The New York Times reported it this way: "Joe Kent, a top U.S. counterterrorism official who had been a contentious choice for the post because of his promotion of conspiracy theories, resigned on Tuesday, citing his opposition to the Iran war. Here is his resignation letter in full." (Read Joe Kent's Resignation Letter). Mr, Kent's announcement of hisd resignaiton, as is now the c ustom among members of the political lclass, was, in part distributed through X (Twitter):
After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. (here)
The President, of course, was more than willing to play. He had this to say:
In response, Trump said Tuesday he "always thought" Kent was a nice guy but also "was weak on security, very weak on security." "I didn't know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but when I read his statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat to every country," Trump said during an Oval Office event. (here)
I generally do not bother with the details of the harem politics that tend to mark the inter-personal relations and the politics of high level government organs, whatever the political ideology within which those organs operate. This case would have been no different though it does appear to provide a nice story lines that crisscross the current strategic positions on President Trumps engagement with Iran. (eg here).
But I did take the New York Times up on its invitation to read the letter, which, with thanks to the NYT is also reproduced below. Mt reflections, which follow focus on the semiotics of resignation.
1. Mr. Kent's resignation brought back memories of another resignation, which like this one, was mean t to provide fodder for politics--that of Mr. Bolton during Mr. Trump's first Administration. I wrote reflections about that here: Ruminations 91: Very Brief Reflections on John Bolton's "Secret History" of Mr. Trump, and the Art of Political Burlesque. Much of its starting points might well apply here:
The Bolton "Secret History," salaciously (well, we all "Gotta Have a Gimmick") titled "The Room Where it Happened"will be published in late June 2020 by Simon and Schuster, subject of course, to legal action on the Trump Administration's claims that the work contains materials which may not be published (Trump administration sues Bolton over book dispute). Like the Procopius work, it is brimming with accusation and demonization. His former master is not fit for office (ABC News video); and that he sacrificed national interest to further is own career. There is more. Like Procopius, the material is meant to incite political maneuverings--in early Byzantine imperial politics centered on the Hippodrome factions (Blues and Greens); in the United States among political parties and disaffected but powerful elements of the elite shut out of office with the loss of the 2016 election. All of this, of course, is fair play given the mores, the morally binding customs of a particular group (in this case of the high functionaries), of early 21st century America, And perhaps it augurs, like much of what is happening in 2020, the start of a new era, the character of which is still up for grabs. The brief Ruminations are . . . not focused on the "truth" of the allegations made--as saucy as many of them are. Instead it considers Mr. Bolton's "Secret History" in the context of the type to which it relates. It is an act of revenge, and betrayal as a payback for a perceived betrayal or thwarting of ambition, and is built on the believability of its demonizing revisionism the most potent element of which is its power to scandalize.The power of Secret Histories lie in the invitation for the target's enemies to treat as fact the interpretations of the disloyal author.
That appears to be the point here--the object is not the act but rather the act provides the opportunity to engage in the sort of politics "outside" that were rejected "inside." Betrayal is a bloody business and it is passionate. And here one encounters the sort of passion that, in some instances, usually erupt on the streets, and so erupted sometimes are successful and sometimes serve as a blood sacrifice.
