“I Work for Crazy Too”, Herr Clausewitz Explains, Part II: Hu’s on First?
Tank Man
Let’s go back to June 5, 1989, to Peking, to this very spot. Once we arrive, while recovering from a bad case of time lag, we happen to notice Clausewitz’s disembodied floating head circling the scene. No one else can see the Clausewitz head. Being a sensible disembodied floating head, the Clausewitz head has selectively cloaked itself in invisibility so it doesn’t draw the fire of the People’s Liberation Army, who were understandably jittery that day. Seeing the disembodied floating head of a long dead and much reviled Prussian military theorist is just the sort of thing that would make a jumpy PLA peasant conscript fire indiscriminately into the middle of a major city. His superiors probably wouldn’t be amused. People’s Liberation Ammunition is supposed to be expended on unarmed civilians, not gwailo disembodied floating heads. The debriefing of this particular tank crew would be somewhat tense. Their defense may come down to Marx, Lenin, and Mao’s favorable mentions of the original bearer of this particular disembodied floating head.
Disembodied Floating Clausewitz Head
Whether Tank Man would flee if he could actually see the Clausewitz head is unknowable. Our only clue is Tank Man’s demonstrated courage in choosing to stand in front of a column of Type 59 tanks without the immediate assistance of his very own M-1A2 Abrams tank. If he could see the Clausewitz head, he might realize that, since he is neither a simpering Basil Liddell Hart, a sinister kitten-hating Martin Van Creveld, or some other purveyor of snake oil, he has nothing to fear from the Clausewitz head. In any event, none of the other participants in this historical vignette can see the Clausewitz head.
However, due to the power of IPv6, we can see the Clausewitz head. The events that we and the invisible disembodied floating Clausewitz head witness are known history:
The [Tank Man] incident took place near Tiananmen on Chang’an Avenue, which runs east-west along the south end of the Forbidden City, [Peking], on June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests. [Tank Man] placed himself alone in the middle of the street as the tanks approached, directly in the path of the armored vehicles. He held two shopping bags, one in each hand. As the tanks came to a stop, [Tank Man] gestured towards the tanks with his bags. In response, the lead tank attempted to drive around the man, but the man repeatedly stepped into the path of the tank in a show of nonviolent action. After repeatedly attempting to go around rather than crush the man, the lead tank stopped its engines, and the armored vehicles behind it seemed to follow suit. There was a pause for a short period of time with the man and the tanks having reached a quiet, still impasse.
Having now successfully brought the column to a halt, [Tank Man] climbed up onto the hull of the buttoned-up lead tank and, after briefly stopping at the driver’s hatch, appeared in video footage of the incident to start calling into various ports in the tank’s turret. He then climbed atop the turret and seemed to have a short conversation with a crew member at the gunner’s hatch. After ending the conversation, [Tank Man] alighted from the tank. The tank commander briefly emerged from his hatch, and the tanks restarted their engines, ready to continue on. At that point, [Tank Man], who was still standing within a meter or two of the side of the lead tank, leapt in front of the vehicle once again and quickly reestablished the [Tank Man]-tank standoff. Video footage shows that two figures in blue attire then pulled the man away and absorbed him into the crowd; the tanks continued on their way.
The reason we’ve returned to this place and time is to ask the Clausewitz head whether this scene we are witnessing is consistent with his well-known observation that, “War is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.” The Clausewitz head may deign to speak to us. It may remain tactfully silent. It may merely nod its assent by inclining forward, perhaps even rotating vertically 360 degrees.
Kind of freaky.
It may choose to shake its head in profound disapproval, perhaps so emphatically that it rotates horizontally 360 degrees.
Even freakier.
For the purpose of argument: we’ll channel the Clausewitz head here: its answer is yes. In fact, the Clausewitz head is in such total agreement that it is currently rotating on its horizontal axis like the planet Uranus.
