Preface

Preface: Post-Script, 2004

It has been 24 years since first writing this book, my first, as I sat on a footlocker in a Marine Corps squad-bay, or waited in our tanks for our next command to move out. Much has changed in the world since then. We have born witness to the rise of the electronic battlefield, expensive but with precision lethality, and to the horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The cold war is officially over, and the Berlin Wall was torn down piece by piece by the people who lived on both sides. Terrorism has developed religious frameworks and connotations. The Twin Towers of New York, built just before this work was completed, stand no more. We bear witness to a transformed military industrial complex and a conservative kind of political-economy that is largely at the command of the Pentagon and foreign military agencies. Militarism continues to abound in the world, and the US has been taking a heavy hand to secure its national objectives in the Gulf states, motivated as it is by the need for oil. The basic lessons that inform this work apply as much today as they did back then, with but minor and few modifications. The need for an alternative value strategy not based on force or on military development is greater now than anytime previous in modern history as nation-states and people grapple with the problems of disease, nutrition, poverty and all the associated dilemmas. The requirement for an active, aggressive form of pacifism to be felt in the world is perhaps greater today than anytime in human history. And yet, the status quo of the World System, and the conservative military political economy which preserves and protects this status quo, remains unaltered and intransigent to change. It is clear to me now as never before that humankind can simply not afford to continue in the future to depend upon making war, and the ends of war, as a strategy for achieving limited peace.

I had already been in the Marine Corps for three years. I was a field Marine. By my second year I was in command of my own tank, and we were racing around the desert in almost weekly war games. The Pentagon bailed out of Southeast Asia, in some disarray and demoralization, and turned its strategic objectives on the Gulf. We were experimenting with tactics and weapons systems that were later fully deployed in the Gulf War.

During that time, I had become pretty salty. I had become something of an expert in tanks, to the point where the company would frequently call on me to go out on special tank operations and to retrieve tanks that were broken down in the oddest of circumstances in the field. It was all the amazing places that the Marines could drive their tanks that made them so difficult to recover. I had designed my own tank tactics that were almost in complete reverse of all that we were taught to do based upon conventional Marine Corps infantry tactics and US Army manuals that essentially taught us "attack in reverse."

By the end of my time, during my fourth year, I had basically renounced my rank of corporal, and returned to the humble status as a driver while writing Military Dimensions. I had even designed many new weapons and complete systems, many of which basic designs proved themselves in subsequent events. I never published or elaborated these designs to anyone, for a fundamental reason they seemed like "bad business" in the promotion of violence instead of peace.

No matter how hard I worked or how well I performed in the field, whenever I returned to the base I seemed never to be able to get ahead. Whatever I did seemed always to be undercut by some new boot lieutenant, with whom we were always in a popularity contest, even if we didn't know it, and their staff NCO's, most of whom were Vietnam veterans and many of whom appeared to me to be in need of psychiatric intervention.

I witnessed many good young men transformed in the course of less than a year or two into drug addicts, losers, and often criminals or insanity, due largely to continuous mistreatment by their own leaders. There was much blaming the victim in this, as those in power increasingly abused their sense of authority and power, often in ways that fundamentally denied the humanity and rights of the people who were subjected to this kind of petty mistreatment and abuse of power.

When I earned corporal meritoriously, mostly for my work in the field, and for managing to stay clear of trouble on base, I found myself becoming to my own tank crew and platoon what I despised most in the other leaders I saw around me. When becoming this way was demanded of me by staffers who wouldn't leave us alone, I called their bluff.

The turning point came for me with the death of a buddy who, during a night operation on a windy and dusty night, was thrown out in front of our tank as we crashed headlong into a ravine. We were serving as a target tank for anti-tank missile gunners, and had been blinded by heavy searchlights. We were at least a mile in the middle of nowhere, and I had the unfortunate duty to try to reclaim the life of my buddy in tact. I sent my driver, who had broken all his front teeth out, to find help, partly so that he wouldn't have to witness the entire affair, and partly because, beside myself, he was the only one who could still walk.

