The Apotheosis of Hidden Power

The Apotheosis of Hidden Power:

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe; Military, Inc; Absolute Destruction; Stalin as Warlord; Castleview

Why is the United States of America not governed by its military?

This question might appear surprising. Why should the United States of America be ruled by its military?

Yet if we think over the question in the light of history, things get rather murkier. And if we (as is often useful) rub out the lines of our familiarity with America, our unthinking assumptions about what America is and how it is governed, and merely treat it as a distant and foreign historical object, the reasons we might expect America to be a military state multiply rather quickly.

First, America has been since before its founding a remarkably militaristic society engaged in almost constant wars: beginning with the violence of settlement itself, the wars with France that defined the 18th century globally, extending into the Revolutionary War itself, leading into the numerous low-level "frontier wars" with American Indian tribes and tax rebellions and even more colonial conflicts with the British and French and Spanish, and climaxing in less than a century in the enormous, devastating mass-conscript campaigns of the American Civil War. The 20th century saw two back-to-back World Wars followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and ended with military interventions in Eastern Europe and Africa, while the 21st century so far has seen campaigns against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, Venezuela, and now Iran, as well as significant proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine. 

For much of that time, America has been governed to a significant degree by military officials and in service of military goals. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was effectively the dictator of all that existed of the American state--the principal reason why his relinquishing of power after the war was seen as so remarkable not just in America but around the world. Under Lincoln, the United States was a thoroughly military government, though one led by a civilian; and while the Civil War was still within living memory, Woodrow Wilson plunged the country into World War 1, in the process again transforming America into a mass-conscription military regime led by a civilian that reached deep into the most remote parts of the country to find soldiers, train them, equip them, and ship them across the world. 

A mere twenty years after WW1, FDR and Truman again exercised nearly dictatorial powers to build perhaps the greatest military-logistical system in global history, one capable of conscripting men and constructing goods in unthinkable amounts and transporting them rapidly more or less anywhere in the world on extremely short timescales. Of course, the "military-industrial complex" that emerged from this conflict was not an army as anyone before WW2 would have recognized it, but an entire society in itself, a largely self-governing institution capable not just of fighting wars but of organizing and directing entire civilian societies in economic and cultural and scientific production, recruiting and training and incorporating into the populations of entire continents, manufacturing buildings, goods, and equipment in unimaginable quantities, and bringing all of the above to bear in overwhelming force at nearly every point from the Philippines to France to the islands of the Pacific and back again.

Nor did this society go away when WW2 concluded: even as the United States of America gave back most of the territory it had conquered, let go some of its former colonies, and demobilized most of its own population, the basic infrastructure of American global military government, including factories and corporations and stores of munition and recruitment and training centers and ships and planes and military bases scattered across the world and capable of striking more or less every point within it, has continued to the present day, sustained by the Cold War and periodically built back up through the 1950s and '60s for mass-conscription wars in Korea and Vietnam and the more or less continual arming and funding of anti-Communist states and terrorist organizations and militaries throughout the Third World.

We tend to forget, now, that a lot of the fears of the post-Soviet-Union era in America centered around the idea that the end of the Cold War would lead to massive drawbacks in American military spending and competence--drawbacks that would not only prove devastating to the large sectors of America directly or indirectly dependent on the military-industrial complex, but might also leave America vulnerable to new, unimaginable threats. 

Of course, that hidden malevolence soon took the rather strange form of the elegantly-turbaned head and performatively unkempt beard of the heir to a Saudi construction company and founder of a CIA front against the Soviet Union. The transformation of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden into a generalized "War on Terror" provided once again a proper enemy for the American military to build guns and tanks and bombs and develop new technologies and employ security corporations and train and arm and fund terrorist groups to defeat. 

Still, what is by far most striking about the entire era of the "War on Terror" in retrospect is the degree to which, in popular imagination, the "enemy" against whom soldiers and cops and spies and superheroes struggled continued to be entirely amorphous. 

The relatively straightforward Islamist ideology of Sunni mujahideen groups like Al-Quaeda--whose roots rather paradoxically lie both in the Deobandi Pakistani madrasas and in the rival Salafi ideology of the Saudi Arabian state, but more immediately in the American government's anxious interest in sponsoring and funding anti-nationalist and anti-Communist strains of Arab thought during a period when Soviet-inspired Arab Nationalism and Ba'athism were at their height and the Soviet Union was looking to assert itself as a sponsor to the Arab world--was never that I can tell portrayed or addressed in American popular media, or even in middle-brow intellectual discourse. 

The distinguishing claim of 'Islamism' as an ideology is simply that most existing secular and nationalistic Muslim governments are more or less illegitimate insofar as their laws are insufficiently based on Muslim Scripture and traditional Muslim jurisprudence. As it turns out, this belief is shared in some form or fashion by a huge number of Muslims around the world, and almost certainly by a sizeable majority of the citizens of most contemporary Muslim states--and is not easy to disentangle, as I have argued, from the more basic failures of the post-colonial state in general and Islamic Modernism in particular.

An America also facing a legitimacy crisis, with laws and methods and basic ways of life alike all challenged continually by both secular and religious critiques, might well have found in 'Islamism' a profound and perhaps transformative mirror and challenge; but, with a very few exceptions, did not. Instead, what America found in the 'War on Terror' was mostly just a faceless, nameless, utterly mysterious sense of threat--never better embodied than in the Joker as portrayed in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, a man from nowhere, with no face or name and no ideology, driven merely by a desire to 'watch the world burn.'

Of course, the truth is that one cannot understand an organization like Al Qaeda solely or primarily in terms of Islamist ideology any more than one can understand an organization like the United States military sole or primarily in terms of the doctrines of the Founding Fathers. Islamist terror organizations as we know them are more than anything else creatures of the modern, global military-industrial complex. They are hierarchical para-military organizations whose structure and activities are defined at every level by 1) easily-accessible and advanced weapons and explosives, 2) instant and untraceable communication technologies, 3) international financial institutions capable of transferring huge amounts of money instantly around the world, 4) the colonial and post-colonial adoption of modern Western military training methods and hierarchies, and 5) in most cases some form of direct assistance, training, or organization by Western intelligence or government agencies. 

In this way, too, the threat of Islamist terrorism might have been a profound challenge and mirror for America and the West: but also was not. For while American popular art again and again created narratives where the heroes and villains were similar sorts of militarized vigilantes, members of similar trans-national clandestine organizations, or in short more or less the same sort of people wearing similar clothes and wielding similar arms--they never that I can see ever seriously interrogated the reasons behind those similarities, or seriously questioned why one group of para-military vigilantes were the good guys and another the bad-guys.

All of this is not, of course, to deny that there are real and determining differences between Islamic and Christian societies, or even between Islamic and modern secular societies: and that these differences might have been the inspiration for a genuine popular war or even a religious or secular crusade against the Islamic world and/or Islamism. This, too, however, did not happen. 

In any case, the War on Terror ultimately wore itself out in the failure of America to successfully govern its new colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the failure of the 'Arab Spring,' in the rise and fall of ISIS, and above all in the gradual, creeping realization, driven probably more than anything else by the disaster of the Syrian Civil War and resulting European migration crisis, that the simple narrative of the War on Terror might in fact be a mask for blundering interventions into an extremely complex and many-sided conflict among different Muslim groups, none of which were from an American perspective all that sympathetic--with the brutal secular-cum-military-cum-financial Sunni Muslim governments with which America has generally allied against Shi'ite Iran and various strains of Islamism being perhaps the least likeable faction of them all.

Still, as I write this in 2026, America is of course once again fighting a large-scale war in the Middle East--a war, however, that was launched on something approaching a whim, whose goals and justifications and proposed timelines have constantly changed and contradicted themselves, and where it is clear that not even the highest levels of American leadership, let alone elites or the populace at any large, has any clear idea of why the war is being fought or what for. 

The truth, then, is that for all the destruction and pageantry of the War on Terror, America has never in fact found a meaningful way to justify its conflicts with Muslim states and organizations--at least not one that has ever been acceptable to most of the population or even most elites.

All we have found, in fact, is a series of nameless, faceless, remote, alien enemies--enemies that are acceptable precisely because they are not opposed or understood in any consistent moral terms. And when one understands that, one begins to understand that the underlying reality here has nothing in fact to do with the Muslim world and its continuing and accelerating crisis of legitimacy and religious and political collapse, and everything to do with the American military.

To me, one of the most remarkable things about the United States of America as a society is how popular the American military has been and continues to be with the general public, and this despite the fact that, unlike during WW2 and its aftermath, very few Americans now live their lives in and around the institutions of the military or depend on the it for their livelihood. The total number of people to have ever served in the military at any time is now the lowest it has been since WW2 at around half of one percent--making this in almost an entirely different country from the mass-conscription regimes that defined 20th century American life.

Still, public approbation for the military has if anything only gotten stronger as people's direct attachment to the military has atrophied. As measured by Gallup, public confidence in the US military reached its absolute peak in 2003 and again in 2009 at 82%, and remained with one exception over 70% until 2020 before dipping again. In 2025, it held at 62%, a significant reduction that still leaves the United States military six times more popular than Congress (10%), more than twice as popular as the Office of President (30%) and the Supreme Court (27%), and easily crushing its more distant rivals organized religion (36%) and the police (45%). Indeed, polls show quite consistently that the US Military is the only governmental institution to be reliably trusted by a majority of the US population--a rather remarkable state of affairs.

If, as I argued recently in this space, the United States is in the middle of a basic crisis of legitimacy, then it must be the case that, as the only governmental institution to possess anything approaching public legitimacy, the American military is the governmental institution most capable of exercising public political power. Hence, we would expect prima facie and a priori for the US military to take on more and more public power, and for something resembling a publicly and officially military regime to emerge in America.

Of course, things are not quite that simple. For one thing, it is very likely that a huge portion of the American military's popularity comes from it being the only governmental institution to not yet be drawn into the hyper-partisan symbolic warfare that has come to constitute the bulk of popular and elite political life. The Supreme Court had majority confidence, roughly speaking, until after Bush vs Gore; and the downfall of Congressional legitimacy cannot be disentangled from the constant, bruising public partisan battles and government shutdowns now endemic to the system. The military suffered a precipitous drop in public confidence during the conflicts over the Iraq War (from 82% in 2003 to 69% in 2007), when support or opposition for the war and therefore "the troops" was to a significant degree made into a partisan political issue; and it is difficult to see how a military regime could avoid being drawn into some kind of similar partisanship trap.

Still, even at the height of the Iraq War, the military retained something like 70% public confidence; and if polls are to be believed, it has regained most or all of that public confidence over the last few decades. 

Moreover, it is insufficiently noted that one of the main legitimizing factors for military governments around the world has been precisely their nonpartisanship, their separation from ideological and elite conflicts in the broader society. Not only need military regimes not be partisan, they have in fact normatively posed themselves precisely as unification governments bringing peace to internal quarrels and establishing a new unifying sense of national purpose. And with the continual rise in America both of hyper-partisan polarization at every level of government, and popular hatred of that polarization and of inevitably partisan liberal-democratic politics more basically, we have yet another reason to see a military government as likely.