Clausewitz Agrees
How is it that both Tank Man and a PLA tank column find themselves in agreement with a foreign disembodied floating head’s most famous catchphrase? This unwitting agreement with the mighty Clausewitzian head unfolds on many levels, transcending the particular time, place, and participants in Tank Man’s moment. Some of this agreement is the direct result of what happened on that street, with those people, with those armored vehicles, and with those shopping bags. Some of this agreement is what others have made and will make of what happened on that street, with those people, with those armored vehicles, and with those shopping bags.
Clausewitz’s absolute war, though an abstraction, is a particularly aggressive abstraction. If it suddenly found itself manifested in this particular tank column, Tank Man is gone. There’d be a barely discernible thump and no more Tank Man. The only annoyance Tank Man would cause the People’s Liberation Army is the effort of cleaning him out of the tank treads and scraping unarmed civilians out of tank treads is what peasant conscripts are for. Not only that, there are a lot of tanks in that column.
A Lot of Tanks
Even if you replaced Tank Man with Mr. T, that would be a lot of tanks for one individual to take out.
This is where real war replaces absolute war. The factor that differentiates between the two is politics. Politics acts as a ratchet to scale real war back from the hypothetical extremes of absolute war. While, in purely military terms, Tank Man is hopelessly outmatched, on the political level the tanks are hopelessly outmatched. Tank Man has the advantage. He has that entire column of tanks trapped in a political gray zone. Tank Man seems to have been returning home from shopping when, suddenly, he just decided to stand in front of a column of tanks. It was an unintentional moral ambush. Tank Man surprised the lead tank driver (he may have surprised himself).
To the lead tank driver, Tank Man is supposed to be smart enough not to stand in front of a column of tanks. Heck, everyone is supposed to be smart enough not to stand in front of a column of tanks. Yet there he is. And Tank Man is alone. If you’re going to insist on standing in front of a column of tanks, you should probably try to find a few others who’d be crazy enough to stand in front of a column of tanks with you. However, if Tank Man was with others or Tank Man was trying to throw a Molotov Cocktail at the lead tank, the tanks would probably have a response. But nothing in their training or orders seems to have prepared them for facing a lone Tank Man. There’s probably nothing in the PLA tank operating manual that says, “Turn to page 114-B for instructions for dealing with lone Tank Men blocking your way. Reference diagram.”
While it may be politically opportune for the security forces of the People’s Republic of China to massacre a large number of students in Tiananmen Square in the middle of the night, running over a lone Tank Man in the middle of the day might not be. Tank Man’s action is a clearly political action, one that even a random tank crew can recognize as opposing, in its own small way, the Communist Party. In its own small way, it’s an act of war, expressing hostile intent against the political position of the current ruling clique. But the lead tank’s crew lacks an appropriate response.
Amidst the Ruins
Tank Man may have accidentally exposed a political seam between the jurisdiction of the PLA and the jurisdiction of the Chinese internal security forces. Dealing with the many in the middle of the night is something the PLA had orders for. Dealing with the one in the middle of the day may not have been. That’s probably a situation the PLA would usually leave to internal security forces. The tank crews may have even been told that there were foreigners in the vicinity, especially foreign media, making any sudden running over of Tank Men bad politics. The logical conclusion, especially in a top down organization not noted for rewarding the personal initiative of subordinates, is to sit still and radio for instructions.
This allowed Tank Man to launch his one man propaganda war, climbing the tank and assaulting its crew with messages that were contrary to the general political thrust of their orders. The PBS Frontline documentary The Tank Man relates how many protesters and their sympathizers would beg the police and army not to attack their fellow subjects. In some respects this tactic was initially successful, which may have worried the Communist Party leadership. Many of the PLA units brought into Peking were composed of peasants from the countryside who were not necessarily simpatico with city dwellers. This lack of fundamental simpatico allowed the PLA to mow down the protesters with little protest from the PLA soldiers doing the dirty deed. The regional identity of this particular tank crew and their individual political opinions are unknown. Needless to say, they stopped and waited.