With the tragic death of PFC Greenly, my entire perspective upon the Marine Corps changed dramatically. I began seeing the entire affair as a construction of social process, as something relative to the participants and actors who made the drama happen rather than as something to be taken for granted as true and real beyond doubt. After recovering Greenly's body, I remember feeling quite disembodied, or what has been called derealized, from the events going on around me. It was as if I was standing far away from everything, watching it all happen. This feeling lasted perhaps for three days afterward. As a result, I began questioning and redefining the core values of my own life and thus, inevitably, of those around me.

My growing disillusionment with the Marine Corps stemmed from several sources. They demanded a commitment not only of one's body, but of one's spirit and mind as well. I gave them the former, but I could not relinquish my sense of mind and independent spirit. I could not be a true believer in any thing that was greater than life itself, especially if it was built upon the principle of violence.

Today, I've grown so far away from what the Marines had made me that I can no longer recognize myself in that mode of living any longer. And yet it was an undeniable part of my experience. I realize in retrospect that my subsequent choices that led me into Anthropology were due in large part to those early experiences I had during my military days that led me to look at the world and to see things in terms different than the conventional point of view.

In hindsight I would say that though the context of global militarism has changed remarkably in the last twenty years, the basic aspects of what I wrote about remain unaltered. Then I ascribed the basis for problems in the world to what I termed "authoritarian power structures." Subsequent study and acquaintance reveals that this central theory is not so far off base, but has only led me to an expanded and more elaborated model of authoritarianism, both as a social phenomenon that is articulated structurally in everyday life and that has certain characteristic group dynamics, and as a characteriological and psychological predisposition of personality.

In anthropology, we employ the term ethnocentrism to describe the frequently chauvinistic attachment to a particular style of life or cultural orientation. I would say that most corruption, inequality and violence that happens as a social pattern occurs as the result of different and competing ethnocultural groupings, or sub-groupings or representations of such groupings, in competitive relation with others for basic resources, albeit in terms that are symbolically mediated. This is as true in American society as it is in the Latin American or the Asian or African world.

I believe that even at the personal level violence that occurs within most societies, and is prevalent in some, can be tied back to these basic issues in an indirect sense. The attribution of psychological motivations and rationales for violence committed among youth and for idiosyncratic, and often very perverse patterns of violence in society, does not complete the entire story, and such idiosyncratic patterning is as much a reflection of the individualized orientation of modern state society, that does not prescribe basic symbolic mediating structures in a uniform manner. The social character and context of these processes, that are vital to their expression, as for instance in the rising prevalence of gun violence in schools in the US, becomes revealed in the analysis of the statistical patterning that underlies this prevalence and that is not obvious if we treat each case individually as an isolated and idiosyncratic "exception to a rule."

Subsequent experience, largely within Academia, but also in the field in ethnographic work in Malaysia and the People's Republic of China, as well as in everyday life in North America, revealed a strong undercurrent of a similar kind of pattern that I would describe as authoritarian in structure and function. It comes to me as something of a paradox that especially those in Academia who like to delude themselves and to live with the illusion that they, among all people, in their ivory paradise, are free from the small world constraints of authoritarianism are in their own way perhaps the most authoritarian of all. I conducted an ethnography of an anthropology department in 1989, and authoritarianism seemed to me a key factor emerging from that study. Academic authoritarianism, that manifests itself mainly in intellectual areas, is as strong and perhaps in some ways even more invidious than some of its more obvious and blatant forms of expression in other less privileged walks of life.

I would claim that authoritarianism, and the problem of authority, is an issue that all people, as human beings, must deal with on a very basic level, with interpersonal relations between family, friends and colleagues in work contexts of all kinds, and in a larger more elaborated organizational sense. Policemen probably have to deal with it in basic terms, in more areas of their life than professors, but it is possible that good policemen probably have learned to be much better managers of authority than professors, who often presume the entire problem into thin air while pontificating from the lectern or the armchair.

Anthropology has a history of field research that does not treat the problem of authority and authoritarianism very directly or very clearly. It tends to hold the other upon a pedestal, even if it means ignoring the all too human nature of violence and abuse of authority in everyday life.