And, of course, regardless of its popularity or lack thereof, the American military remains an almost unimaginably powerful institution, retaining among other things a status as arguably the primary driver of scientific and technological development in the world, a very effective global transportation and communication infrastructure, a vast surveillance and intelligence apparatus, a powerful industrial base, and, of course, a vast military force and direct control over nuclear weapons capable of killing millions and ending the world. If the US military as a collective force wanted to rule America and the world, they certainly would--though for how long, and how successfully, is quite another matter.

All of the works reviewed below bear directly or indirectly on the theoretical question of the role of the military in American life, as well as the more practical question of whether or if or how the military might come to dominate America and the world. In the process, we will travel very far afield indeed, to Pakistan, Stalinist Russia, Medieval Europe, and Fairyland; the question of the future of America and the American military is not, however, far afield, but present and immediate for every person in the world today. I ask you to remember this in all of what follows.

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe (1997)

Susan Reynolds is, or rather was, one of the foremost Medieval scholars of the last generation, and one of a small coterie of scholars to carry out what has appeared in retrospect as a largely successful revolution in the field as a whole, which can most easily be summarized as a near-total rejection of the term and concept of "feudalism" as a reasonable designation for either an economic or military system present anywhere at any time in the Middle Ages, let alone as an overarching category gathering together all the economic and/or military and/or political affairs of all Western European royal and noble and urban and peasant societies over nearly a thousand years.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I am not really interested in Reynold's rejection of feudalism (which is in any case both rather straightforward and rather academic), but rather in what emerges in this volume as her alternative to the construal of Medieval Europe as a society defined by "feudal" relations between hierarchical superiors and inferiors. 

For Reynolds, to my profound relief, is absolutely not one of those tedious scholars who labor merely to point out that the things gathered within a particular category in fact differ from each other in various respects. She is, rather, if anything a far more ambitious creator of grand narratives and grand, sweeping generalizations covering many centuries and many societies than her rivals--and if her work has any weaknesses (and it does), they emerge more from a tendency toward sweeping statements about practically everything than from a penchant for pointing out that different words were used for knights in France and Italy.

What emerges from Reynold's scholarship, then, is a quite definite, and extraordinarily broad summation of what she herself sees as a coherent set of set of assumptions about community and government and justice shared by nearly everyone in Western Europe during the centuries of the High Middle Ages. These assumptions as Reynolds lays them out differ in quite extreme ways from the assumptions on government both in many other historical societies and in the succeeding centuries of European Early Modernity and European and American High Modernity; and the largest single weakness in Reynold's presentation is her almost total failure to account for either 1) where these apparently iron-clad assumptions came from, or 2) why they went away. 

For the former question, Reynolds is somewhat obsessed with refusing the obvious answers to 1) of the Gregorian Reform and/or the Catholic Church and/or Roman law and/or the Roman Empire--to such an extent at certain points as to almost suggest that they came from nowhere at all and even that nothing particularly happened in the High Middle Ages except for economic growth. Still, what her polemic really amounts to substantively is simply the (indeed important) point that the assumptions she locates were profoundly not something foisted from above onto illiterate laypeople by literate clergy or monastics or lords or lawyers trained in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but rather deeply-rooted assumptions of laypeople themselves, which were very frequently used to push back against clerical or monastic or noble or legal elites.

Speaking for myself, I would say that some of the assumptions she chronicles reflect more or less universal common sense, some clearly have their roots in the societies of the Ancient Mediterranean and Roman Empire (though most not per se in codified Roman law), some have their root in Christianity as a broad historical culture, and some are clearly the result of specifically clerical and monastic concerns spread by the Gregorian Reform. 

For the purposes of this essay, however, Reynold's sketch of Medieval European society acts as a good historical and human (and indeed Christian) control or baseline against which to define and measure the very modern forms of military rule discussed elsewhere in this essay. 

What Reynolds sees as the basic social and political form of the Middle Ages is what she calls the "community," an entity referred to by many names in different European societies, but nonetheless defined by the same basic assumptions. These assumptions can roughly be summarized as 1) commonality, 2) equality, 3) hierarchy, 4) representation, 5) unanimity, and 6) rights. This listing may be surprising to people trained in various outdated Whig narratives of history by which nearly all of the above concepts, and even at times even the terms, were assumed to have been created out of whole cloth during the Enlightenment--a narrative that is still somehow, after all these years, frequently taught to children in schools and taken for granted by educated people generally. 

No one who knows the slightest bit about historical polities, though, will fail to appreciate the extremely generic quality of this listing. Key to Reynolds' construction, then, is not merely the terms and concepts in themselves as the extraordinarily fluid and pragmatic and interrelated ways in which Medieval laypeople constructed them. That should emerge clearly in the following summary:

1) A Medieval community, whether a craft guild or a peasant commune or a manor, was defined by an extremely broad and free-floating idea of commonality that required neither legal nor written ratification. Communities were not created by charters, let alone by feudal grants, but were formed ad hoc by people who recognized some commonality among themselves or even wished merely to create some commonality, whether that commonality was membership in a common craft or devotion to a particular saint or occupation of a particular swathe of territory or subjection to a particular lord or even merely a shared desire to share meals and drink wine. 

2) The assumption was that everyone within this community, once formed, was equal in all essential points with every other member of this community, regardless of their legal status or nobility or wealth. As Reynolds points out, Medieval peasant communes rarely made any particular distinction between legally "free" peasants and so-called "serfs," nor were these distinctions often particularly clear in practice.

3) Nevertheless, as she also points out, the rooted assumption of nearly every Medieval community was that some members of the community took precedence over other members of that community for a variety of complex and shifting reasons that might include wealth or intelligence or skill or nobility or clerical status or literacy or even merely good reputation. The people taking precedence within the community were generally known, regardless of context, by some term approximating boni, or "the good ones." 

4) These hierarchical distinctions, however, were rarely taken to be in any way opposed to the general equality of the community in rights and interests--precisely because the boni were seen not as a higher class apart, with their own sources of legitimacy or power or status or interests apart from the group, but rather as the natural representatives and leaders of the group as a whole. It was assumed that decisions made by them were made not only for, but in a sense by, the group, and in its interests.

5) Still, this sense of representation on the part of boni was not seen as detracting from the equally strong sense that every decision made by a community must be made by all its members: embodied in the famous canonical and Roman maxim that Quod omnes tangit, omnibus tractari et approbari debet, or "what touches all must be decided upon and approved by all." It often surprises people trained in modern majoritarian-democratic regimes to learn that practically all Medieval institutions assumed that people who had not specifically consented to a law or decision by a community they belonged to were not bound by it--and that this principle remained in place and even to a large degree effective in many European monarchies and Empires well into modernity. 

Of course, as Reynolds points out, this principle did not in practice mean a prevalence of quasi-Libertarian "sovereign citizens" exempting themselves at will from public laws and regulations. What it meant was that practically all communal institutions featured theoretical or practical mechanisms aimed at producing unanimity or at least nominal consent in all their members for at least major decisions. These mechanisms could be at times either coercive or deceptive or both, but most of the time relied on a mix of social pressure and human reality, with most members of the community happy to leave major decisions to their wealthier or more educated or merely geographically closer peers. As Reynolds points out, most Medieval communities struggled far more with how to get people to participate in decision-making than with how to restrict participation.

6) On the basis of the above assumptions, any number of what we would see as "rights" were seen as normatively present in every member of the community, and capable in principle of being appealed to at any time. It was these inchoate rights that Reynolds sees as driving the famous written charters and codes of the High Medieval period, and not vice versa. While everyone assumed, for instance, that every member of the community had to agree to every major decision, this "right" would in practice be implemented by some kind of procedure of voting or representation or consultation or even merely nominal consent. Likewise, while everyone assumed that in matters of crime and judgment every person ought to be judged by fellow members of the community, or in other words by equals and peers rather than inferiors or superiors, this principle could be implemented in various ways, including judgment by the community's boni, by legal procedures overseen by specially-trained lawyers, by systems approximating to later jury trials, or even in courts overseen by territorial lords.

There is a great deal of complexity and exception in this presentation of Reynold's system, a great deal that is disputable, and even some things that I would dispute. Nevertheless, for our present purposes, we might take Reynold's description of the High Middle Ages as a kind of model or limit case of a "communal government" defined above all else by the twin principles of commonality and unanimity. 

Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2005)

Taken in these terms, we might define what I call in this essay "military government" as more or less the opposite extreme of political form or order: as a government defined above all else by difference and command. 

A military in the modern sense is first and foremost a minority, a group of people possessed of a distinct status and institutional membership that by its very nature sets them apart from the majority of "civilians" in a society. 

A military is also, and perhaps just as importantly, an institution defined by an absolute, voluntaristic hierarchy of command. Military decisions by their nature cannot be made consultatively or unanimously or with the consent of all those affected by them; for a wide variety of reasons including the required speed of decision-making, the restriction of information, the technical nature of military tactics, the specialized nature of military structures, the fact that military organizations normatively sacrifice members to achieve their goals, and the even more significant fact that the wars militaries fight typically originate with and strongly affect a much broader world of civilians. 

Hence, the military commander commands not, like a communal bonus, because of some fluid qualification of wealth or competence or wisdom or literacy, but because he is the commander; and his orders must be followed by all not because of but regardless of the unanimity or agreement or even consent of those affected. On these principles depend not only the efficiency, but even the existence of military organizations.

Isabel Hull's Absolute Destruction is the best book I have ever read on modern military organizations; and, properly understood, constitutes an extremely powerful and universal case against the very idea of military government as such. More immediately, her volume purports to give an examination of the ideology and tactics and structure and constitutional position and crimes of the German Imperial military from 1870 through World War I, as well as an explanation for how their utter failure was made by that ideology and those tactics and that structure and that constitutional position more or less inevitable. This is an ambitious project by any standards--and it is remarkable, to me at least, how totally it succeeds.

Germany prior to WW1 was not in explicit terms a military government; it possessed a nominally civilian Kaiser and a civilian Reichstag and all the other accoutrements of civilian government. Nevertheless, as Hull points out, the German Imperial (originally Prussian) military possessed from the beginnings of the new state in 1870 an absolutely unique constitutional and political position and even more public position as the primary model and emblem and means and legitimizer for the very novel idea of a Pan-German, Protestant- and Prussian-dominated national and colonial Empire. 

Put in political terms, Otto von Bismarck distrusted the other German states and especially the Southern Catholic Germanies and so saw to it that the Prussian military was exempted from more or less any oversight or control from the new Pan-German civilian government, subjected to the Prussian Kaiser alone. Put in historical terms, Prussia attained its status as first leader of the Protestant German states and later monarch of the Germanies not through any cultural or political or religious or historical preeminence, but almost solely on the back of its uniquely disciplined and brutal and effective military. It was this military that defeated Austria and so allowed Prussia to build a new German Confederation without the traditional Catholic monarchy of the Hapsburgs; it was this military that forced other German states to gradually join this Confederation on inferior terms; and it was finally and decisively this military that in the sight of all Europe dominated the famous and feared post-Napoleonic French military in the Franco-Prussian War, took Paris, forced the remaining Southern Catholic German states to join it, and crowned its leader as German Emperor in the French palace at Versailles in 1870. Considered Imperially, it was this military that enabled Germany in the years after this to begin "catching up to" the other European Great Powers by rapidly building a colonial Empire in imitation of the British and French Empires and enacting an aggressive policy of Weltpolitik.

