(Thanks to C.F. Oxtrot for linking the Orlov article which got me a'thinkin' - and to the essayists outlined in several posts below.)
Over the last several weeks we've had the opportunity to see crisis government in action, in two separate fields of action, spanning two different continents, in two different political and economic environments. Over the past year and a half, we've also had the ability to study how the TARP bail outs, and associated book cookings, have managed to transfer billions of dollars of debt from private ledgers to the public account (see Michael Whitney's series of essays at Counterpunch), protecting the network of perpetrator firms from their own toxic ramifications, whilst socializing their costs.
As the Invisible Committee opined, in 2009*: "Our governors themselves increasingly consider it [the state, specifically the French welfare state] as a useless encumbrance because they, at least, consider the conflict for what it is - militarily. They have no complex about sending in elite anti-terrorist units to subdue riots, or to liberate a recycling center occupied by its workers. As the welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of a brute conflict between those who desire order and those who don't."
An order, we should understand, that requires continuous Emergency - peripheralized insecurity which must of necessity threaten the comforts and complacencies of the well governed interiors. An order resembling everyday corporate structure, and its political analog, the garrison state. As long as threats, seemingly perpetual, emerge at this expanding periphery, the state offers a validation to the program of militarization which must appeal to the ruling, creative and managerial beneficiaries of its powers.
They continue, further on, "Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse."
This process, outlined in greater detail by Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, and hinted at by John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, depends upon a catalog of manufactured instabilities.
These destabilizations do not arise from unintended glitches within the firm and government based management of capitalist accumulation, but from the specific, necessary and ongoing transfer of national welfare state capacity towards police-military control.**
As the primary resource fueling later order capitalism - oil - approaches its revaluation as a luxury commodity, the surviving managing states must look for a new approach to stability; it must look to what populations it will protect, and which ones it will exploit and control. If international currencies can no longer depend on trade in fungible petroleum for their exchange value, then one of the final necessities of the modern nation state, and the international system of loans, debt financing and trade agreement, no longer acts as a pervasive bond between it and subject populations, losing its ability to discipline the citizenry with monetary policy. Without this oil based international order, the ruling factions must re-conceive the disciplinary nation state, configuring it to protect the wealth and welfare of a smaller class of beneficiaries, while retaining the power to police externalized populations.
Oil will not remain a widespread commodity into the next generation. If disciplinary states cannot retain their hegemony over captive populations their usefulness as delimiting organizations ends, setting into motion a period of intense competition for contested resources, as newly unrestrained actors search for advantages without enduring systems for conflict mediation. No longer assisted in conflict management by nation states, and the application of captured labor receipts to the military gelding of underdeveloped populations who happen to sit on resources, finance and extraction firms lose the capacity to shield their actions under the aegis of national interest and public security, exposing themselves as direct agents of alienation, violence and systematic oppression.
Exposing their operational logic to the immediate pressures of rebellious populations.
The modern nation state, understood in this light, remains vital as a buffer against direct opposition to exploitation, absorbing the violence, outrage and justified anger of laborers and the dwindling classes of petty small holders. For an American example, see the Tea Party. Or liberal political advocacy organizations.
But, for the nation state to serve this function, and with any degree of efficiency, it must shed either its excess populations, its welfare capacity or some of both. In the US, we have a very successful prison industry, as well as the marginalization of foreign and "illegal" workers, to provide a species of population shedding, since institutionally alienated populations (poor blacks, immigrant Asians and Latinos), subject to the control of prisons or deportation, do not immediately threaten the state's field of operation. They instead provide a justification for it, and for the increasing police-militarization of social life. In Israel, see Palestinians. In France, the residents des banlieuses. In Germany, Turks and other immigrants.
Returning to a theme first announced above, the dismantling of the welfare state must either proceed at an increasing pace, so that the state can return to direct management of populations through isolation and violence, thus safeguarding the accumulated assets of the ruling class, or it risks collapsing before those same ruling classes can properly corral subject and captive populations into new zones of control, buffer and instability.
