FETISHIST RUMSFELD

Election Campaign in the US

By Helmut Mueller-Sievers

[This article originally published September 28, 2004 in Frankfurter Rundschau online is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/feuilleton/.]

Seen psychologically, Donald Rumsfeld represents the most disheartening type among all the figures surrounding George W. Bush. Karl Rove still shows a certain sincerity in his religious convictions and Dick Cheney a kind of positive energy in his maliciousness. With Rumsfeld, on the other hand, one enters a plane of freely-floating aggressiveness not bound to any principles or any special competence. Psychological textbooks know unbridled ruthless tyrants as failures. Rumsfeld may be a successful cross-breeding, a new type in American centers of power.

From his time in Chicago as CEO of the pharmaceutical and chemical corporation Searle, anecdotes are told about the extraordinary unpleasantness of this man in
Personal interchange. He tested his co-workers and shouted in their faces. If they flinched, they lost the respect of their boss. He managed to circumvent the regulatory boards for a controversial sweetener that caused a high percentage of brain tumors in clinical experiments. He eluded the controls by using his connections in Washington. Relatives of the tumor victims complain about this on the Internet and in lawsuits.

Rumsfeld’s appointment as Secretary of Defense made clear that Colin Powell was Secretary of State to satisfy the PC-advocates. In the Pentagon, Rumsfeld surrounded himself with a phalanx of undersecretaries – Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone and Douglas Feith – who despised the military and its commanders and simultaneously sought to remove the CIA from military reconnaissance work. With the president’s approval, these extremist neo-conservatives knit a net of ultra-secret special units with orders to hunt suspects, permission to set up secret prisons everywhere in the world and conduct interrogations without prohibitions on torture. These orders were issued easily since parts of the headquarters were not subject to any military command. The state is now turning away from safeguarding law. Guantanamo is only the most visible island in this ocean of legal impunity. Abu Ghraib only became known accidentally.

WHY IS RUMSFELD SO QUIET?

In his sensational reports in the “New Yorker” in May 2004, Seymour Hirsch showed that these initiatives were drawn up directly in the office of the Defense department and that offenses of individuals cannot be the dominant theme. Now Hirsch actualizes these reports and shows the findings from the investigating committees. The conclusions that he offers in his book “Chain of Command” are more shocking than expected. The evidence that leads directly from the prisons to the Pentagon and to the White House is very clear. If Hirsch’s facts are correct, finding the responsible parties is no longer central but whether taking responsibility – the original political speech-act – still means anything to this White House.

The furor over the torture has lately become muted. What is so paralyzing and shameful for many Americans about the torture scandal in Abu Ghraib goes beyond the question of political responsibility. The unconsciousness of a culture is revealed in acts of systematic torture – when as here the command was given for the visible sexual humiliation of prisoners. How this culture dreams of power and powerlessness and how it wants to live out its fantasies uncensored were illustrated publically. The body-pyramids, fellatio-orders, the dog-leashes, hoods and chains are the stagecraft and objects of a collective sexual fantasy that no longer focuses on gender differences. Rather the potential terror of the other’s body is banished through the fetish.

A survey of the relevant Internet pages could confirm the spaciousness of these fantasies. Reading academic texts shows that gender research contributed to these fantasies. As we know from many analyses, the fetishist oscillates between two extremes, failure and rage. He resists taking responsibility for these two phenomena. Therefore Donald Rumsfeld is very quiet. Seymour Hirsch’s call for responsibility dies away. Hirsch brought Richard Perle to fall owing to a conflict of interest. Perle quickly described him as the figure that comes nearest a terrorist in America. But Hirsch will not get hold of Donald Rumsfeld before the election.