Considered culturally, though, as Hull in large part considers it, none of these principles can entirely account for the overwhelming, iconic charisma the German military began to assume not only within Prussia but in the rest of Europe in the decades after 1870. The German soldier was not merely a German civilian in uniform; he was something qualitatively different from and indeed higher than the rest of the German population and the world. In himself he embodied both the values on which the German Empire as a whole rested, and the dominating global victory it would soon achieve.

There is no need, however, to seek for the specifics of this charisma, as Reynolds does for her subjects, in the inchoate assumptions of the German population and culture--since, as Hull points out in exhaustive detail, the principles of German military superiority and charisma were in fact laid out in black and white and repeatedly and pervasively restated in German training books and military manuals during the pre-WW1 period. From the stated principle of charismatic superiority arose what Hull sees as the unique, and uniquely doomed, nature of German military strategy and tactics and organization during this period--as well as the famous (and now well-documented) crimes that Hull points out in the German military both in its colonial wars and during WW1.

Put simply, indeed deceptively simply, German war strategy and tactics alike were based during this period entirely on the idea of the "absolute destruction" of the enemy military in a single engagement brought about by rapid, decisive movement leading to unanticipated breakthrough and complete encirclement.

Taken in very general and tactical terms, this ideal is not in itself exceptional, but lies somewhere at the heart of most military strategy since the 18th century. As Hull exhaustively chronicles, though, hidden in the specifics of this ideal was a quasi-religious belief.

On the most general level, German military manuals and war planning began during the pre-war period to rely explicitly on the purported ability of individual German soldiers and commanders at every level to create through initiative and charisma and sheer willpower decisive engagements and rapid maneuvers and breakthroughs and encirclements even in the absence of logistical support or planning or resources or explicit orders. Culturally, training manuals and superiors at every level from drill sergeants to the Kaiser himself actively encouraged their men with stories about German soldiers and commanders who had gone beyond their orders, endured seemingly impossible hardships, moved faster and fought harder than anyone could have anticipated, done without resources or logistics or planning, ignored larger strategic goals, sacrificed themselves and their men, and so charismatically and beyond expectation and belief brought about total victory. 

One such oft-repeated legend, chronicled in great detail by Hull, was in fact true: the tale of a minor commander during the Herero genocide who had gone beyond his orders to pursue a small group of native men and women and children into the deep desert for days, travelled incredible distances with insufficient food or water, gotten nearly all of his men killed, achieved no strategic goal whatsoever, but finally achieved "absolute destruction" of the unfortunate Africans regardless.

As time went on, this concept began to define not merely German military culture, but even German tactical and operational planning. Unlike the absurdly detailed logistics of American military plans, German war plans provided only general goals and left individual commanders and soldiers a great deal of leeway in carrying them out. The overall goal, though, was always the same: rapid movement leading to breakthrough and encirclement leading to absolute destruction of the enemy.

What makes Hull's book so interesting, however, is not just her exhaustive chronicling of military sources for the period from 1870-1919, but her overall thesis: one that has implications far beyond 19th century German military culture. Put simply, it is Hull's contention that the Germany military's obsession with overwhelming tactical victory, combined with its freedom from civilian control and dominance of political decision-making and war-planning, created conditions by which defeat was not only likely but in a real sense inevitable. 

To understand why Hull makes this contention, it is necessary to lay out a few theoretical distinctions, which she draws from the (to me mostly unknown) world of military scholarship but modifies in her own ways. Chief among these distinctions is that between strategy and tactics, which itself tracks a more fundamental divide between military and political goals and methods.

Put simply, Hull strongly contends that wars as such are first and fundamentally not military but political events, originating in a conflict between states or communities or ideologies and always and inevitably aimed at achieving some goal in this realm. It is the overall political goal(s) of a war that in turn dictate and shape strategies, which is to say, means for achieving these larger political goals. Among these strategic means will be actual military campaigns leading to battles--along with such things as diplomacy, propaganda, intelligence-gathering, sabotage, annexation, economic warfare, and so on and so forth. It is only when one looks at the actual details of individual military campaigns that tactics in the proper sense emerges, understood as the essentially military art of winning battles and destroying opposing forces.

In Hull's view, the German military form 1870 to 1919 was above all defined by a near-complete elevation of tactics over strategy, leading in turn to a near-total rejection of the essentially political nature of warfare. Put simply, the German military assumed that any war could be won simply by destroying the opposing army--or, more specifically, by rapidly achieving a total encirclement of the enemy forces and effecting their "absolute destruction." 

Strategy, then, was in a sense totally replaced by tactics; and the combination ultimately destroyed both. On the one hand, German tactics were drastically distorted by the overwhelming need to create sudden, decisive engagements that would presumably win wars by themselves--an emphasis that was arguably as responsible for belief in German charisma as the product of it--while German strategy became in Hull's telling not only intrinsically productive of atrocities such as the Herero Genocide and the reprisals and massacres and forced labor of French and Belgian civilians in WW1, but more importantly more or less inevitably doomed to defeat.

As Hull clinically lays it out in great detail, Germany entered WW1 without any achievable war goals at all. Their only tactical goal was to rapidly mobilize, rapidly maneuver, and rapidly encircle and destroy both the French and the Russian armies--and once that failed to happen, they mostly just tried to do the same thing again and again. Even if they had succeeded, however, it is far from clear how this would have translated into a war victory for Germany; since in fact neither the German government nor the German military had any tangible plans for what to do with the French and Russian governments and peoples, let alone the British Empire. German attempts to govern the Occupied Territories through reprisals and forced labor produced outrage and never-ending conflict, and never achieved any degree of stability. 

As it turned out, however, the Battle of the Marne was lost, so it was at no point really feasible even tactically for the German military to achieve absolute destruction of the enemy armies. Ironically, this produced quickly total military control of the German government, and a series of strategic offensives aimed at achieving absolute destruction regardless of the costs, provisions which, even where they were tactically effective, were strategically counterproductive and made victory more and more unlikely. 

As Hull points out, it was the continual and indeed constitutional subordination of all political and ethical goals to rapid tactical victory that led to nearly all the German atrocities of WW1, just as it had earlier led to the genocide of the Herero in Africa, where any kind of resistance led to militarized reprisals which in turn generated more resistance and led to more severe reprisals and attempts to achieve the "absolute destruction" of rebels through mass deportation and other drastic measures. At the same time, the logic of the subordination of everything to military tactics made the German military treat civilians entirely as obstacles and means to achieving tactical victory on the battlefield. This led naturally to the internment and deportation and forced labor of huge numbers of civilians from the Occupied Territories, as well as the deliberate destruction of villages and towns and indeed nearly everything human along the French frontier. Yet as Hull points out, while all this served certain tactical purposes, it raised so much outrage in the French and English governments and populations as to push any kind of negotiated settlement ever farther from reach--or even any kind of long-term annexation and governance of captured territories. Without either a negotiated settlement or stable annexation and governance of captured territories, though, Germany could never in fact win World War One.

The most famous example of German tactical obsession leading to strategic defeat, though, came in the events that led to American entry into WW1. American accounts naturally tend to paint the decision by America to enter WW1 mostly in terms of American politics and ideology and the personal decisions of Woodrow Wilson--and much less in terms of German decisions and policies. As Hull lays it out, though, the entire German High Command and military government was completely certain that a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare would lead in short order to American entry into the war; and just as certain that American entry into the war would lead in relatively short order to German defeat.

Nevertheless, the German military government ultimately chose to inaugurate a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against civilian shipping regardless. They did so for the very simple reason that they saw such a policy as the only way to achieve a rapid, totalizing victory over the British Empire by destroying the British Navy and starving the population into submission--and because as prospects for a rapid and total military victory on the Continent grew ever more unlikely, they became if anything even more desperately fixated on the idea of achieving rapid and total military victory.

As the German naval commanders insisted, so rapid and so decisive would their victory over the British be that America's entry into the war would be irrelevant; by the time American soldiers began showing up in Europe en masse England and France would already have surrendered and the war would be over. As it turned out, every part of this plan was a fantasy; sinking lots of British and American ships and starving the British population did not in fact cause Britain to surrender, but if anything increased popular resolve. And then, of course, America entered the war, and, as the German military government had correctly predicted, the Germans lost. 

While "inevitable" is a difficult word to use about any historical event, it is hardly too much to call the Germans in WW1 "self-defeating." Still, while this particular example is both extreme and specific, the lesson here is by design almost entirely general and universal: no degree of tactical victory necessarily leads to strategic victory, for the simple reason that strategic victory is always primarily political while tactical victory is always merely military. Destroying an army is simply not the same thing as negotiating a treaty or taking over a government or even annexing and ruling a town or city or province. It can under some circumstances be a means to achieving those goals; and under some circumstances, it (and/or the means chosen to achieve it) may in fact become an obstacle to victory. 

It is this which happened to the German military in Africa and in WW1; and it is also this which happened more recently to the Israeli military in Gaza. As matters stand, the War in Gaza has been an absolute defeat for the State of Israel on more or less every level imaginable, to such an extent that it has in my judgment created conditions that taken on their face seem to spell the inevitable end of the state of Israel as it now exists. 

That this complete strategic defeat has been more or less entirely caused by a never-ending series of tactical victories makes the War in Gaza perhaps the purest example of Hull's thesis in all of history. Dropping a bomb on civilians from a plane is by definition and absolutely inevitably a tactical victory. Doing it in such a way as to render a territory you are trying to govern permanently ungovernable and a population you are trying to pacify a constant source of new enemies and a threat you are trying to nullify even more a threat is by definition and absolutely a strategic defeat. That in doing so you also manage to permanently alienate all those foreign groups, including the American Jewish diaspora, the American general public, and the entire continent of Europe, on which your country depends for its short-term economic and military survival is merely the apocalyptic icing on the proverbial absolute defeat cake.

A war originating entirely from within the military class, aimed at merely tactical military goals, and in no way affecting anyone outside of a military organization is not really even conceivable; and it is by definition not winnable. 

From this point we can derive an even more general truth about militaries and their relationship with politics and governance. Properly understood, a military is always an effect of a particular set of essentially non-military political or social conditions, as well as a means to a set of ends and outcomes that is in itself non-military. From this follows the necessary conclusion that military systems and goals can only function reliably when and to the extent they are subordinated to broader political and ethical ends. 

Hence, in the most philosophical sense, "military government" is simply a contradiction in terms.

In actual history, though, "military government" is a term that can be taken in multiple, albeit related, senses. If by military government one merely means a government in which military officials act as the political rulers, a military regime can exist somewhat stably, and even fulfill its purposes somewhat well, to the extent that military and political goals coincide or to the extent that military officials are able themselves to subordinate military to political goals. 

If, however, by military government one in fact means a government where military concerns and goals predominate over political concerns and goals, then a military government is simply not a government at all, but always and by definition a tyranny doomed to destruction. And the real difficulty with even the former is that it has a very strong tendency to turn into the latter. 

Military, INC: Inside's Pakistan's Military Economy (2004)

This academic volume by the Pakistani scholar Ayesha Siddiqa is a fascinating look into the reality of what American global hegemony has looked like for quite a large proportion of the world's population over the past seventy years: which is to say, not modernity or democracy or liberalism or conservatism or any of the other isms beloved of Western intellectual theorists, but rather development economics and direct or indirect military rule. 

The genius of Siddiqa's book, however, is that it directly joins these two factors into one, showing in great detail both how a certain vision of economic modernization and development drives military rule, and how the reality of military rule sets the terms and goals for economic modernization.