In this light: Greece. As Michael and Richard have outlined in a series of excellent essays - the pillaging of Greece, and the subsequent collapse of the Greek economy, has forced the German dominated EU to consider how to manage this crisis to the benefit of the Euro zone capitalists, and towards the preservation of domestic standards of living within the central powers. They must do this, though, while continuing to defer the chaos engendering collapses of Portugal, Spain and Italy, if not France. If the expansion of the Greek condition to Portugal, Spain and Italy runs ahead of efforts to manage domestic populations, and runaway devaluations, the European experiment may end abruptly, leaving the denuded states of the South and Eastern Europe without any hope but default and unmanageable destabilization. Government by crisis becomes, in short order, government dissolved in crisis. Enter Turkey, the US and Russia - which powers have the capacity to extend military hegemony and which also control the major sources and transfer points of European energy (exempting France in the short term, which has its nuclear buffer; see the current US state transfer of public assets towards the re-invigoration of the domestic nuclear industry).
A Europe so denuded, we ought to understand, exposes Germany and France as the unwilling guarantors of a security they cannot maintain or project, surrounded by weak neighbors to the east and south, and the Russian hydrocarbon state beyond them. Without contractual or military access to the petroleum of the Middle East, the European central powers (including Britain) cannot sustain a prolonged defense against insurrectionary populations or foreign invasion, since the police-military complex more than almost any other depends upon oil. Without oil, no modern military machine.
Without the police and military, no armed staffers for the capitalists. Hence, the crisis managed deconstruction of the welfare state.
Which brings us to the British Petroleum-Halliburton-Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Even more than Germany, France and Britain, the US capacity to project power rests on oil. On top of this fact, the petrodollar provides the US government with a liquidity and stability it could otherwise not possess. The Gulf Oil crisis has exposed the necessary leniency of the US state towards oil producing corporations. If the State does not offer this benign neglect, its own ability to accumulate petroleum comes into immediate question, since petroleum producing firms, and their FIRE guarantors, can satisfy alternative demands in less regulatory environments. Furthermore, the entire American economy (and of those manufacturing nations which supply its foodstuffs, ersatz goods and component parts) requires the maintenance of an oil platform which becomes an unsustainable burden the moment it terms of use become negotiable. As long as the US state can project its power within national confines (by dismantling the welfare state, militarizing the commons and with the now decade long delegitimization of civil rights and obligations) and onto resource producing populations, the relationship between extraction/finance firms and government serves all concerned parties.
The federal state will not and cannot make anything but symbolic gestures towards regulation of the oil industry, in much the same way that its predominant actors will not and cannot reign in insurance, banking or real estate combines without risking the rapid decomposition of its domestic authority - its capacity to enact systemic and immediate violence against those who threaten the transforming order. Its power derives not from the imaginary consent of citizen producers, but from the wealth of the corporate ruling class.
As we noted above, oil will not long remain a common use commodity. Too vital to the maintenance of police-military power, states will either reserve the use of oil for enforcement and force projection, especially over laboring and resource extracting populations, as well as towards the sustenance of ruling class health and luxury production, or it will lose its self-defining justification.
The ruling class - represented in this age by corporations, military hierarchies, academia and managerial service institutions - has already cast its lot against the Commons as shared public space. It has begun the revaluation of the state, and therefore of social relations, towards the preservation of economic and social advantage in the face of oil contraction, resource scarcity and rising population. Towards this end, deconstructive crisis hastens the project of redefining the Commons as a policed military space, and away from three centuries of construction and agitation for the Commons as commonweal and social amelioration.
In this light, then, perhaps we can better tackle how to oppose this process, and how to transform the emerging period of crisis into our own social revaluation.
Or, and this possibility I readily admit, I've only offered my own catalog of errors...All flaws and errors belong to me, and in no way reflect upon those persons, essays and thoughts I've quoted or read.
* - The Coming Insurrection, 2009, Semiotext(e)
** - Forty-five miles from my own home, in just the last twelve hours, the police militarized a "crisis situation" which amounted to a man who did not want to get off a bus, bringing in the FBI, the state police, DHS, biological-nuclear sniffers, bomb robots and neighborhood evacuation.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
May 7, 2010
May 6, 2010
How Stuff Works
This:
Plus this:
Gets you this:
"Accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad has been charged in federal court with numerous crimes in the terrorism plot including attempting to commit an act of terror, attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and traveling over an international border to commit an act of terrorism."