If we seek anthropological definitions of authority as a political relation, we see that it involves in an ultimate and basic sense the right to appropriate the lives of people in an arbitrary manner. In more limited senses, it becomes the right to determine the outcomes, changes, and resources that are critical to the livelihood and development of people in given circumstances.

From the anthropological study of authoritarianism comes a basic understanding of the mechanisms of warfare, of strategy and mobilization for war, of militarism in terms of its industry, its production, and its consequences, the role of the media and security agencies in information control and manipulation, the administrative apparatus of government through which authority is articulated, often without democratic pretensions or reference to the rights of people. All these facets of social life in general bear out a similar profile of human behavior that is very deep-seated.

Of course, the original purpose for writing Military Dimensions was to provide not only a critique and critical understanding of war and militarism in a philosophical sense, but in a meta-logical way to provide an alternative approach and a realistic recipe for peace and for an alternative pathway of development than that based upon the threat and forceful use of violence.

The cultivation of human creativity is an important facet of this solution to the problem of war and violence in human society, especially as human society is reaching a global scope of integration. I had deliberately applied these ideals of human creativity and its cultivation to my own personal development subsequent to leaving the military, and to my social relations subsequent to my time in the Marines, and it has yielded in the long run only positive results. I do not think, twenty years later, that I was wrong in either a fundamental or in a sophisticated sense, though I have not grown wealthy for it.

It follows that the promotion of alternative human development is based upon the ability to create viable programs at many levels in human society that foster creativity and constructive development among the most number of people possible. This might seem like a simple and trite prescription, but it seems to hold quite true for most contexts and circumstances.

In human nature, as unfinished business as we are, it is true that what is not turned to creative and constructive purposes will become frustrated and show itself in destructive processes and patterns. Related to this is a basic issue of the projection of aggression in personality and in social relations, and the ability to sublimate aggressive impulses and, I believe, sexual libido, towards more cerebral and symbolically open ends. Much that is promulgated in the name of religion appears to me to be quite neurotic if looked at from the standpoint of the obsessive-compulsive ritualization of certain fixed beliefs and behaviors.

There remains, unfortunately, a necessary place for the military and war in the world. We would like to defeat its purpose for being, to provide a preventive antidote to its necessity in the world, but until the day that certain conditions of freedom, equality and security can be afforded for most, if not all people on earth, we are likely to have to have last resort to the instruments of war to enforce and defend whatever kind of peace we can achieve.

Part of the tyranny of war is that it forces otherwise innocent and peaceful people to commit acts of violence to defend their security and peace.

The conclusions then and that remain now is that if global peace is to be secured in a realistic manner, then the world as an international community of both nation states and world citizens, needs to do two things together:

1. They need to institute a global government that is hopefully democratic in orientation and anti-authoritarian in its action and results.

2. They need to design and implement global peace-keeping forces that are essentially like an elite police organization and that are strategically and tactically effective in meeting almost any possible situation or scenario of violence that might arise in the world.

The implication of this argument is that the whole world might then be turned into a police state, with all the implications of Big Brother kind of control. The alternative that has been suggested by others is the feudal fragmentation of the world into green-states, none of which are large enough to achieve dominance in the world. But in this world with instantaneous communications, widespread proliferation and manufacture of increasingly exotic weapons of mass destruction, and increasing ethnocentric competition between ethno-national interests that often cross-cut conventional nation-state boundaries, a feudal fragmentation of power would prove to be historically regressive. In the long run, would lead us into another dark ages dominated by pestilence and the rule of ignorance.

The challenge of creating an effective international government with an effective military organization to enforce its power in a manner that preserves and promotes democratic ideals is difficult to meet. As an anthropologist, I would say such an effort would be culturally challenged at almost every level and in almost any attempt at its institutionalization. The difficulties of creating an effective international government arise from the same basic source as the impossibility of achieving uniform multi-lateral disarmament.