In this, Siddiqa challenges the limited perspective that sees in modern militaries merely a institution for waging war, a more or less passive tool for political or ideological ends and actors. The military of Pakistan has not always ruled the state directly: in fact, only about half of the nation's lifespan so far has been spent under a regime led by a military official. Even where the military was not ruling directly, though, it has been impossible to understand the military apart from politics, and impossible to understand politics without the military.

It is hardly too much to say that since the country's inception the military of Pakistan has served as the central, irreplaceable core of both the Pakistani state and the Pakistani economy.

Just last year, the 27th Amendment to the Pakistani constitution granted the head of the Pakistani Army Asim Munir, largely responsible for the overthrow of the previous Prime Minister Imran Khan (previously brought to power with the support of the military) and the brutal repression of his supporters, a new title and office as overall "Chief of the Armed Services," as well as granting him lifelong immunity by rank from all prosecution or imprisonment. Munir is widely seen both within Pakistan and internationally as the most important man in the country, overshadowing the civilian Prime Minister and President. Pakistan, I hasten to say, is not at the present day officially ruled by the military.

Yet the power of the Pakistani Armed Forces has not come merely in and through what we would consider straightforward "military" or even "military-industrial" activities: security operations, munitions factories, wars with India and Bangladesh, and so on. Pakistan has been at war for much of its history, but mostly in rather small-scale conflicts with its neighbors--certainly nothing remotely approximating the nation-defining victories that made and broke the German Imperial military. Rather, the military has been from its inception a complex melange of institutions and relationships embodying a singular, intertwined model of politics, economics, sociability, ethnicity, and ideology. This makes the Pakistani military a much more useful model for the post-"Great War" era of global history, where war has been ever more and more distanced and privatized and reduced in intensity while becoming ever more commonplace. 

Here, though, is the basic problem: if the ideology of a military government relies on the idea that members of the military possess a unique charisma and proclivity for victory, how can this charisma function when the nation is at peace? Or, more philosophically: how can one privilege military goals over political goals if the military itself does not? Or, more simply: how can a military dominate society if they don't fight?

Well, one very straightforward answer is to point out that even when they are not fighting, a military organization can still make a lot of money for its members.

To understand the Pakistani military, then, one must understand that it is in the present day as much, if not more, driven by profit as by any military or even ideological goal. To understand the Pakistani military, then, one must understand its Milbus: a somewhat annoyingly academic acronym for "military business." This "milbus" is a vast and largely unmeasured field where a mix of serving and retired military officials engage in economic activity unrelated to military goals, but supported by military power. 

This takes a few distinct forms. 

1) Each major service in Pakistan runs a "Welfare Foundation" which is formally distinct but which is supposed to earn money to support retired soldiers and to provide guaranteed jobs for them upon their retirement from the military; these Foundations in turn own many, many businesses, ranging from farms to cement factories to bus companies, that use their connections with the military to gain preferable treatment or even at times exemption from laws to earn profits that are then taken up by the senior management and expended in unclear ways for the alleged benefit of the services. 

2) The military periodically annexes private land for state purposes, which often amount more or less to just making a profit. This has resulted in a number of public disputes in which entire villages have been forcibly annexed or else put under crushing 'feudal' taxes and/or where lake fishing rights have been taken over by the military, depriving all locals of their existing livelihoods. These public conflicts, though, are only thet ip of the iceberg in a much more widespread process and reality, and one often driven less by literal legal annexation as by de facto feudal "overlordship" of wealthy military officials over ordinary Pakistani farms and villages.

3) The military openly uses state land to provide housing and education for its service members, using government funds to build up entire military compounds and an entire parallel education system for service members (that has increasingly also admitted civilians at exorbitant rates). More importantly, state land appropriated by the military both in cities and in the countryside has been pervasively "developed" in an essentially corporate way, built up and rented out to civilians and civilian (or ex-military-run) businesses for a profit.

4) State land is frequently directly privatized and given to serving or retired military personnel as a perk, both within cities and in the countryside; this land is in most cases developed for business or housing or agriculture and used to generate large private profits for the owners, but in some cases is merely used to build mansions.

5) A large number of formally private businesses with no direct attachment to the Foundations or the Military are in fact run by retired military personnel. These businesses frequently enjoy preferential treatment from the government and themselves favor other retired military personnel in hiring and contracts; the same is true to a lesser degree within the civilian government bureaucracy. 

Taken as a whole, then, it is hardly too much to say that the Pakistani military is not primarily a military at all, but a kind of centralized, bureaucratic for-profit corporation--or, more accurately, an extension of the militaristic, hegemonic, centralized, bureaucratic, but nonetheless profit-driven project of colonialism that birthed it.

Still, the roots of this remarkable economic empire cannot be easily reduced to one factor. First, it is true that the Pakistani military is the one major institution to continue uninterrupted from the period of British colonial rule, where the largely native military hierarchy was considered crucial by the British to maintaining order and furthering colonial rule and modernization not only in what is now Pakistan, but also throughout the entirety of the Indian subcontinent. While democratic institutions were weak to nonexistent upon the country's founding, then, the military had the armaments, organization, and self-confidence to rule. In all this, it should be said, there is a direct parallel between the Pakistani and German Imperial military, which in its pre-existing state as the Prussian Army was one of the few institutions to carry on uninterrupted and actually increase in power after the founding of the German Empire.

Secondly, the Pakistani military is systematically drawn from only a few of many ethnic groups within Pakistani society, with a prevailing Punjabi ruling elite that has historically viewed other Muslim ethnic groups with prejudice. This was most visible in the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence, which was precipitated by the refusal of the Pakistani military to accept the results of an election that saw ethnic Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan win a majority in the national Parliament; in response, the military removed the Bengali politicians from office and began a campaign of what is now widely considered genocide in East Pakistan. Similarly, in a society divided between members of different states, the German Imperial military systematically favored Prussians for higher office, and in practice acted as a tool for the dominance of Prussia over the rest of Germany.

Thirdly, and closely related to the former, is the extremely strong ideology of superiority found throughout the Pakistani military. Many of the military officials' interviewed by Siddiqa for her book, or quoted by her giving public remarks, were direct and emphatic in their belief that the true reason for the Pakistani military's relative strength was not any greed or lust for power on their part, but merely the inevitable result of the competence and honesty of military officers on the one hand, and the incompetence and corruption of civilian politicians and business elites on the other. The reason, the military officials alleged, that the Welfare Foundations dominated so much of the economy, while ex-military-officers took on more and more important rules in infrastructure and economic life, was simply that military men always and everywhere simply did a better job than their rivals. Even extraordinary government actions, such as those that gave the military a monopoly on building roads and railroads and developing agriculture and real estate and total control of port infrastructure did not originate in any unjust cronyism, but in simple recognition of this basic reality.

(Siddiqa's own research, in contrast, shows that Foundation businesses have exceptionally poor records and have survived only due to pervasive favoritism and bailouts by the government and military; also that ex-military-officers tend to show worse performance than civilians in nearly every role, with jobs treated more as sinecures and rewards for past service than serious duties. Evidence of pervasive corruption within the military, the Foundations, and ex-military corporations is also not wanting.)

Fourth, and arguably most importantly in Siddiqa's treatment, is the pervasive role of an ideology of development, modernization, and Westernization in granting the military greater legitimacy both within the Pakistani government and, importantly, with many consecutive American administrations. Put simply, while the military echelon is emphatically not the most competent or least corrupt echelon within Pakistani society, they are and have been perhaps the most thoroughly Westernized group. In this, the importance of the military's limited ethnic makeup and subsidized education system cannot be overrated; as well as the proclivity of upper officers for sending their children to study in British and American universities. Given a belief that Pakistan must develop and modernize and secularize in a broadly Western direction, the military is the obvious choice for the "spearhead" for this process. And, as Siddiqa points out, the role of the United States of America in systematically favoring and funding the Pakistani military even at the expense of civil society and civilian governments is well-documented.

When we broaden our perspective slightly, we will simply notice, as Nick Cullather points out in his magnum opus The Hungry World, that during the Cold War the model of "development economics" championed by the United States government and private entities like the Rockefeller Foundation as a counterweight to Soviet communism--based on government subsidies for agriculture and the at-scale forced adoption of American-bred seeds, large-scale irrigation works, and artificial nitrogen fertilizers to increase grain yield and gain control over native peasantries--led everywhere it was enacted to authoritarian and usually military governments. 

We might also note that at various times American government officials averred their preference for military regimes in American client states, seeing them as more effective at promoting economic modernization and as more reliable allies against Communism. The chicken-and-egg question of which factor produced which--American preferences producing pro-Western military regimes, or pro-Western military regimes producing American preferences--is quite difficult to answer.

Still, when taken as a whole, we can see the outlines of a true ideology or even belief system of military rule, as well at least some conditions that favor the practical success of that ideology: a weak political system, often only recently originated, a multi-ethnic society in which one or a few ethnicities already tend to view themselves as superior to others, and above all a single, unifying goal that at least elites see as overridingly necessary to accomplish by any means necessary. 

The ideology of military rule is always an ideology of superiority; sometimes in part an ideology of racial or ethnic superiority, sometimes merely an ideology of greater competence or better education or even a superior cultural outlook. It is generally, though, an ideology that sees military personnel as constitutionally better capable of carrying out practical and symbolic tasks alike. Most importantly, though, the ideology of military rule is typically grounded on the conceptualization of an overriding goal that must be pursued at all costs, regardless of the violence and sacrifices involved, and the belief that the military is the only institution or at least the best institution for carrying out that goal.

Of course, any military is in essence a highly-structured and specially-trained organization for conducting warfare--and hence is logically assumed to be better at carrying out military tasks than civilian personnel or organizations. Hence, the most common, and arguably most logical form of military government is one established in the context of and for an existing war. As already stated, many thoroughly Western and even liberal societies transformed more or less completely into military governments in anticipation of and/or in response to and/or merely for the duration of the World Wars; and all of them eventually changed back.

As the German example shows, however, a military government is not necessarily or even often the best regime type at actually winning wars; and even where such war-oriented governments are more or less successful, they rarely last all that long. One war may be won, and another started, or even an indefinite succession of such wars; but sooner or later, the destructive effects of warfare always outweigh the benefits, and people en masse choose, as they always eventually do, death over life, and politics over military.

For military rule to be securely established in the long run, then, a belief must exist in at least military personnel themselves, and to some extent in the rest of society, that military personnel are more competent at carrying out non-military tasks and playing non-military roles. And, importantly, the tasks and roles at which military personnel are assumed to be better must be at least ideologically, and most likely also politically and societally, central.

Hence the absolute, overriding importance Siddiqa ascribes to the widespread development ideology of the modern Pakistani state. It is only in light of a widespread, pre-existing agreement among military and civilian elites, as well as among at least a decent proportion of the general public and the overwhelming majority of American governments and business elites, that the success or failure of the new Pakistani nation would be measured in terms of its economic and cultural modernization--which meant economically the building up of infrastructure and industry and culturally the expansion of education and cultural secularization and Westernization--that the widespread belief in the military's greater competence can be understood. 

(Admittedly, the military's greater competence at achieving these developmental goals is itself a very questionable thesis--with glaring evidence of incompetence and the counterweight of Western liberal ideologies being the main sources for the recurring downfall of military regimes and the recurring attempt to establish facsimiles of Western liberal democracy in Pakistan.)

