In my view the worst American president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. His crimes:
1) In his first act in office, he closed all the banks to stabilize the financial system. Only the largest banks were allowed to reopen. This had the immediate effect of concentrating control of finance capital.
2) He continued Hoover's policies of subsidizing railroads, banks, and mortgage corporations with public money.
3) He cut tens of millions from pensions for veterans of World War I and vetoed a bill to allow them to collect their promised bonuses immediately.
4) He was allied politically with a number of disreputable figures, the most notorious among them including Klansman Senator Theodore Bilbo, Nazi sympathizer Joseph P. Kennedy, appointed by Roosevelt to head the SEC and as ambassador to the UK, and former Klansmen Hugo Black and Harry Truman, who became Supreme Court Justice and vice president under Roosevelt. Charles Coughlin and Huey Long were also his allies before turning against him. Douglas MacArthur became a powerful war chief under Roosevelt and was given a free hand for massacres in the Philippines. In foreign policy, his allies included Laval, Petain, Franco, and Chiang Kai-shek, in addition to Churchill and of course Joseph Stalin.
5) He provided for compulsory arbitration for labor disputes, essentially empowering a board of bureaucrats to outlaw strikes. He worked closely with conservative union leaders such as Daniel Tobin and Walter Reuther to persecute union militants and break strikes.
6) 2 major pieces of social legislation signed by Roosevelt, the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, provided benefits to whites only.
7) He introduced payroll taxes, paid only by the working class and the most regressive form of all taxation.
8) He took an active role in breaking the dockworkers' strike in San Francisco, the auto workers' strike in Toledo, and the teamsters' strike in Minneapolis by deploying military force against them and arresting their leaders. He signed the Smith Act outlawing communism (a violation of the 1st Amendment) and sent 18 teamsters and antiwar activists to prison under it.
9) He censored the federal mail to prevent radical views from being heard.
10) He took steps to prevent private American aid from being used to help the anti-fascist forces in Spain.
11) He attempted to create a pliant Supreme Court by "packing" it with his allies. He was prevented only by his death from serving an unprecedented four terms in office. By these lights alone, the modern imperial presidency began with Roosevelt.
12) He put the economy on a permanent war footing which exists to this day and created the first peacetime draft in history.
13) He created the FBI, reorganizing the Bureau of Intelligence, increasing its powers, and putting in charge another ally, the notorious J. Edgar Hoover. He used the FBI to spy on members of Congress.
14) He created the OSS, precursor to the CIA.
15) He approved research on nuclear weapons.
16) He conducted WWII with the aim of securing American colonies in the Pacific and the control of the U.S.'s puppet Chiang Kai-shek in China. He helped British, French, and Dutch empires regain control of their former colonies. He provided only inadequate and shoddy equipment for defense of the Soviet Union and charged exorbitant prices for this material in both monetary and diplomatic terms. He ordered attacks on civilian targets in Germany and Japan, including the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden (in collaboration with the Churchill regime) as well as the attack on Tokyo which was the deadliest bombing raid in history.
17) He refused to bomb supply routes leading to German death camps, thereby disrupting the progress of Germany's Final Solution. He maintained strict quotas on Jewish immigration that prevented an estimated 3 million Jews from escaping death in the Holocaust.
18) He maintained racial segregation of the military and refused to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of alienating his segregationist allies.
19) He officially encouraged the rise of price-fixing cartels as part of his economic program.
20) He signed an executive order confining hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and some Italian-Americans in what he himself termed "concentration camps."
To me, whatever good he did is far outweighed by this truly awesome monument to evil.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sudan for beginners
Sudan and South Sudan seem like interesting places to start a discussion about world politics today. It has a recent history of violence involving some of the major powers both in East Africa and internationally. In previous centuries, this violence stemmed mostly from 3 related sources--the Nile River trade, the Ottoman/Arab slave trade, and the wars of cattle herders. P
erhaps the cattle wars are the simplest. For centuries, the main form of wealth for the patriarchs of the mostly Nilotic people living in the wetlands, savannas, and riverine areas of east Africa was cattle. It was and continues to be common for tribes to be locked into conflicts involving cattle raids, and often these conflicts have involved complex alliances among tribes. The addition of automatic weapons in the 20th century have increased the stakes of these conflicts and made them much deadlier. Warfare over cattle has also intermingled with the other wars in the region.
The taking of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East and Indian subconginent dates back centuries before the European slave trade, but it was not until the 18th or 19th century--when a backward form of capitalism was triumphant in the Ottoman Empire--that slavery became the major factor in Sudan's economy. The major powers of the time--Darfur, Sennar, the Azande kingdom--both sold slaves on a wholesale basis to Arab emirates nominally loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and incorporated slaves into their armies. Slave labor continues to be used, especially by armies.
The Nile River trade brought guns and gold to the upriver region, intensifying the deadly competition for access to the river. Besides slaves, the main export was for a long time ivory, usually carried by teams of enslaved porters.
Such was the situation in the 19th century when the khedive of Egypt, seeking land, gold, and slaves with which to carve out a European-style empire, invaded Sennar. A centerpiece of Egyptian policy at the time was the planned Suez Canal, which would allow for direct trade between the Mediterranean and India. The people of Sudan were heavily taxed to pay for the canal.
As Egypt, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire, fell on hard times, the British began taking an increasingly direct role in Egyptian affairs, including the canal from which the British would benefit the most. This was the situation when the Mahdi Army rose up against British rule.
A Sufi man claiming to be the Mahdi--a role similar to a messiah in some forms of Islam--and saying he was preparing the way for the 2nd coming of Issa (Jesus as the Islamic prophet) organized a major rebellion against Turkish-Egyptian rule. Building a modern army with its own factories for manufacturing guns--the first such in African history--he captured Khartoum, the ancient city where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge. The movement he began, the Ansar, continued to be involved in Sudanese politics into the 20th century.
Islam is a relatively recent import to Sudan. For centuries, the upper Nile basin was a stronghold of Christianity, specifically the Oriental Orthodox Christianity practiced by the Nubian kingdoms established in the wake of the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Meroe. These kingdoms were protected by geography and military organization from the conquests of early Islam. However, as Islam became established in Egypt to the north, the powerful and long-lasting Kanem-Bornu Empire to the west, and powerful Red Sea trading ports like Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar to the east, and in less powerful states in their cultural orbit, and as Muslim traders became frequent visitors to Nubia, conversion to Islam spread from the periphery to the centers of power. By about the time of the height of Ottoman power (15th century), the rulers of the 3 major Nubian kingdoms, along with most of the powerful tribes, had converted to Islam, often foollowing civil wars between Christian and Muslim factions. The rise of Darfur and Sennar, who had adopted Islam from their neighbors in Nubia, Kanem-Borni, and Wadai, also helped spread the Islamic faith while killing or selling into slavery many of the remaining Christians of northern Sudan.
Ironically, the Nilotic, Central Sudanic, and Ubangian people of South Sudan, who are most likely to be Christian today, were mostly Christianized after Christianity had long been practiced, and later abandoned, farther north. Missionaries concentrated on this area partly because the natives were less hostile to Christianity here than farther north (they were less organized politically, they had little history of conflict with Christian powers, despite some slave trades by Christian Ethiopia, and the Nilotic people's traditional religion worshipped a single male sky god, creating a fertile ground for conversions), and partly because missionaries believed that by Christianizing the people who lived in the heartland of the Arab slave trade, they would help stamp that trade out.
Christians and other non-Muslims resented the Mahdi's attempt to impose shari'a law. After the British and their Egyptian lackeys regained control with the help of a large army equipped with repeater rifles, Britain consciously pitted Muslim north Sudan against Christian/"animist" south Sudan, setting the stage for civil war once Sudan gained its independence.
The three-way Cold War among the U.S., USSR, and China, and the shifting positions of powerful neighbors (Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kinshasa regime) in this war, as well as the destabilizing conservative pressures from the Ansar on the side of the conservative Muslim establishment, and Israel on the side of the resistance, helped turn the struggle against shari'a law into a series of bitter factional fights involving repeated massacres in South Sudan. Cattle raiding helped intensify these fights, as did the discovery of large oil deposits in South Sudan.
A leftist resistance force based in the South, the Sudanese People's Liberation ARmy, was expertly maneuvered by the U.S. from a revolutionary force seeking nationwide power, an end to shari'a, and social equality, into a secessionist movement by southerners. A peace agreement reached in 2006 led to the referendum in which South Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence this year, which they achieved just recently. This independence will make it easier for the U.S. to control South Sudan's oil.
In the meantime, the SPLA, hoping to open up a 2nd front in the northwest, encouraged the Fur and Saharan people of the Darfur region to rise up against the government. Some initial successes by the Darfur rebels were impressive, but they were largely unable to capitalize on their victories because of infighting among the major tribes (conflicts stemming partly from opposing attitudes toward shari'a law and partly because of political conflicts in Chad and other countries that have spilled over into tribal conflicts in Darfur). Many Arab mercenaries have also assisted the government in putting down the rebellion.
The role of the Arabs in Darfur has been much misrepresented. First, although there is often conflict between "Arabs" and "Blacks," there is a substantial Arab component in some rebel factions (in fact, anti-Arab sentiment is one cause of infighting among the rebels). More interesting is that the "Arabs"--although they speak Arabic, keep alive Arabic cultural traditions, and trace their ancestry to patriarchs from the Arab world--are as Black in color as the "Blacks" who are culturally identified with a sub-Saharan tradition and speak an African language. Second, the Arab janjawid militias have been represented as murderous, genocidal maniacs in oversimplified presentations of the conflict by pro-interventionist parties. Certainly the lure of weapons supplied by Khartoum has tickled the avarice of a few Arab leaders, and certainly there have been too many acts of brutality by the janjawid. But it is wise to recall that most of Darfur is a desert, that pastoral Arab herders are among its poorest residents, that Arabs had long been accustomed to water their herds at some of the few oases in Darfur, and that the first attacks of the janjawid began after rebel leaders, involved in their own tribal faction fight, cut off access to the most important of these oases. It is also often alleged that the Arab Muslims are oppressing the Black Christians in Darfur. This misconception probably comes from a confusion of the Darfur conflict with the Sudanese Civil Wars in South Sudan. In fact, Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a powerful pre-modern Islamic sultanate.
The 2010 peace agreement in Darfur was transparently the result of American pressure to sign any agreement irrespective of the roots of the conflict. It was signed by only 1 of the 3 major rebel movements, namely the Justice & Equality Movement dominated by the Zaghawa tribe--notably the only one of the three to support shari'a law and to be allied with the ultra-Islamist opposition to Sudan's Islamist president Omar al-Bashir. The agreement would increase the influence the most powerful Darfurian Black tribes have in Khartoum, but make no steps toward autonomy or independence, the avowed goal of the JEM. The JEM has recently repudiated this agreement as rival groups have gained territory. The latest development here, though, is the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya which was the main source of military support for the rebels in Darfur. This, as well as the apparent stabilization of the situation in the south and the east (where an Eritrean-backed insurgency allied with the Nilotic and Darfurian rebels has reached a peace agreement as part of a general agreement between Sudan and Eritrea), can be expected to strengthen the government's brutal fist in Darfur.
The discovery of oil also prompted a major highway construction project overseen by none other than Saudi billionaire industrialist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was also allegely major shareholder in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was the main supplier of medicine (for war injuries, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and other endemic diseases for all of east Africa and the source of 90% of Sudan's pharmaceuticals including all its anti-tuberculosis medication. This plant was destroyed by an American missile attack in response to the U.S. embassy bombings. The U.S. claimed that nerve gas was being manufactured there, but blocked Sudan's demand for a chemical analysis of the site by UN-appointed experts. Sudan's government continues to enjoy friendly relations with al-Qaeda and allied groups.
As we look to the future, there is still an unresolved border dispute between Sudan and South Sudan; nearly a dozen armed rebel groups jockeying for influence within South Sudan; the ongoing conflict in Darfur; and 2 visible problems on the horizon. The first is the plan announced by Ethiopia to dam the Blue Nile, source of 2/3 of the Nile's total flow, which could wreak havoc on Egyptian and Sudanese irrigation. This could potentially draw Sudan into a war with Ethiopia, which has one of the world's largest tank armies, is already engaged in propping up an allied government in Somalia, and has a long-standing border dispute with Eritrea, which has recently become increasingly friendly toward Sudan.
