Internal Subversion Research Articles

The state and national security: current issues and contemporary application

The dominant security paradigm has styled the nation state in order to reflect its popular basis as the fundamental source of social belonging. The good governed nation state is a formidable security organization as an all. It is through the nation state that citizens guarantee their own security, individual as well as collective. Personal security thus becomes dependent upon and even analogous to national security. In contrast, insecurity is understood as an external threat located outside the state. Internally or externally directed, policies taken to ensure national security may be of an economic, political or military nature. National security measures thus include, among others: maintaining effective armed forces; implementing anti-terrorist measures; ensuring civil and emergency defenses; using intelligence to detect and counter external attack and internal subversion; using diplomacy to strengthen alliances and isolate threats; and using economic power to encourage cooperation and isolate or weaken political rivals. Generalizing, the article reflects the national security approaches, specifics and extreme circumstances of liberal democracies, authoritarian states and failed states.

Reconstructing Historical Geographies of the Dirty War in Mexico: The Challenges of Working with the Archives of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad

As part of the process of democratic transition, the Mexican government opened the archives of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad in 2002. Created after World War II, the mandate of this agency was to protect the country from internal and external subversion. When decommissioned, the archives joined the Archivo General de la Nación, which is housed in the former Lecumberri prison in Mexico City. The archives help to outline the development of new technologies of state power that underpinned Mexico’s Dirty War. Working with such documents therefore poses significant methodological and ethical challenges. This article addresses several of these challenges. It first addresses the complex transitions represented through the prison-turned-archive and highlights the ways in which access to the archives has been politicized and tenuous. The article draws on the concepts of “state fixations” and “fugitive landscapes” developed by Craib (2004) to explore the spatialities of power and resistance represented through the archives. Drawing on archival material that documents a significant university movement that emerged in the 1970s in Oaxaca, this article presents a range of strategies for building an explicit geography of student mobilization and state repression in Mexico.

Genealogía y modernización de las fuerzas armadas en el Ecuador

La modernización de las Fuerzas Armadas en el período de Alianza País se asienta en la disyunción entre institución armada y soberanía nacional, combina diversas formas superpuestas de soberanía con nuevas formas de disciplinamiento y control de la población, y se orienta al paso del Estado de derecho al Estado de seguridad a nivel global. Las modificaciones de las Fuerzas Armadas se articulan al proceso genealógico del Estado-nacional, pasando por cuatro momentos: primero, el momento fundacional en la Revolución Alfarista ordenado en torno a la soberanía territorial-nacional-interna. Segundo, con la incorporación al Tratado Interamericano de Asistencia Recíproca (TIAR), las FFAA entran en la lógica de la defensa continental como dispositivo de alineamiento y dependencia del poder americano, en el marco de la Guerra Fría. Tercero, este ordenamiento llega a su forma fuerte con la Doctrina de la Seguridad Nacional que trasmuta el orden de la soberanía territorial al dominio de la subversión interna. Y cuarto, la fase neoliberal parte de la licuefacción del Estado nacional.

Migração e crime: a Lei 6.815, de 1980

Resumo O artigo analisa o debate e as circunstâncias do envio ao Congresso Nacional, em 1980, do projeto de lei que seria sancionado como Lei 6.815, de 1980 (Estatuto do Estrangeiro). Num contexto de ditadura militar, em plena vigência da Guerra Fria, da Operação Condor e da Lei de Segurança Nacional, o texto enviado pelo General João Batista Figueiredo é intensamente criticado por parlamentares de oposição, intelectuais, sindicatos e pela grande imprensa. Além de apresentar os principais elementos que pautaram o debate parlamentar e os aspectos mais questionados da proposta de lei, o artigo analisa teoricamente a visão do estrangeiro como ameaça, numa tradição legislativa que remonta ao Império mas que, no período analisado, tem características próprias ligadas aos conceitos de guerra interna e de subversão. Busca apresentar subsídios para legisladores e especialistas no tema e permitir ao leitor refletir sobre a resiliência possível deste discurso (de trinta e cinco anos) atrás nos debates contemporâneos.

Moscow’s Visions of Future War: So Many Conflict Scenarios So Little Time, Money and Forces

Like the United States and NATO, Russia is struggling to define the future security environment and shape a course to the creation of a relevant and effective military. Russia’s strategic vision is of an uncertain, complex and quite dangerous word with threats ranging from internal subversion through intercontinental nuclear exchanges. The Russian military faces an impossible dilemma. It must address a broadening spectrum of prospective conflict scenarios with inadequate resources leading inevitably to the fielding of inadequate capabilities. One reason that Russia clings so tenaciously to nuclear weapons is its recognition that it is the nation’s central, even the sole, source of political relevance and military power.