As discussed in a previous post, the more popular (and likely much more prevalent) belief among the masses that the success or failure of the Pakistani state would be measured in terms of its conformity to Islamic law and values has itself been sufficient--despite the almost total lack of purchase of these goals with Pakistani elites--to empower a counter-elite of Islamic ulamma and a set of counter-institutions in proliferating madrasas and Islamist groups. 

The fundamental truth, though, which is universal in its scope, is that the legitimacy of a governing group is always measured against and dependent on a particular set of goals. Hence, to understand the likelihood of a particular governing group gaining or retaining political legitimacy, one must first understand what elites and/or the public see as the essential goals of the government and/or the nation as a whole. 

A second, very important takeaway from Siddiqa's study is that a much-neglected requirement for military rule is in fact the internal unity of the military; as well as the concomitant fact that economic and cultural factors tend to play the most important role in enabling that unity. 

Pakistan's military is in fact a highly hierarchical organization in which the upper echelons of the officer corps enjoy the overwhelming majority of economic and political opportunities alike. Indeed, even the upper officer corps has generally been structured in an extremely hierarchical and indeed monarchical way, with a pyramidal structure and a single ruling general (usually the Chief of the Army) exercising power with little in the way of challenge from the officers beneath him. At present, there are only two four-star officers in the Pakistani military, the heads of Air Force and Navy, while Asim Munir holds the only five-star commission in existence as both head of the Army and overall Chief of Defense Forces. Given the history of the Pakistani military, one might be forgiven for thinking that the upper echelon of officers is really much more frightened of their subordinates in the military than of any civilian government, let alone the public at large.

As Siddiqua concludes, the birth and growth of Pakistani milbus at scale has tended to follow, not the threat of civilian governments or movements, but rather perceived threats from within the lower ranks of the military. While the initial Fauji Foundation was established in 1954 by (mis)appropriating pension funds sent by the British government to provide for those who had served in the British military in WW2, the largest and most powerful Army Welfare Trust was established only in 1971 in direct response to the revolt of lower officers that precipitated the end of military rule in Pakistan for decades. The idea, such as it is, is straightforward: that the loyalty of lower officers and enlisted men can be bought, and that the price is not very high. 

By Siddiqa's chronicling, this model has been apparently successful. For while upper officers continue to monopolize the profits and advantages of military business, the lesser benefits provided even to lower officers and enlisted men--including scarce goods like jobs, housing, and education--have been sufficient to grant the Pakistani military a remarkable degree of cohesion even when pitted against the civilian population, and hence to reinforce the power of the upper generals both over the military and over Pakistani society as a whole.

Here, then, are the two essential benchmarks for anyone in America or the world who wants to measure the likelihood of military rule in their country. 1) To what degree does the military as a whole possess an ideology of superiority over civilians and civilian politicians? 2) Are the goals against which the government and nation are measured by most elites and/or the general public goals the military are seen as more competent and effective in achieving? 3) To what degree is the military as a whole, including lower officers and enlisted men, united by culture and shared economic interests?

Stalin as Warlord (1976)

It has been nearly a century, and the world has not yet gotten over Joseph Stalin.

Unlike his rival Hitler--a straightforwardly ideological character easy to mock and demonize--people still do not know what to make of this Georgian dictator, who at his height was the world's and probably the century's most powerful man. After all, who was Joseph Stalin? What did he want? What ideology did he stand for? Even after his death, even in the Soviet Union he had ruled, even people who had been terrorized or had murdered or terrorized others in his name did not know, really, what to make of him.

After all, here was a man who had liquidated the kulaks, imposed collectivization on the countryside, built heavy industry out of nothing, and electrified the country, or in short, did all the things Lenin promised but failed to do, and so for the first time completed the basic scheme of Soviet Communism, making the Soviet Union for the first time in a pervasive and meaningful sense Communist. So here was a Communist?

At the same time, though, here was a man who embraced international commerce, reopening the Soviet Union to trade with America and the West and freely collaborating with Western business leaders in the development of industry; a man who led a return to cultural and sexual conservatism; a man who embraced the dominance of ethnic Russians over minorities, who ruthlessly repressed Ukrainians and Tatars and Poles, who betrayed and exiled Jews; a man who made an alliance with Hitler; who built the Red Army into the greatest military machine in the world; who revived the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of state control; who empowered many former Tsarist military officers and utilized Russian nationalist propaganda in an openly Tsarist vein. So here was a conservative, a nationalist, a militarist, perhaps even a fascist?

Yet it is precisely these contradictions, this enduring elusiveness, that was at the core of much of Stalin's power and fascination both in the Soviet Union and in the West. In Politburo meetings, Stalin listened more than spoke, and rarely gave away what he was thinking or feeling. Foreign visitors noted how effortlessly he seemed to dominate everyone around him, the uncanny way rooms of blustering politicians went suddenly silent when he spoke, the fawning subservience with which brutal murderers rushed to light his cigars, the haunted fear in the eyes of generals and Bolshevist ideologues alike at the mere mention of his name. After his death, most of these men wrote memoirs, in which they spoke endlessly about his constantly smiling eyes, his face that betrayed no emotion, his penchant for calling meetings and listening quietly and betraying no reactions as others spoke, then rapidly dictating his own decisions without consultation or explanation. From the most technical questions of metallurgy and tank design and industrial chemistry to the most wide-reaching industrial and economic plans to the most personal evaluation of officials and generals at every level of the Soviet government, everything was in Stalin's hands: and what he said was final. 

How, though, did he manage to do this? How did one man for generations to single-handedly make every important decision involved in managing one of the two or three largest industrial economies and the single largest military and the most complex bureaucracy and one of the largest populations in the world? 

Or, perhaps more perplexingly: what did Stalin believe in? On what principle did he make all of those decisions? What did he stand for?

Perhaps the simplest answer would be to say that what Stalin stood for is what the Pakistani military has generally stood for; what many third-world regimes over the past century have stood for; and, to a significant degree, what many Americans on both Right and Left have come to stand for as our politics draws ever closer to complete consensus. This might be called, a la Pakistan, "development economics"; it might be called, more academically and propagandistically, "modernization"; it might be called, more negatively, "Imperialism"; it might also be called, more fashionably, "Abundance." More precisely, it might be called "industrialization and militarization": more vaguely and pejoratively, it could be called "fascism": perhaps most accurately, it could be called "nationalization."

Put simply, Joseph Stalin set out to centralize Eastern Europe around the Russian state, to rapidly industrialize its economy, and to expand and modernize its military. All his policy choices--though not all his individual decisions--are completely explicable if one keeps this goal in mind. 

He repressed and persecuted and sometimes committed genocide against ethnic minorities because they were threats to his goal of building a united Imperial state encompassing all of Eastern Europe; he favored Tsarist-style Russian nationalist propaganda and the Russian Orthodox Church because they got ethnic Russians to work and suffer and fight against ethnic minorities and Germans. On the other hand, he ruthlessly collectivized agriculture because he needed cheap labor for his factories, as well as cheap grain to sell overseas to acquire the money and heavy equipment and materials and mining and technical experts he needed to rapidly build up Russian industry. He sent convicts to Siberia to build up heavy industry in these regions far away from the front lines; and, later, to mine uranium and build laboratories and plants for his atomic program. His five-year plans killed millions because he deliberately took away land and grain from millions of people in the countryside (disproportionately ethnic minorities) so that he could sell that grain overseas to earn money that he used to import machinery and equipment and expertise that he then used to build factories that he supplied with raw materials mined by prisoners and on which he imposed unrealistic output quotas and draconian food rations and competitive labor systems: all with the quite rational and explicable goal of increasing industrial output and catching up with and eventually surpassing the heavily industrialized economies of Western Europe.

In all this, it cannot be emphasized enough, Stalin was on the whole successful. He succeeded in an absurdly short amount of time in turning the Soviet Union from a largely agricultural backwater with a weak central government to a centralized Imperial, industrial, and military powerhouse capable of grinding down the German military by sheer relentless force, conquering and occupying a huge proportion of Europe and the globe, and standing toe-to-toe with the United States of America for fifty years. 

So utterly morally and intellectually bankrupt are most contemporary American intellectuals that the above description will likely be read by many as a defense of Stalinism. It is very far from that: for the correct response here is that while Stalin was successful in achieving his goals, that his goals were in fact bad--or at least, that they were in no way remotely worth the millions of intensely valuable and interesting and beautiful things, including not only millions of human lives but also the freedom and happiness and dignity and joy of human souls, which he destroyed to achieve them.

Still, I cannot help noting that the core of contemporary American and increasingly global discourse centers on very similar goals--though not yet, thankfully, on identical means. A mechanistic system of brutal industrial expansion and militaristic plunder that also securely provides for those who work for it is in fact, it seems to me, the vision lurking behind much of what passes for economic and foreign policy on both Right and Left in America today.

More relevantly to our immediate goals are what Stalin's career shows us about the complexity of talking about a "military government" at all. The Soviet Union was never at any time directly ruled by military officers; nevertheless, there can be no doubt that from its beginning through the reign of Joseph Stalin and to its end, Soviet policy was frequently dominated by military concerns and interests. 

Also, more immediately, at no point in Soviet history up to Stalin was there a clear divide between military and civilian personnel. Lenin directly ran the Russian Civil War, conceiving and approving and ordering and commenting on individual operations in great detail and mostly by himself; and his subordinates in the Politburo, Trotsky and Stalin prominent among them, acted indistinguishably as Party commissars and generals, leading troops and planning operations and being sent by Lenin wherever he wished. 

This military focus and centralization was increased even further by Stalin's rise to power; and by the time of WW2, though Stalin had gradually restored much of the structure and personnel and even the uniforms of the Tsarist military, there remained little distinction between the allegedly civilian Politburo and Party committees, on the one hand, and the various military committees of the Red Army, on the other hand, since Stalin chaired them all. Though a separate military hierarchy existed by this time, Politburo members like Khrushchev and Molotov were freely sent to the frontline to carry out Stalin's orders and direct troops. Meanwhile, various generals and commissars were gathered at Stalin's command in Moscow with little consideration for who belonged to what organization; and final military decisions were always made by Stalin himself, who issued them in the name of whatever committee he chose. 

Nevertheless, there can be no question that for all the incredible militarism of the Soviet Union in its inception and under Stalin, the military hierarchy was never remotely close to being able to rule in its own name; and its personnel were far more subservient to Stalin and his Politburo associates than any officer in any Western nation. Western visitors frequently noted the pinched look of fear in the eyes of Stalin's generals, the silent panic every time he entered the room, and the cringing subservience to his every opinion and whim. Far from viewing themselves as a superior caste intrinsically more capable at dealing with both military and political tasks, career soldiers under Stalin viewed themselves as frightened, tentative second-bests, not only in matters of civilian politics, but even in directly military and indeed purely technical matters.

How was Stalin able to so thoroughly dominate the Soviet military? Indeed, how was Stalin able to so thoroughly dominate Russia? This is perhaps the true mystery of Josef Stalin and Stalinism both at the time and since; a mystery that for me is impossible to extricate from the more general question of charisma.

