the dtos are practicing and exploiting racism more than is normal in mexico? i dunno; just a notion.
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and spealing of dtos/tcos: there are interesting updates to note about nomenclature and organization. sylvia longmire has opted at her blog to shift to using tco instead of cartel. this makes sense to me. but tom barry points out at his blog that this shift has downsides, including compounding the hype.
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meanwhile, in a sensational interview, an alleged narco claims that the zetas are the worst of the worst and the ones who have really fouled things up in and for mexico. thus, if all parties in the drug war collaborate to destroy the zetas, old-style peace and stability could return to mexico, with each cartel going back to its low-profile regional niche. hmm. clever. but yikes.
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sources for last two paragraph above:
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http://borderviolenceanalysis.typepad.com/mexicos_drug_war/2011/06/some-thoughts-about-drug-war-nomenclature.html
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http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/tco-question.html
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http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/rhetorical-rise-of-transnational-crime.html
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http://mexicoinstitute.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/narco-gangster-reveals-the-underworld/
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June 25th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
as follow-up to what i noted in preceding comment about tcos, i see that yet another interesting new term is being applied to Mexico: “warlord entrepreneurs.” this term already has some currency elsewhere. but this is the first i’ve seen it for mexico. add it to the other terms — e.g., criminal insurgents — circulating at zp, swj, and other blogs.
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source: http://southernpulse.com/index.html
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June 25th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
Hi David,
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Yes. Going to send you something in a minute…