The 2nd problem I mentioned is the depradations of the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. The LRA is a militant group of Acholi (a Nilotic tribe) nationalists seeking to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments. It is known for atrocious massacres and abduction of child soldiers. It was supported by the al-Bashir regime in Sudan, a long-time enemy of Uganda where the LRA is most active and where the entire Acholi population was recently forcibly relocated, and it carried out attacks (slave raids) on SPLA-allied tribes such as the Dinka during the 2nd Sudanese Civil War. More recently, South Sudanese leaders at the national as well as tribal and village levels have allegedly paid ransoms to the LRA to prevent attacks. Now the U.S. is sending forces to the area of LRA strength--also a border region that is home to the ongoing Ituri conflict between farmers and herders, to displaced armies from the Second Congo War and the race wars in Rwanda and Burundi, and also not coincidentally a major source of both oil and rare metals with high-tech industrial applications (e.g., coltan)--resources coveted not only by the U.S. and the French who already have forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring nation to which the U.S. is also committing special forces--but also to China, which is already heavily invested in Africa, a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, and poised to build a navy capable of effectively projecting Chinese power in Africa. Incidentally, the main U.S. base and the main French base in Africa are both in Djibouti, on the borders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Yes, Sudan and South Sudan seem likely flashpoints for the earliest battles of the coming great war.
erhaps the cattle wars are the simplest. For centuries, the main form of wealth for the patriarchs of the mostly Nilotic people living in the wetlands, savannas, and riverine areas of east Africa was cattle. It was and continues to be common for tribes to be locked into conflicts involving cattle raids, and often these conflicts have involved complex alliances among tribes. The addition of automatic weapons in the 20th century have increased the stakes of these conflicts and made them much deadlier. Warfare over cattle has also intermingled with the other wars in the region.
The taking of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East and Indian subconginent dates back centuries before the European slave trade, but it was not until the 18th or 19th century--when a backward form of capitalism was triumphant in the Ottoman Empire--that slavery became the major factor in Sudan's economy. The major powers of the time--Darfur, Sennar, the Azande kingdom--both sold slaves on a wholesale basis to Arab emirates nominally loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and incorporated slaves into their armies. Slave labor continues to be used, especially by armies.
The Nile River trade brought guns and gold to the upriver region, intensifying the deadly competition for access to the river. Besides slaves, the main export was for a long time ivory, usually carried by teams of enslaved porters.
Such was the situation in the 19th century when the khedive of Egypt, seeking land, gold, and slaves with which to carve out a European-style empire, invaded Sennar. A centerpiece of Egyptian policy at the time was the planned Suez Canal, which would allow for direct trade between the Mediterranean and India. The people of Sudan were heavily taxed to pay for the canal.
As Egypt, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire, fell on hard times, the British began taking an increasingly direct role in Egyptian affairs, including the canal from which the British would benefit the most. This was the situation when the Mahdi Army rose up against British rule.
A Sufi man claiming to be the Mahdi--a role similar to a messiah in some forms of Islam--and saying he was preparing the way for the 2nd coming of Issa (Jesus as the Islamic prophet) organized a major rebellion against Turkish-Egyptian rule. Building a modern army with its own factories for manufacturing guns--the first such in African history--he captured Khartoum, the ancient city where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge. The movement he began, the Ansar, continued to be involved in Sudanese politics into the 20th century.
Islam is a relatively recent import to Sudan. For centuries, the upper Nile basin was a stronghold of Christianity, specifically the Oriental Orthodox Christianity practiced by the Nubian kingdoms established in the wake of the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Meroe. These kingdoms were protected by geography and military organization from the conquests of early Islam. However, as Islam became established in Egypt to the north, the powerful and long-lasting Kanem-Bornu Empire to the west, and powerful Red Sea trading ports like Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar to the east, and in less powerful states in their cultural orbit, and as Muslim traders became frequent visitors to Nubia, conversion to Islam spread from the periphery to the centers of power. By about the time of the height of Ottoman power (15th century), the rulers of the 3 major Nubian kingdoms, along with most of the powerful tribes, had converted to Islam, often foollowing civil wars between Christian and Muslim factions. The rise of Darfur and Sennar, who had adopted Islam from their neighbors in Nubia, Kanem-Borni, and Wadai, also helped spread the Islamic faith while killing or selling into slavery many of the remaining Christians of northern Sudan.
Ironically, the Nilotic, Central Sudanic, and Ubangian people of South Sudan, who are most likely to be Christian today, were mostly Christianized after Christianity had long been practiced, and later abandoned, farther north. Missionaries concentrated on this area partly because the natives were less hostile to Christianity here than farther north (they were less organized politically, they had little history of conflict with Christian powers, despite some slave trades by Christian Ethiopia, and the Nilotic people's traditional religion worshipped a single male sky god, creating a fertile ground for conversions), and partly because missionaries believed that by Christianizing the people who lived in the heartland of the Arab slave trade, they would help stamp that trade out.
Christians and other non-Muslims resented the Mahdi's attempt to impose shari'a law. After the British and their Egyptian lackeys regained control with the help of a large army equipped with repeater rifles, Britain consciously pitted Muslim north Sudan against Christian/"animist" south Sudan, setting the stage for civil war once Sudan gained its independence.
The three-way Cold War among the U.S., USSR, and China, and the shifting positions of powerful neighbors (Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kinshasa regime) in this war, as well as the destabilizing conservative pressures from the Ansar on the side of the conservative Muslim establishment, and Israel on the side of the resistance, helped turn the struggle against shari'a law into a series of bitter factional fights involving repeated massacres in South Sudan. Cattle raiding helped intensify these fights, as did the discovery of large oil deposits in South Sudan.
A leftist resistance force based in the South, the Sudanese People's Liberation ARmy, was expertly maneuvered by the U.S. from a revolutionary force seeking nationwide power, an end to shari'a, and social equality, into a secessionist movement by southerners. A peace agreement reached in 2006 led to the referendum in which South Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence this year, which they achieved just recently. This independence will make it easier for the U.S. to control South Sudan's oil.
In the meantime, the SPLA, hoping to open up a 2nd front in the northwest, encouraged the Fur and Saharan people of the Darfur region to rise up against the government. Some initial successes by the Darfur rebels were impressive, but they were largely unable to capitalize on their victories because of infighting among the major tribes (conflicts stemming partly from opposing attitudes toward shari'a law and partly because of political conflicts in Chad and other countries that have spilled over into tribal conflicts in Darfur). Many Arab mercenaries have also assisted the government in putting down the rebellion.
The role of the Arabs in Darfur has been much misrepresented. First, although there is often conflict between "Arabs" and "Blacks," there is a substantial Arab component in some rebel factions (in fact, anti-Arab sentiment is one cause of infighting among the rebels). More interesting is that the "Arabs"--although they speak Arabic, keep alive Arabic cultural traditions, and trace their ancestry to patriarchs from the Arab world--are as Black in color as the "Blacks" who are culturally identified with a sub-Saharan tradition and speak an African language. Second, the Arab janjawid militias have been represented as murderous, genocidal maniacs in oversimplified presentations of the conflict by pro-interventionist parties. Certainly the lure of weapons supplied by Khartoum has tickled the avarice of a few Arab leaders, and certainly there have been too many acts of brutality by the janjawid. But it is wise to recall that most of Darfur is a desert, that pastoral Arab herders are among its poorest residents, that Arabs had long been accustomed to water their herds at some of the few oases in Darfur, and that the first attacks of the janjawid began after rebel leaders, involved in their own tribal faction fight, cut off access to the most important of these oases. It is also often alleged that the Arab Muslims are oppressing the Black Christians in Darfur. This misconception probably comes from a confusion of the Darfur conflict with the Sudanese Civil Wars in South Sudan. In fact, Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a powerful pre-modern Islamic sultanate.
The 2010 peace agreement in Darfur was transparently the result of American pressure to sign any agreement irrespective of the roots of the conflict. It was signed by only 1 of the 3 major rebel movements, namely the Justice & Equality Movement dominated by the Zaghawa tribe--notably the only one of the three to support shari'a law and to be allied with the ultra-Islamist opposition to Sudan's Islamist president Omar al-Bashir. The agreement would increase the influence the most powerful Darfurian Black tribes have in Khartoum, but make no steps toward autonomy or independence, the avowed goal of the JEM. The JEM has recently repudiated this agreement as rival groups have gained territory. The latest development here, though, is the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya which was the main source of military support for the rebels in Darfur. This, as well as the apparent stabilization of the situation in the south and the east (where an Eritrean-backed insurgency allied with the Nilotic and Darfurian rebels has reached a peace agreement as part of a general agreement between Sudan and Eritrea), can be expected to strengthen the government's brutal fist in Darfur.
The discovery of oil also prompted a major highway construction project overseen by none other than Saudi billionaire industrialist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was also allegely major shareholder in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was the main supplier of medicine (for war injuries, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and other endemic diseases for all of east Africa and the source of 90% of Sudan's pharmaceuticals including all its anti-tuberculosis medication. This plant was destroyed by an American missile attack in response to the U.S. embassy bombings. The U.S. claimed that nerve gas was being manufactured there, but blocked Sudan's demand for a chemical analysis of the site by UN-appointed experts. Sudan's government continues to enjoy friendly relations with al-Qaeda and allied groups.
As we look to the future, there is still an unresolved border dispute between Sudan and South Sudan; nearly a dozen armed rebel groups jockeying for influence within South Sudan; the ongoing conflict in Darfur; and 2 visible problems on the horizon. The first is the plan announced by Ethiopia to dam the Blue Nile, source of 2/3 of the Nile's total flow, which could wreak havoc on Egyptian and Sudanese irrigation. This could potentially draw Sudan into a war with Ethiopia, which has one of the world's largest tank armies, is already engaged in propping up an allied government in Somalia, and has a long-standing border dispute with Eritrea, which has recently become increasingly friendly toward Sudan.
The 2nd problem I mentioned is the depradations of the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. The LRA is a militant group of Acholi (a Nilotic tribe) nationalists seeking to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments. It is known for atrocious massacres and abduction of child soldiers. It was supported by the al-Bashir regime in Sudan, a long-time enemy of Uganda where the LRA is most active and where the entire Acholi population was recently forcibly relocated, and it carried out attacks (slave raids) on SPLA-allied tribes such as the Dinka during the 2nd Sudanese Civil War. More recently, South Sudanese leaders at the national as well as tribal and village levels have allegedly paid ransoms to the LRA to prevent attacks. Now the U.S. is sending forces to the area of LRA strength--also a border region that is home to the ongoing Ituri conflict between farmers and herders, to displaced armies from the Second Congo War and the race wars in Rwanda and Burundi, and also not coincidentally a major source of both oil and rare metals with high-tech industrial applications (e.g., coltan)--resources coveted not only by the U.S. and the French who already have forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring nation to which the U.S. is also committing special forces--but also to China, which is already heavily invested in Africa, a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, and poised to build a navy capable of effectively projecting Chinese power in Africa. Incidentally, the main U.S. base and the main French base in Africa are both in Djibouti, on the borders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Yes, Sudan and South Sudan seem likely flashpoints for the earliest battles of the coming great war.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
And hello to oblivion
The guy who came into The Book Exchange today, bought a book about how Middle Easterners are scary (and nothing else), and insisted on putting it in a plastic bag seems particularly oblivious to me.
Monday, July 11, 2011
war on terror
The modern war on terror may have begun with the attack on the al-Shifa plant in Khartoum. To a large extent it grew out of the war on drug users and the Cold War. The war on drug users prepared the U.S. and other imperialist countries for it by eroding search & seizure protections, presumption of innocence, and a market free from confiscations; while this war and the Cold War contributed to the refinement of terror methods in Italy, Germany, the Philippines, S. America, etc. The use of suicide bombings, invented by Russian nihilists, was adopted and popularized by the oppressed Tamils of Sri Lanka and India. This method epitomized the goals of bourgeois "resistance" leaders--not to organize a broad working class movement to struggle for power, but to pressure capitalist forces through spectacular acts of violence into reaching a backroom deal.
Al-Qaeda used religion as part of a substitute nationalist narrative. Its fighg had little in common with the Iranian mullahs, who used religion to stifle the revolution and impose capitalism and conservatism on it, and more in common with the populist nationalism of the Fulani jihad and the Mahdi Army. Its greatest success was the capture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a popular action that resulted in expansion of democratic breathing-space in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda was enriched by the fight against the Soviets, subsidized by the U.S. on behalf of landlords of Afghanistan, and by construction contracts in Sudan, which meanwhile under Cold War and internal political pressure had become increasingly conservative and theocratic.
Emboldened by the defeat of the Soviets and by the U.S.'s retreat under pressure by Iran- and Syria-backed Hizballah in Lebanon, and al-Qaeda-allied militias in Somalia, and seeing their social position slip as a result of repression in Muslim countries and popular revulsion at their thuggish tactics, al-Qaeda struck American embassies in E. Africa and troop positions in Saudi Arabia. The bombing of the al-Khifa plant was the U.S.'s response.
The plant was partly owned by al-Qaeda, which was among other things a business empire operating major "legitimate" businesses around the world. U.S. intelligence may have feared chemical weapons' being developed there--although this was shown not to be the case, and regardless it was a war crime and crime against peace--but it behooved the U.S. to deal a commercial blow to al-Qaeda regardless. The timing of the attack, too, was probably indeed affected by Clinton's wish to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky "scandal." At any rate, the destruction of the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan created a profound social crisis resulting in perhaps 2 million direct deaths, and intensified the desperatiom of impoverished Arab and African tribes. Sudan responded by seeking to get back into the U.S.'s graces by reaching a deal with the dominant S. Sudanese tribes and the SPLA, which would give the U.S. more reliable access to oil. Coming largely at the expense of the east and west, this peace deal ironically contributrd to the rise of fighting in Darfur. The recent squeeze on Gadhafi, the main backer of Darfur's rebels, will probably shift the balance in the government's favor, allowing them to defeat Darfur's tribal, secular, and religious militias and ensure peaceful acquiescence in the poverty imposed thereby.