Propaganda, Internal Security and Alliance Politics: Greek Proposals to NATO in the 1950s

In a prolonged multidimensional conflict such as the Cold War, military threats were aggravated by the challenges of internal subversion and propaganda. These posed huge problems to the smaller NATO members, who lacked the resources to respond to Soviet bloc/communist tactics. This article focuses on two Greek proposals to NATO, in 1952 and 1958, which intended to address such issues. In the first instance, Athens contributed to the creation of the NATO Special Committee. In 1958, a Greek proposal on psychological warfare was brushed aside. The article tries to interpret Greek motives, the alliance's response and the reasons which led to the rejection of the latter proposal.

Erosion of Moral Ethics among Military Personnel

The study examines the issue of moral ethics among military personnel. Military is the core component of a country. Country maintains its military in order to safeguard their core values and national interest from external aggression and internal subversion. The military personnel come from the same society where erosion in the value system is constantly taking place from various reasons. Consequently it is difficult for military personnel to remain completely immune to these corrupting influences. The present study focuses on the erosion of moral ethics in our savior. The research was carried on the basis of both primary and secondary sources and the result was analyzed accordingly. The study revealed that erosion is more at senior level and personnel are not free to talk about such incidence officially. It is acting like a termite among personnel. Article will also focus to propose some suggestive measures in this regards.

Protecting the Northern Flank, or Keeping the Cold War out of Scandinavia? British Planning and the Place of Norway and Denmark in a North Atlantic Pact, 1947–9

A pragmatic, but focused, pursuit by British policy-makers of an alliance is often regarded as a central element in the genesis of the North Atlantic Treaty. Analysis of the issue of Scandinavian membership shows that British policy was not actually consistent regarding either means or ends. It was subject to internal debate, based upon conflicting assumptions in the Oslo embassy, the Foreign Office, and the armed forces. The Foreign Office's main concern was to provide Norway and Denmark with a sense of security so that they would take measures against internal subversion, while the military was more concerned to prevent British military resources being overstretched and were prepared to accept Scandinavian neutrality: they wished if possible to keep the cold war out of Scandinavia. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and the Foreign Office did not believe this was possible, nor necessarily desirable, but were less than wholehearted about Norway and Denmark joining the pact on their own. Even in early 1949, when Soviet pressure was applied to Norway, Britain was ambivalent about whether Norway should be a founder-member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Although Britain strongly desired the alliance for long-term gains, they worked hard to ensure the form it took worked to meet their short-term needs.

Here Comes the Fear—Again

Here Comes the Fear—Again Matthew Salafia (bio) Craig Thompson Friend . Kentucke's Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. xxiv + 369 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Stanley Harrold . Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xvi + 292 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Anne E. Marshall . Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiii + 233. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. "Lie still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you," Kentucky women warned their children at the start of the nineteenth century, using fears of Native American bogeymen to discipline their children (Friend, p. 256). In the antebellum period when Kentuckians' anger was "waxing warm," the Warsaw Patriot, in order to silence abolitionists' "demon spirits" (Harrold, p. 81), called for capital punishment for anyone convicted of circulating antislavery documents. Finally, in the postebellum South, with Kentucky wracked by violence, the New York Times stated "the peaceable people of Kentucky are to-day in more danger from outlaws and murderers of their own race than they were at the dawn of the century from hostile Indians" (Marshall, p. 79). Whether found in bedtime stories or on the pages of the New York Times, fear, with its unique combination of universality and divisiveness, plays a special role in Kentucky's history. Fear of external invasion and internal subversion haunted white Kentuckians from the settlement of the region to the emergence of modern Kentucky in the twentieth century. But, rather than let fear cripple them, Kentuckians embraced it to define themselves against their real and imagined enemies. Taken in sequence, Craig Thompson Friend's Kentucke's Frontiers, Stanley Harrold's Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, and Anne Marshall's Creating Confederate Kentucky, provide a history of Kentucky from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth; yet at each stage of development, fear drives [End Page 73] Kentucky's history. White Kentuckians seemed to be constantly assailed by both real and perceived threats to their very existence, and they made this persistent state of conflict the foundation of their identity. White Kentuckians turned that fear of invasion and subversion into a call for vigilant defense; and in defining their internal and external enemies, however inchoate, they in turn defined what it meant to be a Kentuckian. In Kentucke's Frontiers, Craig Thompson Friend argues that the transition from a western Kentucky in the 1770s to a southern Kentucky in the 1800s was not a natural development but was instead a contested process that ended with the dominance of wealthy white male Kentuckians. Friend frames this transition, and Kentucky's early history more broadly, through the rise and fall of several frontiers. He uses the term frontier to unite Kentucky's history, from the "Indians' Frontiers" of the early eighteenth century to the "Old South frontier" that developed at the start of the nineteenth century. Even more than cultural conflict, Friend makes the argument that violence, fear, and terror defined these various frontiers. Violence between native people, between white hunters and native hunters, between white settlers and Native Americans and then between free whites and enslaved African Americans were all part of the settlement of Kentucky. Indeed, decades of violent conflict led white Kentuckians' to construct their identity in opposition to an "Other." Native Americans were colonial Kentuckians' negative reference point, but Friend argues that, by 1800, "African Americans became the dark, uncivilized Others" (Friend, p. xxi). According to Friend, both violence and fluidity characterized "Indians' frontiers" and the early colonial frontiers. A series of imperial wars both led to the depopulation of the trans-Appalachian West and its eventual repopulation by the Shawnee, Miami, and Mingo. Much of this material will be familiar to specialists on the early American West, but Friend offers a model that connects this early history of Kentucke with later periods in colonial American history. While this frontier ends with the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, it is only the beginning of a colonial...

