The Police Concept of History

"A Marxist might say that with 9/11, we enter the world of radically false consciousness, where the superstructure has become completely detached from social and material reality in a way that Marx never contemplated in his writings. 

A suggestive study that addresses precisely this complex of problems is Joseph Gabel’s 1975 False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification. Gabel sees reification (hypostatization) as the making of people, ideas, and time into things. His point of departure is the gross fact of mass belief in ideological chimeras, specifically Nazi and Stalinist ideology. The 9/11 myth is of a piece with these.

GABEL: THE POLICE CONCEPT OF HISTORY 

Gabel elaborates a lengthy definition of the political world view which is correlated with alienated and manipulated political life under the rule of schizophrenic/autistic ideologies which exhibit a low degree of fidelity to reality. Gabel called this the “police concept of history;” if he were writing today, he might well have called it the intelligence community or CIA theory of history. 

Gabel writes: “The police concept of history is the negation of the historical dialectic, in other words the negation of history. . . . History’s driving force is not the ensemble of objective forces but good or evil individual action . . . since the ‘event’ is no longer understood as the normal substratum of the course of History, but as miracle or catastrophe; it is no longer dependent on scientific explanation but on black or white magic. In the Manichean diptych of this view, the hero (leader) and the traitor represent two poles of the same principle of reificational negation of the autonomy of history. It is therefore a pseudo-history, a non-dialectical result either of success due to the genius of the leader or failure explicable through treason; an authentic ‘syndrome of external action’ permits the privileged system to evade eventual responsibility. 

The police concept of history represents the extreme form of political alienation; it is both a sociocentrism which dichotomizes the world into a privileged system [the US] and a non-privileged remainder [the Arab and Islamic world], and a phenomenon of consciousness of a Islamic world], and a phenomenon of consciousness of a schizophrenic nature. Since the privileged system is considered as perfect, extra-temporal and extra-dialectical, the event–particularly the unfavorable event–can only be explained by means of external action; it is experienced as an unexpected, ‘undeserved’ catastrophe, which is no longer integrated into the normal course of events whose succession constitutes the threat of concrete, dialectical temporality. 

One can compare this ensemble with the two specific elements in the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world (Weltuntergangserlebnis, abbreviated as WUE by German authors), the clinical translation of the appearance of the dialectic in a reified world which can accept the event only as a catastrophe.” 

(Gabel 115–116, with my interpolations) 

Here we have the principal elements or memes of the 9/11 myth in a clinical description a quarter century before the fact. The event has nothing to do with real historical forces. The realities of world commodity flows and of the world financial system in particular go out the window. Bin Laden and al Qaeda provide a deus ex machina of absolute evil and black magic. 9/11 is the undeserved catastrophe or WUE, experienced as a nightmare out of the blue. In order for such notions to gain mass acceptance, the American ideology had to already have traveled a considerable distance down the road towards schizophrenia and autism, and such mass acceptance has in turn further accelerated that descent.

For Gabel, schizophrenia is a loss of contact with reality and with history. His definition of schizophrenia depends heavily on the notion that, for the schizophrenic, development over time has become incomprehensible, while relations in space have become all-important. In space we can often choose to move, but time does not permit this. Therefore there is a close relationship between a radically anti-historical view of the world, as for example among the neocons and the Bush regime, and the syndromes of clinical schizophrenia, prominent among whose symptoms Gabel sees morbid rationalism, understood as a weak hold on reality: 

In the light of recent work, schizophrenia appears as a loss of the sense of personal history, and psychotherapy therefore consists of a reconstruction of the totality of the person with a reintegration into history. From the viewpoint of the investigator the schizophrenic loss of the historico-dialectical perception of reality can be seen in the form of a preponderance of the spatial factor or as a loss of experienced time: as over-spatialization or as sub-temporalization.” (Gabel 116) 

Gabel’s work here dovetails with that of Frank, who points to Bush 43’s notorious refusal to discuss the details of his youthful debauchery before the age of about 40. It is as if these episodes were repressed and no longer accessible to memory–at least, in Bush’s own propaganda patter. Frank is certainly on firm ground when he points to the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: “Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush’s evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency. . . . To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner.” (Frank 59–60) 

WOE IS WUE: CATASTROPHE FROM OUTSIDE A PERFECT SYSTEM 

A vital part of the WUE brought about inside the perfect system by evil forces is that these evil forces are axiomatically seen as coming from outside of that perfect system. Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators. “The result is that when the evidence of the historicity of existence forces itself on the misoneism (hatred of change) of reified consciousness, it appears as an unexpected catastrophe, inexplicable and often attributed therefore to external action. . . . For sociocentrism, the privileged system being perfect, any change (particularly any unfavorable change) is the work of external maleficent powers.” (Gabel 288 and note) Gerhard Wisnewski has related this idea most directly to 9/11. As Wisnewski points out, “from outside” is the central slogan of the official version of 9/11. “The impression is produced that the perpetrators came ‘from outside’: from outside of the building, from outside of America, even from outside civilization. The official version of these events screams ‘outside, outside, outside.’” (Wisnewski 143) 

In a world axiomatically defined by terrorism, the Manichean outlook seems destined to win out. Sanguinetti saw something similar in Italy at the beginning of the strategy of tension: “In view of terrorism presented as absolute evil, evil in itself and for itself, all the other evils fade in to the background and are even forgotten; since the fight against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it already is the general good, and the State, which magnanimously conducts it, is good in itself and for itself. Without the wickedness of the devil, God’s infinite bounty could not appear and be appreciated as is fitting.” (Sanguinetti 3) 

Gabel insists again and again on the key role played by the loss of the historical dimension, and it is clear that this problem was shared by twentieth-century America with Nazi Germany and with Soviet Russia. Anglo-American propaganda exhibits an overwhelming tendency to demonize enemy leaders: Noriega, Milosevic, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are notable examples, but the tendency goes back to Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least. Today the explicit speech of propaganda is conducted on the overtly infantile plane: good guys and bad guys, of bad actors, and most of all terrorists. Gabel writes: “ 

For Gabel, this is another symptom of reification (hypostatization): “As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity. Consequently the undeniable fact of change forces itself on this ‘consciousness of immediacy’ as a catastrophe, as a sudden change from the outside that excludes mediation. . . . Seen in this perspective, history appears as a function of demiurgic action. An external force (God, the hero, a party) transcends the efficiency of its autonomous dialectic. Reified consciousness is essentially ahistorical: mens momentanea sive carens recordationem [a mind in the moment, or lacking memory], said Leibniz on this subject.” (Gabel 151) 

Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue bin Laden as champion of evil. How can hundreds of millions of people believe in such a product? Gabel discusses the stress on biological heredity and race as one of the leading anti-historical features of the Nazi outlook, and there is evidence that Hitler was also well aware of this. Gabel points out that Nazi ideology, with its glorification of race and biology, was marked by “morbid rationalism in its worst form.” Gabel argues that “any unfavorable event for this racial pseudo-value is itself extra-historicized and ‘understood’ in terms of treason or conspiracy: the ideology of national socialism is logically inseparable from the theory of the ‘stab in the back.’” (Gabel 117) 

If fascism comes to the United States, it is now certain that its ideology will prominently feature the 9/11 events as a stab in the back to a benefactor by an ungrateful and treacherous outside world; fascist neocons are already spouting this point of view. Ironically, the German request for an armistice in 1918, which Hitler later condemned as a stab in the back by Social Democratic politicians, was actually the work of Field Marshal Ludendorff and other future backers of Hitler. 

As for 9/11, which Bush blames on the Arab and Muslim world, it too had some of its main backers inside the US military and intelligence services.