(emphasis mine)
But...
This:
Plus this:
Plus this:
Gets you this:
WTF?
"Former New York Giants great Lawrence Taylor was arrested after allegedly raping and beating a teenage girl in a New York hotel Thursday, CBS 2 has learned.
Taylor, 51, was taken into custody by the Town of Ramapo police at the Holiday Inn Holidome Hotel in Suffern.
Details surrounding the rape have not yet been released other than the location and that it occurred early this morning. Charges against the Hall of Fame linebacker will be filed once police complete their investigation.
A news conference is expected later Thursday afternoon where police will reveal more details. Taylor is expected to be charged with third-degree rape.
It is believed that a 15-year-old girl complained to the police after she said that Taylor hit her, meaning assault charges could be coming also.
When police investigated the teen's claims and saw Taylor in the hotel, he was arrested overnight, CBS 2 has learned."
(emphasis mine)
http://wcbstv.com/breakingnewsalerts/lawrence.taylor.rape.2.1678714.html
I don't know about anyone else, but when referring to a fifty one year old alleged rapist and physical abuser of a fifteen year old girl, "great" gets left out of the go-to descriptions column.
Taylor, 51, was taken into custody by the Town of Ramapo police at the Holiday Inn Holidome Hotel in Suffern.
Details surrounding the rape have not yet been released other than the location and that it occurred early this morning. Charges against the Hall of Fame linebacker will be filed once police complete their investigation.
A news conference is expected later Thursday afternoon where police will reveal more details. Taylor is expected to be charged with third-degree rape.
It is believed that a 15-year-old girl complained to the police after she said that Taylor hit her, meaning assault charges could be coming also.
When police investigated the teen's claims and saw Taylor in the hotel, he was arrested overnight, CBS 2 has learned."
(emphasis mine)
http://wcbstv.com/breakingnewsalerts/lawrence.taylor.rape.2.1678714.html
I don't know about anyone else, but when referring to a fifty one year old alleged rapist and physical abuser of a fifteen year old girl, "great" gets left out of the go-to descriptions column.
Please Read Chris Floyd Today
"...What would I do if I came home from an ordinary day at work to find my children dead beneath the ruins of my drone-struck house? What would I do if saw my ailing father muscled from his home by masked goons who beat him and humiliate him then drag him off, bleeding, dying, to some iron-fronted dungeon? I hope I would have the strength to hold onto my belief in non-violence as the only hope to one day evolve our natures, and our cultures, beyond their deep-dyed savagery. But how likely is it that I would be that extraordinary, that I would have the extra measure of wisdom and spiritual fibre it would take to hold back the natural and understandable craving for violent retribution?
Not very likely; not in my case, nor in that of most others. Yet every day -- day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year -- atrocities like those described above are being carried out, in the name of the American people, in the name of civilization, in the name of our "way of life." Every day, day after day, some father or mother finds their children's limbs hanging in the trees, some child finds his parent's broken bodies smoking in the rubble, some ordinary, innocent human being sees their loved ones beaten, chained, abused and killed. Every day, day after day.
Only a fool -- a bloody-minded, arrogant, puffed-up, pig-ignorant fool -- could not see the horrific harvest of hate and destruction that will spring from such evil seeds. Only a fool -- or an elitist so wadded in wealth and privilege that he believes these monstrous fruits will never touch him personally, and doesn't care what happens to the rabble below, as long as his profits -- and his primitive, psychosexual lust for forcible dominion -- remain safe.
We are ruled today by just such fools, together with just such cold, deadened, malevolent spirits. But we seem to be content with this. Indeed, the most vociferous, active dissent we see these days comes from those who feel the system is not cruel enough -- who rage at the very thought that tax money might be spent to help someone in need, or that the borders have not yet been laced with radioactive razor-wire, or that accused criminals still have their rights read to them, or that Iran has not been destroyed, or that the power of Big Money might in any way be hedged with light restrictions.
Not very likely; not in my case, nor in that of most others. Yet every day -- day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year -- atrocities like those described above are being carried out, in the name of the American people, in the name of civilization, in the name of our "way of life." Every day, day after day, some father or mother finds their children's limbs hanging in the trees, some child finds his parent's broken bodies smoking in the rubble, some ordinary, innocent human being sees their loved ones beaten, chained, abused and killed. Every day, day after day.