Behind the atomic curtain: School desegregation and territoriality in the early Cold War

The early Cold War was, infamously, a time of political retrenchment, when anticommunists exploited popular fears and national security pretexts to squelch the democratic energies of the Popular Front. Left-led unions and civil rights organizations alike purged their leadership of any communist affiliation, while professional anticommunists pushed other organizations on the Left to do the same or land on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Support for left-liberal causes such as anti-fascism, labor rights, gender equity, and racial equality' provided red flags for investigators and agitators on the prowl for evidence of internal subversion.1

60 Years Israel - A Catastrophe? Reply to the Integration Speaker of the Muslim Religious Community in Austria, Mr. Omar Al-Rawi (60 Jahre Israel - Eine Katastrophe? - Replik an Den Herrn Integrationsbeauftragten Der Islamischen Glaubensgemeinschaft in Oesterreich, Landtagsabgeordneten Ing. Omar Al-Rawi)

This article contradicts the theses published by the head of the Integration Department of Austria's official Muslim Community, Mr. Omar Al-Rawi, in the Vienna daily Die Presse (May 15th 2008) on 60 years Israel - 60 years of catastrophe. His article has to be contradicted on behalf of Social Democracy, on behalf of Austrian foreign policy and on behalf of a liberal and tolerant, cosmopolitan Islam. Mr. Omar Al-Rawi says: * the Palestinians have nothing to do with the Holocaust * Hamas will become a political movement, capable of transforming itself * Muslims in Europe have nothing to do with the dark history of Europe. There is a legitimate demand of Palestinian solidarity. It is time to remember the NakbaThe author hopes to provide a more balanced view of events:The tragic events of the year 1948, during which ultimately 2000 Jewish and 13,000 Palestinian civilians have lost their lives, were caused in the ultimate analysis by the anti-Jewish ideology of militant Arab nationalism, which from the beginning did not accept the coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The military and political leadership of the young Israeli state at the time of the attack from the outside against the young Jewish state (5 Arab armies) was confronted with the tough question of possible internal subversion. Mr. Omar Al-Rawi does not mention the fact that the countries of asylum for the Palestinian refugees for many years did nothing to incorporate Palestinian asylum seekers. The author then analyses at length the role of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the important Palestinian religious and political leader at the time, who was a close collaborator of the Nazi regime. The author then analyses the continuity of anti-Jewish Arab extreme nationalism in the Charta of the Hamas movement, which even quotes passages from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the worst anti-Semitic propaganda pamphlet before Hitler's Mein Kampf. Hamas blames in its Charta the Freemasons for French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and World Wars of the 20th Century. All this is decently neglected by this important Austrian politician and religious leader.While the website of the Austrian social democracy provides under the heading Israel unequivocally a link to the Aavoda Party - the Israeli Labor Party under Ehud Barak, Mr. Omar Al-Rawi tries to introduce the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Hamas movement as a possible partner for dialogue and cooperation.The author then analyses on the basis of Encyclopedia Judaica today's scientific consensus on the true dimensions of what constituted the al Nakba. The new generation of historians in Israel does not exclude these thorny questions, but it has to be said at the same time that Medinat Israel - the state of Israel - fully respects the Muslim minority, and that a genuine peace and an alternative social policy would facilitate a better socio-political integration. On the basis of European Social Survey data the author shows that the following relationships hold in the country (percentages per total population group):* low trust in the way democracy works in the country, 2002 non-Muslims 25.7 Muslims 49.3 * very difficult on present income, 2002 non-Muslims 39.5 Muslims 47.4 * low trust in parliament 2002, non-Muslims 32.3 Muslims 41.7 * low trust in the police 2002, non-Muslims 14.8 Muslims 26.8 * low trust in the legal system 2002, non-Muslims 15 Muslims 16.4 Inferences about the true dimensions of necessary, feasible and possible change can also can be drawn from the data series of the inequality