2. What, though, is resignation. The word itself provides a space nest into which the words of that act may be nested. Its etymology suggests the central element of meaning of the term: "late 14c., resignacioun, "abdication, act of resigning" (an office, claim, etc.), from Old French resignation, resignacion (14c.) and directly from Medieval Latin resignationem (nominative resignatio), noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin resignare "annul, cancel, give back, resign" " Yet there is more to it than this. That etymology also suggests this: "From c. 1500 ("Imitation of Christ") as "surrender to God, resignation to God." The non-spiritual meaning "quiet submission, unresisting acquiescence" is from 1640s." This notion is emphasized in the verb form of the word "resign"--"late 14c., "give up (something), surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish (an office, position, right, claim)." And it is in this latter sense that one might best approach the lamentation that is the letter projected put from Mr. Kent to the nation, and the world. It is, however, a submission not to the President, but to a higher power. And in the process it suggests that this surrender, this abandonment is a natural product of himself being abandoned by his superior. That, indeed, it is not Mr. Kent that is resigning, or relinquishing his principles and moral stances--it is the President who has betrayed his, and in that betrayal puts Mr. Kent's immortal (political) soul at risk of external damnation. The religious element of this performance ought not to be under estimated. The essence of the semiotics of this resignation. The betrayal that is itself prompted by betrayal produces the sort of semiotic "pong" that constructs object/significance from the object/significance that is both it and the oppositye of it, but at the same time that reflect it and between which the field of play is produced. In this case within MAGA, with bleed over effect beyond it b y those who would feed on the detritus of this match.
3. The reciprocating betrayal produces a sort of interesting semiotic resonance. The key, and much quoted line is this:
"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." (Kent Resignation Letter, below).
Marvelous. . . from a semiotic perspective. It is object--the grand normative vision, the faith, that compels both judgment (the President as betrayer of the community of the faithful) and action (the "surrender to a (higher) God.
Still it is worth taking these short but rich sentences apart for their semiotic presumptions. First, the "can not." Mr. Kent's "cannot" is a physical manifestation of the incarnation of ritual of rejection. The question isn't focused on inability; it is instead focused on unwillingness; and that unwillingness in turn is focused on Mr. Kent's construction of his own faith universe, the betrayal of which produces the inevitable "cannot." That cannot, then is a function of his "good conscience. HIS good conscience, a conscience which Mr. Kent is willing to export onto the belief and preferences of his faith community. In that sense, it is not his conscience, but rather his projection of that expression of a conscience of a community of the faithful outward to that community that is of interest. In the absence of that projection that is no semiotic corporeality to his conscience, something that he might have, in his own good conscience, kept to himself.
Second, the "support." Mr. Kent's "support"is apparently an important element, but also a specifically directed one--"support the ongoing war in Iran." That support is personal to Mr. Kent. That was made clear by Mr. Kent's "cannot"--though the personal assumes semiotic significance only is a relflection of a communal "cannot"--one which Mr. Kent presupposes. What he cannot support is "war." Yet the term "war" has lost all general significance. The concept of war as a construct of law, of mythology, of prior practice, of tradition, of habit, etc. are all now in flux--not a flux created by the Trump Administration, but one whose contradictions proved ready to be blown up at this time. To assume that the situaiton is a war is to presuppose the basis on which the term is used, and more importance, its semiotic interpretive significance. Some would disagree that the term is the correct one, or for that matter that the term has any value except as propaganda and as an instrument of legal warfare. That "war" is not just any "war" but a specific instance of bellicose behavior--that directed toward Iran. Apparently, there is no problem with the wars against bandits and law breakers in Venezuela, even if one purports to be the sitting president of that place. It is just Iran.
Third, it is not immediately clear why "war" in Iran, as he might define it, is special to Mr. Kent. But then clarity is provided--this is a war of the Jews. It is a war of the Jews into which the U.S. was "pressured"--and it was pressured by a lobby the power and breadth of which reduces the rest of the political landscape of the United States to insignificance. That is what separates blowing things up elsewhere and attacking the peace loving government of Iran, one apparently happy to live pacifically among its neighbors without any projection of power or ambitions beyond its borders (etc.), and one that "posed no imminent threat to our nation". . . except for the Jews. (and their "lobby"). One encounters here not a semiotics of war but of Jews. A semiotics that
conflates war-Iran-Jews in a way that then necessarily excludes the
US.
