September 25 - 30. Holmes’s books
The Last Gambit · перевод (English) · раздел 7 из 17
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September 25 - 30. Holmes’s books
In last ten years there appeared many new Russian emigres in London: some of them went in for business, others taught in Universities and colleges, others worked in mass-media sphere. Unfortunately, I hadn’t any acquaintances in these circles, and so I had to turn to the meditation of Mr. Hopkins, who was well acquainted in these surroundings.
– I really know some people among Russian emigres, - started Hopkins, - but I’d like to know before, Watson, what exactly do you want to learn about Russia?
– I’m interested in last ten years of Russia after USSR collapse.
– What do I hear, Watson? Maybe you’re fed up with chess and decided to go in for politics? Ten years passed after Russians had left Afghanistan, and you never wanted to hear anything close to politics when you returned from there, as I remember. Well, well! At last, it’s your problem. I’ll try to talk with one Russian, which, I think, can satisfy your interest to Russia. I’ll call you in about two days and we’ll meet somewhere, say, in Woldorf. Do you agree, Watson, to meet in Woldorf?
Though I was far from the sphere usually called “politics”, I still supposed, that I knew something about events in Russia in last ten years: USSR, as “superpower №2”, split up to the plenty of states, and among them Russia became the successor of the “empire of evil”. Thinking about Russia this way, I caught myself thinking with cliche, formed by our mass media under influence of rich and powerful partner of my old good England.
And at this point I remembered one of former USA presidents, who declared in live broadcasting on TV, that he has just signed an edict, according to which USSR was outlawed and armed forces of USA were ordered to inflict a nuclear strike on the “empire of evil”. Afterwards it turned out, that Reagan happened to joke, thinking that tuning and checking of apparatus went on, while the broadcasting of his speech to the country has started already. Fine jokes for a leader of “superpower №1”… And we all are extremely lucky, that this “joke” wasn’t followed by return-preventing massed strike by “superpower №2”.
– Have Russians missed this, in effect, declaring war to them in live broadcasting? Or did they have so strong nerves and knew whom they dealt with? And what do I think about America indeed?
The question, suddenly come to the light from the depths of sub-consciousness, made me think about the subjects, which for common people belong to the sort of things which “goes without saying”, and I founded out, that I don’t have any distinct answer to it. I didn’t like this condition somehow. And maybe the point is in the enigmatic name of “Internal Predictor of the USSR ” which awoke nostalgia for passed Empire? We, Englishmen, have yet recovered from the similar illness, but maybe nostalgia is especial enigmatic attribute of Russian soul? Or Russian empire hasn’t yet passed, and its intelligent services, having far-going plans on future and realizing them step-by-step, have played giveaway checkers with naive West? These questions didn’t make my condition easier…
Having returned home, I took the books, which Holmes had left for me, and got the second note from the site www.dotu.ru. There were three books, and I give their titles in the order, in which Holmes left them for me:
Zbignev Brzezinski. “The Grand Chessboard” (American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives).
Ralph Epperson. “Invisible hand. The introduction to the view on history as a conspiracy”.
M. Buygent, R. Lay, G. Lincoln. “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”.
Since the note represented the review on the work of professor of American foreign policy from the School of contemporary international researches by Paul H. Nitze attached to the John Hopkins University in Washington, the former adviser on the questions of national safety of American president in 1977 - 1981, consultant of the Strategic and International Researches Centre, and so on, and so on; and the title of review (“Egoist is like one sitting for long in a well”), in effect, was a characterization of the author of the book and reminded about Oscar Wilde’s fairy-tale “Selfish Giant”, it can be said, that I had no choice. Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday I devoted to reading “The Grand Chessboard”. It can seem strange to somebody, but the book by Brzezinski helped me to answer the question which has never before risen in my mind:” What’s my real attitude to America?”
Brzezinski had a little understanding of chess, it soon became clear from the text of his book, and he apparently gave it this loud title, trying to express many longing desires of future world pattern, but he said nothing in particular about strategy - as a method - of realizing his desires in reality. If follow him in this chess analogies, it all resembled the situation when someone hardly aware of rules of the game declared his guaranteed victory against any rival, not knowing any chess theories and not possessing the feeling of the game in playing chess. Not paying much attention to phrase-mongering of Brzezinski, with the thought that “pawn” wrote memoirs imagining itself a “queen”, at last I started reading the review, and I’ve found that its beginning expressed my mind essentially, but without chess analogies. I liked the insinuation on “intellectual muscles” of the former National Security Adviser of American President:
“There is a legend coming from the antiques times of Greek-Persian warfare. The numerous armies and fleet of Persia which by that time already conquered many peoples and established its presence on the Mediterranean Sea, were overhanging the Hellenistic Civilization, the latter, at the first sight, being much less powerful and controlled less “human” and material resources than its potential conqueror. The war began and one sage suggested showing to the Greek warriors their future enemies as they really were.