project at the University of Texas (Prof. JK Galbraith) and World Bank and ILO data series. Globalization and the neo-liberal policies of past Likud governments indeed certainly increased the social contradictions of Israeli society. But a fair and proper balance on Israel 60 would imply that all this - with Israel being a democracy - is debated where it should be - in the Parliament, and that a fair balance would also necessarily imply to state in clearest possible terms Israel's right of existence as a basic and necessary principle of Austrian foreign policy, repeated many times by successive Austrian heads of government and foreign ministers. In analytical terms, the peaceful coexistence and collaboration between Turkey and Israel could serve as a role model for the region. The article also contrasts the unacceptable perspective of Mr. Omar Al-Rawi with the plurality of peaceful coexistence patterns, which the majority of the countries of origin of Austria's Muslims already established with Medinat Israel, and also shows the very positive patterns of active Muslim solidarity with Europe's persecuted Jewry at the time of the Shoa by such countries as Albania and Turkey.

The Racketeer Menace and Antiunionism in the Mid-Twentieth Century US

AbstractIn the postwar era, conservatives manipulated concerns about union corruption and organized crime in order to score political points against New Deal Democrats and to win new legal restrictions on union power. The resulting racketeer menace had much in common with the contemporary red scare. Antiunion conservatives framed the issue of labor racketeering in terms that resembled the language then being mobilized against internal communist espionage and subversion. This rhetoric proliferated in the congressional debates of the postwar era. Proponents of the Taft-Hartley Act invoked the racketeer menace in 1946 and 1947. They depicted the law as an effort to curb racketeering and thus protect workers and the general public by restricting abusive union power. In the years that followed, a series of congressional hearings into union corruption kept attention focused on the issue of racketeering. For the Eisenhower Administration this campaign against labor racketeering offered a chance to peel the working-class vote away from the Democratic Party by politically dividing union members from their leadership. The culmination of this trend came at the end of the 1950s during the McClellan Committee hearings, which was the largest congressional investigation up to that time. Those hearings transformed Teamsters President James R. Hoffa into a potent symbol of the danger posed by labor racketeering. The committee's revelations and the publicity they received undercut the labor movement. Polls showed growing public skepticism toward unions, and especially union leaders. Such attitudes helped conservatives win a new round of legislative restrictions on organized labor in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).

“THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TAPESTRY”: ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, often considered her finest and most psychologically complex novel, tells its story through narrative indirection–what Gaskell's heroine Molly Gibson identifies in a conversation late in the novel as telling a story with a “mental squint; the surest way to spoil a narration” (623; ch. 58). In this conversation, Molly is conscious of her audience–her admiring and encouraging aunts and her less admiring and less encouraging stepmother. Like Gaskell, Molly is conscious of the presence of a “critical listening.” Thus Molly selects which details of her visit to the Towers, the manor of the largest landowners in her town, she will relate. In examining the use of details, of particulars, in Victorian and Modernist poetry, Carol Christ makes clear that what is at stake is “not whether literature should contain detail but what the significance of the detail should be, and consequently what the criteria for its selection are” (4). Gaskell's realist domestic fiction delights in detail. Yet Gaskell has been taken to task by such critics as Virginia Woolf for an incidental and excessive use of detail, detail that for Woolf represents the mid-Victorian novelist's inability to select what is important in rendering reality. The aesthetic problem with detail, Naomi Schor explains, lies in the way that detail subverts internal hierarchic ordering by blurring the lines between the foreground and the background, the principle and the incidental (20–21). Schor's explanation of this internal subversion is useful for opening up Gaskell's use of detail in Wives and Daughters.