Here one constructs two object/significs--the first is Iran, and the second is that now useful stand-in for world Jewry (does one still use that term; probably less so but in this context the old words have punch), Israel. With respect to the first Mr. Kent draws on the customary efforts over the last several generations to rebuild, and legalize, what might be termed the "spirit of Pearl Harbor"--that is that until one has a significant amount of people and thing blown up on national soil, then one is hardly in a position to declare an other nation's actions as "imminently threatening." Closely tied to that is the notion of proportionality--that is an enemy state blows up some thing, one has the "right" only to blow up an equivalent amount of things (and people presumably) but no more. In this case, unless Iran would have blown up a substantial part of the United States there was no "imminent" threat to the national heartland. That makes sense semiotically is one is willing to invest the word "imminent" and "threat" with specific meanings drawn from a cognitive cage that starts from the presumption that war is to be avoided even at the cost of life and property. That might have made sense for that briefest of moments between 1989 and 2010. One wonders, though, whether its presumptions, and indeed its pretensions, are worthy subjects of debate. And, indeed, they are. And perhaps that debate has moved from significs to objects which signify, that is from the signification of meaning through law/policy text, to law/policy constructed on the ground, producing a set of data that itself may be aggregated into meaning. That suggests a movement from deductive to inductive cognition that is already evident in tech based systems. What one encounters now are centers of belief, and belief communities; orthodoxy is ascribed to text but that is hardly plausible where text becomes more and more the symbols of interpretive opportunity.
Semiotically, then, Mr. Kent's fine paragraph might be signified this way: it embraces objects--faith, war, lobbies, Israel, threat, Iran--and invests them with a specific significs which are then valued, and interpreted in ways that are meant to reach out to a community of believers who together might produce a vision of the world, and the values against which actions are assessed, that for the orthodoxies embedded in the way that Mr. Kent has chosen to absorb and judge the world, justifies this quite operatic performance, a performance that is meant to signal solidarity with a community from which. it would seem, President Trump is meant to be declared heretic and excommunicated. Fair enough, b it that is politics, even if it is clothed in the language and sensibilities of faith; and it is semiotics in the way on which Mr. Kent fights for a specific significs to key terms and ideas which he presumes his readers will either agree or accept.
4. And speaking of Jews and discomfort around Jewish "machinations," one is known by the company one keeps. And in this case Mr. Kent appears to enjoy the company of Tucker Carlson (see eg
here, "'Key decision makers were not allowed to express their opinions. There wasn't a robust debate,' Kent told
Tucker Carlson on Wednesday."). I have nothing else to say about this--except this: semiotic transposition suggests that the site in which one produces objects and gives them significance provides the structural/normative framework within which that significance can be situated within a larger cognitive framework. In this case that is the larger cognitive framework of the reality spheres ion which Mr. Carlson operates. Mr. Kent's presentation of his faith performance within the territories of the collective semiotic rationalizations of the world of Mr. Carlson then suggests that Mr. Kent's words and idea must be mediated against and through those of Mr. Carlson. To perform with Mr. Carlson is to become a party of Mr. Carlson's semiotic universe. That is also something Vice President Vance might consider.
5. Betrayal begets betrayal. Mr. Kent then pleads; he pleads for President Trump to abandon his current heresies, and the control of the Jews, and return top the values on which he was perceived--or semiotically which have been reconstructed out of time as the meaning universe he offered his community of the faithful up until 2026. To that end, Mr. Kent offers a nice Catholic opportunity--to confess, to show contrition, to do penance and to seek absolution among the community of the faithful he has abandoned. . . but; Mr. Kent has not. At the center of this is the signification of "never ending wars." Mr. Kent suggests that the proper construction, the proper signification of that concept is the occasional missile aimed at a leading figure or two from time to time. That, of course, leaves open the question of imminent threat which appears not to apply when one is merely blowing up the occasional personality that is irritating and that might have caused harm and might in the future cause more--like Iran, perhaps in the mind ofg the President, but things are easier to evaluate against a "no endless war standard" when what one does is the periodic assassination. All of this suggest a peculiar application of abstraction ("no endless wars") which, when combined with the "no Jewish wars" abstractions, might provide the semiosis of the protection of what is by implication assumed to be a peace loving enough Iranian regime (or peace loving enough when it comes to the US) in the context in which the current hostilities arose. All of this makes sense only as and to the extent that Mr. Kent's faith in his own semiosis remains relevant to him, and then, by projection of that resignation, also as an object of evangelization meant to convert others to or invite them into the communion of his like minded fellows.