Stalin was certainly not charismatic in any straightforward sense. Nearly everyone who met him, from Winston Churchill to Georgy Zhukov, was struck by how unimpressive he was in person: a short, rather squat figure with an unexceptional face who avoided people's eyes, spoke little, always smiled but often seemed surly, and spoke Russian with a Georgian accent that many found clumsy or even comical. While it would be absurd to call Stalin stupid, relatively few people found him brilliant; people noted, rather, both his "peasanty" "shrewdness" and his lack of interest or facility in abstract topics. Lenin's secretary claimed that during the Russian Civil War, Lenin would select Stalin for assignments with the tag: "We don't need an intelligent man there--let us send Stalin." An intellectual he certainly was not, but rather someone obsessed with what he called "facts," which he used to solve practical problems on his own and according to his own lights. 

In this domain, though, Stalin certainly showed a remarkable ability to keep straight vast arrays of highly technical facts, crafting plans covering entire campaigns and economies in the most precise detail, and making difficult decisions on the fly and nearly always alone. Still, that these decisions and plans, both in the spheres of economy and strategy alike, were often poorly-informed, badly-conceived, and disastrous can hardly be denied. This was not really the result of incompetence, though, so much as drastic over-extension, itself rooted in an obsession with control that bordered on the psychopathic, and an equally pathological refusal to delegate power.

Still, despite these relative liabilities, Stalin managed to hold absolute power for decades over a nation of many millions, in the process wielding something close to absolute dominion over a vast technical and scientific and military and Party bureaucracy filled with scheming, plotting, equally ambitious, and in many cases much more competent officials. How did he do it?

The answer I have come to may appear surprising, and is not in itself drawn from any particular work: and that is that Stalin ruled largely on the basis of his unique and charismatic ability to dominate small groups of technicians in rooms and/or over the phone.

To understand why this type of charisma became so important in the 20th century Soviet Union, though, one has to understand more about the period in general, not only in Russia but to a great degree also in the West: and the actual systems and personnels that ruled nearly the whole world during this time. In this underlying structure, I would argue, lies the real reason why America has not, up to this point, become a formally military regime.

Unlike, say, Adolf Hitler or even Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin was not for the most part a mass or popular leader in the 20th century sense. Soviet technology and social structure alike rarely allowed him to interface directly with the public: his public addresses, even via radio, were rare and not particularly impressive. His first comment to the public during the German invasion came a full two weeks after the start of the war, and consisted of a rather curt call for victory. The "cult of personality" that struck Western visitors so forcefully--the constant invocations of Stalin's name, the ubiquitous plastering of his round smiling face onto every possible surface and object--was in fact largely a sign of unsophistication and therefore weakness. There was far more of a genuine cult of personality around Franklin D. Roosevelt or even Winston Churchill--it was simply expressed in more complex forms far more effective at falsifying reality. 

There can be no greater proof of this than the continuing Cult of Winston Churchill. In the British and popular press going back to the turn of the century (huge amounts of which I have read as part of my Researches into G.K. Chesterton) Churchill was viewed more or less across the political spectrum as a clumsy, unintelligent nepo-baby aristocrat and overtly cynical rabble-rouser with a penchant for brutality prone to shifting loyalties and positions alike for political gain, but during WW2 was abruptly and effectively transformed by British propaganda into a pure emblem of the nation's resolve, and is still largely remembered (especially by Americans) as nearly everything he was not: a clever, witty, intelligent, forceful man of principle. 

Churchill was not a populist; but he was a mass-democratic political leader in a society with ubiquitous mass-media, and so knew how to make comments for the newspapers and pose for photos and pretend to kiss babies and give radio talks and public speeches. Roosevelt, in a much more democratic society, knew how to do this far better; and so did Hitler. Stalin, though, was really only comfortable talking to small groups of his own subordinates. 

In this, the true significance of Stalin (and the Soviet Union more generally) is easily misunderstood. The early 20th century, it is true, was the age of mass democracy; but the mid-20th century was the age of the technical expert, the management bureau, and the planning committee. Viewed properly, Stalin was the leader to most fully embody the essentially technical and managerial (and hence conspiratorial) nature of political power in the 20th century: and the Soviet Union, as he quite correctly pointed out, was not behind but well ahead of the prevailing trends of its time.

Stalin was not good in public; he was not even particularly good at diplomacy, or indeed any other situation where he was forced to relate to others as at least nominal equals. In such situations, Stalin was both awkward and rather timid. Meetings with foreign diplomats made him so uncomfortable that before meeting a British delegation for dinner he reportedly spent hours memorizing fake anecdotes about his knowledge of English literature. In a small room with a technical committee, however, or in a private meeting with a subordinate, or even in a large Party meeting, he was terror incarnate.

Like very many people throughout the world in the mid-20th century, including very many in America, Stalin was someone who was acclimated to the kinds of highly technical, bureaucratic institutions that ran most of government and corporate and especially military life in both the Soviet Union and the West. Put another way, he was someone who was really only remotely comfortable operating as a cog in a highly hierarchical machine. True, in the Soviet system he happened to become the top cog, but he did so precisely by coming off to most potential rivals as an unassuming and background figure, a secretary who did not have much to say at meetings. Even as top cog, he was still an institutionalist above all else, someone who listened well and was good at coming up on the fly with highly detailed and distinctive opinions on every subject coming under the purview of the Soviet government--which is to say, all of them.

In all this, though, it is important to understand that Stalin was not primarily a technician, but an administrator, a manager--which is to say, the cog in the machine whose job was not to know anything, but rather to decide everything. It was his capacity to make snap decisions on any and every topic presented to him, from the type of signaling system to use to communicate with the front lines to the date when an offensive would begin to the precise material to use for tank treads. Technicians would present him with facts, and he would give them goals; technicians would present him with parameters, and he would give them decisions.

In the 20th century, Western institutions from Russia to America and back again were above all defined by the inherently hierarchical alliance of two extremely small and extremely specialized classes of people, which we may call simplistically technicians and managers. The role of the former group was to know things and build things; the role of the latter group was to deal with people and to make decisions. Together, they formed a durable social model, visible everywhere from restaurant kitchens to corporate offices to football locker rooms to the Oval Office, which we might call the "managerial-technical institution." 

The essential paradox of this highly successful system of governance, though, at least in the eyes of many 20th century people, is that it was the managers that always and everywhere ruled and dominated, and the technicians that served. More or less 99% of the idealistic and progressive and radical and utopian literature of the mid- to late-20th century consists of little more than various declarations that this state of affairs was stupid and it would be better if the technicians ruled instead.

For a good answer to the question of why this should not happen, though, we might simply look at the discussion of Germany and Pakistan above. What is true of military tactics is true, mutatis mutandis, of every technical institution and body and group and class in all of human history: that it exists entirely as an effect and means of essentially human and political institutions and goals. Where scientists are put in charge, they destroy science; just as when soldiers are put in charge, they cause defeats. 

Essential to the mindset of the technician in very society under heaven, then, has been a fundamental subservience, which considered rationally is not a psychological flaw but something approaching a practical necessity. Scientists, like soldiers, demand to be ruled; and if there is a flaw in the mindset that produces such men, it is that they are frequently too eager to be ruled and governed and directed by any person or group or institution whatsoever in the service of any ideology or goal whatsoever. Technicians are the straw of tyranny.

This essential bifurcation of classes and roles, I would argue, is probably the main reason both why the United States of America has shown a marked preference for military governments in its client states, and why the United States of America itself has never been ruled by a military regime. As the Empire in history most thoroughly dominated by a managerial class used to ruling and dominating a technician class, the leading men of America have naturally sought out or even created such technical classes in every place they have ruled. America did not expect Pakistan to govern itself, and did not want its leaders to relate to America's leaders as equals; hence, they naturally sought out within Pakistani a Western-style servile technical class to interface with, and happened to find it (as in most post-colonial societies) in the existing colonial military. When one sees the point in its broader light, one can note that the American preference for having its dependencies governed by servile technicians goes well beyond explicit military governments.

The same principle that dictates that America's dependencies must be governed by servile technicians, though, also dictates that America itself cannot be. Within and outside of America, the manager always rules over the technician, while the technician serves the manager. On this deceptively simple structure depends the managerial-technical institution, and therefore the success of the American Empire at its height.

But what makes for a good manager? 

The truth is, it is this question that is arguably at the core of many, if not at all, brands of contemporary American politics. For something has happened in America; something no one expected was ever possible. The managerial class that made the Empire is gone. Perhaps the managers failed and fell due to their own fault; perhaps they were overthrown from below; perhaps they were mysteriously replaced by usurpers; perhaps they simply vanished, returned to the Fairyland from whence they came. 

Hence in America today, one can simply observe numerous new classes, technicians and cultists and con men and television entertainers and streamers and bankers and arguably AI itself, battling for control of the levers of institutions built for a certain kind of managerial elite that seemingly no longer exist--and meanwhile create entire discourses and write lengthy books centered around nothing more or other than trying to understand just what made the previous managerial class so successful. Was it unions? Democracy? The Penguin Mindset? Racism? Magic?

Well, then: what does make someone a good manager? As an enshitifying world looks backward at the 20th century, desperate to reclaim some of the mojo that built the roads and dams and bridges and atom bombs we have inherited and left to decay, this question has acquired a certain urgency across the political spectrum. Academics and politicians and generals and influencers and consultants have all built entire careers off of pretending to reveal the secrets of the Managerial Class at its 20th century peak. 

If so many have failed, however, I suggest that it is in part due to not looking to the true peak and exemplar of 20th century Managerial excellence. 

The rise and dominance of the first truly managerial class in this sense during the latter half of the 20th century has been noted in many contexts, for many countries, and mostly in terms of capitalist rather than communist economies. In America, the term "manager" has mostly conjured up images of clueless bosses Peter Principled many levels above their area of competence, or even, perhaps, picked out via the Dilbert Principle precisely for their unrelenting stupidity.

I would put it to you, though, dear reader, that when we think of the rise of managerial elites in the 20th century, when we talk about the PMC or lazy girl jobs or pointy-head bosses or even Susan on the Parish Council, we should think first and foremost not of a data entry specialist with an account on Instagram or a Lesbian couple in Denver or even a soulless bureaucrat pushing paper across a spotless desk, but first and foremost of the most outstanding and successful Manager of the 20th century, and possibly of all time: which is to say, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Joseph Stalin. 

This kind of person, though, is remarkably under-studied in anthropological or moral or religious or even artistic terms. Despite being arguably the defining type for nearly every major political or economic or indeed religious movement of the 20th century, it is difficult to think even of much art focused on this sort of person--as opposed, say, to the oppressed employees working under them, say, or the individualistic outsiders working against them. There are popular shows about Jim Halpert, and popular movies about Spiderman: but where are the pop songs about Joseph Stalin?

The Great Purges of the Soviet Union under Stalin, which killed and imprisoned millions of people, among them many of the most devoted partisans of Communism in general and Stalin in particular,  confused and terrified many people throughout the world when they took place, and even now are often taken as a mystery to be explained through various inscrutable black boxes such as "ideology" and "Marxism" or "totalitarianism." As modern scholarship has quite definitely shown, however--and in particular Wendy Goldman's excellent Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, which I read a few years ago--the primary cause and goal of the Purges was in fact managerial. 

