News from nowhere: Into the unknown

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At the end of last month, the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, just a few days after the death of one of the key architects of its War on Terror, former United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 

Unlike his often ‘misunderestimated’ boss George W Bush, Rumsfeld wasn’t merely prone to gaffes or malapropisms but deployed language in a targeted strategy of obfuscation, a diversionary tactic which underpinned the false rationale upon which the War on Terror – and in particular the invasion of Iraq – was founded, a campaign which led from the invention of illusory ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to the Pentagon’s repeated attempts to edit that war’s Wikipedia page to represent Iraq’s ‘occupation’ by American forces as a ‘liberation’. 

Rumsfeld was a master of paradox, a bellicose Oscar Wilde. He defended the absence of WMDs in Saddam’s arsenal by pointing out that the last thing you want to find when searching for such things is a ‘smoking gun’. He added that ‘simply because you don’t have evidence that something exists doesn’t mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.’ He rebuffed critics of his hawkish policies with the argument that ‘death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.’ Despite his claim that he didn’t ‘do quagmires’, he landed himself and his country in military morasses and verbal entanglements of historic proportions.

Secretary Rumsfeld’s most ridiculed – yet perhaps most significant – statement was, of course, that ‘there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ There was indeed something crucially unknowable about Rumsfeld himself, the abstruse pronouncements of this Donald perhaps pre-empting those of America’s next. ‘I believe what I said yesterday,’ he once said, adding: ‘I don’t know what I said, but that I know what I think — and I assume it’s what I said.’ Try disputing that, with or without a mouthful of ‘covfefe’ (coverage).

The incomprehensible is virtually incontrovertible. It’s impossible to argue against something you don’t understand, and it’s also impossible to understand something that makes no sense. In this way, Rumsfeld was something of a prophet: His unknown unknowns articulated and anticipated the peaks of ‘constructive ambiguity’ drawn to the point of unmitigated gibberish, generated by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who, like those ‘strongman’ leaders, they’ve often sought to emulate – such figures as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Bashar al-Assad – came to realise that the most implausible stories could acquire extraordinary authority if delivered with shameless conviction.

In the same week, when Rumsfeld died, in the north of England, the British opposition Labour Party narrowly retained a parliamentary seat at a bitterly contested by-election. Although their primary rivals for the seat were the ruling Conservatives, Labour’s greatest adversary in the poll had been a former member of their own party called George Galloway. Mr Galloway had stood against his old party, in an attempt to split the leftist vote and thereby facilitate a Tory win which would have destabilized what he perceives to be the conservativism of the current Labour leadership. Mr Galloway is a controversial figure, and also an interesting and influential one. It may be observed that George Galloway (an individual who has been professionally associated with this news organization amongst others) has several things in common with both Mr Trump and Mr Johnson, though they sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum. All three men reached notable heights of media celebrity through their popular television appearances: Trump, of course, on The Apprentice; Johnson in episodes of topical comedy series; and Galloway through the hit reality show Big Brother (which he joined in a bid to popularize his politically progressive messages). All three men are adored by their followers for a peculiarly strident brand of populism. All three have been dismissed by the mainstream press as political jokes. All three are essentially political disruptors. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and environmental activist Greta Thunberg, for example, may be seen fall into the more benevolent and progressive end of the disruptors’ scale. It might be argued, depending on your perspective that Mr Johnson and Mr Galloway also do. Indeed, there are those who would point out, not unreasonably, that the impacts of social injustice or climate crisis can become so disastrous that such turbulence becomes absolutely necessary. Those who rage against the disruption of the status quo are most often those who are safe, comfortable, well-off and well-fed.

With the fickle gift of hindsight, it seems clear that we should have seen such forces of disruption coming a long way off: We should have predicted their rise every time. Yet we very rarely manage to do so. The West has, for example, repeatedly allied itself with leaders - whom it considered pragmatic reformers or freedom-fighters - that grew into authoritarians due to the Western support.  Those dictators jeopardized the lives and liberties of their own people and came to be perceived as threats to the security of those western nations. That’s the trouble with disruptors. They’re by their nature impossible to predict, trust or control. They’re the truly unknown unknowns.

These ideologically diverse envoys of chaos may be seen either as offering opportunities for revolutionary change or as exponentially growing the risks of global catastrophe. They would most likely loathe being lumped together in this way, but their approaches demonstrate remarkable parallels, though their intentions and their effects may differ profoundly.

This conclusion brings us back round to Donald Rumsfeld and his old comrades Dick Cheney and George W Bush. Their first response to the attacks of 9/11 was entirely predictable and was no doubt intended to be provoked by the perpetrators of those attacks. The invasion of Afghanistan was, in these terms, pretty much a ‘known known’; its longer-term fate has remained, however, something of a ‘known unknown’, a clear area of uncertainty. But the Bush administration’s war against Iraq seemed so irrational, so militarily, politically and strategically foolhardy, so insanely miscalculated and divisive, an inevitable catalyst for decades of instability, a gift for extremists and warmongers on every side, the product of a critical mass of untruth and unreason, that it most clearly aligns with those very same ‘unknown unknowns’ against which Rumsfeld so famously railed.

In the end that’s the problem with Rumsfeld’s brand of disruption. It’s not usually strategic in any constructive or progressive sense. It doesn’t have an endgame, a point of consolidation or reconciliation. It may offer interested parties the prospect of immediate gains, but it tends to lead towards further cycles of upheaval. It’s also the case that ostensibly anti-establishment projects (such as Johnson’s or Trump’s) may merely serve to legitimize marginal, emergent or dormant aspects of the extant establishment, often shifting influence from political institutions towards monied corporations, or translating democracies into kleptocracies, and creating even less palatable incarnations of entrenched power.

Disruption isn’t a good or bad thing in itself; it may be a necessary tool of liberation, but it can also be a weapon of oppression. These things are always relative; one person’s freedom-fighter is another’s terrorist; and we will only ever make progress in human understanding if we can appreciate the validity of others’ perspectives and the sincerity of their motives, even if we don’t agree with them. That much mutual respect is the base-line for keeping the global conversation going. 

The techno-economic disruptors of the online realm (the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) may have divested many ordinary people of their communities and livelihoods (and may have improved many other lives). Geopolitical disruptions, as those enacted across the globe by agents of terror, have threatened countless thousands with social collapse and loss of life, almost as though they were the ideological equivalent of the pandemic itself. When leaders on all sides (East or West, left wing or right wing) lose any sense of reality or reason, when their words become the tools of their illusions, when the sham narratives of their simulacra go unchallenged because nobody knows what’s true anymore, then the impact upon the world can be utterly devastating. That’s why we must continue to unpick their nonsense, because such nonsense can kill. 

We may, at the last, observe that both Mr Galloway and Mr Corbyn once broke party ranks to oppose the Iraq War, while Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Bush broke ranks with diplomatic, geopolitical and military precedents to wage that war. Both pairs were disruptors in their very different ways. Rumsfeld and Bush won the argument at the time; but they've hardly been proven right by the judgment of History. It remains essential that we continue to hear all voices, to challenge their truths, to try to make sense of them and (when we cannot) to expose their senselessness. It’s a vital issue: where it’s necessary, we will all disrupt.