A group of captured Persians appeared naked in the field where the battle-ranks were drawn up. It is known, even from antique sculpture, that the Greeks of those times paid special attention to bodybuilding exercises to prepare themselves for military service. When this people who were used to purposeful physical training from their childhood saw the Persians naked they almost fell with laugh as they could not imagine that such feeble men even though grouped in numerous armies would be a dangerous enemy on the battle-field. The ensuing military actions brought decisive victory of Greeks over feeble Persians who at that time pretended to establish the unrivalled world primacy of their state and subsequently, to shape the outlook of the whole world”.
The authors of the review thoroughly familiarized me with the USA NSC-20/1 Directive of August 18,1948, which was clearly headed: "Our goals with respect to Russia" [29], and also with extracts from other, not less aggressive, if to get away from formed by themselves political predilections and fears, document of the same department - USA NSC-68 Directive of September 30, 1950.
The boldness of assessments in the review was considerably supported by convincing description of contemporary global strategy, but I was amazed most of all by distinctly formulated priorities of generalized means of ruling a society, which can be perceived by the opposite side in definite circumstances as a kind of weapon:
“Every society is managed in one way or another, and therefore the global historical process may be perceived as a global process of ruling which, at the first place, comprises many processes of regional ruling (policies of regional states and international policies, forces which are not institutionalised within state: mafias, Jewish diaspora); secondly, it proceeds within life processes of the Earth and Space, standing higher than it in the hierarchy. Accordingly, in terms of the Sufficiently Universal Theory of Ruling with respect to the life of societies in the course of historically long intervals (hundreds of years and more) one may specify the following instruments of influence on society, whose reasonable use allows controlling its life and death:
Information of worldview nature, or methodology, which, once adopted, allows men to project - individually and socially - their "standard automations" of identification with regard to particular processes within the completeness and integrity of the World, and to define in their individual perception the hierarchic order of these processes in their mutual interconnection. This information lays foundation for the culture of thinking and for the completeness of ruling activities including also intra-social absolute power both on regional and global levels.
Information of annalistic, chronological nature, in all domains of Culture and all domains of Knowledge. It allows seeing, in which direction the processes are developing, and to correlate particular domains of Culture as a whole and of branches of Knowledge. To those, whose worldview is based on the sense of proportion and is conformable to the World, this information allows identifying particular processes while sieving the "chaotic" flow of facts and phenomena through the worldview "sieve" - subjective human measure of identification. (Within the present context the culture means all information, which is not transferred genetically in the succession of generations).
Information of fact-descriptive nature: description of particular processes and their interconnections constitutes the substance of information of the third priority, which includes the faith-teachings of religious cults, secular ideologies, technologies and facts of all domains of science.
Economic processes, as an instrument of influence subordinated to purely informational instruments of influence through finances (money), which embody a totally generalized type of information of economic nature.
Genocide practices, affecting not only those who live today but also the generations to come, eliminating the genetically determined potential for learning and for development by them of the cultural heredity of ancestors: nuclear blackmail-threat of use; alcohol, tobacco and other kinds of narcotic drugs genocide, food additives, all ecological pollutants, some medicines-real use; "gene engineering" and "biotechnologies" - potential danger.
Other instruments of influence mainly by force - weapons in traditional sense of this word; killing and crippling human beings; destructing and exterminating material and technical objects of civilization, cultural monuments and bearers of their spirit.
Although there are no evident distinctions between the instruments of influence because many of them, by their capacities, could be related to different priorities, their classification in hierarchical order, as presented above, allows nonetheless to identify the dominating factors of influence that may be used as instruments of ruling, and in particular, as instruments of suppression and elimination of those phenomena in the social life that are conceptually inadequate in the sense of ruling.
When used within one social system this set is tantamount to generalized means of ruling this system. But when applied by one social system (social group) to others, which have different internal concepts of ruling, it is tantamount to generalized weapons, i.e. means of warfare, in most general sense of this word, or - instruments of support for self-ruling within another social system, when there is no conceptual incompatibility of ruling in both systems.
