The Folly of Fools (38 page)

FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE: CRY “ANTI-SEMITE”

The naive reader should be aware that in criticizing Israel for its racist and/or unjust policies toward Arabs, you at once risk being called an anti-Semite, that is, someone who has a (racial) bias against Jewish people (or, if Jewish, a “self-hating Jew”). The term has now been so degraded by its frequent use in defense of injustice that its actual meaning is inverted—it is now usually a racist term used by those who support racist policies against those who do not. Or, better put, “an anti-Semite” used to mean someone who hates Jews; now it means anyone Jews hate—a simple case of denial and projection.

It takes more than showing that a person speaks out against Jewish-perpetrated injustice to show that he or she is anti-Jewish. Perhaps he or she is merely anti-injustice. But the anti-anti-Semites have an answer for this. Why are you picking on
us
? Are there not worse people in the world? According to this view, you must rank the world’s injustices from biggest to smallest, then criticize everybody above Israel before you are permitted to criticize Israel itself. When you have finally reached Israel, though, a new rule is imposed: balance. If you concentrate only on Israel’s manifest injustices—let us say its regular attacks on its northern neighbor, Lebanon (1976, 1982, 1996, and 2006) or its remorseless theft of Palestinian land, water, indeed life itself, all based on terror and subjugation—you are being unbalanced. For every Israeli transgression, you must show a parallel Palestinian one to demonstrate lack of bias. But this is of course impossible (given reality). The best you can come up with are suicide attacks and some poorly guided missiles that claim fewer than one-thirtieth of those being killed by the Israelis during the same time period. So much for balance. Finally, should you come up with an argument that is strong in logic and content, you are said to make “tendentious” statements against Israel. This is a possible case of a malphemism treadmill (see Chapter 8).

Many first-class minds in mathematics, the sciences, and many other intellectual pursuits are Jewish (or partly Jewish). But this intellectuality can have a downside. Greater intellectual talent may be associated with more deception and self-deception (see Chapters 2 and 4). Where Israeli misbehavior is concerned, this has the unfortunate effect that an enormous amount of blather in defense of the indefensible pours out from every corner. This ranges from the truly rabid and racist—with full bells and whistles—to much more subtle arguments in which small, key errors are well concealed. UN Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 war—but not “the” lands. Even though “the” appears in the French version of the resolution and there is no mistaking the UN’s intent, this missing article is used to assert that the UN deliberately called for Israeli withdrawal from some but not all of its occupied land. And because the UN never specified which land should be relinquished, any withdrawal would satisfy the UN—a few square meters if put to the test. Or take another piece of sophistry. Israel declares that it is necessary for its neighbors to acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist” before diplomatic relations can be sought, but nowhere else in the world is this a prerequisite. You recognize that a government exists and you set up diplomatic relations—nowhere do you assert that the government has a right to exist. In addition, Israel is unusual in failing to define its own borders, so recognizing its right to exist may have hidden implications regarding future ownership of land. To take but one example, Israel has taken care to build about 85 percent of its security wall outside of Israel, creating new borders and a larger country by fiat.

Thus, on the subject of Israel, a vast wave of biased argumentation washes over people who have not had (or taken) the chance to study the matter carefully. The key is a fundamental inversion of reality: The Palestinians are not displaced people, driven from their homes and their land and persecuted ever since. They (and Arabs more generally) are terrorists—virulent anti-Semites—against whom all is permitted. What looks like Israeli terrorism and relentless theft of land and water is really just a proactive campaign to prevent another holocaust (apparently by inciting the very feelings that would invite one).

The truth about Israel’s theft of Arab land and water since 1967 via “settlements” was well put by a pair of Israeli historians:

Deception, shame, concealment, denial, and repression have characterized the state’s behavior with respect to the flow of funds to the settlements. It can be said that this has been an act of duplicity in which all of the Israeli governments since 1967 have been partner. This massive self-deception still awaits the research that will reveal its full magnitude.

As is so often true, what can be said in Israel is usually more honest and detailed about Israel than what can be said on the same subject in the United States.

WHY FALSE HISTORICAL NARRATIVES?

False historical narratives are important because every country has one, they are often fiercely defended (and regularly upgraded), and they provide a strong underlying system of logic (easily biased) for interpreting social and historical trends and truth. In short, they are available to justify all action—contemplated, under way, or accomplished. Deception is often involved in their construction. That is, people consciously lie to create them, but once created, false historical narratives act as self-deceptions at the group level. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they take to be true.

A true historical narrative might force us to make reparations for past crimes and to confront more directly their continuing effects. A false one permits us to continue a policy of denial, counterattack, and expansion at the expense of others. Why do we continue to attack our Arab neighbors? Well, because they have long harbored racist animosity toward our Bible-ordained project. Why are we attacking Iraq? Because it is part of our divine mission, our “American exceptionalism” that requires us to interfere and sacrifice for the good of the world.

Inevitably, false historical narratives will have their deepest connection with religion: Where did we come from and with what aim? To that subject we shall return, but first we consider self-deception and war, to which false historical narratives make their own contribution.