6. The rest suggest the semiosis of self-construction, and the power of marginalization in driving an acolyte to apostasy. What makes it interesting from a semiotic perspective is the way that the letter reframes apostasy--it is not Mr. Kent's apostasy but rather that of President Trump that requires Mr. Kent to preserve his immortal soul by a rupture with the offending person. Mr. Kent sought to project his views but was denied; he might have been excluded, he might have been rejected (or his views anyway). He speaks of echo chambers managed by the Jews but longs for the echo chambers of an orthodoxy from which Mr. Trump strayed. Thus it is not the echo chamber itself that is bad--it is the echo chamber of infidels, heretics and Jews that is distasteful. His echo chamber, on the other hand is one that approaches the purity in which semiotically at least a proper system of self referencing objectification of signification of things and actions can be undertaken inc ways in which that signification reinforces the premises of interpretation on which the community of the faithful build their world views, and then measures its attainment by the measures they themselves great through meaning measures--the no endless war theme for instance. Not that is is bad; just that this is semiotic performance that is powerful precisely because it establishes a structure inside of which the entirety of the world can be captured and understood--and from which everything else can be understood as corrupt or just wrong. It is appropriate, then, that Mr. Kent calls President Trump back from the abyss of heresy before heresy becomes apostasy. For that evangelization and faith are needed; and both are much in abundance here.
7. And that is the fundmental character of the letter--not its politics, but its faith in its politics; not its policy choices, but the belief in policy choices as the way one lives one's faith in policy as the lived expression of a faithful community; not marginalization of his voice but the sin of refusing to hear the word preached. Mr. Kent has produced a marvelous semiosis of faith, the expression of which is politics. This is nic e old fashioned stuff, the stuff with which the politic al community of Iran is also built--at least in its current form. Perhaps that explains the affinity--two semiotic communities the building blocks, the foundational objectification of its community is faith in belief, that is in objects imbued with signification that transcends argument and requires the resignation of faith, the "surrender to God, resignation to God." expressed in the faith objectification of politics as the "quiet submission, unresisting acquiescence"to the cognitive universe of the faith community, in communion with which political solidarity serves as its evangelizing expression:
(1) object (semiotic "firstness"--faith, internalized as conscience, but an individual conscience that is itself
merely a singular expression of a collective conscience among the
faithful expressed in OTHER objects (policy) and action), (2) signification (semiotic "secondness" the structured meaningfulness of policy and action that reinforces faith as object/action by fusing faith and and in action that expresses each other; a thing is important as a matter of faith--faith is signified by its expression), and (3) communal interpretation (semiotic "thirdness" the communion of the faithful made stronger by its catechism, the language and vocabulary of belief, the values of which must be collectively infused into objects and actions around political objects, such as the precise interpretation of forever war and imminent threat, not as policy but as expression of faith (object) evangelized)
build to the triumphalism of the surrender to the faithfulness of the community of believers that is the ultimate sacrifice of Mr. Kent. Against this Mr. Kent draws on the semiosis of the Great Satan into whose traps and deceit President Trump has fallen. And that leads inevitably to sacrifice--Mr. Kent's as a prelude to the sacrifice of the great man fallen into sin who must either be brought back from heresy or consumed in the fires reserved for the torment of sinners.
And, of course, by failing to take any of this into account, by providing analysis detached from meaning, most of the coverage of this spectacle will tend to "get it" right only from their own perspectives and reflecting only their own needs. That, too, is the politics of cognition.