South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition

Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of ‘superior’ European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did it rest lightly on top of pre-existing structures and serve to sustain established elites? Did it undermine the hold of ‘indigenous’ cultures on society or did it merely scratch their surface or even did it promote their revival?

In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday

In 1951, at the height of the Scare, Justice Hugo Black predicted that the Supreme Court would one day change its view on the balance between the need to ensure domestic security against subversive influences and an obligation to preserve First Amendment principles. Justice Black predicted that calmer times the Court would favor protecting the rights of political dissenters. He was right: six years later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover named June 17, 1957, Red Monday for the four Supreme Court decisions announced that day, meaning that the Reds had won. Arthur J. Sabin investigates the decisions after 1955 in which the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated its earlier endorsement of the political prosecutions that had engulfed the nation after World War II. Those prosecutions had sent hundreds to jail, reflecting a widespread belief that the nation was in serious danger of internal subversion and revolution. He does so in the context of the larger political culture of the times-and also in the context of the history of political dissent in America, from World War I through the McCarthy era and beyond.

Iranian covert aggression: Support for radical political Islamists conducting internal subversion against states in the Middle East/Southwest Asia region

The extent to which the Islamic Republic of Iran provides covert assistance to radical Islamist groups employing terrorism and violence against states in the Middle East/Southwest Asia region is a controversial issue. This study takes an analytic approach to the topic to determine the degree to which linkages exist. The evidence examined was drawn exclusively from open sources. The author provides an analytic framework for both current and future analysis of the issue. Five specific conclusions about past, present, and impending Iranian sponsorship of radical Islamists conducting internal subversion activities in the region are deduced from the assessment of the evidence. Given the consistency in Tehran's use of covert aggression as an instrument of foreign policy since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, there is little to indicate a change in this policy in the near term.

The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied. The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure. This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been soundly applauded. Conferences have been convened; journals have been founded; monograph series have been established. All of these have facilitated methodological and substantive dialogue between legal and social historians.

Spies, National Security, and the "Inertia Projector": The Secret Service Films of Ronald Reagan

WITHIN DAYS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR II IN 1939, RONALD REAGAN began working on new motion picture tentatively called Enemy Within. In the following weeks, its working title would change Uncle Sam Awakens and finally the more sensational Murder in the Air. The film favorably portrayed the young House Committee on Un-American Activities, warned of internal subversion from spies and saboteurs, and contained veiled criticism of those who would hinder American preparedness. Reagan played Secret Service agent, Brass Bancroft, whose mission included the defense of new super weapon, a death ray projector, that could stop enemy aircraft and make the United States invincible in war, thus promising to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered. Murder in the Air is one of four Brass Bancroft films Reagan completed in 1938 and 1939. In addition publicizing the Brown Scare, these pictures formed part of campaign enhance the image of government agents in their battles against counterfeiters, illegal aliens, and international spies and saboteurs. In the films youthful, heroic Reagan, then under contract Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., dramatically set forth concerns about law and order and national security an international audience. What do these films, historical documents unique in the annals of American presidents, tell us? Viewed in isolation, they say little. They do not necessarily give us direct insight into Reagan's pre-World War II social or political beliefs. We should treat the evidence from them with care if for no other reason than the fact Reagan had little say in choosing the films he appeared in or the roles he played. Having made this qualification, however, these motion pictures can tell us great deal if they are studied within the context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and alongside the substantial archival records that pertain Warner Bros. and the Hays Office. ' We can learn much about Reagan the actor and the public image that was created for him by studio publicity. Together, the movies and the records can improve our understanding of the internal workings of film censorship, major Hollywood studio, and more generally, the motion picture industry which helped revolutionize communication in this century. Moreover, they clearly reveal something of the political