CHAPTER 11

Self-Deception and War

I
t has been said that truth is the first casualty of war. Actually, truth is often dead long before war begins. Processes of self-deception make an unusually large contribution to warfare—especially in the decision to launch aggressive ones. This is as depressing as it is important: one of our most critical behaviors, often with huge, widespread costs, appears to be strongly ruled by forces of self-deception. There is, indeed, a subdiscipline of military studies devoted to the study of military incompetence, and this does not usually refer to computational error. It refers to biased and self-deluded mental processes. Think Custer’s Last Stand.

Faulty decisions are said to arise from four main causes: being overconfident, underestimating the other side, ignoring one’s own intelligence reports, and wasting manpower. All are connected to self-deception. Overconfidence and underestimation of others go hand in hand, and once self-deception is entrained, the conscious mind does not wish to hear contrary evidence—even when provided by its own agents, whose express purpose is to provide such information. Indeed, the old rule was to shoot the messenger. Likewise, self-deception will make it more likely that manpower is underestimated (vide US invasion of Iraq in 2003) or employed along illusory lines of attack. In the military it is said that “amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” False logistics easily feeds overconfidence and vice versa.

For faulty logistics (and other acts of self-deception), Napoleon’s invasion of Russia provides the classic example. In an extreme act of overconfidence, he grossly underestimated the enemy, the harsh conditions of the Russian winter, and, most critically, the problem of supply. When he reached Moscow, he was more than a thousand miles from home and his men and horses required 850 carts a day for their care alone, never mind the additional carts needed to transfer weapons, medicine, the injured, and so on. There was no way such a feat could be sustained, so the French were forced to live off the land, but of course the Russians did their best to make this difficult. Stuck without resources far from home, with no ability to seize Moscow (or clear advantage in doing so) and the Russian winter closing in, Napoleon was forced to withdraw. He marched in with 450,000 men and returned with 6,000. Even worse, he lost 175,000 horses. The men could be replaced; the horses could not. After another disastrous foray by Napoleon into Russia a year later, the Russian army stood outside of Paris. It was the problem of supply that broke the back of the overconfident warmonger. Napoleon had been very successful before his disastrous Russian adventure. This is a deep feature of self-deception: success entrains confidence but also overconfidence. How many of us have taken success
one
step too far? (Bill Clinton and his women?)

Here we will gain an overview of the evolution of warfare in humans and the growing role self-deception plays. Besides such classics as World War I, we will concentrate especially on recent wars where the facts are well known: the US war on Iraq in 2003 and the US-supported Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008. These are not to suggest that the war in the Congo is not more hideous than all other ongoing wars put together, and probably more deserving of analysis in terms of deceit and self-deception, but the relevant information for this is far more meager than for the recent US and Israeli wars.

CHIMPANZEE RAIDING → HUMAN WARFARE

Chimpanzees reveal a likely route to human warfare. Chimps raid other groups, or, more precisely, usually three or more chimpanzee males working together will watch a neighboring group until they spot a chance to make a lightning strike on an isolated male (or occasionally more), who is attacked and killed. The marauders quickly return to the relative safety of their own territory. If over a period of time enough males are killed, the killers may take over their neighbors’ territory, along with some of the surviving females, but with even a single rival dead, the killers can expect to gain a little more territory and, thereby, food. At the Gombe Preserve in Tanzania in the 1970s, one group of chimps appeared to pick off and kill isolated males in a neighboring group until, after four years, all seven were gone. In another area of Tanzania, five adult males in their prime disappeared under similar circumstances, and after ten years the entire group was gone, with most of the females (and territory) absorbed by the larger (murderous) group. Attacks appear to be carefully planned, that is, launched when there is a clear likelihood of success—an isolated male is quickly overwhelmed by a superior force acting in silence.

In both chimpanzees and our own lineage, primitive warfare—or raiding—was a male territorial strategy based on the coordinated murder of neighboring males. The benefits were increased access to resources, including, in some cases, adult females—in either case, a net increase in reproductive rate. Deception by attackers was based primarily on hiding and surprise, with traps on the other side unlikely. Recently, remarkable evidence has surfaced of ten to twenty males engaging in regular warfare against a neighboring group. About every two weeks, males are drawn by some unknown signal to walk very quietly, single-file, into a neighboring territory to attack a vulnerable male. Infants are often killed, as in animal infanticides more generally, the better to bring the mothers into reproductive readiness. Likewise, an adult female is sometimes killed, but the overwhelming targets are other males.

This pattern of intergroup male raids leading to murder and later territorial expansion probably lasted in our lineage for several million years, undoubtedly increasing steadily in subtlety and design. Detailed studies of surviving hunter-gatherers suggest that intergroup war was widespread and dangerous. The best data from both archaeological sites and current hunter-gatherers suggest an astonishing 14 percent of human mortality every generation due to war (a percentage that thankfully has declined steadily since then). Killers were almost always men, as usually were the victims. Circumstances varied from massacres of vulnerable strangers encountered by chance to deliberate forays in search of victims in distant groups. The key was usually overwhelming advantage in surprise, numbers, or technology. Sometimes surprise consisted of inviting people to a peace banquet and then slaughtering them. Evidence from slash-and-burn agriculturalists (such as the Yanomamo of South America or the Dugun Dani of New Guinea) suggests that raiding often resulted in killing but that battles were rare, largely ceremonial, and ended badly only when one displaying group discovered to its dismay that it was greatly outnumbered, after which it might well be massacred. Participation in warfare was voluntary, but since attackers were rarely killed, it was, for them, not very dangerous.