The face off was resolved when someone dragged off Tank Man and his groceries. Opinions about who it was that dragged him off differ. Some witnesses believe it was friends of Tank Man, saving him from his own insanity. Others believe it was the secret police who dragged him off, perhaps summoned by the lead tank crew or other snitches. Nothing is known about Tank Man or who he was. Nothing is known about his fate. He may have been arrested and later shot. He may have gone underground. He may have simply returned to the anonymity from which he temporarily sprang.
Tank Man's Rendezvous With History
His fate doesn’t change the immediate outcome of the event. It was a stalemate and, as with any such stalemate, the tank column won. Only if Tank Man had inspired that entire tank column to turn around and head for Zhongnanhai, possibly accompanied by a crowd that spontaneously broke into song and dance, would he have won the face off. Perhaps if Tank Man had been a Chinese Mr. T or even one of those magical flying Shaolin monks that died by the millions fighting Pei Mei or the dreaded Manchu. Tank Man would be just more forgotten Tank Man grist for the Communist tyranny mill if not for happenstance. The presence of foreign media who took video and photos of the face off transformed Tank Man into a cultural archetype, a warrior of narrative.
Tank Man’s narrative, his own private compression of the outside world, is lost to the world. His narrative only survives as messages. If a narrative is a compressed version of the outside world, a message is a compressed version of a narrative. If narratives are compressed by throwing out large parts of the immensity of the outside world, messages are compressed by throwing out large parts of a narrative. Messages are a pale shadow of a pale shadow. Yet messages are how narratives are spread. Only by tighter compression can narratives be communicated through the narrow limits of language. No other human to human medium available to mortal man offers a similar level of bandwidth.
Tank Man had sent messages directly to the tank column. Blocking the column was a message. Climbing on the tank and propagandizing the crew was a message. Yet those messages were lost. Tank Man’s message to the rest of the world is entirely indirect and inferred. This means whatever Tank Man communicates to us is entirely through messages transmitted by other people, mostly foreign devils with long noses and flaming red hair.
Say Tank Man was convinced that shopping bags bestowed immunity to Soviet-style tanks. Say he was an expert on Type 59 tanks and he wanted to demonstrate just how feeble they were. Say he was an agent provocateur of the Communist Party, sent out to test the loyalty of random PLA tank crews. We’d never know. Foreign journalists saw what they saw and compressed it according to their own cultural compression mechanisms.
Tank Man’s message, whatever it was originally, has become a message of resistance to Communist oppression. This is the message that the Chinese government fears enough that it is blocked by the Great Firewall of China along with all references to the Tiananmen Incident. Tank Man’s message is now hopelessly mixed with other potent messages that have been invading China since the First Opium War. The utter helplessness of China against the West was a deep shock to the predominant Chinese cultural narrative, shaking it its core. The lingering aftershocks resonate to this day. This shock started soon after the First Opium War with the Taiping Rebellion, a strange hybrid of traditional Chinese culture and Christianity unwittingly unleashed by an American missionary that lasted for 14 years and killed almost 2o million people. The later nineteenth century brought more foreign narratives to China as the Western powers carved out enclaves. Missionaries, especially, it seems, American missionaries, infected the Chinese with all sorts of strange narratives. With the fall of the Manchu Dynasty, this became even worse. Marxism, Fascism, democracy, and other ideas came through. Marxism, heavily adapted to Chinese sensibilities by Mao, triumphed for a while, only to fall before the awesome onslaught of Alexander Hamilton and the American System as transmitted by Lee Kwan Yew and Friedrich List.
This is where Red China gets nervous. Culture is the division of priority between narratives. Priority is achieved through politics, the division of power between narratives. There is a self-reinforcing relationship between culture and politics. Culture tends to favor politics that reinforces its dominant narratives. However, it’s a two-way street. Politics tends to favor cultural narratives that favor its dominant holders of power. Successful culture tends to generate successful politics. Successful politics tends to reinforce successful politics. The opposite is also true. Unsuccessful culture tends to generate unsuccessful politics and unsuccessful politics tends to lead to unsuccessful culture. If you’re riding a cultural wave, there’s always the chance that things may suddenly go wrong. Cultural challenges are the most potent of challenges. They can knock the foundation out from beneath the strongest seeming political power structure.