Only a fool -- a bloody-minded, arrogant, puffed-up, pig-ignorant fool -- could not see the horrific harvest of hate and destruction that will spring from such evil seeds. Only a fool -- or an elitist so wadded in wealth and privilege that he believes these monstrous fruits will never touch him personally, and doesn't care what happens to the rabble below, as long as his profits -- and his primitive, psychosexual lust for forcible dominion -- remain safe.
We are ruled today by just such fools, together with just such cold, deadened, malevolent spirits. But we seem to be content with this. Indeed, the most vociferous, active dissent we see these days comes from those who feel the system is not cruel enough -- who rage at the very thought that tax money might be spent to help someone in need, or that the borders have not yet been laced with radioactive razor-wire, or that accused criminals still have their rights read to them, or that Iran has not been destroyed, or that the power of Big Money might in any way be hedged with light restrictions.
These things bring thousands out in anger: but murder, aggression, torture, atrocity, and corruption on a scale unseen and hitherto unimaginable in human history -- these leave them cold ... as cold as the malevolent spirits who with their useful fools accelerate our degradation."
Greek Questions
"Greece has been brought to a standstill as angry workers stage a general strike over planned austerity measures.
Spending cuts and tax rises are planned in return for a 110bn euro (£95bn) rescue package for Greece's economy. Parliament is to vote on the measures by the end of the week. Measures include wage freezes, pension cuts and tax rises. They aim to achieve fresh budget cuts of 30bn euros over three years, with the goal of cutting Greece's public deficit to less than 3% of GDP by 2014. It currently stands at 13.6%.
The general strike is the third to hit Greece in as many months.Meanwhile, the German parliament has begun considering the bail-out plan for Greece. Chancellor Angela Merkel urged MPs to back the emergency loan package agreed by European finance ministers. It requires Germany to pay the largest proportion of the loans. "Quite simply, Europe's future is at stake," she said. The EU has agreed to provide 80bn euros (£69bn) in funding - of which around 22bn euros would come from Germany - while the rest will come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Flights in and out of Greece stopped at midnight, and trains and ferries were not running. Schools, hospitals, and many offices are expected to remain shut. A mass rally took place in central Athens before protest marches passed through the city, with parliament again the focus of attention. TV images showed police firing teargas at a group of about 50 protesters who tried to reach the parliament building..."
http://libcom.org/news/general-strike-paralyses-greece-05052010
Does anyone have any direct contact with Greek general strikers?
Does anyone know if they will continue, even after the Eurozone bail out?
Do they protest on immediate concerns, or does this have a more revolutionary character?
Does anyone have an in depth and topical analysis, especially one which avoids college age obfuscation and sectarian jargon?
And in reading this, all that the authors suggests seems to amount to staged drawn downs, the better to preserve as much as possible already existing conditions. In other words, the preservation of the euro zone, and capital markets:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/its-not-about-greece-anymore/
Have I read this wrong?
(h/t Suburban Anarchist)
May 5, 2010
A note to clownish bombers and Greek protesters...
...giving the big dogs a reason to chew on your hind legs doesn't result in the world you want. It makes them stronger. Don't try to bomb public spaces where you'll probably kill only yourself or some laborer on her way to a pay check that only rarely pays her bills. Don't burn bank workers and patrons alive. Ferchrissakes, don't burn people alive.
Stop it. Just stop.
Stop it. Just stop.
Why No Anti-War Movement?
Want to know why the US will continue to occupy and eviscerate foreign peoples and nation?
"Hands may come into contact with millions of germs every day. Hand washing is one of the most important steps to help stay healthy. But have you ever thought about those germs ending up on your soap pump?
Fact: Your soap pump can harbor a lot of bacteria.
Introducing the LYSOL® No-Touch Hand Soap System, it automatically senses your hands and dispenses just the right amount of soap that kills 99.9% of bacteria.
For use in the kitchen or bathroom, the antibacterial hand soap is enriched with moisturizing ingredients and comes in three great scents!