In a world segmented by competing national interests, and with the growing historical tendency towards the balkanization of nations into smaller and smaller ethno-national groupings in spite of mechanisms and efforts at functional integration and structural centralization, all players are afraid of the consequences of being caught powerless and defenseless in a power vacuum. This is a realistic concern that all nations and all people share.

At the same time, the world is increasingly waking up to the fact that space ship earth is a small, finite and very lonely planet in the universe, and it harbors life and intelligence that so far seems unequaled as far as we can broadcast our light and electromagnetic signals. We are coming to a globalization of government and worldview with the realization that we may be collectively and separately poisoning the common pot for all humankind. No individual can deny this in an honest way, though many live their lives daily in at least implicit denial of these issues.

I have come to the conclusion that the guarantee of human rights & responsibilities provides the basic meta-ethical charter for global citizenship. This charter has been both implicitly and explicitly mandated upon numerous occasions during the Twentieth Century, especially by the unfortunate events of World War II and the Nuremberg hearings. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that it has found applicability the world over.

Of course, the relativity argument can be invoked to refute this contention. Myself, as an anthropologist, must accept relativity of values that can lead to violence in many contexts, and to the rationalization and systematic justification of this violence in many instances. But in terms of being a human being, rather than just as a scientist, I cannot accept the relativity argument as a reasonable justification for the perpetuation and promotion of authoritarianism and violence in human social life, especially on a massive scale.

In China, human rights are regularly demoted and officially sanctioned in a negative sense. The educated Chinese are taught, through state-controlled media, that human rights is the equivalent of too much freedom and license to be irresponsible, and I believe this kind of prejudice encapsulates very well the case that is made against the doctrine of universal human rights. But basic issues articulated daily in the background of the Chinese reveals the desperate need for the promotion of human rights and the opportunity structures and freedoms that are part and parcel of this definition. This is not only related to the cheating in the class room and behind closed doors at all levels of a huge, triple-tiered bureaucracy, but in all business, military, legal and even medical spheres of social life. The implementation of a healthy dose of human rights and democracy in China would prove to be a healthy antidote to the kind of totalitarian authority that the Big Brother communists have imposed, often with a very heavy hand, upon the Chinese people.

The official condemnation and denigration of human rights by all authoritarian and totalitarian governments is evidence to me not of the relativity of cultures and therefore illegitimacy of human rights, but of the threat and possible power of this doctrine in overturning these unjust regimes and in building a better, more human platform of representational government.

A basic lesson in political science, perhaps with some cultural bias that comes from a Western European tradition, is that democracy, that demands a commitment to human rights and freedoms, is a necessary prerequisite to open economic development of a society. Indeed, the actual examples of democratic government in human history have been few and far between. Most empires have been founded upon the regal-ritual appropriation of state authority in the body and person of an autocratic dictator, emperor or hereditary monarch. If these empires or kingdoms prosper and grow strong, it is almost always as the result of the military imperialism and subjugation of neighbors in service of the asymmetrical interests of the elite of the empire. These are not democratic, but autocratic, structures.

The few times when a genuine democracy has surfaced in human history, in Athens during the age of Socrates, in Britain, in the US, are usually associated with some of the most brilliant and creative flowerings of human civilization that has ever been witnessed. There is a veritable explosion of creative activities in such contexts. There is a simple and realistic explanation for this. When people are allowed to control themselves, and are given the means to do so, then a much greater reservoir of human ability and creative talent is realized and released than if control remains rigidly structured and articulated at the apex.

The challenge of establishing a stable democracy is to get people to cooperate without cheating, to abide by the same legal structures without making exceptions for friends and family, to participate actively and voluntarily in causes that serve collective interests of all people, while at the same time being allowed to pursue their own interests without undue interference or taxation. It is not just a challenge of the succession of power, which in a stable democracy will become indirectly sanctioned as routine-operational and formally ritualized process. It is a challenge of preventing any special interests groups, or even the collective will of the majority, from being able to achieve total autocratic control of the machinery of government. The history of the United States as a democracy might have played out very differently if, instead of stepping humbly down as President, George Washington had decided, somewhat like Napoleon had done in crowning himself emperor of France, to make himself a monarch, as some wanted him to do.