Small changes in narrative priority can generate massive shifts in political power. Narratives are very powerful. Humans are narrative creatures and spreading narrative through messages is something humans do without much thought. Narratives that, when compressed down to messages, are vivid, visual, visceral, visionary, viral, or validating, are excellent candidates for triggering changes in cultural priority. Tank Man is unusually vivid, visual, visceral, visionary, viral, and validating. Under the right circumstances, mixed with other narratives, Tank Man could be truly scary to Red China. Red China has fought against Tank Man in China, killing, repressing, obfuscating, blocking, bribing, and denying all the way. But Tank Man is currently beyond the reach of the Chinese government. It lingers over the horizon, on the Web, in magazines, on television, in foreign countries, and surreptitiously within Red China itself, forever threatening.
Tank Man is waging war on China’s current regime, with the ultimate aim of achieving a different political result where the division of power is shifted to other narratives than Hamiltonian-Marxism. The original incident was triggered by the politically motivated act of stepping in front of a tank column. The incident was allowed for a time by a politically motivated stop by the lead tank crew. The message of the original incident was captured by politically motivated journalists. It has been taken up by politically motivated opponents of the regime and used as a weapon of war against it. This war is a continuation of the political intercourse between the regime and its opponents. The crazy act of stepping in front of a tank is an inherently Clausewitzian action and as guaranteed as anything to draw the attention and approval of the disembodied floating Clausewitz head.
The ultimate outcome of the battle between Tank Man and competing messages is up in the air. Consider the narrative gap to be closed:
Meeting of the Minds
Obama: I got my job because I have a remarkable talent for reading a teleprompter.
Hu: That’s interesting. I got my job because I have a remarkable talent for killing Tibetans.
That’s a bridge too far but life is for learning, which is a process of acquiring useful narratives. Learning is the only thing you can take with you.
5. If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea;
6. If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee from the bosom of thy wife, and of thine offspring, and thine elder son, although but six years of age, shall cling to thy garments, and shall say, My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us? O, my father, what are the men going to do with you? and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword, and thou be dragged to prison, and thine enemies prowl around thee like wolves for the blood of the lamb;
7. And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.
8. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?
- D&C 122:5-8
Wait a minute… not too long ago you posted three definitions for politics over at Zen’s place, and all three seem to nullify this statement. If politics is truly a conflict over power, as those definitions suggest, than all war – be it absolute or real – is politics.* Even the frenzied thrashes of the incognizant madman and the instinctual attack of the threatened animal are conflicts over power. Conflicts without narrative, surely, but conflicts nonetheless.
Please then. explain to me this: if war is but a subset of politics, how can you add politics to it?
*Power being defined here as an entity’s capability to control its environment. If you have a better definition – or are simply working with a different one – feel free to provide it.
The distinction between absolute war, an illustrative metaphor, and real war, which is um…real war, with politics as the primary differentiator between the two is taken directly from On War Book I Chapter I. It’s pure Clausewitz.
My definition of war is broader than conflict over power, though that’s a large part of it. The Bassford definition:
is the closest to my definition (see here).
War, which I define as being a strategy, is a political instrument. It’s a tool within politics’s pocket, which means it’s subsumed within politics. Of course I also classify politics as an instrument of culture, subsumed within culture. They’re subordinate processes within subordinate processes.
Ah, just because Clausewitz wrote something does not make it correct, or useful.
I guess that is really my gripe here – I do not see the utility between making the distinction between absolute war and real war. War is the mere continuation of politics by other means. Done. If true, then the very idea of absolute war is nonsensical. I would like to think we have not fallen so far into absurdism to think nonsense analytically useful.
Absolute war was primarily used as an explanatory device. It lampoons the belief that war is somehow its own beast, better left to the generals. If war was an independent phenomenon, Clausewitz argued, it would become something terrible to behold like a fire river bursting its banks. But because it’s under political control, however exercised, it will never be wholly a total burst of pure violence. It works relatively well as an explanatory metaphor, assuming you explain it well.