Meanwhile the 9/11 attacks succeeded spectacularly (in killing) partly as a result of the coincidental removal of American safeguards for training, failure to follow other procedures, I.e., incompetence of the Bush administration, the firing of thousands of veteran, competent air traffic controllers under Reagan, and the disregard for building codes by the mob-linked construction companies that built the WTC. But after years of the war on terror, the top leadership of al-Qaeda is dead, command and control is disrupted, and al-Qaeda (as well as nmost of its allies) are less popular among Muslims today than in 2001, much less 1979.
Meanwhile, NATO invaded Afghanistan, increasing the encirclement of Russia, sharpening the disputes among NATO powers, and seizing control over oil & gas and heroin. Then there was the war on Iraq, prompted partly by the desire to stop Iraq from developing nuclear weapons, at least a theoretically realistic possibility; partly by the desire for oil; and mostly for a strategic location bordering Iran, Saudi Arabia, and (almost) Russia. This war lessened the U.S.'s dependence on Israel, and since then the U.S.'s pro-Israel tilt has decreased considerably.
More than that, the "war on terror" has blurred the boundaries between overseas wars and wars at home, with the U.S. government openly targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. It has legitimized torture, Orwellian "memory hole" b.s. (are we at war with Sunni extremists or Shi'ite extremists in Iraq? Depends what day of the week it is). And meanwhile the imperialist powers are increasingly at odds over strategy, material interests, and now depression and trade wars are more and more creating conditions for WW3.
Next in this series: military goals of the major powers.
Al-Qaeda used religion as part of a substitute nationalist narrative. Its fighg had little in common with the Iranian mullahs, who used religion to stifle the revolution and impose capitalism and conservatism on it, and more in common with the populist nationalism of the Fulani jihad and the Mahdi Army. Its greatest success was the capture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a popular action that resulted in expansion of democratic breathing-space in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda was enriched by the fight against the Soviets, subsidized by the U.S. on behalf of landlords of Afghanistan, and by construction contracts in Sudan, which meanwhile under Cold War and internal political pressure had become increasingly conservative and theocratic.
Emboldened by the defeat of the Soviets and by the U.S.'s retreat under pressure by Iran- and Syria-backed Hizballah in Lebanon, and al-Qaeda-allied militias in Somalia, and seeing their social position slip as a result of repression in Muslim countries and popular revulsion at their thuggish tactics, al-Qaeda struck American embassies in E. Africa and troop positions in Saudi Arabia. The bombing of the al-Khifa plant was the U.S.'s response.
The plant was partly owned by al-Qaeda, which was among other things a business empire operating major "legitimate" businesses around the world. U.S. intelligence may have feared chemical weapons' being developed there--although this was shown not to be the case, and regardless it was a war crime and crime against peace--but it behooved the U.S. to deal a commercial blow to al-Qaeda regardless. The timing of the attack, too, was probably indeed affected by Clinton's wish to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky "scandal." At any rate, the destruction of the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan created a profound social crisis resulting in perhaps 2 million direct deaths, and intensified the desperatiom of impoverished Arab and African tribes. Sudan responded by seeking to get back into the U.S.'s graces by reaching a deal with the dominant S. Sudanese tribes and the SPLA, which would give the U.S. more reliable access to oil. Coming largely at the expense of the east and west, this peace deal ironically contributrd to the rise of fighting in Darfur. The recent squeeze on Gadhafi, the main backer of Darfur's rebels, will probably shift the balance in the government's favor, allowing them to defeat Darfur's tribal, secular, and religious militias and ensure peaceful acquiescence in the poverty imposed thereby.
Meanwhile the 9/11 attacks succeeded spectacularly (in killing) partly as a result of the coincidental removal of American safeguards for training, failure to follow other procedures, I.e., incompetence of the Bush administration, the firing of thousands of veteran, competent air traffic controllers under Reagan, and the disregard for building codes by the mob-linked construction companies that built the WTC. But after years of the war on terror, the top leadership of al-Qaeda is dead, command and control is disrupted, and al-Qaeda (as well as nmost of its allies) are less popular among Muslims today than in 2001, much less 1979.
Meanwhile, NATO invaded Afghanistan, increasing the encirclement of Russia, sharpening the disputes among NATO powers, and seizing control over oil & gas and heroin. Then there was the war on Iraq, prompted partly by the desire to stop Iraq from developing nuclear weapons, at least a theoretically realistic possibility; partly by the desire for oil; and mostly for a strategic location bordering Iran, Saudi Arabia, and (almost) Russia. This war lessened the U.S.'s dependence on Israel, and since then the U.S.'s pro-Israel tilt has decreased considerably.
More than that, the "war on terror" has blurred the boundaries between overseas wars and wars at home, with the U.S. government openly targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. It has legitimized torture, Orwellian "memory hole" b.s. (are we at war with Sunni extremists or Shi'ite extremists in Iraq? Depends what day of the week it is). And meanwhile the imperialist powers are increasingly at odds over strategy, material interests, and now depression and trade wars are more and more creating conditions for WW3.
Next in this series: military goals of the major powers.
Communism doesn't work
Communism doesn't work, and the capitalists have spent billions of dollars and killed millions of people to make sure it'll be thus. Just to give the most notorious examples: 1) perhaps 100,000 Native Americans were killed in the effort to uproot the primitive communist property relations shared by most tribes and establish private ownership; 2) the French abandoned their resistance to the Prussian invasion because they needed Prussia's help slaughtering thousands of communist and anarchist rebels in Paris; 3) after the Russian revolution, the Russians had major rebellions on three fronts, all funded to some degree and one funded almost entirely by foreign powers; 4) Russia also faced a total trade embargo by every other country in the world that lasted more than 10 years, something no other country in the globalized epoch has faced; 5) the major imperialist countries including the U.S. collectively executed, imprisoned, and banished tens of thousands of radicals during this period; 6) Mussolini and Hitler went on to imprison or kill leftists on a much larger scale; 7) the Spanish Republican (Popular Front) government enlisted the help of the KGB to kill tens of thousands of anarchists, centrists, and Trotskyists (that is, communists on the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition); 8) however, because this Popular Front included the Socialist and Communist Parties and had won the election, Franco's forces inaugurated a brutal war against it and its allies in the Basque and Catalan communities. This war was notorious for killings of civilians both in mass shootings and in bombings such as the German bombing of Guernica; 9) meanwhile, Chgiang Kai-shek's government ordered the mass slaughter of 150,000 communist party members after breaking his alliance with them, and during the civil war in China would kill 450,000 more; 10) Germany and its allies then invaded the USSR, with 20 million killed on the Soviet side alone (including massacred Jews and Romany). The date of Germany's invasion of the USSR marks the only day in history that the Dow Jones Industrial Average doubled; 11) when Truman bombed Hiroshima, killing another 150,000, his stated reason was to gain an advantage over the USSR in the Cold War he intended to start; 12) the capitalists killed thousands more in bloody wars in Yugoslavia and Greece to prevent the workers' parties backed by the majority from taking power. In greece, as in Spain, this resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship notorious for torture and murder of political opponents; 13) more bombs were dropped on Korea during the Korean war than by all parties during world war two. The bombing only ended because U.S. forces ran out of targets to bomb, including huts. Biological weapons were also used against Korea. 100,000 bodies have been recovered from mass graves of people killed by the U.S.-backed south Korean government, also long notorious for torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and murder; 14) 1 million members of the Communist Party were slaughtered by Suharto); 15) another bloody war with villages napalmed, resulting again in a brutal dictatorship, was waged against Lumumba's forces in Congo-Kinshasa; 16) the Vietnam War killed at least 3 million and featured bombings of dikes, warfare against the environment resulting in permanent pollution, chemical warfare, mass bombings and strafings of civilians, torture, murder of leftists by every successive government of S. Vietnam; 17) meanwhile in Cuba, there were 3 separate incidents in different decades of biological warfare attacks--by Kennedy against sugar crops, by Carter against pigs, and by Clinton against civilians; 18) there were also several literacy volunteers lynched by U.S.-backed mercenaries; 19) a French ship carrying weapons to Cuba--legally purchased--was blown up by the U.S.; 20) Cuban sugar fields were bombed, hotels and beaches were machine-gun attacked in an effort to stop people from other countries from investing in tourism, there was a 40-year embargo as well as a full-fledged naval blockade during the October crisis, and of course there was the attack on the Bay of Pigs; 21) the CIA spent millions of dollars illegally to prevent a communist candidate from winning an election in Lebanon; 22) a bombing carried out with CIA support killed hundreds of people on a Cuban civilian jet liner; 23) the U.S. intervened to have the democratically elected leaders of Guatemala and Chile; between these nations and El Salvador, which waged a brutal war against rebel forces backed by the majority, perhaps 400,000 were killed; 24) meanwhile, France's war against a communist-led anticolonial movement in Algeria was notorious for the use of torture and mass reprisals; 25) the U.S. backed the bloody Khmer Rouge government, which created not a workers's state but more a national Auschwitz, because it was fighting against Vietnam. The Thai government, as brutal in its own way against communist rebels as the Khmer Rouge, also supported the Khmer Rouge; 26) meanwhile, Portugal's fascist dictatorship waged bloody wars against leftist anticolonial movements in its former African colonies; when Portugal's government was overthrown, the U.S. backed a bloody civil war in Mozambique that lasted about 15 years, included vicious attacks on villages, and spilled over into zimbabwe, where it continues today. Meanwhile in Angola, the U.S. with its cold war allies in Mobutu's Zaire and apartheid S. Africa organized attacks on villages and infrastructure and laid down a huge number of land mines; 27) the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua killed 1 in 6 Nicaraguans mostly in attacks on schools, hospitals, factories, and government offices; 28) meanwhile, the CIA trained ten times as many people for guerrilla warfare in Tibet as in Nicaragua; 29) the U.S. also mined civilian harbors in Nicaragua, for which it was found liable by the World Court but has neglected to pay its $90 million fine; 30) the U.S. has repeatedly intervened to overthrow democratic governments in Haiti and the dOminican Republic, as well as in Iran with untold consequences, giving as its reason the friendliness of those countries' governments with communist regimes; 30) similarly, the U.S. intervened recently against the elected president of Honduras; 31) and of course there were three separate attempts--the coup, the bosses' strike, and the constitutional attempt--against the elected president of Venezuela; 32) the COINTELPRO and other Red Squad programs, and the McCarthy-Nixon witch hunt, killed some Americans and put hundreds more behind bars; 33) and of course there's the U.S. intervention against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, often portrayed as a response to the Soviet invasion, but actually begun before the Soviet invasion; 34) the U.S.'s intervention against Soviet-backed governments in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya created a legacy of wars and famine; 35) all this was accompanied by a massive and expensive intelligence-gathering and disinformation campaign not to mention the U.S.'s development of an arsenal unparalleled in history and increasingly coming with a price in high taxes and cuts in infrastructure and social programs.
Why? The State Department's explanation of the need to invade tiny Grenada is revealing. Grenada was dangerous, they said, because it had a Black majority that spoke English. If oppressed Blacks in the U.S. saw a successful communist country a few miles away, and heard what their leaders had to say, it could be dangerous to the power structure here at home.
Now the workers' states have had their setbacks, of course. Partly this has been human error, partly the result of corruption (and Zinoviev's analysis of the origins of opportunism, which can be verified by reference to countless empirical cases, shows that repression and corruption facilitate each other). Partly, however, they were the result of war, terror, sabotage, and economic warfare.
Even so, it was capitalism that gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the first concentration camps, industrial-level slavery, apartheid, the bloody partition of India, fascism, , genocide against the Indians, two world wars and countless others, 2 billion underfed, 1 billion without access to clean water, 200 million homeless, 2 billion illiterate, and I don't know how many premature deaths each year from preventable diseases. Meanwhile the workers' states for all their problems can boast world-record economic growth rates (#1, China; #2, USSR); the highest rates of citizens with advanced educations and of women with advanced educations; land reform; first country in space (USSR); world's 2nd-largest economy (USSR); massive engineering projects; aid to liberation forces and in humanitarian crises throughout the capitalist world; etc. E. Germany was the first country to eradicate homelessness, a feat later duplicated in Cuba. Cubav went in 3 years from 1 in 3 illiterate to virtually no illiteracy. N. Korea has the highest literacy rate in the world. The USSR was the 3rd country in the world to have woman suffrage. It also played a major role in bringing down Hitler, while Cuba played an even bigger role against apartheid. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had important parts in the civil rights movement, and the USSR and its Anmerican allies are largely responsible for the NAACP, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and CIO. The USSR introduced the 5-year plan while Cuba did the first gall bladder transplant. Vietnam forced pOl pot from power. China had a lower literacy rate than India in 1949; now it is almost 70% higher. Cuba, a very poor country, has a health care system that compares to the U,S.'s. Cuba was also first to sign the international convention against terror and has an unparalleled record fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has an all-time world record incarceration rate and is openly torturinbg people in Afghanistan.