Never touch a germy soap pump again."
http://www.lysol.com/products/no-touch-hand-soap-system/
The dirt fearing, hypocritical center-left, center-right, consumptive, short sighted, malleable, manipulable target market for this product: The American Electorate.
In a country where mega corporations can render the damned household soap dispenser a scary vector of contamination - soap as a disease causing agent! - can we really expect a whole lot of support for withdrawing from the global bomb dropping marketing campaign tomake pretend to make everything safe, goddamned everywhere?
"Hands may come into contact with millions of germs every day. Hand washing is one of the most important steps to help stay healthy. But have you ever thought about those germs ending up on your soap pump?
Fact: Your soap pump can harbor a lot of bacteria.
Introducing the LYSOL® No-Touch Hand Soap System, it automatically senses your hands and dispenses just the right amount of soap that kills 99.9% of bacteria.
For use in the kitchen or bathroom, the antibacterial hand soap is enriched with moisturizing ingredients and comes in three great scents!
Never touch a germy soap pump again."
http://www.lysol.com/products/no-touch-hand-soap-system/
The dirt fearing, hypocritical center-left, center-right, consumptive, short sighted, malleable, manipulable target market for this product: The American Electorate.
In a country where mega corporations can render the damned household soap dispenser a scary vector of contamination - soap as a disease causing agent! - can we really expect a whole lot of support for withdrawing from the global bomb dropping marketing campaign to
Hopey Changey Making My Point For Me
http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/2010/05/priorities.html
http://topnews.us/content/219113-experts-say-focus-bioweapons-isn-t-right
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=16617&context=va
h/t Avedon @ Sideshow
The short: Hopey McChangealot has decided to improve upon Bush's refocusing of the NIH towards bioweapons research. As in, more of it.
http://topnews.us/content/219113-experts-say-focus-bioweapons-isn-t-right
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=16617&context=va
h/t Avedon @ Sideshow
The short: Hopey McChangealot has decided to improve upon Bush's refocusing of the NIH towards bioweapons research. As in, more of it.
Another Reading Recommendation
An excellent analysis:
http://conflictions5.blogspot.com/2010/05/greece-in-transitional-world.html
I doubt I could muster up support for a defensive military seizure of the Commons (because I don't believe there exists a populace anywhere in the Western world which can extricate its military apparatus from corporate obligations).
Otherwise:
"It is my contention that when a critical mass (or systemic threshold) of discontent, poverty and social disintegration is reached, recently hollowed-out states will rapidly convert to a loose system of regionalized and centralized corporate military zones with protected enclaves of trading and functionality (so-called “green zones”) for those of us who can afford it. Those unfortunate enough to get excluded in these new zones of fuctionality will simply be abandoned and marginalized existing in anarchic and despotic conditions (so-called “red zones”).
Moreover, from the point of view of the protected they will simply be cutting dead weigh, so to speak, on the way to the full rescuing and transformation of social life - with its movement towards neo-feudal corporatist socioeconomic organization. In less words, those who have the guns and technology, and therefore the resources, will make that "transition" smoothly while those who don’t will be forced to the periphery.
Now I understand this projection might seem wildly apocalyptic and far removed from current conditions. But let point out why it is not.
For starters, for those lucky and connected green-zoners such rapid and intensive transformations will undoubtedly seem to them as a drastic but necessary step to safe-guard “civilization” from disaster and prevent the overall degeneration of human social life. But for the red-zoners it will be much worst than an apocalypse because it will be perpetual. An apocalypse implies a moment in time, but for red-zoners that time will be constant and relentless. What's worse, at least for the first few generations, is that not only will they become prey to whatever anarchic distribution of power that will follow rapid disintegration, they will also have to watch from the margins how “civilization” continued without them.
Also, for those of you who want to dismiss such possibilities as mere fantasy (as opposed to fantasy per se), please consider that this type of organizational assemblage is not that much different than what currently exists. It has been argued that we post-industrial consumer-citizens exist in our ‘first-world’, while others have their ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds. And the only strong difference between the zoned societies I describe above and today’s international orders (plural) is mobility.