Put simply, Stalin's Five Year Plans had starved and terrorized and brutalized innumerable workers throughout the Soviet Union by drastically increasing output quotas in agriculture and industry alike while funneling food into exports to other countries to pay for heavy machinery and foreign experts to build an entire industrial economy out of nothing. The immediate means of this brutalization, though, were innumerable low- and mid-level managers, who had, following dictates from above, again and again cut rations and increased quotas and punished workers harshly for failing to meet standards. 

The Five Year Plan being over, however, the natural thing to do, both to relieve stress and strain among the workers and to insulate and protect the higher Soviet leadership from the inevitable backlash, was to allow and even encourage the workers to turn on and denounce and take active part in punishing the managers who had brutalized them, to treat them as scapegoats and force them to take responsibility as "wreckers" and foreign agents and ideological heretics for all the failures and harsh effects of Stalin's own policies. 

As Goldman points out, this managerial strategy was an enormous success in generating mass worker participation in and enthusiasm for the detection and denunciation and brutal punishment of their own managers--indeed, it ultimately generated far too much such enthusiasm, forcing Stalin to once again step in and relieve the strain caused by the Purges through the simple and oddly familiar expedient of blaming and punishing the NKVD agents and leaders involved in executing the Purges themselves. Through all these twists and turns, Stalin and the Party remained firmly atop the Soviet structure, and indeed grew more popular than ever. Considered morally and politically and economically, the Purges were an enormous and absolutely irrational waste; it is only when considered managerially, as a means to maintain control over subordinates at all costs, that they begin to make rational sense. 

If we take Joseph Stalin as our model for the managerial class of the 20th century, a few relatively easy conclusions emerge about the key features that made him a success:

1) The first, as discussed above, was a charismatic social ability to dominate small groups of subordinates in a room, grounded in turn in a complex and perhaps inimitable mix of social awkwardness, surliness, contempt, and indifference to all social norms and manners and propriety. Put simply, nearly everyone, whether Bolshevist activists, ex-Tsarist officers, or foreign diplomats found Stalin confusing and off-putting and uncomfortable and more or less impossible to predict or control; and in the highly social atmosphere of managerial-technical institutions, this gave him great, indeed overwhelming power.

2) Also required, though, was an essential technicity, an ability to rapidly assess lots of random facts and simplistic systems and speak and think entirely in terms of them. To dominate technicians as thoroughly as Stalin dominated them, Stalin had to be able to speak, to a limited extent, their language--not so much for the purpose of making decisions as for the purpose of being able to detect and punish mistakes and confuse and humiliate subordinates. Numerous very similar stories are told of Stalin unexpectedly challenging his subordinates' decisions with highly technical critiques, or suddenly demanding that they justify their decision in highly technical terms--and the difference between those who under such circumstances could rise to the occasion and justify their own position and competence while also giving Stalin the final say-so in what to do, and those who simply buckled under the pressure and either stubbornly held fast or immediately yielded, was to a very great extent the difference between those who stayed alive and those who died.

3) Equally required, though, was an essential stupidity, which is to say, a finally utterly reckless indifference to feasibility and efficiency and strategy and tactics and technicity and indeed reality itself. This trait, I would argue, played an essential role in allowing the manager to make decisions on any and every topic rapidly whenever called upon and override every objection. Stalin's objections to his subordinates' decisions and plans were sometimes technically sophisticated and perspicuous; sometimes, though, they were confused, ignorant, or downright nonsensical. The simple truth is, though, that no one person could ever conceivably be technically proficient in all of the areas that Stalin saw it necessary to maintain absolute control in. Without a willingness to say and do incredibly stupid things, Stalin simply could not have maintained the degree of control he did over his technicians, and probably would have fallen before them.

4) Of course, this stupidity necessarily results in poor decisions, and so an essential irresponsibility is also absolutely necessary, allowing one to rapidly shift positions on any and every issue whenever necessary, go back on decisions, shift blame onto others, and in general avoid any consequences from one's actions. That Stalin managed to wield so much power over so many while also effectively avoiding responsibility for nearly everything that happened under his rule and nearly everything he in fact did makes him perhaps the fullest embodiment of the modern obsession with power as the avoidance of responsibility ever to live. Measured against Stalin's overwhelming talent in this area, Donald Trump is barely visible.

4) The most important character trait necessary for a truly exceptional manager, though, as exemplified by Joseph Stalin, is ultimately simple mistrust. What made Stalin so truly exceptional, and so successful at every stage of his career, was that he fundamentally viewed every person and nation around him as a constant threat and behaved accordingly.

As Stalin as Warlord chronicles in exhaustive depth, Stalin's relationship with Nazi Germany was defined above all else by a fear and insecurity amounting to a permanent inferiority complex. Stalin believed that the Germans were better than the Russians at more or less everything, and so wanted to copy them in more or less everything--and also avoid a military confrontation with them at all costs. 

Admittedly, the degree of Stalin's obsessive fear of Germany led to one of the largest mistakes of his career, when he absolutely refused to believe that Hitler was on the verge of invading the Soviet Union even after numerous warnings from the Americans and British and his own intelligence services and military and German defectors. 

Oddly, though, this miscalculation was itself defined entirely by mistrust. Stalin was obsessed with the idea that the Germans were trying to trick him into thinking they were about to invade, that they were trying to provoke him into starting a war for them, or merely draw him into an aggressive enough stance that they could frame it as a provocation. Stalin flatly refused again and again at the request of his generals to mobilize the Red Army or put it in a properly defensive posture--because he was sure that even an aggressive tactical posture might be used by the Germans to manufacture a provocation. 

As it turned out, Hitler was not so complex; he merely wanted to invade the Soviet Union, not to trick them. Hitler, as all those who served under him testified, was a poor manager.

That the heart of the obsessively controlling managerial systems and classes of the 20th century is a pervasive moral mistrust of the world, other people, nations, peoples, and reality itself, may appear strange; but it is, considered in itself, rather straightforward. On the individual level, an obsessive need for control is practically always motivated by mistrust; and what is true for individuals is just as true for collectives. Stalin, to the greatest extent, conceivably, of anyone in human history embodied this ethos, and suffered accordingly. In the last few years of his life, an aging Stalin was heard by several witnesses remarking, as though to himself: "I'm finished. I trust no one--not even myself." And this might serve as a final epitath for both the man and his legacy.

There is a real sense, though, in which America in the 20th century was more defined by pervasive rule by managers than the Soviet Union. Both sides of the Cold War had their technical professionals, their Kurchatovs and Zhukovs and Oppenheimers and Tellers. In both sides, too, the technicians ultimately paid court to men whose principal qualifications were neither scientific nor military, but almost purely managerial. Harry Truman was certainly such a man; so, too, were all American Presidents from Truman until at least Ronald Reagan. Corporations were run by CEOs, governments by administrators, and churches largely and increasingly by lay trustees.

The truth is that nearly all the qualities that seem so foreign about Joseph Stalin--his elusiveness, his taciturnity, his fixed smile, his social dominance of small groups in a room, his making of snap decisions, his calling up and personally berating subordinates, his constant reshufflings and demotions of personnel, his habit of theatrically proposing toasts with water while pretending it was vodka, even his penchant for purges--would suddenly seem much more familiar if we merely shifted him from a Soviet Politburo meeting room to an American corporate boardroom.

And while in the Soviet Union managers and technicians alike were theoretically limited by the all-pervading ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which dictated both ends and acceptable means, in the United States managers typically had far more freedom to embrace management as an ethos unto itself.

As argued above, what is most notable about the Soviet Union for our present purposes is how much it was able to embrace militarism and military goals as the principle ones for the whole society, while still continuing to be ruled by managers and ideologues rather than soldiers. 

In this, the intrinsically subordinate nature of military operations and tactics certainly played a role--with Soviet generals and soldiers intuiting, quite correctly, that their efforts were ultimately aimed at strategic and political and ideological aims that they themselves lacked the expertise to coordinate--as did Stalin's deeply ingrained managerial ethos of control at all costs. When Stalin died, both scientists and generals were liberated, and quickly moved to regain as much autonomy as possible from the broader Soviet system, to varying degrees of success. So long as Stalin was alive, though, they did what he said--or suffered the consequences.

However, if we take "military government" not in its precise but in a broader moralistic sense--for a kind of anti-government defined by the elevation of one technical type of person and one set of technical and inherently subordinate goals over all others--then one could argue that both the militarized Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and the bureaucratized United States of the late 20th century were among the purest such governments in human history. 

For after all, if management is not an inherently subordinate thing, always and everywhere a means to some end outside of itself, then I do not know what is. A manager manages a group to attain an end--but the end cannot by definition be merely managerial. It must come from some other realm--politics, ethics, even merely personal vice. 

Hence, in most historical societies, the manager as a type has been always and everywhere a subordinate one--as in the Medieval world, where lay and clerical lawyers and scribes trained in universities but worked in royal and episcopal chanceries and the Papal curia under the firm control of hereditary nobles and dynastic royals and anointed priests, representatives and products of other, entirely separate orders of value. 

As Chesterton pointed out already in the early 20th century, there is nothing stranger and more unique in all of human history than the modern obsession with efficiency as a paramount end in itself. For after all, if efficiently achieving victory is presumably a good thing, then efficiently achieving defeat must be a bad one; and in no case whatsoever does efficiency in itself suffice to determine the goodness or badness of an action. Modern managers were above all else a class trained and dedicated to efficiently getting anything done--even such things as genocide or the nuclear annihilation of the human race. It is merely self-evident, on any understanding of politics whatsoever, that such people cannot be allowed to rule.

If we wish to speak of the true psychological and moral and intellectual sin involved in nearly all modern systems, we might call it merely the pervasive and systematic elevation of means over ends--of tactical success over strategic victory, of management over politics, of efficiency over morality, of all those things that exist from and for human persons over the good and dignity and community and happiness of human persons themselves. 

Castleview (1997)

Whatever else he is, Stalin is not a mystery. 

However extreme his behavior and effectiveness, Joseph Stalin lived and died according to a straightforward ethos of managerial control aimed at a quite straightforward set of managerial goals: the building up of the Soviet Union into a Great Power according to a consensus 19th century model of a centralized bureaucracy presiding over a managed industrial economy with high production quotas of heavy machinery and military equipment, a large and well-trained and well-equipped and professionalized military, and large subject territories with access to strategic resources and easily defensible borders. At this goal he succeeded, and was damned. In the process, he killed perhaps more people than any other individual in the history of the world.

The broader danger for which both "military government" and "managerial-technical institution" act as mere illustration and exemplar, is of a political system governed by a special type of person living according to a set of values and aiming at a set of goals that are radically disjunctive with, and radically in conflict with, the values and goals of ordinary persons: or, put alternately, a political system governed by a minority group systematically and professionally working towards a particular good in opposition to the common good. 

Considered philosophically, then, this would simply be Aristotle's tyrannical "oligarchy"--and in one form or fashion it remains the reality of nearly every modern government. 

As discussed above, though, in speaking of an America ruled by a bureaucratic-managerial class, I am some decades out of date. The managerial class in America is now quite visibly a class of servants--but servants to what?

One answer might be a new ruling class of technicians and tech billionaires, the uncoifed and uncongenial mavens of the new economy of Artificial Intelligence. Yet these people, too, are quite visibly servants--and the question of what they are serving is, if anything, even harder to answer. It might be a new class of scammers, financial and political, Internet-poisoned madmen self-consciously devoted to screwing over everyone else out of a ideologized murderous self-interest and/or a conspiratorial desire for self-protection. In America, at least, it is not yet the military; though perhaps it will be. 