Failure is in the eye of the beholder. Hannah Arendt suggests that one feature of totalitarianism s to insulate people at the top of a hierarchy from everyone but the (more radical) layer above them and the (less zealous) layer under them so that they are blinded to how their decisions affect and are seen by the majority, while they see themselves as occupying a moderate poaition in comparison. But of course this is a social function of money and it blinds most of us to the realities of capitalist success.
Why? The State Department's explanation of the need to invade tiny Grenada is revealing. Grenada was dangerous, they said, because it had a Black majority that spoke English. If oppressed Blacks in the U.S. saw a successful communist country a few miles away, and heard what their leaders had to say, it could be dangerous to the power structure here at home.
Now the workers' states have had their setbacks, of course. Partly this has been human error, partly the result of corruption (and Zinoviev's analysis of the origins of opportunism, which can be verified by reference to countless empirical cases, shows that repression and corruption facilitate each other). Partly, however, they were the result of war, terror, sabotage, and economic warfare.
Even so, it was capitalism that gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the first concentration camps, industrial-level slavery, apartheid, the bloody partition of India, fascism, , genocide against the Indians, two world wars and countless others, 2 billion underfed, 1 billion without access to clean water, 200 million homeless, 2 billion illiterate, and I don't know how many premature deaths each year from preventable diseases. Meanwhile the workers' states for all their problems can boast world-record economic growth rates (#1, China; #2, USSR); the highest rates of citizens with advanced educations and of women with advanced educations; land reform; first country in space (USSR); world's 2nd-largest economy (USSR); massive engineering projects; aid to liberation forces and in humanitarian crises throughout the capitalist world; etc. E. Germany was the first country to eradicate homelessness, a feat later duplicated in Cuba. Cubav went in 3 years from 1 in 3 illiterate to virtually no illiteracy. N. Korea has the highest literacy rate in the world. The USSR was the 3rd country in the world to have woman suffrage. It also played a major role in bringing down Hitler, while Cuba played an even bigger role against apartheid. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had important parts in the civil rights movement, and the USSR and its Anmerican allies are largely responsible for the NAACP, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and CIO. The USSR introduced the 5-year plan while Cuba did the first gall bladder transplant. Vietnam forced pOl pot from power. China had a lower literacy rate than India in 1949; now it is almost 70% higher. Cuba, a very poor country, has a health care system that compares to the U,S.'s. Cuba was also first to sign the international convention against terror and has an unparalleled record fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has an all-time world record incarceration rate and is openly torturinbg people in Afghanistan.
Failure is in the eye of the beholder. Hannah Arendt suggests that one feature of totalitarianism s to insulate people at the top of a hierarchy from everyone but the (more radical) layer above them and the (less zealous) layer under them so that they are blinded to how their decisions affect and are seen by the majority, while they see themselves as occupying a moderate poaition in comparison. But of course this is a social function of money and it blinds most of us to the realities of capitalist success.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
odds & ends
I really like the rhyme I learned recently which was inspired by the orientation of the statue of Brigham Young in Salt Lake City:
There sits Brigham, like a bird on a perch:
His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.
I just became aware of the owl on the dollar bill. My friend called me a conspiracy theorist just for showing it to her. I say, if you have empirical confirmation, that's as value-neutral as it gets. Now, if you want to speculate as to why it's there ... I have to say as an innocent evocation of wisdom. Texe Marrs blames it on Satan but is clearly batshit insane.
But speaking of pseudo-pagan symbolism, I only just realized how much the statue of liberty resembles the poppy-headed goddess of ancient Crete. Holy junkies!
Ayn Rand, criticizing the proliferation of welfare programs, suggests that if shoes had been provided by the state, and a conservative proposed to take away the entitlement, indignant leftists would accuse conservatives of wanting the poor to go barefoot. For its force, this argument depends on our ignoring the fact that millions of poor people do go barefoot (including 't afford shoes.
Some conservatives say the U.S. can't be a bastion of racism today because we have a Black president. By that logic, 16th-century England under Elizabeth I was a model of women's rights.
I saw Jesse Jackson on TV during the 2000 election criticizing Bush's heartless decision to execute a mentally retarded man. Too bad he hadn't spoken up when Clinton did the same thing during the 1992 campaign season.
There sits Brigham, like a bird on a perch:
His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.
I just became aware of the owl on the dollar bill. My friend called me a conspiracy theorist just for showing it to her. I say, if you have empirical confirmation, that's as value-neutral as it gets. Now, if you want to speculate as to why it's there ... I have to say as an innocent evocation of wisdom. Texe Marrs blames it on Satan but is clearly batshit insane.
But speaking of pseudo-pagan symbolism, I only just realized how much the statue of liberty resembles the poppy-headed goddess of ancient Crete. Holy junkies!
Ayn Rand, criticizing the proliferation of welfare programs, suggests that if shoes had been provided by the state, and a conservative proposed to take away the entitlement, indignant leftists would accuse conservatives of wanting the poor to go barefoot. For its force, this argument depends on our ignoring the fact that millions of poor people do go barefoot (including 't afford shoes.
Some conservatives say the U.S. can't be a bastion of racism today because we have a Black president. By that logic, 16th-century England under Elizabeth I was a model of women's rights.
I saw Jesse Jackson on TV during the 2000 election criticizing Bush's heartless decision to execute a mentally retarded man. Too bad he hadn't spoken up when Clinton did the same thing during the 1992 campaign season.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Scientific integrity threatened
I had a friend who was taking an advanced chemistry class, and she told me that she ans other students in her class routinely falsified lab results to make them conform more closely to predicted values. When I tried to point out that falsification is a gross breach of scientific ethics, not least because it fails to produce the anomalous results that spur scientific 'revolutions', she explained that it was only because in her class one would get a lower grade if one's lab results weren't within a specified range, adding that obsolete and degraded equipment in her lab precluded accurate measurement even by the most conscientious experimenters.
Of course, when her class graduates to go to work for monitoring agencies, research institutions, and other laboratories that are highly susceptible to funding cutoffs, they will come under even GREATER pressure to get the "right" results, while the equipment used in some cases will be worse than at a state university.
My friend assured me that she would never falsify results in the real world, only in the classroom where it had no practical effects beyond her own career. However, the situation as she describes it constitutes training to disregard scruples in the pursuit of personal reward; training that well serves, say, the snake-oil peddlers at Merck and the Mayo Clinic.
First and foremost, a bright student should not be punished for running an experiment correctly but getting anomalous results. Although it may mean more work for an already overburdened class, this should be a starting point for a hypothesis explaining the unexpected results (perhaps the lab equipment is to blame) and an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. On the assumption that the experiment confirms this particular hypothesis, it would serve to spur demands that the university provide students with the equipment vital to scientific education, and combined with statistical analysis of lab results it would help expose a culture of cheating.
My final thought on this: science is a particular method of testing hypotheses by means of open inquiry. If a university department teaches you to ignore empirical results that don't correspond to predetermined ideal results, that department is not teaching science; in fact, it is actively destroying the scentific part of your mind and replacing it with dogmatism.
Of course, when her class graduates to go to work for monitoring agencies, research institutions, and other laboratories that are highly susceptible to funding cutoffs, they will come under even GREATER pressure to get the "right" results, while the equipment used in some cases will be worse than at a state university.
My friend assured me that she would never falsify results in the real world, only in the classroom where it had no practical effects beyond her own career. However, the situation as she describes it constitutes training to disregard scruples in the pursuit of personal reward; training that well serves, say, the snake-oil peddlers at Merck and the Mayo Clinic.
First and foremost, a bright student should not be punished for running an experiment correctly but getting anomalous results. Although it may mean more work for an already overburdened class, this should be a starting point for a hypothesis explaining the unexpected results (perhaps the lab equipment is to blame) and an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. On the assumption that the experiment confirms this particular hypothesis, it would serve to spur demands that the university provide students with the equipment vital to scientific education, and combined with statistical analysis of lab results it would help expose a culture of cheating.
My final thought on this: science is a particular method of testing hypotheses by means of open inquiry. If a university department teaches you to ignore empirical results that don't correspond to predetermined ideal results, that department is not teaching science; in fact, it is actively destroying the scentific part of your mind and replacing it with dogmatism.
Monday, July 4, 2011
long may it stand
Happy independence day. Turns out the U.S.'s national anthem is set to the tune of a British drinking song. Who knew?
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Drive to War
War has, of course, been a feature of civilization since its birth; but the post-Cold War period shares a number of features not found in previous wars, among them the decline of American economic and political power, the reversal of the bipolar or tripolar alignment of the Cold War, the growing privatization/denationalization of killing, the triumph of the volunteer army, and the advent of modern ways of killing. But the basic logic governing war, the logic of finance capital, is the same as it was in Lenin's time.
The modern war drive can be said to begin with the Gulf War. Iraq's belligerency against Kuwait was the proximate cause of the war. Iraq, at the time, boasted one of the largest and best-supplied armies in the world, having received massive material aid from the U.S. and USSR during the war with Iran (this betrayal on the Soviet part, a consequence of years of playing big-power politics at the expense of supporting world revolution, prefiguring the post-Cold War alignment). Presuming on the confidence of the imperialist and social-imperialist powers, calculated that it could take over Kuwait's oil and port, weakening the U.S.'s alliance with Saudi Arabia and cementing Iraq's position as a regional power broker. Most importantly, the material and psychological benefits of an easy victory would undo the humiliation of the stalemate with the poorly equipped Iranians, and shore up the senile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But,like any leader of a poor country who counts on his friendly relations with the wealthiest coubntries, Saddam Hussein was betrayed.
The U.S. led the way in assembling an international coalition against Saddam Hussein for a variety of reasons that are symptomatic of the country's bipartisan drive to war today. First, the 1987 stock market crash had exposed the vulnerability of the world financial system and (as has been the case since World War 2) war was the stimulus program of first resort. In fact, the U.S. has never had economic growth during peacetime since before WW2, and its economic stability today depends heavily on permanent war. During the Reagan administration, I think, the official unemployment rate was recalculated to include members of the military among the employed, instead of out of the labor force, one of many steps taken by Reagan, Clinton, and Obama to hide the true extent of economic devastation. Besides this, the U.S. was actively preventing the rise of a strong Iraq, as it would similarly prevent the rise of a strong Brazil or S. Korea, to protect its hegemony from being challenged and reassure its client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With its resounding defeat in Vietnam, and France's temporary defection from NATO, as well as the exposure of American atrocities and war crimes, the U.S. is no longer the political power it was during the Truman era; and American economic power, tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system as a whole, has been in free fall since 1987. But the U.S. is still by far the strongest military power in the world. President Carter, envisioning this situation, inaugurated a major militarization drive, ramped up later under Reagan and Clinton. Since then, the U.S.'s mainstrategy in world affairs has been to use its military power to reverse its declining economic and political fortunes.
Other countries joined the coalition against Iraq for a variety of reasons--Saudi Arabia to preserve its own regional hegemony, the USSR in exchange for backdoor deals in Afghanistan, trade concessions, etc., Syria in hopes of repairing its relations with the U.S., European powers to get a piece of the military contracts. China, preoccupied by student revolt, chose not to take on the world's biggest powers by exercising its veto power. The UK, Australia, and New Zealand all are politically dependent on the clout that comes from their "special relationship" with the U.S. and are usually reliable military allies of the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel was pressured into not retaliating for Iraqi rocket launches, in a humiliating diplomatic comeuppance, for fear of alienating American allies.
The war was an open massacre of largely unarmed, often fleeing Iraqis--partly because Hussein reserved his best military forces to use against his own people. Hussein set afire Kuwaiti oil wells causing senseless environmental destruction, while coalition forces destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, planning for a containment strategy that would reap big profits for oil speculators, lawyers, and arms dealers while leaving Iraqis with poor access to medicine, clean water, and electricity for years. In the aftermath, Palestinians were massacred in Kuwait, Shi'ites in Iraq, and Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.
The next major war was in Bosnia, the largest war on European soil since WWII. Above all else, this war, ostensibly between rival gangs spawned from Yugoslavia's ruling Stalinist party, exposed the fragility of the NATO and EU alliances that had assembled coalitions against Iraq. Germany, eager to get out from under the U.S.'s shadow and create a 4th Reich where German industrial capital monopolized European production, early backed the Croatian Tudjman faction. France, jealous of German power, found itself supporting Karadzic's Serb forces, in alliance with Russia, which sought a reunification of Yugoslavia under a corrupt Chetnik pro-Russian regime. As it happened, the Serb and Croat militias, in that order, were responsible for most of the atrocities of that war. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia being carved up into rival spheres of influence, began backing the Bosniak Muslim forces just enough to keep the Serb forces from dominating, while military strategy pushed Serb and Croat forces toward alliance. Meanwhile, the U.S. let its rivals in Europe bleed their treasuries for months, while lives were lost in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, until it saw its political fortunes served by intervention which would humiliate its rivals and create a new Balkan regime that, while it did little directly for the U.S., preserved a balance of power among its European rivals.
