Early 19th century German General Carl von Clauswitz wrote that “war is politics by other means.” And so it is today.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the response reminded me of the beginning of the First World War. Sides were chosen and the propaganda battle for the righteousness of each side began. Simple differences became the rationale for supporting one side over the other. In the West, Russia was blamed because of the invasion. In the East, the West was to blame because it had spent nearly a decade arming Ukraine for war. As a result, both sides got what they wanted. A conflict that validates national leaders’ personal desire for global prominence.
A Mimetic Conflict
This is the history of the past century. A history of the growing closeness of nations. A history that resembles Rene’ Girard’s mimetic theory of violence and conflict. Two sides, one from the East and the other from the West, like siblings fighting over who will be the more prominent ones in the world’s global family culture. They are imitating each other trying to show who is the greater. The goal is not simply to win against one’s enemy but to destroy them. For the enemy is not just the opposition, but the competitor who is the potential destroyer of our right to power and dominance. This is why domestic politics in the US has become so ugly and destructive of our society. This mimetic conflict is played out through global crises that hide the true purpose of the conflict. The enemy is the scapegoat that has to be sacrificed for the status of being a world power to be maintained.
Code names get tossed around to validate the righteousness of our going to war. It is also true, that the leaders of nations start wars for personal and domestic policy reasons. They send their people off to war to suffer and die for a reason that only matters to the nation’s leaders. This is more true today than ever before.
From Competition to Conflict
This is not a new phenomenon in human history. As Girard shows throughout his writings, the mimetic perspective is a fundamental understanding of human nature and the source of the violence that exists in society. This understanding has to do with imitation. From an interview with Rene’ Girard by David Cayley of the CBC.
“Girard: Let’s say that two boys are friends because they are in the same field. They love the same things. But there is only one fellowship for the two of them. Therefore, they become rivals. Any master and disciple are in a double bind situation with each other. The master wants his pupil to imitate him as diligently and effectively as possible. But, it the pupil is too effective, he will become better than the master and overshadow him. And the master will see the contradiction but will not dare to say, you imitate me too well. He will not even think that. He will try to find something wrong with his disciple. There is a tendency never to express a double bind because, if you express it, you express the essential contradiction of living together, which is competition.
Cayley: So we keep quiet about it.
Girard: We keep quiet about it, and it’s one of the most fascinating things. We tell children, for instance, that they should imitate this, or not imitate that, but we never say that they should imitate us only some of the time and not too effectively. This is the essential existential contradiction, you might say. And this essential contradiction can be expressed logically and is very visible in all our actions. It’s the essence of competition. Competere means to join together toward the same goal; but at a certain moment, someone, everyone, wnt to be the first to reach that goal.”
This is the underlying psychology of the global powers over the past century. Putin, Biden, Xi, and the leaders of the United Nations and World Economic Forum all want the same thing. They want to be the one who dictates to the rest how the future will be realized. It is a very dangerous scenario. At some point, they realize that there can be no sharing of power, and the real World War III will erupt.
History is Repeating Itself
In his history, The Great War, Marc Ferro sets the stage for the First World War this way.
“In 1914 there were no doubts. They marched off to war, their faces a picture of delight. … In 1914 they had no doubts that the war would be short, that they would be home by Christmas crowned with victory. In Paris, London and Berlin they left singing and exuberant, ‘with flowers on their rifles’. This elation is a factor in the origins of the war and of its after-taste, and deserves as much stress as the more strictly economic and political causes. There are many such unanswered questions. What were people’s aspirations before the war? How could societies both want peace and leave light-heartedly for war? What was the nature of patriotism? What economic and political forces governed states and nations? How did those people who opposed war suddenly find themselves without the means to resist it?”
As I write, we are not a month into the war, and already it is being used for purposes beyond the war itself. In the US, the Biden administration is blaming the war for the highest rates of inflation in nearly a half-century. In Russia, there is talk about Putin reviving the pre-Soviet state of Imperial Tsarist Russia. They all have their rationalizations for what is happening. They want us to believe that they are responding to others’ actions. The reality is all of them are maneuvering to create the catastrophes that rationalize their individual domination of the world stage.
Beyond the Ukraine Conflict
Biden and Putin are the big boys in the mimetic conflict. They are two of the world who want to claim the leadership of a one-world government as it is called. However, if Girard’s mimetic theory fits in this situation, one of them will lose. Then another global conflict will occur to challenge the former winner. Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset are poised to conduct his own takeover of the world’s stage. None of them should underestimate Chinese President Xi as a worthy opponent in this historic mimetic conflict. Could it be that in the end, they all lose? I don’t know but the drive to be THE world power is fraught with complexity and unanticipated developments.
While the big boys wrestle for dominance, we see a little power, Ukraine, taking center stage in the conflict between Russia and the West. The Ukrainian people are showing their mettle. Yes, they have been supplied with military hardware by the US and the West. Yes, they are a proxy for the US in its fight with Russia, just as Syria and Iraq were proxies before them. However, the performance of the people of Ukraine shows the world that the little people don’t just have to roll over and accept global domination.
Small is NOT Insignificant
Ukraine isn’t seeking to be a global power. Instead, it is simply fighting to preserve the security of its nationhood. The lesson here is that a smaller power is still a power in the right circumstances. Especially when the people of the nation are called on to defend their homes and communities.
This is the Two Global Forces (see here, here, and here) unfolding before our eyes. Global elites are still in command. But the past two years has shown that it is more difficult to create an authoritarian world government than probably they imagined. For information and technology are fluid assets that flow to wherever the opportunity awaits. In this sense, code is the fly in the ointment of the globalist powers.
Concepts Must Change
It is time to reconsider the language that we use to describe the global context that we are in. The binary descriptors of Right vs Left, Capitalist vs. Socialist, East vs West, or Globalist vs Nationalist do not really describe what we see happening. Maybe the closest thing that we see is what could be distinguished as the Fascism of the Left vs the Fascism of the Right. Fascism today is less about political ideology and more about political behavior. It is a set of tactics and methods that are adaptable to any ideological persuasion.
Girard’s Insight
Rene’ Girard’s mimetic theory points to the development that as the competitors become more and more alike, their extremes begin to emerge. This is what we are seeing. The Left and the Right are becoming ever closer in relation, just as the East and the West, and Capitalism and Socialism have done so since the end of the Soviet Union. Their extremes emerge to counter the hominization that is a normal product of mimetic behavior. The closer we get, the greater threat of violence grows.
The differences between the West and the Communist bloc during the Cold War were great enough so that the temptation to launch nuclear annihilation was less than it is today. As a global society, we are all quite similar, even with the differences in our ethnic cultures. We are joined as a global community by a shared consumer, entertainment, and economic culture. The result is that has brought us a mimetic conflict far greater than any time during the past century.
We are now faced with a real leadership crisis. Because all these global leaders are playing out a drama of mimetic conflict leading to a conflagration of the first order.
What are we to do?
First is that we see global conflict as a mimetic competition between leaders, nations, and organizations that are very close to achieving their shared goal. Someone will lose. Someone will be designated
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as the scapegoat. And the patterns of behaviors of our leaders will change.
The second is that we who have no power and authority in this context can see that this same mimetic conflict happens in our homes, our businesses, and our communities. To thwart the mimetic desire is to call it out. Acknowledge it for what it is the human tendency to destroy that which we care about.
Lastly, don’t encourage the acceleration of the violence that comes with mimetic competition. Don’t choose sides. Try to identify both the good and the bad in each side’s position. Then, maybe we can avoid the destruction of the world in the name of righteous ideologies.