Teaching democracy abroad, in traditional cultures that are not familiar with the concept in any but the most formal and abstract of senses, is not a kind of acculturatively ugly Americanism that comparative literature professors steeped in post-modern deconstructionism would want us to believe. Indeed, promoting capitalistic business is an uglier form of exploitation abroad than this that largely encourages and preserves the status quo of authoritarian regimes in the world today. Capitalism cannot expect a trickle down transformation of the revolution of rising expectations among peoples of the world. It should rather expect, as it pushes forward policies of natural and social resource exploitation, that increasing violence and conflict will result.

Democracy as a set of principles and as a way of going about getting things done is something that is possessed by all people, much as the Theory of Relativity or the Theory of Evolution is owned by all people. Another way of putting this is to say that if human beings did not have big brains and somewhat inherently independent temperaments, then the imagination of an insect colony or a cattle industry might be the appropriate form or model to follow in creating human social organization. The fact that people can and often do think, and sometimes even act, for themselves, entails that eventually humankind must face and try to solve the problem of implementing democracy in the way that must be inevitable if we are to achieve a lasting and stable platform for world peace.

Democracy is a difficult thing to do, especially to do well. It is usually not accomplished without some bloodshed and some reactionary violence by those few who have most to lose from the institutionalization of democratic government and their mindless minions. People have to learn, and must even be taught how to do democracy in order to do it well. But it can be done, and people can learn how to change themselves, and to expect change from one another in the accomplishment of a better world.

While in China last, I did a simple but very effective experiment in basic democratic organization, which proved very interesting and fundamentally alien to the traditional Chinese style, even in the heartland of modern Communist China. With my students I organized a small open library. It began at first as but a small book shelf in the classroom, but it soon caught on like wildfire. All the libraries on campus were "closed" such that the borrowings available to students was extremely limited and poor. My students were intellectually starved for even basic knowledge by which they could make sense of the world. This of course is a common 1984-style strategy of the communists to fracture and to render subservient the worldview and attitudes of their intellectuals.

We organized our library completely around democratic principles derived from the American model first institutionalized by Benjamin Franklin. Its organizational structure was largely derived from the American constitution with its balance of powers. I explained basic concepts to my students, and they got together and sorted out the details and set up a structure that was congruent for themselves, in their own terms. The first three months were very difficult with many unexpected problems. Many didn't believe that an open library could be accomplished, as the students would borrow books and not return them. During the time that I was there, books were frequently borrowed, and only one book was lost, stolen off the student's desk.

We had to fight the school authorities, and I believe the library was only tolerated because of my own support and interest. They relinquished and provided a room for the library, as it rapidly expanded in both holdings, membership and active participation, not because they cared about the library, which they didn't, but because they knew that I knew too much about the inside secrets and were afraid I might divulge this information if they did not at least make a token show of support for the library. The library has lasted at least 3 years, but only under the tutelary support of American teachers who reside there, though it is entirely self-managed by the students themselves.

This library proved to be a simple and effective experiment in the possibilities of human development. The Chinese students took a working model, derived from the American library, and adapted it to their own context, in their own terms, and made it work. It not only worked, it worked very well within the extrinsic restrictions it suffered from in the communist Chinese context.

As I publish these pages, written more than 21 years ago in the bowels of my tank as a young field Marine, I cannot but help reflect upon where we have come from, and where we have gone subsequent to that time. Whenever I edit or look at these pages, I cannot but help remember this period of my life that seems now so distant and different from anything I subsequently experienced. Especially I think about the tragic death of another buddy, who died five years after leaving the Marines in a fishing accident. John had tried to rescue his girlfriend who fell into the current of a river, and he was dragged to the bottom by the rubber wading boots he was wearing. I had spent almost the entire four years together in the Marines, and by the time we left, we were pretty good soul mates. He was a very likeable character, and like myself, became a young Lance Corporal tank commander and achieved his rank, not by kissing staff officer's asses, but by hard work in the field and psychological endurance with a good track record on base. I had occasionally a dream that John returned to me as a forlorn spirit, or a ghost, and we would talk and he would tell me something that seemed quite profound, tragic and prophetic. One time he came and told me that he wouldn't return anymore, and since that last dream, I've not dreamed any more of him.