Liberals like to say, "When Clinton lied, no one died." In fact, his lies about the length of the Bosnian intervention paved the way for a war that cost thousands of lives and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe.
Around the same time as this war was Russia's bloody war on Chechnya, demonstrating that the Russian rulers had kept Stalinism's brutal murder machine while discarding its verbal commitment to the oppressed. The use of chemical weapons and spies in this war helped pave the way for the war on Afghanistan, and the scapegoating of Muslims prefigured the "war on terror" of countless powers.
Russia's successful war against Chechen children and peasants also was symptomatic of the defeats of guerrillas around the world--the IRA, ETA, PLO, Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, CPN (Maoist), Communist Party of the Philippines, and EZLN have all been dealt major blows by the governments they fought, usually after years of alienating themselves by their thuggish ways, and after a strategy focused on permanent war, not the conquest of power, kept them from capitalizing on their victories. Often in the wake of defeat they've been drawn into an appearance of sharing power (Maoists in Nepal, Sinn Fein in N. Ireland) at the cost of compromising on the very issues that impelled them to war in the first place. The biggest success of guerrilla warfare recently, the S. African revolution, was unlike most of these an urban-led movement with mass support in urban and rural areas in S. Africa and tremendous popular sympathy around the world, largely the fruit of correct political decisions by the ANC, COSATU, and the Communist Party.
Central Africa and the Sudan region also presented us with a spectacle of the horrors of modern war, complete with genocide, mass rape, and cannibalism. One of the most notorious examples is in Rwanda, where in a case of the plunge of rightist politics toward the gutter, the racist Hutu government was overthrown by an even more virulently racist Hutu faction. The Hutu/Tutsi divide , created by the Belgian colonizers but also roughly reflecting the historical rivalry between mostly Hutu farmers and mostly Tutsi herders, erupted in carnage in this impoverished country which notably also has one of the world's highest population densities. France and Belgium, hopeful of using the warfare to reassert their control, essentially endorsed the rampage of the dominant Hutu forces, as did the Catholic church which had several powerful Hutu archbishops and a vested interest in reasserting Hutu power. The U.S. didn't intervene, simply enough, because its interests were adequately served by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans seen as "taking up space" and the embarrassment of its European rivals.
Tutsi refugees led the popular movement to overthrow wealthy, corrupt, CIA-connected dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but ongoing struggles between farmers and herders, rising demand for central African resources, the Cold War proliferation of militia groups supplied by the great powers, and and the absence of a proletarian movement in central Africa, resulted in a bloody, atrocious free-for-all struggle for cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, aluminum, coltan, and other resources that would eventually kill more people than any other war since WWII. This scramble dragged in half a dozen neighboring governments, and, although the highest-intensity conflict ended with the military defeat and exhaustion of Rwanda, it spawned violence that continues today. Imperialist powers largely ignored the war, both because they didn't care much which militia sold goods to them if the prices were OK, and because rival industries supported different parts of the country and the militias based there.
The war on Sudan has older roots, dating back to the Soviet Union's support for Khartoum when Egypt and Ethiopia were U.S.-dominated, and the U.S.'s support when Ethiopia and Libya were dominated by the Soviets. The Sudanese leaders sought to use their war chests, anti-Christian demagogy, and rivalries between southen tribes of cattle herders and smugglers to establish firm control over S. Sudan's oil fields and establish itself as a regional power. This war fed into and was fed by similar major wars in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, but has received more attention partly for the largely Christian composition of the resistance vs. A Muslim government, partly for the media savvy of the rebels, partly owing to the large al-Qaeda presence in Sudan in the 1990s, and partly for Sudan's oil wealth, central location, and sheer size. Early in the war, Sudan was heavily subsidized by the U.S., still thinking in terms of its Cold War rivalry with the USSR. The Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia meanwhile aided the rebels in hopes of keeping a strong rival from building up on the border. So did Israel, at that time hopeful of building up a power center in E. Africa, and Uganda, which hoped to seize S. Sudan for itself. When Eritrea gained independence and was fighting its own bloody war with Ethiopia, it bribed the rebels to turn on the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, villages, tribes, and language communities in S. Sudan were wiped out with systematic ruthlessness by Khartoum and allied militias.
The S. Sudanese rebels financed propaganda and provocations designed to drag disaffected people in Darfur into war against Sudan, thus relieving pressure on the south. (They did similar things in E. Sudan). Many people conflate the two Sudanese conflicts, believing for example that most Darfurians are Christian, when in fact Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a slave-trading sultanate in early modern times. These conflicts intensified when starving Arabs, excluded from traditional grazing grounds by considerations of rebel military strategy, were recruited as mercenaries against the mostly "Black" tribes fueling the rebellion. (In fact, the Arabs, of mixed Black-Arab ancestry, would in most contexts also be identified as Black by most Americans.) Sudan was aided primarily by Eritrea, which as a result of spillover from the war on the eastern front had become enemies with tribes that were also fighting the Sudanese, while Libya, always alert for opportunities to expand its power southward, and Chad, serving as Libya's proxy, backed the Darfur rebels. Indeed, Chad helped precipitate the rebellion by funding incursions aimed at Sudanese targets.
Next in this series: the American strike on the al-Shifa plant and its aftermath.
The modern war drive can be said to begin with the Gulf War. Iraq's belligerency against Kuwait was the proximate cause of the war. Iraq, at the time, boasted one of the largest and best-supplied armies in the world, having received massive material aid from the U.S. and USSR during the war with Iran (this betrayal on the Soviet part, a consequence of years of playing big-power politics at the expense of supporting world revolution, prefiguring the post-Cold War alignment). Presuming on the confidence of the imperialist and social-imperialist powers, calculated that it could take over Kuwait's oil and port, weakening the U.S.'s alliance with Saudi Arabia and cementing Iraq's position as a regional power broker. Most importantly, the material and psychological benefits of an easy victory would undo the humiliation of the stalemate with the poorly equipped Iranians, and shore up the senile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But,like any leader of a poor country who counts on his friendly relations with the wealthiest coubntries, Saddam Hussein was betrayed.
The U.S. led the way in assembling an international coalition against Saddam Hussein for a variety of reasons that are symptomatic of the country's bipartisan drive to war today. First, the 1987 stock market crash had exposed the vulnerability of the world financial system and (as has been the case since World War 2) war was the stimulus program of first resort. In fact, the U.S. has never had economic growth during peacetime since before WW2, and its economic stability today depends heavily on permanent war. During the Reagan administration, I think, the official unemployment rate was recalculated to include members of the military among the employed, instead of out of the labor force, one of many steps taken by Reagan, Clinton, and Obama to hide the true extent of economic devastation. Besides this, the U.S. was actively preventing the rise of a strong Iraq, as it would similarly prevent the rise of a strong Brazil or S. Korea, to protect its hegemony from being challenged and reassure its client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With its resounding defeat in Vietnam, and France's temporary defection from NATO, as well as the exposure of American atrocities and war crimes, the U.S. is no longer the political power it was during the Truman era; and American economic power, tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system as a whole, has been in free fall since 1987. But the U.S. is still by far the strongest military power in the world. President Carter, envisioning this situation, inaugurated a major militarization drive, ramped up later under Reagan and Clinton. Since then, the U.S.'s mainstrategy in world affairs has been to use its military power to reverse its declining economic and political fortunes.
Other countries joined the coalition against Iraq for a variety of reasons--Saudi Arabia to preserve its own regional hegemony, the USSR in exchange for backdoor deals in Afghanistan, trade concessions, etc., Syria in hopes of repairing its relations with the U.S., European powers to get a piece of the military contracts. China, preoccupied by student revolt, chose not to take on the world's biggest powers by exercising its veto power. The UK, Australia, and New Zealand all are politically dependent on the clout that comes from their "special relationship" with the U.S. and are usually reliable military allies of the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel was pressured into not retaliating for Iraqi rocket launches, in a humiliating diplomatic comeuppance, for fear of alienating American allies.
The war was an open massacre of largely unarmed, often fleeing Iraqis--partly because Hussein reserved his best military forces to use against his own people. Hussein set afire Kuwaiti oil wells causing senseless environmental destruction, while coalition forces destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, planning for a containment strategy that would reap big profits for oil speculators, lawyers, and arms dealers while leaving Iraqis with poor access to medicine, clean water, and electricity for years. In the aftermath, Palestinians were massacred in Kuwait, Shi'ites in Iraq, and Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.
The next major war was in Bosnia, the largest war on European soil since WWII. Above all else, this war, ostensibly between rival gangs spawned from Yugoslavia's ruling Stalinist party, exposed the fragility of the NATO and EU alliances that had assembled coalitions against Iraq. Germany, eager to get out from under the U.S.'s shadow and create a 4th Reich where German industrial capital monopolized European production, early backed the Croatian Tudjman faction. France, jealous of German power, found itself supporting Karadzic's Serb forces, in alliance with Russia, which sought a reunification of Yugoslavia under a corrupt Chetnik pro-Russian regime. As it happened, the Serb and Croat militias, in that order, were responsible for most of the atrocities of that war. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia being carved up into rival spheres of influence, began backing the Bosniak Muslim forces just enough to keep the Serb forces from dominating, while military strategy pushed Serb and Croat forces toward alliance. Meanwhile, the U.S. let its rivals in Europe bleed their treasuries for months, while lives were lost in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, until it saw its political fortunes served by intervention which would humiliate its rivals and create a new Balkan regime that, while it did little directly for the U.S., preserved a balance of power among its European rivals.
Liberals like to say, "When Clinton lied, no one died." In fact, his lies about the length of the Bosnian intervention paved the way for a war that cost thousands of lives and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe.
Around the same time as this war was Russia's bloody war on Chechnya, demonstrating that the Russian rulers had kept Stalinism's brutal murder machine while discarding its verbal commitment to the oppressed. The use of chemical weapons and spies in this war helped pave the way for the war on Afghanistan, and the scapegoating of Muslims prefigured the "war on terror" of countless powers.
Russia's successful war against Chechen children and peasants also was symptomatic of the defeats of guerrillas around the world--the IRA, ETA, PLO, Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, CPN (Maoist), Communist Party of the Philippines, and EZLN have all been dealt major blows by the governments they fought, usually after years of alienating themselves by their thuggish ways, and after a strategy focused on permanent war, not the conquest of power, kept them from capitalizing on their victories. Often in the wake of defeat they've been drawn into an appearance of sharing power (Maoists in Nepal, Sinn Fein in N. Ireland) at the cost of compromising on the very issues that impelled them to war in the first place. The biggest success of guerrilla warfare recently, the S. African revolution, was unlike most of these an urban-led movement with mass support in urban and rural areas in S. Africa and tremendous popular sympathy around the world, largely the fruit of correct political decisions by the ANC, COSATU, and the Communist Party.
Central Africa and the Sudan region also presented us with a spectacle of the horrors of modern war, complete with genocide, mass rape, and cannibalism. One of the most notorious examples is in Rwanda, where in a case of the plunge of rightist politics toward the gutter, the racist Hutu government was overthrown by an even more virulently racist Hutu faction. The Hutu/Tutsi divide , created by the Belgian colonizers but also roughly reflecting the historical rivalry between mostly Hutu farmers and mostly Tutsi herders, erupted in carnage in this impoverished country which notably also has one of the world's highest population densities. France and Belgium, hopeful of using the warfare to reassert their control, essentially endorsed the rampage of the dominant Hutu forces, as did the Catholic church which had several powerful Hutu archbishops and a vested interest in reasserting Hutu power. The U.S. didn't intervene, simply enough, because its interests were adequately served by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans seen as "taking up space" and the embarrassment of its European rivals.
Tutsi refugees led the popular movement to overthrow wealthy, corrupt, CIA-connected dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but ongoing struggles between farmers and herders, rising demand for central African resources, the Cold War proliferation of militia groups supplied by the great powers, and and the absence of a proletarian movement in central Africa, resulted in a bloody, atrocious free-for-all struggle for cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, aluminum, coltan, and other resources that would eventually kill more people than any other war since WWII. This scramble dragged in half a dozen neighboring governments, and, although the highest-intensity conflict ended with the military defeat and exhaustion of Rwanda, it spawned violence that continues today. Imperialist powers largely ignored the war, both because they didn't care much which militia sold goods to them if the prices were OK, and because rival industries supported different parts of the country and the militias based there.