Crisis and ethnicity: Legitimacy in plural societies

Governments cannot choose freely the type of problems which arise in society and with which they have to deal. Nevertheless, they do have discretion as to how to react. They presumably seek responses which are compatible with, and if possible contribute towards, the pursuit of their contemporary policy goals; and they have some choice as to how to diagnose the problems, who to blame, and how much attention to direct to them. One well-known strategy is for government leaders to invoke externally based threats or crises of internal subversion; furthering their own political dominance and enhancing their legitimacy by promoting a sense of siege. The problems they face are then depicted as symptomatic of a potential Armageddon which they alone can prevent. Certain politicians may favour such a strategy more than others because it accords with their particular style of leadership, but clearly both the extent of the strategy's employment and its actual impact on domestic politics depend primarily upon the social and political environment in the state concerned. It will be argued here that there are particular features of the ethnically pluralistic Third World states which are especially conducive to the employment of siege strategies. Numerous Third World governments have made political capital by dramatising, exaggerating, or even inventing problems. In the case of Africa the most dramatic example was provided by Sekou Toure's Guinea where an isolated and insecure regime survived for over twenty-five years by maintaining a 'permanent plot' atmosphere in which fear and anxiety were generated so as to justify purges against opponents. In both Togo and Ghana the particular problems posed by the bifurcation of the Ewe ethnic group have repeatedly been translated into political crises by regimes concerned to promote both national unity and their own legitimacy. In the case of Asia, examples would include

In War as in Love: The Significance of Analogous Plots in Cooper’s The Pathfinder

IN W AR AS IN L O V E : T H E S I G N I F I C A N C E OF A N A L O G O U S P L O T S IN C O O P E R ’ S T H E P A T H F I N D E R WILLIAM OWEN Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (Critical interpretations of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder have been preoccupied with the unusual spectacle of Natty Bumppo in love, the solitary frontiersman incongruously the central male figure in a romantic plot.1 The usual reaction of critics, faced with Natty’s strange behaviour, has been to step back and consider the novel in enlarged contexts. Robert Zoellner, for instance, after pointing out that The Pathfinder marks Cooper’s return to the character after thirteen years, argues that Natty’s role reflects the struggle between Cooper’s new social values and the primi­ tivistic values Natty represented in the earlier Leatherstocking tales.2 Look­ ing at novels in Cooper’s canon closer to the publication date of The Path­ finder, Donald A. Ringe contends that the romantic plot involving Natty is a continuation of the discussion of social values expressed in Home As Found, the novel published immediately prior to The Pathfinder.3 In a psychoanalytical view, George Dekker theorizes that Natty’s experience and the moral derived from it, truth to vocation, are related to Cooper’s psycho­ logical turmoil at the time.4 These responses provide valuable perspectives, but because the views address only the issues of the romantic plot the critical focus on the novel is narrowed and fixed there. This is a common bias, how­ ever. The same focus is held by a critic who interprets Natty’s actions within the confines of the novel: Daniel Peck, stressing the Edenic pastoral setting, accepts Natty as an Arcadian lover.5 What is lacking in these interpretations is a consideration of the total narrative structure of the novel. Instead of being confined to Natty and the romantic plot, critical attention needs to be extended to another plot, the military one, and its central character, Lieutenant Muir. The intricate connections between the two plots provide a context in which Natty’s actions may be understood. More important, the contributions of the military plot and Lieutenant Muir to the meaning of the novel are significant and deserve critical recognition. The military plot concerns an expedition to relieve an outpost in the Thousand Islands during the Seven Years War or the French and Indian Wars as they are known in the United States. Initially regarded by the English Studies in C anada, x, 3, September 1984 characters as a pleasant excursion, the expedition erupts into a bloody battle between the British colonial forces and Indians led by a French officer. The enemy, it is disclosed, has been aided by a traitor, Lieutenant Muir, a quar­ termaster present on the trip. Though the plot has been overlooked, it is far from being a negligible part of the novel. It serves the narrative by moving the characters, contributing the climactic scenes and, not least, allowing Natty to regain respect by displaying his frontier skills. Moreover, the mili­ tary plot not only adds the action and adventure of colonial warfare, it advances a theme that obsessed Cooper in the last decade of his life. A close examination of Muir’s actions in the military plot reveals that The Path­ finder contains Cooper’s grave warning to his contemporaries about internal subversion, that enemies within may work dangerously and successfully. The reason for the critical neglect may lie in the difficulty in distinguish­ ing between the military and romantic plots, for they have an unusual and intricate relationship. The romantic plot dealing with Natty in love domi­ nates, or appears to dominate, the novel, allowing the beginning of the mili­ tary plot featuring Muir’s treachery to go unnoticed. This effect is aided by the use of the same major characters — Mabel, Muir, Pathfinder, Jasper, and Dunham — in both plots, so that there appears at first to be only one plot. As the narrative proceeds, however, the features of...