The truth, though, I think, is that the people who rule America today, of whatever class or group or ideology, are best seen not as members of a class, but as devotees of a religion, which from one perspective is the ritualized worship of an utterly alien power that may be an AI superintelligence or the Market or the Media or the Bomb or merely Donald Trump, and from another perspective is merely the ancient cult of heroes and the worship of death. That the members of this religion are divided into numerous mutually hostile sects, that they squabble with each other over power and money and other goals, merely makes them like members of other historical religions. In all this, though, there is an essential mystery, indeed an essential mystagogy, that is quite finally foreign to the entire mindset of 20th century managers. The managers and technicians of the 20th century were rarely troubled by doubts about the goodness of efficiency and of achieving technical goals; and their efforts were buttressed by entire reams of elaborate ideology designed to convince them and everyone else that in doing what they were doing they were, in fact, actually working for the inevitable salvation of the human race. In contrast, nearly all the people who rule today genuinely do not know what goal they are seeking. Perhaps they are simply more honest; but they are certainly more confused.

What is equally certain is that the goals and values and interests of all such people--whether managers, technicians, soldiers, or our more modern equivalents--are in the final balance alien to, and frequently hostile to, that of ordinary human beings. And in this lies in essence the crisis of our times.

But what's so bad about being ruled by special people? 

As discussed previously, nearly all American popular art for more or less the last two centuries has been focused on the glorification of heroic, special people acting in special ways to achieve special goals and in the process wielding vast special power over ordinary people. This is obviously, among other things, a description of a political system.

When Spiderman surprises a group of robbers, beats them, and leaves them tied up on the sidewalk, he is exercising some of the most essential functions of governments, executing and enforcing the laws and punishing malefactors. He has the right to do this because he is special.

More impactfully, when in Avengers: Infinity War: Endgame a small cabal of superheroes use corporate resources to build a time-travel device and a weapon of mass destruction which they use to kill every member of an enemy space army and bring a bunch of people back to life. They have the right to do this because they are special.

From one perspective, this rule by special people is simply aristocracy, perhaps even Aristotle's idealized aristocracy, the rule of the best and most virtuous members of society, though how Tony Stark and Joseph Stalin fit into this picture may appear somewhat unclear. Considered less moralistically, one might say this is simply the inevitable rule of the homo imperialis, a special type necessary for the networking and communication and hence governance of any sufficiently large and diverse collective.

Consider, though, the perspective of an ordinary person, a non-special person, living in such a society--a society ruled by special people, people whose values and goals and interests are not merely different from, but entirely incongruent to his own. Imagine that these special people have their own relationships with each other, friendships and rivalries and oppositions and alliances, that are necessarily inscrutable to him for the simple reason that he has no access to the hidden knowledge and alien goals and shared specialness these relationships are all based on. Sometimes the special people seem to want him, for some reason he cannot understand. Sometimes, though, they do not even seem to know he is there. Sometimes, they hurt him; sometimes they kill him. But is he a valued sacrifice, or just collateral damage? How can he know?

I am on record as saying that despite being a certified Gene Wolfe Fan and one of the few people in the world who claims to understand Gene Wolfe, I do not like most of his novels all that much. Castleview belongs to the very short list of exceptions to this rule; though unlike such perfectly crafted masterpieces as Peace and such bizarre and sprawling triumphs as The Book of the New Sun, it is both quite slim, and may in fact be genuinely inscrutable. 

Gene Wolfe's works are often accused of being mysterious and impossible to understand--but are most often simply cleverly constructed but quite straightforward tales of life in a multi-level reality torn between transcendence and nonbeing. 

Castleview, though, is by design different from all this; it is perhaps, considered properly, Wolfe's most thoroughly perspectivist work, and also among his most atmospheric. At no point in the narrative do any of the human characters understand what is going on; and we share their limited perspectives, never breaking free of them at any point in the story.

Even for an experienced Wolfe reader such as myself, then, it is very difficult to say what happens in Castleview, or who is making it happen, and for what. Compared to Wolfe's other works, Castleview has received more or less no sustained analysis in the academy or online--with much of that analysis that exists merely noting how much the story seems designed around deceptions and illusions.

To a very great extent, though, this lack of understanding is the entire point of the story, which in its most immediate sense is a series of riffs and remixes and syncretisms and narrativizations and atmospheric reflections on European and American folklore. According to Castleview, implicit in all this folklore is the idea that there exists alongside human society and civilization another society, hidden and elusive, with its own rules and laws and goals and conflicts and powers. 

In the novel, this concept is embodied and symbolized by the Castle, a floating building sighted periodically by inhabitants of the small Midwestern town of Castleview. Many people within the town have seen this building, generally floating near sunrise or sunset or the early morning hours; but most do not believe in it, thinking it merely an optical illusion or cloud formations or a distant glimpse of Chicago. Even visitors to Castleview see it; and most simply do not know what to make of it, and go on with their lives.

Yet the Castle, as it turns out, is inhabited by beings that we might call fairies or elves in the Irish sense--but which are also associated at various points in the narrative with UFO aliens, ghosts, vampires, Norse gods, trolls, jinn, werewolves, Bigfoot, and various and sundry other elusive figures from European and American folklore. These beings are quite real, and quite capable of acting in our world. In the opening of the novel, one of them murders a man in broad daylight--and later attempts to buy his house. Some are merely attacked; some are kidnapped and mysteriously returned; others, like the dead man's wife, merely have strange people and dead dogs show up at their doorstep.

Oddly, though, these beings do not seem at one with each other; they seem, in fact, to be in conflict with each other, for reasons that are unclear. Some of these conflicts may simply be feigned, though; and how would anyone know the difference? 

Nor is it always possible anyway to tell if and when these beings are around. For some of these beings are pretending to be humans, and doing quite a good job at it. Teenage girls, paranormal investigators, and the family dog may all turn out to be fairies; or, even, perhaps, your grandmother.

No narrative description can really convey the atmosphere of Castleview, which is among Wolfe's most masterful in all his works. Every chapter is a condensed portrait of confusion, of the strange prickling you get on the back of your neck when you feel you are being watched, of the even stranger sensation when you see someone or something looking at you, and realize you do not know what they want from you, and what they are about to do to you, and why. A teenaged couple stops by the side of a tiny road in the dark to give a lift to another young couple standing by a broken-down car, who may be ghosts. A woman gets into a locked car, and finds a teenaged girl waiting for her, who claims to be French but speaks sometimes with an American accent, who claims to be a resident at a summer camp, but who may be a vampire. A man feels a presence he cannot place and hears music he cannot recognize played in an empty museum, then recognizes the sound of breaking glass, and descends the stairs to find his companion gone. A woman finds her dog, who has recently been killed, alive in her kitchen, and feeds him cheerios; and a minute later he vanishes, and a bearded man knocks on her door, who claims to be an investigator, but who may be a werewolf, who may also be Bigfoot, who may have been the dog. And when they reach the Castle...

Well, what do these strange beings, this strange and inscrutable ruling class, actually want with us? As hints throughout the story suggest, one thing they seem to want is to find a descendant and heir of King Arthur; though some of them seem to want to find him so he can do something for them, and some of them only seem to want to find him to kill him. And anyway, who is the heir of King Arthur? Or rather, a better question might be: who isn't an heir of King Arthur? More or less the only comment in interviews Gene Wolfe ever made on this most elusive of his works was to point out the basic irony that, thanks to the nature of genetics, if King Arthur ever existed, more or less everyone with any British descent in the world would be his descendent. But do the fairies know this? And would they care if they did?

In the end, our apparently human heroes unite to go to the Castle to fight a battle against what appears to be a hostile force of fairies. But as they wonder out loud, perhaps there are fairies on both sides, and what appears to be a struggle between fairy and human is in fact merely an internal power struggle between different factions of fairies. Is one faction good, and the other evil? And how would one know?

Or perhaps what appears to be a battle is not a battle at all, but something else. As Gene Wolfe was well aware, a significant scholarly tradition holds that many of the events depicted in the Arthurian mythos are in whole or in part derived from ancient Celtic rituals that may have to some extent centered around or allegorically depicted natural processes, including some kind of vegetal myth of the slaying of the old year by the new, of the spring by the winter. In the Castle is an old man whose name is the Celtic word for Winter; and in the final battle a Green Knight is slain who may be in some sense Spring. But then, all of this may be as allegorical for the fairies as it appears to be for us; a social ritual, perhaps, or even some sort of political process. How, again, would we know? 

Anyway, in the end our human main character Will Shields steps forward, and takes on the role of champion fighting in single combat against someone who a moment ago had pretended to be his ally and human, who is in fact a fairy and a werewolf and the champion who slays King Arthur in the person of his heir. And our hero dies, and the battle ends, and our presumably human characters return home to resume their lives. But the teenaged boy finds that his new stepfather is the werewolf who slew the King, and wonders what his half-brother will be like; and he does not know what is becoming of his girlfriend, whose own father is dead, or perhaps not dead at all, but merely taken far away by a woman who is a ghostly hitchhiker and princess of the fairies and sister of Arthur...

In any case, it is not my intention in this essay to spoil every twist and turn of this extremely atmospheric and terrifying literary ghost story. Properly understood, it is impossible to spoil, for the simple reason that it is nearly impossible to say what actually happens, and why.

For the moral and practical purposes of encouraging and directing action, a single good image, or a single atmosphere, are worth far more than a thousand words. Analytical discussions of the PMC or the military or the political elite or even Melania Trump all in my view pale in comparison to the single image of the Castle, floating just out of reach, and sending its agents down into the human world: or the single, prickling atmosphere of someone realizing that there is a strange being in the room with him.

The real threat of our time, I think, is that the pace of tyranny is increasing faster than the imaginative ability of people to grasp it. We already live in a place and time when elites can use omnipresent listening devices to access the most personal information of anyone, anywhere, for purposes that are for ordinary people entirely inscrutable. We already live in a place and time when invisible drones, floating just out of the blue, can launch missiles to kill nearly anyone, anywhere, at any time, for purposes that are for ordinary people entirely inscrutable. And the real import of AI as a political program driven and directed and enabled and even paid for more and more by governments rather than consumers, I am becoming more and more convinced with each passing day, is that the powers of this age really think they can use it to create military technology that will allow them to kill more universally and effectively and without responsibility or recourse or retaliation than ever before.

And, most importantly, we already live in a place and time when elites the world over are acting out of motivations and for goals that are for ordinary people as inscrutable as finding the lost heir of Arthur to enact a ritualized battle in fairyland--to manipulate unreal motions in unreal markets through false information, to earn more unreal money through mathematical calculations, to buy and sell unreal tokens, to create fake videos of fake people doing fake things simply to trick people, to achieve virtual goals for virtual audiences, to fulfill insane ideologies from the depths of unreality, to create machine gods, to avoid machine hells, to love machine women, to die in a ritual and come back again. To such people, as for the gods of Ancient Greece or the elves of Castleview, we are little more than flies.

For this essay, then, Castleview provides perhaps the best conceivable argument for why a military government, or any other government ruled by an insular class of people with hidden and alien goals and values, is something that must be avoided at all costs, and dismantled and destroyed everywhere it presently exists. 

In this lies the crisis of our time, and its only possible resolution.