The war on Sudan has older roots, dating back to the Soviet Union's support for Khartoum when Egypt and Ethiopia were U.S.-dominated, and the U.S.'s support when Ethiopia and Libya were dominated by the Soviets. The Sudanese leaders sought to use their war chests, anti-Christian demagogy, and rivalries between southen tribes of cattle herders and smugglers to establish firm control over S. Sudan's oil fields and establish itself as a regional power. This war fed into and was fed by similar major wars in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, but has received more attention partly for the largely Christian composition of the resistance vs. A Muslim government, partly for the media savvy of the rebels, partly owing to the large al-Qaeda presence in Sudan in the 1990s, and partly for Sudan's oil wealth, central location, and sheer size. Early in the war, Sudan was heavily subsidized by the U.S., still thinking in terms of its Cold War rivalry with the USSR. The Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia meanwhile aided the rebels in hopes of keeping a strong rival from building up on the border. So did Israel, at that time hopeful of building up a power center in E. Africa, and Uganda, which hoped to seize S. Sudan for itself. When Eritrea gained independence and was fighting its own bloody war with Ethiopia, it bribed the rebels to turn on the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, villages, tribes, and language communities in S. Sudan were wiped out with systematic ruthlessness by Khartoum and allied militias.
The S. Sudanese rebels financed propaganda and provocations designed to drag disaffected people in Darfur into war against Sudan, thus relieving pressure on the south. (They did similar things in E. Sudan). Many people conflate the two Sudanese conflicts, believing for example that most Darfurians are Christian, when in fact Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a slave-trading sultanate in early modern times. These conflicts intensified when starving Arabs, excluded from traditional grazing grounds by considerations of rebel military strategy, were recruited as mercenaries against the mostly "Black" tribes fueling the rebellion. (In fact, the Arabs, of mixed Black-Arab ancestry, would in most contexts also be identified as Black by most Americans.) Sudan was aided primarily by Eritrea, which as a result of spillover from the war on the eastern front had become enemies with tribes that were also fighting the Sudanese, while Libya, always alert for opportunities to expand its power southward, and Chad, serving as Libya's proxy, backed the Darfur rebels. Indeed, Chad helped precipitate the rebellion by funding incursions aimed at Sudanese targets.
Next in this series: the American strike on the al-Shifa plant and its aftermath.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Great Society
Texe Marrs: is a good example of someone who makes look reasonable. It is evident from his home page, without clicking a single link, that Marrs is anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and given to off-the-planet conspiracy theories.
This is entertaining in and of itself, but what really interests me is the author biography on Marrs's Dark Secrets of the New Age indicating that Marrs was in charge of developing nuclear targeting protocols for the U.S. Air Force. I mean, here's a maniac raving about how the E. Coli outbreak in Germany was a communist biowarfare program by Obama, tool of the Jewish-Jesuit-Illuminati conspiracy, and he almost literally had his finger on the button.
Of course Marrs is retired, but the fact that he was in such a sensitive position for so long is symptomatic of a large amount of sympathy for far-right politics at high levels of the military. Similar symptoms are the participation of so many high-ranking officers in the Confederate treason, the high-level military plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, MacArthur's notorious conduct in Korea, and the existence and political orientation of WHISC. The only way to prevent such reactionaries from being entrusted with such awesome life-or-death responsibilities is by smashing the imperialist military and replacing it with a people's armed forces forged in insurrectionary struggle.
I chose this post's title (Great Society) in homage to the weekly column in The Militant by Harry Ring. Besides being a charismatic old man who gleefully skewered the hypocrisies of the war profiteers and coupon clippers, Ring was a brave fighter in the defense of Cuba and Vietnam against imperialist attack, and played an important role in urging the communist movement to stand its ground against red-baiting by Truman, Humphrey, Nixon, McCarthy, Sidney Hook, Walter Reuther, and their allies. It is largely because of people like him that we enjoy a measure of free speech and privacy in the U.S. today.
This is entertaining in and of itself, but what really interests me is the author biography on Marrs's Dark Secrets of the New Age indicating that Marrs was in charge of developing nuclear targeting protocols for the U.S. Air Force. I mean, here's a maniac raving about how the E. Coli outbreak in Germany was a communist biowarfare program by Obama, tool of the Jewish-Jesuit-Illuminati conspiracy, and he almost literally had his finger on the button.
Of course Marrs is retired, but the fact that he was in such a sensitive position for so long is symptomatic of a large amount of sympathy for far-right politics at high levels of the military. Similar symptoms are the participation of so many high-ranking officers in the Confederate treason, the high-level military plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, MacArthur's notorious conduct in Korea, and the existence and political orientation of WHISC. The only way to prevent such reactionaries from being entrusted with such awesome life-or-death responsibilities is by smashing the imperialist military and replacing it with a people's armed forces forged in insurrectionary struggle.
I chose this post's title (Great Society) in homage to the weekly column in The Militant by Harry Ring. Besides being a charismatic old man who gleefully skewered the hypocrisies of the war profiteers and coupon clippers, Ring was a brave fighter in the defense of Cuba and Vietnam against imperialist attack, and played an important role in urging the communist movement to stand its ground against red-baiting by Truman, Humphrey, Nixon, McCarthy, Sidney Hook, Walter Reuther, and their allies. It is largely because of people like him that we enjoy a measure of free speech and privacy in the U.S. today.
Monday, June 27, 2011
One more for the Road
Alcohol's place in our culture ... advertised on TV and billboards, daily use by some people, and particularly binge drinking ... is incongruent with its nature as an incredibly powerful depressant. I can imagine an alternative world in which alcohol is an exotic drug of recent discovery--rarely publicized except in the all too frequent cases of overdose, car crashes, or assaults committed under the influence--while ketamine is a popular social lubricant served routinely in bars. And we'd all be used to it!
Free Ted?
I wrote to the Missoulian today to dispute the characterization of local celebrity terrorist Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) as a "committed leftist" by Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, a conservative, libertarian-leaning pro-gun group with historic associations with the Militia of Montana. Marbut is not the only person to identify him thusly. Deni Elliott, the Harvard-educated expert in media ethics who once employed me, claimed that newspapers who didn't regularly identify Kaczynski as left-wing, while they characterized the Freemen and Operation Rescue as right-wing, thereby betrayed their bias.
It's my opinion that this is simply wrong. Kaczynski's outspoken environmentalism is shared by more on the left than the right, but this is just one component of the comprehensive critique of technology developed in his manifesto. It is clear that his real objections are to the progressive features of technology, which he sees as replacing the family as basic social unit with the sovereign individual, replacing the master-apprentice relationship with wage labor, and undermining the Hobbesian sovereign authority with what he considers the destructive notions of liberalism, democracy, and socialism. This is objectively a reactionary critique that could have been made by any 18th century pope.
A street sign near my house is stamped "Free Ted" and has an image of the Unabomber. I'm told that this statement was made by one of the anarchists who used to live there, and I suspect that it reflects not only legitimate concern about the fairness of Kaczynski's trial, but also political sympathy. For a long time I assumed that this was again based on a political misidentification of Kaczynski's politics, but I've come to suspect that elements of Kaczynski's philosophy besides his environmentalism may strike a chord with certain strands of anarchist thought. After all, at least since the days of Proudhon, anarchism, for all the unforgettable good deeds of anarchist workers in the U.S., Spain, and even Russia, has contained a strain of opportunism rooted in its peasant/middle class orientation, that has in practice meant betrayal of working-class interests to those of the worst reactionaries, often under the veneer of a "shocking" radicalism.
And say what you will about Kaczynski, he was certainly a radical and a militant. The question is, militant in the support of what end?
It's my opinion that this is simply wrong. Kaczynski's outspoken environmentalism is shared by more on the left than the right, but this is just one component of the comprehensive critique of technology developed in his manifesto. It is clear that his real objections are to the progressive features of technology, which he sees as replacing the family as basic social unit with the sovereign individual, replacing the master-apprentice relationship with wage labor, and undermining the Hobbesian sovereign authority with what he considers the destructive notions of liberalism, democracy, and socialism. This is objectively a reactionary critique that could have been made by any 18th century pope.
A street sign near my house is stamped "Free Ted" and has an image of the Unabomber. I'm told that this statement was made by one of the anarchists who used to live there, and I suspect that it reflects not only legitimate concern about the fairness of Kaczynski's trial, but also political sympathy. For a long time I assumed that this was again based on a political misidentification of Kaczynski's politics, but I've come to suspect that elements of Kaczynski's philosophy besides his environmentalism may strike a chord with certain strands of anarchist thought. After all, at least since the days of Proudhon, anarchism, for all the unforgettable good deeds of anarchist workers in the U.S., Spain, and even Russia, has contained a strain of opportunism rooted in its peasant/middle class orientation, that has in practice meant betrayal of working-class interests to those of the worst reactionaries, often under the veneer of a "shocking" radicalism.
And say what you will about Kaczynski, he was certainly a radical and a militant. The question is, militant in the support of what end?
The Man on the White Horse
The Economist's lead story last week concludes, "Though economic logic suggests that the world economy is just going through a sticky patch, squabbling politicians could all too easily turn it into a meltdown." Of course the squabbling politicians themselves are merely symptomatic of a larger structural problem with world capitalism, the perception that they are responsible for business's woes will tend now, as it did in the last two centuries, to promote Bonapartist politicians--centrist figures who promise to stand apart from the political fray and concentrate power in their own hands to get things done ... cut through the red tape ... etc. The capitalist war drive--itself a symptom of falling profit rates--reinforces the trend toward dictatorship. Classic Bonapartism--and its Stalinist variety, still reinforced by China--in turn prepares the way for fascism. The alternative, of course, is to expropriate the capitalists and thereby thwart their antidemocratic agenda.
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Spectre of War
War, alongside depression and fascism, haunts the world today. The biggest European conflict since World War II broke out in the 1990s in Bosnia and Chechnya. Africa has recently been ravaged by some of the worst wars in the world's history, including the Second Congo War which killed about the same number of people as Jews killed in the Holocaust and spawned conflicts that are going on to this day. Mexico is strained by the weight of narcoterrorism. civil war has engulfed Syria, Libya, and probably Yemen. Afghanistan is called the longest conflict in U.S. history, although the U.S. fought the Moro indigenous people of the the Philippines for at least 14 years straight and the Apache for at least 26. It also involves other major military powers in a big way, and was one of the first major commitments for Germany since World War II. Japan also has stepped up its willingness to send troops into war, notably in Iraq to which it sent 600.
More troublesome than the recent or ongoing conflicts, some of which are heating up at any point in history while others are slowing down, are the indications of a growing bellicosity. Infamous was the disrespect Bush and Blair showed for world opinion in invading Iraq. there is also the casual way several countries rushed into war in Libya, the suddenness of Russia's recent war with Georgia, Israel's war with Lebanon, and the U.S.'s Operation Geronimo that killed Osama bin Laden. During that raid, the U.S. Special Forces were ordered to fire on any Pakistani military personnel who tried to stop their unauthorized incursion into Pakistan's sovereign territory. This is by my count the 4th time the order was given to attack another nuclear-armed power, besides when the U.S. threatened to fire on Soviet forces who crossed their blockade, on Israeli planes and missiles if Israel retaliated for Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War, and in 1999 during the Kosovo conflict when Gen. Wesley Clark ordered NATO troops under his command to fire on Russian troops about to occupy a key airstrip (thankfully the British commander under Clark refused to relay the order). Meanwhile, the U.S. has given certain battlefield commanders authority to launch nuclear weapons without presidential order, the stated goal being to intimidate opponents by creating a perception of chaotic behavior. Imagine if Douglas McArthur had had that power! German commanders also have the authority to launch nuclear attacks from American nuclear submarines without prior American approval. The U.S. has always reserved the right to launch a nuclear first strike. The USSR once pledged never to respond to a conventional attack with nuclear weapons, but today Russia has adopted a policy more like the U.S.'s. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his public persona an extremely bellicose leader who goes out of his way to avoid appearance of a peaceful attitude toward the indigenous Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad is likewise carrying on an extraordinarily pugnacious diplomacy.
And lest we forget, there was this incredible statement by Walid Jumblatt, the Druze politician who leads Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, in 2008: "If you want chaos, we welcome chaos. If you want war, we welcome war." Lebanon's civil war, in which Jumblatt's father wasthe major rebel leader until his assassination, was fraught with sectarian violence (of the sort we're seeing in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen today), betrayals, massacres, international espionage, smuggling, and direct and brutal intervention by Syrian and Israeli forces. Lebanon still has a sectarian witches' brew of political parties, a large displaced Palestinian community, and a confessional political system that gives disproportionate political weight to the Christian minority. When Jumblatt publicly welcomed chaos and war into this situation, he was challenging Hizballah, the largest political party in Lebanon, better armed than the government, and firmly backed by Syria and Iran. Hizballah had previously been an ally of Jumblatt's PSP, and today they are, if not allies, at least partners in a coalition government.
Nuclear and biological weapons are getting more and more widespread while the U.S. is seeking to establish first-strike capacity by building a working space-based anti-missile system. Pakistan and India, N. Korea and S. Korea, share volatile borders with frequent flareups. The U.S. has expanded NATO into E. Europe, established large bases in the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea, occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and has a major contingent in Japan, effectively creating a military encirclement of Russia. The presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, etc., creates similar pressures on Iran. China is building a world-class navy and entering the space race with a vengeance, while the U.S. has nuclear-armed forces in Chinese territorial waters (the Taiwan Strait).
