The Next One Is Always The Enemy

In the comments for the previous post (The King of Cattle), Clovis wrote: "The next one is always the enemy..." I started responding in a comment, but I decided to make this verbiage its own post because it was getting a bit far off topic. And hey, I haven't posted in a while, so two birds with one post and all that...

I think viewing others as enemies is an inherent part of the human condition. Anyone not part of our tribe(s) is a potential enemy and we (many of us) are continuously monitoring those outside our tribes for signs and symptoms that they are the enemy and the most trivial bit of evidence is taken as conclusive that they are indeed the enemy.

I believe that the period from the end of WWII until now (and hopefully at least a while longer) was one of a very unusual and probably unsustainable peace and a workable type of tolerance. By workable type of tolerance I mean this: sure, there was still plenty of suspicion, prejudice and hate between tribes/nations, but the world was so weary of war and violence that for those decades a substantial majority of people were willing to tolerate otherness and perceived slights, insults, injuries, etc. without a willingness to try to obliterate that otherness or right the wrongs of the slights, etc.

Sure, that's a tremendous simplification and yes, I'm aware of other factors like amazing prosperity on the one hand and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) on the other had a lot to do with the workable tolerance as well. For example, MAD allowed us to still have the "other" to hate, an enemy to blame the ills of the world on, but in this case we were able to do it without massive war (barely!). However, that fits into this paradigm I'm describing here fairly well.

From an evolutionary point of view, our capacity (and dare I say need?) to hate could very possibly have a purpose: to spur us to violence and war to take out competing strains of DNA. Hitler used DNA supremacy as a reason for genocide, but Hitler was neither the first nor the last leader to hate the Jews and the Jews themselves are not immune from hating.

Note that I'm not saying that hate and genocide are moral, right, excusable, or anything like that. Instead, I'm saying that to be moral we have to fight with everything we have against our own inherent human nature and if we let down our guard for even a brief instant, horrific evil can and often will follow. Even worse, it's almost certain that from time to time our vigilance will slip and violence, war, genocide and other massive atrocities will follow.

Some of us were alive and aware during WWII. I wasn't born until after WWII but my parents' generation was very, very much aware of the horrors of that war and the memories of WWI. It seemed to me that those wars had an extremely powerful antiwar effect on that generation and on their children (such as me). Now that period is ancient history and even the cold war is something most of the younger generation has only a dim awareness of.

Having very real and mortal enemies is long past, so our younger generation is looking for new ones. And sure enough, they find enemies everywhere they look. Some of the ones looking hardest for enemies are called Social Justice Warriors.

The "Social Justice" part of that label is interesting because it begs the question of whether or not there's a difference between "Justice" and "Social Justice." If they're the same thing, why waste the space by prepending the word "Social"? If they're different, another way of saying something that isn't "Justice" in "Injustice" which is both shorter and perhaps less misleading. [Note that this observation isn't original to me but I can't find a link at the moment in order to give proper attribution]

But the more important part of that phrase is "Warrior." What we have is a fairly large group of people who very much want to be warriors. In other words, to find enemies to hate and fight. They claim to hate and fight those who hate, yet they're obviously uninterested in hating their own hate.

I would say, like many who've come before them, they've let down their guard against their own human nature and I doubt that anything good will come of it and perhaps evil will arise instead.

Insurance

If you were a tiny secretive country, with a wrecked economy run by semi-slaves, and no influence whatsoever beyond your disputed south borders with your far richer nemesis, how would you keep up with the mighty pressure of the most powerful country (and military) the world has ever seen?

Well, you buy insurance, and a nuclear one at that. Kim Jon-un, though relatively young, witnessed in his lifetime what happened to Iraq, Libya and Syria after they gave up their nuclear ambitions. So, contrary to the assumptions in part of the media (‘crazy fat boy’) covering the North Korea imbroglio, Mr. Kim is acting, up to now, as a very rational player.

China, confronted by Mr. Trump to provide a solution on North Korea (NK) - i.e. going against a State it sees as a buffer and ally - while at the same time being challenged over its South China Sea expansionism by the USA, is also acting as a rational player, and doing not much beyond theatrical concessions. 

The USA, apparently, is the only country ignoring basic game theory and asking for denuclearization of North Korea as a pre-condition to any further talks, which the chance of happening is the same as hell freezing over. 

From the point of view of Mr. Kim, the most pressing objective is to maximize its insurance policy. Not only against the USA and South Korea (SK), but also from any possible betray by China.

In this context, I offer the speculative idea that Kim’s ballistic display of force is not only a theater for foreign and internal observers, but also a ruse. 

Kim knows that, when push comes to shove, his atomic arsenal means the chances of a powerful nuclear attack wiping NK out of the map is, now, much higher. The fact that his conventional force is also a great threat to South Korea, given the proximity of Seoul to the border, only adds to the chance of an overwhelming attack, of Fire and Fury, being mandatory if any escalation ever happens. 

What’s a small dog going to do in such a big league fight? 

Kim knows that every surveillance satellite, stealth wing (drone or airplane) and spy is mapping out the main sites to be nullified in the event of war. I don’t think he hopes to ever deliver any ICBM he may have, as well as a good deal of his conventional arsenal. 

So Mr. Kim, if a rational player, can only expect his insurance to hold if he can assuredly deliver a blow even if he is killed by bombs or a China backed coup, and if his weapons and territory are neutered. And that asks for more cunning strategies. 

I place at a high probability that, by now, Kim may have smuggled, by land or sea, a few of his former weaker bombs (in the range of 5-10 kilotons) to hideouts in South Korea, a task far easier than building reliable ICBMs. That, and a few elite agents with trucks, is all he needs to make the threat of nuclear retaliation credible, even after his complete defeat.

A surface detonation of a couple of 10kt bombs, in the middle of Seoul, may instantly claim 100.000 lives, possibly 2 or 3 times that after a few days, and economic devastation of a very rich metropolis. 

There is nothing new in such strategy, as the nuclear-armed B-52 continual flights the US kept up in the 60’s (in order to assure mutual destruction to the USSR before better ICBMs were in place) tell us. The difference being that, in the Koren case with contiguous borders, it makes all the sense NK should have nukes implanted inside SK.

Maybe a few of those showy missile tests were aimed at covering for a submarine/ship landing in a far away and lonely shore of SK, with a precious load to deliver to a small truck driving out of the shadows.