I mention John's tragic death in passing, because I think he would have understood the spirit and intent and the background of these pages far more than almost anybody else. We knew each other under circumstances during a period of time that few others understand or know about. The transition from a military way of life to a civilian mode of existence is rarely an easy one to make. Many people become trapped permanently in some no-man's land between these two worlds.

I have undertaken to reedit and to e-publish these pages for the first time. I have changed considerably since the time I wrote them, and, though many points I probably would not agree with today, I remain fairly stable in agreement about the basic philosophical and intellectual issues that are broached within these pages. I have been a pacifist, but I am not an extremist. I like to eat meat with a beer or two. I would not refuse fighting for ideals that I believe in, or to protect what I consider to be the best long term interests of my own family and my own people. I would seek only to define these ideals to encompass all people, but not in an authoritarian or autocratic manner or in any way that hurts other people.

It has been over twenty years since I first penned out this, my first massive manuscript herein presented. Since that time we have born witness to many unexpected changes in the world. The Iron Curtain has collapsed and the Bamboo Curtain has been drawn back. At the same time, the world has seen diagonal and horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among nations the political structure of which are inherently volatile and, in the long run, unstable. Basic cleavages still dominate the human world, and humanization of the world still seems to have a very long way to go to achieve the ideals that many have long dreamed of--a stable, peaceful world built upon equality and freedom between all people, a world without great poverty, ignorance, disease and chauvinism between different kinds of people.

I have since my military days been an ardent pacifist, but I am not a "true" pacifist in the extreme sense. I would not adopt the form of passive resistance that was central to M. K. Gandhi's style of leadership. It worked with the British, who already had a strong tradition in human rights and democracy, but such a program probably would not of worked against Hitler's Germany or even the French who were known as much harsher colonial task masters. Even Gandhi himself said that one must shoot a mad dog.

I believe in a moderate form of active resistance and in active defense as a necessary antidote to the evils of the world. If this were translated to the issue of nuclear deterrence, it would dictate a minimalist strategy. Any social system, to keep anarchy and the totalitarianism of aggression at bay, must have some sense of a security force to protect and uphold the interests of the collective and its citizenship. But deterrence or the balance of powers among competing nation states cannot alone assure long term peace and stability that humanity has come to need.

In editing and publishing these pages, as well as other manuscripts, I've had to make clear decisions about what to excise from the text, what to leave and what to modify. I've been conscientious about preserving the original voice and character of the texts as they were originally conceived and created. The work stands as much as a testamentary record of a period of my life, and of a view of the world, as it is a significant contribution to military studies or the study of militarism in general. I am a different person now, and would write a different work altogether than what is found within these pages.

I apologize to no one for writing this work when I did, and for publishing it now. More people in Academia have disdained me and put me down for my military service than respected me, and when we were in, being military was a very unpopular thing to do. One senior Professoress told me in no uncertain terms in front of the entire class that because I had been in the military, there was no hope for me in Academia and for this key reason, I left funding and a PhD program in a prestigious university to pursue my interests in Anthropology elsewhere. I never imagined that serving one's country could be such a disservice or a crime. Of course, during Vietnam, I came from "below the Boulevard" and most people I knew did not burn their draft cards or dodge the draft.

For myself, in my own humble manner, this work represented a declaration of independence from the authoritarianism that daily engulfed me and that threatened to drown me in every direction I might turn. It has been a long and often very lonely struggle. It continues today, as many of the same tides still lap all powerfully at our door. As such, it was a vehicle for intellectual integration and growth, and the beginning of a long history now of growth that has culminated in a much deeper and more profound perspective of human reality.

I would say to all those politicians, leaders, weapons designers, engineers and administrators who want to make war upon distant others in the world without understanding the full consequences of their decisions and actions, should first consult the person in the field whom they call upon to do their bidding. Do not presume to know better if you have not walked in our worn out boots.

Last Updated: 09/03/11