None of the issues of the recent multi-country wars in Africa have been resolved. Many of the countries involved and their neighbors are still at war. The upcoming independence of S. Sudan, the Un intervention that has been proposed, and the Libyan civil war, all have the potential to reshape politics not only in Sudan and Libya, but also in Chad, the Central African Republic, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, even Egypt. Meanwhile, the relationship between Ethiopia and Egypt (and, no doubt, Sudan), with two of the largest militaries in the world, are deteriorating rapidly over Ethiopia's proposals to dam the Nile River. Elsewhere on the Red Sea, Israel is nuclear-armed, isolated, and jumpy; Yemen and Somalia are hotbeds of piracy, smuggling, tribal warfare, intelligence activity, and Islamism; Eritrea, also one of the largest military powers, fought a 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia and continues to share with it an uneasy border,; and the U.S. and France both have their largest African bases in Djibouti, right smack in the middle of all this.
In conclusion: the forecast looks like war. Next in this series: case studies of war and the political and economic forces tending to war or peace today.
More troublesome than the recent or ongoing conflicts, some of which are heating up at any point in history while others are slowing down, are the indications of a growing bellicosity. Infamous was the disrespect Bush and Blair showed for world opinion in invading Iraq. there is also the casual way several countries rushed into war in Libya, the suddenness of Russia's recent war with Georgia, Israel's war with Lebanon, and the U.S.'s Operation Geronimo that killed Osama bin Laden. During that raid, the U.S. Special Forces were ordered to fire on any Pakistani military personnel who tried to stop their unauthorized incursion into Pakistan's sovereign territory. This is by my count the 4th time the order was given to attack another nuclear-armed power, besides when the U.S. threatened to fire on Soviet forces who crossed their blockade, on Israeli planes and missiles if Israel retaliated for Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War, and in 1999 during the Kosovo conflict when Gen. Wesley Clark ordered NATO troops under his command to fire on Russian troops about to occupy a key airstrip (thankfully the British commander under Clark refused to relay the order). Meanwhile, the U.S. has given certain battlefield commanders authority to launch nuclear weapons without presidential order, the stated goal being to intimidate opponents by creating a perception of chaotic behavior. Imagine if Douglas McArthur had had that power! German commanders also have the authority to launch nuclear attacks from American nuclear submarines without prior American approval. The U.S. has always reserved the right to launch a nuclear first strike. The USSR once pledged never to respond to a conventional attack with nuclear weapons, but today Russia has adopted a policy more like the U.S.'s. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his public persona an extremely bellicose leader who goes out of his way to avoid appearance of a peaceful attitude toward the indigenous Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad is likewise carrying on an extraordinarily pugnacious diplomacy.
And lest we forget, there was this incredible statement by Walid Jumblatt, the Druze politician who leads Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, in 2008: "If you want chaos, we welcome chaos. If you want war, we welcome war." Lebanon's civil war, in which Jumblatt's father wasthe major rebel leader until his assassination, was fraught with sectarian violence (of the sort we're seeing in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen today), betrayals, massacres, international espionage, smuggling, and direct and brutal intervention by Syrian and Israeli forces. Lebanon still has a sectarian witches' brew of political parties, a large displaced Palestinian community, and a confessional political system that gives disproportionate political weight to the Christian minority. When Jumblatt publicly welcomed chaos and war into this situation, he was challenging Hizballah, the largest political party in Lebanon, better armed than the government, and firmly backed by Syria and Iran. Hizballah had previously been an ally of Jumblatt's PSP, and today they are, if not allies, at least partners in a coalition government.
Nuclear and biological weapons are getting more and more widespread while the U.S. is seeking to establish first-strike capacity by building a working space-based anti-missile system. Pakistan and India, N. Korea and S. Korea, share volatile borders with frequent flareups. The U.S. has expanded NATO into E. Europe, established large bases in the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea, occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and has a major contingent in Japan, effectively creating a military encirclement of Russia. The presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, etc., creates similar pressures on Iran. China is building a world-class navy and entering the space race with a vengeance, while the U.S. has nuclear-armed forces in Chinese territorial waters (the Taiwan Strait).
None of the issues of the recent multi-country wars in Africa have been resolved. Many of the countries involved and their neighbors are still at war. The upcoming independence of S. Sudan, the Un intervention that has been proposed, and the Libyan civil war, all have the potential to reshape politics not only in Sudan and Libya, but also in Chad, the Central African Republic, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, even Egypt. Meanwhile, the relationship between Ethiopia and Egypt (and, no doubt, Sudan), with two of the largest militaries in the world, are deteriorating rapidly over Ethiopia's proposals to dam the Nile River. Elsewhere on the Red Sea, Israel is nuclear-armed, isolated, and jumpy; Yemen and Somalia are hotbeds of piracy, smuggling, tribal warfare, intelligence activity, and Islamism; Eritrea, also one of the largest military powers, fought a 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia and continues to share with it an uneasy border,; and the U.S. and France both have their largest African bases in Djibouti, right smack in the middle of all this.
In conclusion: the forecast looks like war. Next in this series: case studies of war and the political and economic forces tending to war or peace today.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Longest day of the year.
I had to click the link to realize it, but the Google Doodle today celebrates the Summer Solstice. Which is a bit insulting to people in the Southern Hemisphere. I'll be impressed if I find out they used a "Winter Solstice" one down there, but I have a hunch they just decided that other part of the world doesn't count.
how reagan paved the way for 9/11
We all know about Reagan's role in channeling money, intelligence, and weapons to the Taliban and al_Qaeda via the "Landlord Liberation Front" in Afghanistan--although that crime against peace actually began under Carter, and BEFORE Soviet troops entered the country. And bin Laden said the twin towers attack was in part a symbolic revenge for Israel's destruction of two residential apartments during its Reagan-backed war against Lebanon. But I think Reagan may share responsibility for creating the conditions that made 9/11 possible for another reason:
In 1981, Reagan fired more than 11,000 veteran members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union, for seeking measures that would improve air traffic safety--after winning their endorsement in the 1980 election by saying their demands were justified. These professionals, who had experience in the 1970s when airplane hijackings were frequent, were replaced by a new cadre of people lacking that experience, and with a three-year training program it would take years to replace the institutional knowledge of the vast majority of air traffic controllers. , especially because the hours were getting longer and the wages were getting lower.
And they were working under nonunion conditions where they were more likely to be exhausted, sick, overworked, and demoralized. Perhaps these conditions cost a few precious minutes that could have saved thousands of lives?
In 1981, Reagan fired more than 11,000 veteran members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union, for seeking measures that would improve air traffic safety--after winning their endorsement in the 1980 election by saying their demands were justified. These professionals, who had experience in the 1970s when airplane hijackings were frequent, were replaced by a new cadre of people lacking that experience, and with a three-year training program it would take years to replace the institutional knowledge of the vast majority of air traffic controllers. , especially because the hours were getting longer and the wages were getting lower.
And they were working under nonunion conditions where they were more likely to be exhausted, sick, overworked, and demoralized. Perhaps these conditions cost a few precious minutes that could have saved thousands of lives?
Sunday, June 19, 2011
On mathematical realism
With the help of my friend Ali, whose interest in the Mandelbrot set sparked a discussion of imaginary numbers, negative numbers, etc., I've had a chance to clarify some of my views about whether mathematical concepts have some transcendental reality or not. I'm not going to pretend I've solved this question, but here's where my thinking stands right now:
First, the puzzle. Some logical/mathematical concepts, most obviously the Law of Identity, seem to be analytic a priori truths. But consider the thought experiment ofa universe in which there is nothing rather than something, which prima facie appears possible although perhaps in fact it is not. In such a world, would these logical concepts exist? And what would they mean.
Well, decades ago Russell and Whitehead attempted to create a formal system based on pure logic. Russell himself went on to show that an attempt to build such a system on set theory, as they had done, was doomed to failure, because the concept of a 'set' couldn't be rigorously defined in such a way that it could be used to define a number system without leading to contradictory results.
So this attempt to define numbers in terms of sets failed. But clearly numbers are useful and were historically discovered because they describe our world. Whatever formal system is true, it's true because it corresponds with reality. The law of identity (non-contradiction) is a necessary condition for any formal system to be considered true, but not a sufficient condition. It doesn't tell us, for example, how to decide which of three alternative geometries, each of them internally consistent, is true.
We might think that we could choose among such systems based on their correspondence with the real world, and in a given, socially agreed upon context, we can. But Godel demonstrated that no consistent formal system can be used to prove everything that is in fact true, and it follows that no such system can correspond perfectly to the ideal of a transparent mirror of reality in itself.
Consider, for example, addition. Any reasonable system of arithmetic will have, either as axioms, the basic additive equations--a+0=a, a+b=b+a, a+(-a)=0, (a+b)+c=a+(b+c)
, and so forth. We assume, because we derive these formalized intuitions about addition from the world, and apply them in talking about the world, that they represent truths about the world.
This assumes the existence of a 'true' mathematical description of the world that a given mathematical description--inconsistent with other internally consistent mathematical systems with different axioms--approximate. However, it is clear that such a system, even in theory, can't be derived either from pure logic or from the correspondence theory of truth. It is nothing but a chimera.
What any formal system tells us about unambiguously is the rule set for manipulating a set of symbols defined with reference to that system. Since the system cannot in fact provide a complete description of capital-T Truth, there is an apparent gulf between the formal system's symbols and the universe they purport to describe.
But everyone knows that 1+1=2, right? So '1', '+'. '=', and '2' must all mean something, right? Perhaps not. Wittgenstein famously observed the mistake in assuming that because the same word was applied to a class of objects that it followed that they all had something in common. He recommended, instead, that we simply look to see whether they have something in common.
Do they? Consider the '1'. There's 1 dog, 1 mole of atoms, 1 o'clock, 1 "the loneliest number", number 1 signifying preeminence or priority, the ace in my solitaire game, "the One" a single (ubitary) person hopes to meet, 1 thousand, 1 million, 1 in a million, the '1' I'm using to make my point, etc., and it's not clear at all that all the instantiations here have something in common. The same point can be made for such "clearly" intuited concepts as '+', '2', '=', etc.
It does no good to point out that my examples are of imprecise application of a concept since that is exactly my point. In the context of the formal system in which they are defined, the only precise, transparent application of a number defined in that system iswith reference to tat system's rules for manipulating that number. Any application beyond that system--for example, extending '1+1=2' to 'Woody the dog and Misty the dog together make two dogs' is by analogy, by a perceived family resemblance between '1' and 'Woody', even though in a different context, perhaps, Woody, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. It does no good to add rules explaining how to apply, say, the 'Woody' symbol, since there is no set of such rules that can provide a complete description of reality. My ability to see that the equation applies depends on perceiving the "oneness" of Woody. The same goes for threes, fours, negative twos, etc.
In this example, we are required to accept the mathematical equation as a model describing reality. But just as when we use Tonka cars as a model to describe a real-life car accident, we are bound to focus on the family resemblance and ignore irrelevant differences. Our capacity to do this rests on our ability to see that in this context, this or that symbol can be applied to this or that thing. Again, though, it is Wittgenstein who demonstrated that ostensive definition of a thing, acceptance of 'models', etc., all depend on a tacit set of background assumptions that are assumed to be understood, and there is no way to make ALL such assumptions explicit. That doesn't mean these analogies are meaningless, only that they are limited in scope. More to the point '1+1=2' applies to this situation given one set of background assumptions, to that situation with an overlapping but different set. For the mathematical symbols to be good models, they can't "stand for" the same things in every situation. (In fact, there are situations, such as, say, addition of clouds, where '1+1=2' doesn't apply in the usual way.)
I too have intuitions about what is '1' and what is '2', but I think it is a very facile and ultimately incoherent assumption that, unless we are talking about pure, arbitrary (within confines of consistency) rules for manipulating symbols, these concepts have unambiguous application to the things in the world that, by experience, we derive these concepts from.
First, the puzzle. Some logical/mathematical concepts, most obviously the Law of Identity, seem to be analytic a priori truths. But consider the thought experiment ofa universe in which there is nothing rather than something, which prima facie appears possible although perhaps in fact it is not. In such a world, would these logical concepts exist? And what would they mean.
Well, decades ago Russell and Whitehead attempted to create a formal system based on pure logic. Russell himself went on to show that an attempt to build such a system on set theory, as they had done, was doomed to failure, because the concept of a 'set' couldn't be rigorously defined in such a way that it could be used to define a number system without leading to contradictory results.
So this attempt to define numbers in terms of sets failed. But clearly numbers are useful and were historically discovered because they describe our world. Whatever formal system is true, it's true because it corresponds with reality. The law of identity (non-contradiction) is a necessary condition for any formal system to be considered true, but not a sufficient condition. It doesn't tell us, for example, how to decide which of three alternative geometries, each of them internally consistent, is true.
We might think that we could choose among such systems based on their correspondence with the real world, and in a given, socially agreed upon context, we can. But Godel demonstrated that no consistent formal system can be used to prove everything that is in fact true, and it follows that no such system can correspond perfectly to the ideal of a transparent mirror of reality in itself.