This approach determines the priority order of the above classes of instruments of influence on the society because the changes in society's state under the impact of the instruments of supreme priorities, entail much more significant consequences than those incurred by the instruments of minor priorities, although such changes proceed more slowly, without "noisy effects". In other words, within the historically long intervals the level of effectiveness is increasing from the first point to the sixth, while the level of irreversible results of their application, which by and large determine how efficiently problems of the social life are solved in ‘now and forever’ terms, is falling”.
By this moment I couldn’t tell exactly, what attitude can this fragment have to the solution of “picnics” riddle, but something suggested me - there was some connection between them indeed. And it was the fragment with mentioning of the “effect of monkey’s paw”, which strike me most of all, for the image of monkey presented in the third “picnic”:
“Policy is a type of ruling. In the meantime, the theory of ruling suggests that it is objectively impossible to exercise ruling when the objectives and the hierarchy of their significance are unidentified and the simultaneously determined goals are incompatible. The doctrine outlined by Z. Brzezinski does not meet these criteria. In case the ruling is exercised tacitly, i.e. when its goals and the means of their achievement “go without saying” - and hence, the above principle is not relevant, - inevitably come unpredictable consequences which depreciate even the results achieved so far (as it was the case of the US NSC Directive 20/1 of August 18, 1948, in the sense that the execution of its main provisions between August 18 and 23, 1991 has generated even more serious problems for the USA) and may even invalidate them completely (in the West this is called sometimes the “effect of monkey's paw”). It happens because the tacit (when it “goes without saying”) and declared (direct definitions) approaches are practically mutually suppressing by virtue of different objective and subjective factors; besides, in the social life they generate phenomena which are the result of their interaction”.
The text following this paragraph made me remember my latest conversation with Holmes, and then I started to understand, why these two notes were translated into English and why Holmes recommended me to study them:
“The same is true, if the present Z. Brzezinski's book relates to that information flow, by which the true American bosses are washing brains of those crowd members who are interested in politics and thus require for their self-psychological comfort some quasi-truthful explanation of the current events and of how they correlate with the officially declared ideological doctrine of state and with political strategy promoting this doctrine. As far as the bosses themselves are concerned, they are relying in particular on the doctrine, which has been designed for a very limited circle of initiated persons and thus better corresponds to the world's reality. However it could not being articulated in the society in its true dimension without provoking meaningless riot against their dominance or - what is even more dangerous for the bosses - without generating sensible freedom-loving actions of those whose future choice is humaneness.
If the latter is the case, then the concealed political doctrine and the doctrines declared with the purpose to "reason" the crowd in general and its substratum (parts) are inevitably contradicting each other in some of their aspects. But the crowd and its substratum are being self-managed on the basis of collective consciousness and unconsciousness generated by its individual members, and thus in those aspects of social life, where the activity of structures initiated into the real doctrine is inadequate, these structures are loosing their competence. Meanwhile, the foundations of society’s established structure are undermined by phenomena which are gaining strength, along with the crowd falling out of ruling exercised by the hierarchy of structures of mutual deception - whether big or small - whose chiefs are persons initiated in true villainy.
Such processes of loosing the ability to rule may develop in reticence and than suddenly become obvious in particular circumstances, when the crowd, inspired by its collective consciousness or unconsciousness, demonstrates unexpected behaviour”.
The final phrase of the fragment of review, printed in thick type: “Objectively, such was the internal mechanism of state collapse in the USSR, the same mechanism exists as well in the USA, and it is "working" already…” - made my future plans more definite. Now I knew exactly, what I should do! In recent ten years I, as well as the majority of common people in Western countries, was little interested in Russian affairs. In many respects it can be explained by tendentious approach of our mass media to coverage of even domestic events, to say nothing of its “potential” enemies, among which undoubtedly remained Russia. Occupied with chess reviewing, I was interested a little in global politics, and about Russian events knew only those facts, which I could meet in news reports on CNN or BBC when zapping sometimes. Thus I stood before the choice for the second time: to seek for materials about Russia in serious libraries, and for doing this I needed time and again good knowledge of Russian language, or… to wait for the call of Hopkins. Wednesday morning at last the telephone rang:
– Hello, Watson. Let’s meet tomorrow at seven p.m. in the bar of hotel “Woldorf”. They serve fine coffee by French recipe there. I will have the man you need with me, Russian emigre Eugene Galba.