Ring the Alarm
Jackson Lears chillingly demonstrates that the United States military favors neutral technocrats over conscientious officers when it comes to nuclear armaments [“Behind the Veil of Indifference,” Revision, July]. His piece brings to mind an incident from September 1983, when the Soviet Union’s early warning system erroneously reported a U.S. nuclear missile launch. It came at the worst possible time: only a few weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had shot down a plane that strayed into its airspace, killing 269 passengers, including a U.S. congressman. Fortunately, the man who received the alarm, Stanislav Petrov, suspected it was false and refused to report it to his superiors, violating protocol and preventing a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Petrov’s decision saved countless lives. And yet superpowers like the United States take every step to ensure that once an order to launch is transmitted no one gets in the way. As the former CIA director Michael Hayden put it: “The system is designed for speed and decisiveness. It’s not designed to debate the decision.” In an incident reported in Harper’s Magazine in 1978, U.S. Air Force Major Harold L. Hering was discharged for asking how he would know that a nuclear launch order had come from a sane president.
The history of the Cold War is littered with near misses. We’ve been lucky so far, but we can’t always count on a Petrov, a Lears, or a Hering to put their career on the line. As Lears advocates, we should adopt a “No First Use” policy as well as additional checks.
But no risk reduction measure can totally eliminate the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Only the abolition of nuclear weapons can do that. As Barack Obama said in 2009, “If we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.” The road to abolition is far from easy, but we cannot coexist with these weapons of mass destruction forever.
Jennifer Knox
Union of Concerned Scientists
Washington, D.C.
Empire State of Mind
Though it doesn’t use the term, Rachel Nolan’s recent essay [“Do Cartels Exist?,” Review, July] captures the essence of counterinsurgency: To achieve particular political objectives, it’s often advantageous for states (and factions within them) to invent their own enemies. In this instance, it was advantageous for the United States and Mexico to treat the social problem of drug addiction and its attendant supply chains as a concentrated invasion from without, rather than a health crisis from within.
This subversion of cause and effect has been a valued tool in the U.S. military arsenal for centuries. In the era of westward expansion, state-sanctioned settler incursions into native lands sparked resistance that served as further justification for advancing the frontier. Likewise, the delusional paranoia provoked by McCarthyism was the basis for Cold War aggression. In these cases, state agents seeking to expand and consolidate power projected a spectral foe that would warrant—necessitate, even—such expansion and consolidation.
While counterinsurgency is a tried and true strategy of empire, it is not limited to the imperial core: General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi used the phantom threat of terrorism to consolidate his counterrevolutionary government in Egypt, and successive Israeli regimes have done the same to sustain the occupation of Palestine. Nolan shows us a version of this strategy at play in Mexico, helping to explain why, in the war on drugs, much like the war on terror, the enemy seems to be forever beyond reach.
Dylan Saba
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Spirited Debate
Ian Buruma wages that cancel culture derives from a theologically inspired mob effort to cudgel confession from sinners [“Doing the Work,” Essay, July]. “Protestantism,” in Buruma’s understanding, accounts for the situation in which individuals receive public criticism for things they said or did, and then are called on by a collective moral arbiter to apologize properly. This moral arbiter is known as the Elect, “highly educated urban sophisticates” who work in elite institutions.
Buruma draws his portrait of Protestants not from the work of historians, anthropologists, or theologians, but that of critics such as John McWhorter and Sinclair Lewis. Relying on these antagonistic sources offers propaganda rather than facts. Many religious communities around the world include an injunction to acknowledge wrongdoing through expiation. Within Protestant sects, confession is a ritual that occurs in some but not all churches, and not always for the same reasons. Christianity is a term that summarizes thousands of different sectarian movements unified by little other than interest in the Jesus story.
But facts don’t matter when prejudice is being stirred up, and Buruma here leans hard on the last acceptable prejudice—that against religious people—to compare cancellers to fundamentalists. Unable to comprehend religion or its diversity, Buruma offers myopia and misinformation in its place—exactly the hubris cancel culture emerged to redress.
Kathryn Lofton
Professor of religious studies and American studies,
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.
Ian Buruma responds:
Kathryn Lofton obviously knows a great deal about “the Jesus story,” but I don’t think McWhorter or Lewis should be dismissed just because they are not professional historians. Lofton seems to be missing the point of my article. Of course there are many ways of practicing Christianity, and I would never suggest that religious people are all bigots or scourges. I was trying to show how in certain Protestant cultures—Holland in the seventeenth century and the United States today—religious, or pseudoreligious, virtue signaling became a mark of superior status. There is obviously nothing wrong with living a moral life or encouraging others to do so, but when moralism becomes a substitute for serious political thought, then there is a problem. I wish our intellectual elites would spend less time policing language and enforcing dogmatic cultural politics and more time improving health care and public education. Religion per se is no impediment to progressive political thought; pseudoreligious moralism often is.