Consider, for example, addition. Any reasonable system of arithmetic will have, either as axioms, the basic additive equations--a+0=a, a+b=b+a, a+(-a)=0, (a+b)+c=a+(b+c)
, and so forth. We assume, because we derive these formalized intuitions about addition from the world, and apply them in talking about the world, that they represent truths about the world.
This assumes the existence of a 'true' mathematical description of the world that a given mathematical description--inconsistent with other internally consistent mathematical systems with different axioms--approximate. However, it is clear that such a system, even in theory, can't be derived either from pure logic or from the correspondence theory of truth. It is nothing but a chimera.
What any formal system tells us about unambiguously is the rule set for manipulating a set of symbols defined with reference to that system. Since the system cannot in fact provide a complete description of capital-T Truth, there is an apparent gulf between the formal system's symbols and the universe they purport to describe.
But everyone knows that 1+1=2, right? So '1', '+'. '=', and '2' must all mean something, right? Perhaps not. Wittgenstein famously observed the mistake in assuming that because the same word was applied to a class of objects that it followed that they all had something in common. He recommended, instead, that we simply look to see whether they have something in common.
Do they? Consider the '1'. There's 1 dog, 1 mole of atoms, 1 o'clock, 1 "the loneliest number", number 1 signifying preeminence or priority, the ace in my solitaire game, "the One" a single (ubitary) person hopes to meet, 1 thousand, 1 million, 1 in a million, the '1' I'm using to make my point, etc., and it's not clear at all that all the instantiations here have something in common. The same point can be made for such "clearly" intuited concepts as '+', '2', '=', etc.
It does no good to point out that my examples are of imprecise application of a concept since that is exactly my point. In the context of the formal system in which they are defined, the only precise, transparent application of a number defined in that system iswith reference to tat system's rules for manipulating that number. Any application beyond that system--for example, extending '1+1=2' to 'Woody the dog and Misty the dog together make two dogs' is by analogy, by a perceived family resemblance between '1' and 'Woody', even though in a different context, perhaps, Woody, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. It does no good to add rules explaining how to apply, say, the 'Woody' symbol, since there is no set of such rules that can provide a complete description of reality. My ability to see that the equation applies depends on perceiving the "oneness" of Woody. The same goes for threes, fours, negative twos, etc.
In this example, we are required to accept the mathematical equation as a model describing reality. But just as when we use Tonka cars as a model to describe a real-life car accident, we are bound to focus on the family resemblance and ignore irrelevant differences. Our capacity to do this rests on our ability to see that in this context, this or that symbol can be applied to this or that thing. Again, though, it is Wittgenstein who demonstrated that ostensive definition of a thing, acceptance of 'models', etc., all depend on a tacit set of background assumptions that are assumed to be understood, and there is no way to make ALL such assumptions explicit. That doesn't mean these analogies are meaningless, only that they are limited in scope. More to the point '1+1=2' applies to this situation given one set of background assumptions, to that situation with an overlapping but different set. For the mathematical symbols to be good models, they can't "stand for" the same things in every situation. (In fact, there are situations, such as, say, addition of clouds, where '1+1=2' doesn't apply in the usual way.)
I too have intuitions about what is '1' and what is '2', but I think it is a very facile and ultimately incoherent assumption that, unless we are talking about pure, arbitrary (within confines of consistency) rules for manipulating symbols, these concepts have unambiguous application to the things in the world that, by experience, we derive these concepts from.
The sky is falling!
A number of crackpots have garnered attention recently by predicting the imminent end of the world. While superficially these predictions are based on, say, the Revelation of St. John or the Mayan calendar, it is clear that prophets of doom have been able to find post hoc justifications for their claims year in and year out for decades. Something else is at work today.
Consider the appeal of Falun Gong, the illegal movement that admittedly has tens of millions of Chinese followers. Is it a coincidence that this movement, which rejects modern medicine and promises miraculous relief from illness and injury, is exploding just as the state is de facto pricing access to health care out of reach for the vast majority?
Analogously, should it be a surprise that people whose private worlds are coming to an end as a result of capitalism's drift toward depression and war should take refuge in the faith inthe destruction of the old world and the birth of a new? The last big wave of millenarianism in the U.S.--the age of the Millerites and the Jehovah's Witnesses--presaged the days of the bloodiest, most desperate labor battles, of Coxey's Army, etc. Jesus in his time similarly also appealed to those who sought an end to the world of slavery and poverty.
The frantic search for signs of the end times is itself an omen. It signifies the despair of billions with the world we know, and the hope for its destruction. And just as in the past, when the masses find that no God, no impersonal fate, no Man of Destiny, will deliver us from the future capitalism promises, they will take matters into their own hands.
Consider the appeal of Falun Gong, the illegal movement that admittedly has tens of millions of Chinese followers. Is it a coincidence that this movement, which rejects modern medicine and promises miraculous relief from illness and injury, is exploding just as the state is de facto pricing access to health care out of reach for the vast majority?
Analogously, should it be a surprise that people whose private worlds are coming to an end as a result of capitalism's drift toward depression and war should take refuge in the faith inthe destruction of the old world and the birth of a new? The last big wave of millenarianism in the U.S.--the age of the Millerites and the Jehovah's Witnesses--presaged the days of the bloodiest, most desperate labor battles, of Coxey's Army, etc. Jesus in his time similarly also appealed to those who sought an end to the world of slavery and poverty.
The frantic search for signs of the end times is itself an omen. It signifies the despair of billions with the world we know, and the hope for its destruction. And just as in the past, when the masses find that no God, no impersonal fate, no Man of Destiny, will deliver us from the future capitalism promises, they will take matters into their own hands.
The Chick Code revealed
Perhaps you know about Jack Chick, billed as the most widely-read comic book artis in the world. He does those little pamphlets about the need to turn your life over to Jesus before you burn in Hell. Charming guy.
Well, I'm not the first person to find one of his comics particularly perplexing. The story: missionaries are seated on the plane next to an evangelist. They excitedly tell him about the good works they've done for a benighted people, while he asks them how many souls they've won. They don't have ears to hear, and when the plane crashes they go to Hell.
Readers have commented on the implausibility of missionaries' doing all these kind things, teaching people to pray (apparently), and not converting a single soul. Well, in honor of Father's Day, I figure I'll give Chick and his sky-daddy the benefit of the doubt.
See, the tract is really a parable of the sort Jesus used, whose manifest content disguises an esoteric meaning. Remember that Jesus and his disciples were leftist revolutionaries for whom conversion is not about verbal acceptance of a creed or habit, but rather renewed life in perfect love. Not all who call Jesus Lord, but those who do the work of his Father, are the elect. And that work is feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and tending to the sick.
Now the missionaries in the story built schools and hospitals. Similarly, the Priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan no doubt gave generously. But Jesus demands perfection. The missionaries here, perhaps, are like the (unfairly maligned?) Pharisees of Matthew's gospel. Their gifts they write down on the debit side of their ledgers, while on the other side they reckon thousandfold recompense and eternal life.
They have no inkling that the gift that Divine Law requires of us--whether in the name of Jesus, or Paul, or Apollo--is perfect love. If we have faith, we will naturally give what we can, and we will give it in a loving way--unlike so many real-life missionaries, who build schools and hospitals while they exploit native labor and sexuality, support thuggish sectarian movements, and ally themselves with global political reaction.
Modern-day disciples of Christ are not those who hector strangers into repeating arcane formulae of the sort Jesus "Man was not made for the Sabbath" himself rejected, but those who treat their fellow men and women as brothers and sisters. As equals.
Well, I'm not the first person to find one of his comics particularly perplexing. The story: missionaries are seated on the plane next to an evangelist. They excitedly tell him about the good works they've done for a benighted people, while he asks them how many souls they've won. They don't have ears to hear, and when the plane crashes they go to Hell.
Readers have commented on the implausibility of missionaries' doing all these kind things, teaching people to pray (apparently), and not converting a single soul. Well, in honor of Father's Day, I figure I'll give Chick and his sky-daddy the benefit of the doubt.
See, the tract is really a parable of the sort Jesus used, whose manifest content disguises an esoteric meaning. Remember that Jesus and his disciples were leftist revolutionaries for whom conversion is not about verbal acceptance of a creed or habit, but rather renewed life in perfect love. Not all who call Jesus Lord, but those who do the work of his Father, are the elect. And that work is feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and tending to the sick.
Now the missionaries in the story built schools and hospitals. Similarly, the Priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan no doubt gave generously. But Jesus demands perfection. The missionaries here, perhaps, are like the (unfairly maligned?) Pharisees of Matthew's gospel. Their gifts they write down on the debit side of their ledgers, while on the other side they reckon thousandfold recompense and eternal life.
They have no inkling that the gift that Divine Law requires of us--whether in the name of Jesus, or Paul, or Apollo--is perfect love. If we have faith, we will naturally give what we can, and we will give it in a loving way--unlike so many real-life missionaries, who build schools and hospitals while they exploit native labor and sexuality, support thuggish sectarian movements, and ally themselves with global political reaction.
Modern-day disciples of Christ are not those who hector strangers into repeating arcane formulae of the sort Jesus "Man was not made for the Sabbath" himself rejected, but those who treat their fellow men and women as brothers and sisters. As equals.
Hello and welcome!
Hi, my name is Loren. Welcome to my blog (under construction. Well, I wasn't sure where to start, but this seems like a meaty story:
As NARAL alerted me, Congress is voting to block the people of D.C., through their elected representatives, from using their own tax revenues to provide abortion services for low-income women. Keep in mind that this is a Congress that has one of the world's best corporate health care plans for its own members, and a Congress in which the District of Columbia has not a single voting representative, even though its population is higher than some states.
Now, the District also has one of the highest Black populations in the country. So, to sum up, what we have here is a largely male, white-dominated government representing rich women who can afford access to safe, legal abortion, denying the right of a lagely Black community to afford that same access to its members. The white lawmakers live side by side with the Black subjects but don't even pretend to give them a voice in the government.
I can't help being reminded of the infamous abortion policies of white-ruled S. Africa, where thousands of Black women died every year because they lacked access to safe, legal abortion, while affluent whites could afford to get abortions in other countries, albeit inconveniently.
This is one of many examples of governments chipping away at abortion rights recently, and a lot of the fault lies with the failures of liberal feminists to approach abortion as an issue of race and class. The focus on securing legal access to abortion for white, middle-class women has led many "feminists" to connect abortion rights with reactionary population-control policies. from the time of Margaret Sanger up through the second-wave feminist period, many abortion rights organizations tacitly or openly championed the forcible sterilization of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other marginalized women. This genocidal position naturally alienated anti-racists from the abortion rights struggle, and philosophically represented a concession that a woman's right to control her body--to choose to have OR not to have children--is trumped by alleged social interests in controlling her.
It is only when the right to abortion is championed based on a woman's fundamental right to make her own informed medical decisions--a right that is also under attack with prosecutions of medical marijuana patients and other examples of the war on drug users, which itself has resulted in a disparate devastation's being visited on the Black community--that alliances capable of putting powerful social forces behind safe, legal abortion become possible. Such a movement would situate this struggle in the context of the unions' fight for a national, free, government-run health care program.
As NARAL alerted me, Congress is voting to block the people of D.C., through their elected representatives, from using their own tax revenues to provide abortion services for low-income women. Keep in mind that this is a Congress that has one of the world's best corporate health care plans for its own members, and a Congress in which the District of Columbia has not a single voting representative, even though its population is higher than some states.
Now, the District also has one of the highest Black populations in the country. So, to sum up, what we have here is a largely male, white-dominated government representing rich women who can afford access to safe, legal abortion, denying the right of a lagely Black community to afford that same access to its members. The white lawmakers live side by side with the Black subjects but don't even pretend to give them a voice in the government.
I can't help being reminded of the infamous abortion policies of white-ruled S. Africa, where thousands of Black women died every year because they lacked access to safe, legal abortion, while affluent whites could afford to get abortions in other countries, albeit inconveniently.
This is one of many examples of governments chipping away at abortion rights recently, and a lot of the fault lies with the failures of liberal feminists to approach abortion as an issue of race and class. The focus on securing legal access to abortion for white, middle-class women has led many "feminists" to connect abortion rights with reactionary population-control policies. from the time of Margaret Sanger up through the second-wave feminist period, many abortion rights organizations tacitly or openly championed the forcible sterilization of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other marginalized women. This genocidal position naturally alienated anti-racists from the abortion rights struggle, and philosophically represented a concession that a woman's right to control her body--to choose to have OR not to have children--is trumped by alleged social interests in controlling her.
It is only when the right to abortion is championed based on a woman's fundamental right to make her own informed medical decisions--a right that is also under attack with prosecutions of medical marijuana patients and other examples of the war on drug users, which itself has resulted in a disparate devastation's being visited on the Black community--that alliances capable of putting powerful social forces behind safe, legal abortion become possible. Such a movement would situate this struggle in the context of the unions' fight for a national, free, government-run health care program.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)