If throughout his reign Napoleon ...

PERSONAL COLUMN STEPHEN VIZINCZEY

Mary McCarthy's masterpiece on the Vietnam mystery describes a fascinating psychological phenomenon of disassociation. 'The Ameri- can,' she writes, 'is pictured as completely sundered from his precision weaponry as if he had no control over it, in the same way as Johnson, escalating, feigns to have no control over the war and to react like an auto- maton to "moves" from Hanoi.' Feigns, though, isn't the verb. The protestations of powerless- ness to step outside the power struggle over Vietnam, uttered in tones of dignified detach- ment by men who are so passionately involved that their nerves no longer react to the horrors they inflict, the professions of sympathy and concern, are too glaringly contradictory and incongruous to be considere a cynical and therefore rational attempt to quell public in- dignation. The stance of sorrowing innocence is just as compulsive as the burning of Viet- nam. Every obsession carries its tail-end of reverse feeling: the deeper the involvement, the more compelling is the need for unrelated 'or opposite feelings to allow the victim the illu- sion that he is still in charge of himself.

There are many explanations for the Ameri- can government's obsession with Vietnam and most- of them are valid at some level. I'd like to argue, none the less, that this obsession originates in the frustrating, maddening pur- suit of the unattainable—power. The truth is that power (in the sense individuals long for it) is a mirage. And it is in the pursuit of mirages that people lose their minds.

'Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand,' wrote Tolstoy, whose con- cluding essay in War and Peace has lost none of its relevance.

`If throughout his reign Napoleon "continues to issue commands concerning the invasion of England and expends on no' other undertaking so much time and effort, and yet during his whole reign never once attempts to execute his design but undertakes an expedition to Russia, with which country, according to his repeatedly expressed conviction, he considers it to his advantage to be in alliance—then this results from the fact that his commands did not correspond to the course of events in the first case but did so in the latter. For a com- mand to be carried out to the letter it must be a command actually capable of fulfilment. But to know what can and cannot be carried out is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, in which millions participated, but even in the case of the simplest event, seeing that both the one and the other are liable at any moment to find themselves confronted by millions of obstacles. Every command executed is always one of an immense number unexecuted. All commands inconsistent with the course of events are impossible and do not get carried out.' (Rosemary Edmonds's translation—Pen- guin Classics.) No wonder Johnson and McNamara can talk so convincingly about 'the limitations of even the most powerful nation' and tell their critics 'we cannot do everything we want.' Such statements may sound refreshingly pragmatic in comparison with harangues from Peking, but even speaking of 'limitations' is twisting a painful truth to fit a delusion. Far from being in the enviable position of lacking the means to do everything they want in the world, they cannot be certain of their ability to achieve any of their aims. Politics is indeed the art of the possible, except that one can only guess what is possible. If Napoleon in- tended to invade England yet invaded Russia instead, if Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to weaken Israel, if successive American Presi- dents have issued orders designed to bring peace, stability and security to Vietnam—then it must be concluded that when a man wields power he has little notion of what he is actually doing.

Power is the experience of the absurd, a nightmare and a thrilling game of chance, in which you wager the fortunes of millions and it is easy to find reassurance and justification in the belief that, though you don't always win, the outcome is really up to you. The traditional eastern response to the chaos of life has been inertia, the traditional western reaction has been to ignore the nature of life (the flux of billions of laws and occurrences) and to behave as if we could impose our will upon events, as if we could command the future. Taking chances, we were bound to be lucky now and then, and indeed it is worth- while to challenge the multitude of contin- gencies so that the right one may occur. But to keep one's sanity one must never lose sight of the fact that one can only try. We must, in Camus's phrase, 'act without faith.' If events do not echo to our cry of command, we must give up, for no power on earth can create a single occurrence that is not already a potent possibility.

Yet Johnson and his colleagues are bent on producing a democratic (western) or at least a friendly, reliable South Vietnam. As they pursue policies based on the decisive and in- dependent efficacy of power—a force in history which is wholly imaginary—they are increas- ingly losing touch with reality and suffer the intellectual and emotional consequences. (And this is the phenomenon that Lord Acton, witty and dead wrong, defined as 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'—an observation which made Stalin laugh bitterly in one of his sane moments. Camus was nearer the truth in Caligula: it is because the emperor cannot have the moon that he takes leave of his senses.) Hubris is evidently the mental epidemic of our age, and its germ is the universal day- dream that whatever we really, intensely believe to be right and wish and work for, must and will happen. Americans, in particular, still seem to be paying the price for the- glory of the Second World War. They willed to win, they had right and might on their side, they killed and died for victory; how then could they see that all this had but a very tenuous connection

with the outcome? In history nothing fails like success because it tempts nations to take their good luck for the measure of their strength.

And then there is the notion that power has `progressed'—that the totalitarian organisation of society, industrial wealth, superior weapons have made power grow, that it has become more effective than it used to be. But improve- ments in armaments, communications, tech- nology, do not change the nature of power, which is potent only when it corresponds to the course of events. Having more of the same unreal thing doesn't make it any more real. Power is still a stick and then the mirage of a stick; now you have it, now you don't; when you have it, it may be a bigger stick—but when you don't, it's just a bigger mirage.

Thus the vs cannot impose its will on even a small part of a tiny impoverished country.

TO realise this and quit Saigon, Johnson would have to come to disbelieve in, and be willing to explode, the myth of power and thus the

myth of the United States as 'the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.' Yet how could he shed the delusion that even his critics share?

They tell him that he should use the immense power of his office for better purposes! So this great might that everybody is talking about must exist somewhere, it must materialise with a few more soldiers, social workers, ambassa- dors; bombs. But while none of these can turn

a single Vietnamese into a democrat, the bombs do go off and thereby strengthen his illu- sion that if one can destroy the world, one must also be able to control it. So he just can't let go. This is the psychology of escala- tion, the dynamic of the obsession.

One cannot prescribe a cure, but it is certain that -the President's only rational alternative

is to stop trying to create events that are not possibilities and dare his people to face the facts of life.

'My fellow Americans,' he could inconceiv- ably say, 'I may be the most powerful man in history, but in fact I don't have the power to carry through all the social and economic changes necessary to transform the slums within a five-mile radius of the White House.

I could try harder, and I might or might not succeed—there are too many imponderables.

Remember Prohibition? I couldn't be abso- lutely certain of success even if I abolished Congress and you accepted me as dictator with the combined prerogatives of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler, with a thousand big computers and all the intellectuals working out the details. The only thing certain is that I couldn't make the negroes more equal than the rest of you could be coerced or in- spired to tolerate them to be. Now, as to our efforts to build a new society in the southern part of Vietnam. . . .

'As you know, we were fighting there not just on account of that piece of jungle but because we didn't want to hand over the control of South-East Asia to the communists. However, I made a shocking discbvery. There is no such thing as control over South-East Asia. Mao nearly started another revolution just to get hold of the control over China, which gave him the slip the first time around, but it seems this dragon doesn't exist either. So I'm giving him one more mirage to pursue; let him and his successors go stark raving mad over it.'

But there is, of course, the gun. The only thing real and solid among the floating clouds of unrealities. The guns, the ships, the bombs, the missiles, the Bomb. The cruelties of power are the rage of impotence.