Right now the international social order is characterized by the activities that support the hyper-mobility and intensive communicative flexibility of a relatively sizable comfort class. Whereas a world that is post-peak-oil, post-cheap-energy, post-mobile, limited in production and non-state organized, will be more situated, guarded and sharply delineated (stratified) while becoming oriented towards the utilization of remaining resources. In other words, the major difference between these the current social orders and those I argue we will transition into is the intensity (and rigidity) with which they are organized, while their structural interests remain the same: controlled subsistence, energy and security.
The fact remains that the economic foundation upon which our lifestyles depend is dying. And as all those ‘goods’ stop being circulated within capitalist international systems (as a result of collapsing bio-physical systems), and the superfluous “jobs” their production makes possible disappear, it will be less possible to placate and pacify the Western hoards. With their jobs, creature comforts, trinkets, vacations and T.V programs vanishing, the appearance of mutual interdependence will weaken and cease to captivate the imaginations of citizen-consumers everywhere. The resulting weakening of imagined and functional mutual dependence will then undermine most types of remaining social non-zero sum ("public interest") activities and "compel" (or provide opportunity for) all those powerful elites and self-appointed guardians to begin setting up their respective zones of influence, economics and security. "
http://conflictions5.blogspot.com/2010/05/greece-in-transitional-world.html
I doubt I could muster up support for a defensive military seizure of the Commons (because I don't believe there exists a populace anywhere in the Western world which can extricate its military apparatus from corporate obligations).
Otherwise:
"It is my contention that when a critical mass (or systemic threshold) of discontent, poverty and social disintegration is reached, recently hollowed-out states will rapidly convert to a loose system of regionalized and centralized corporate military zones with protected enclaves of trading and functionality (so-called “green zones”) for those of us who can afford it. Those unfortunate enough to get excluded in these new zones of fuctionality will simply be abandoned and marginalized existing in anarchic and despotic conditions (so-called “red zones”).
Moreover, from the point of view of the protected they will simply be cutting dead weigh, so to speak, on the way to the full rescuing and transformation of social life - with its movement towards neo-feudal corporatist socioeconomic organization. In less words, those who have the guns and technology, and therefore the resources, will make that "transition" smoothly while those who don’t will be forced to the periphery.
Now I understand this projection might seem wildly apocalyptic and far removed from current conditions. But let point out why it is not.
For starters, for those lucky and connected green-zoners such rapid and intensive transformations will undoubtedly seem to them as a drastic but necessary step to safe-guard “civilization” from disaster and prevent the overall degeneration of human social life. But for the red-zoners it will be much worst than an apocalypse because it will be perpetual. An apocalypse implies a moment in time, but for red-zoners that time will be constant and relentless. What's worse, at least for the first few generations, is that not only will they become prey to whatever anarchic distribution of power that will follow rapid disintegration, they will also have to watch from the margins how “civilization” continued without them.
Also, for those of you who want to dismiss such possibilities as mere fantasy (as opposed to fantasy per se), please consider that this type of organizational assemblage is not that much different than what currently exists. It has been argued that we post-industrial consumer-citizens exist in our ‘first-world’, while others have their ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds. And the only strong difference between the zoned societies I describe above and today’s international orders (plural) is mobility.
Right now the international social order is characterized by the activities that support the hyper-mobility and intensive communicative flexibility of a relatively sizable comfort class. Whereas a world that is post-peak-oil, post-cheap-energy, post-mobile, limited in production and non-state organized, will be more situated, guarded and sharply delineated (stratified) while becoming oriented towards the utilization of remaining resources. In other words, the major difference between these the current social orders and those I argue we will transition into is the intensity (and rigidity) with which they are organized, while their structural interests remain the same: controlled subsistence, energy and security.
The fact remains that the economic foundation upon which our lifestyles depend is dying. And as all those ‘goods’ stop being circulated within capitalist international systems (as a result of collapsing bio-physical systems), and the superfluous “jobs” their production makes possible disappear, it will be less possible to placate and pacify the Western hoards. With their jobs, creature comforts, trinkets, vacations and T.V programs vanishing, the appearance of mutual interdependence will weaken and cease to captivate the imaginations of citizen-consumers everywhere. The resulting weakening of imagined and functional mutual dependence will then undermine most types of remaining social non-zero sum ("public interest") activities and "compel" (or provide opportunity for) all those powerful elites and self-appointed guardians to begin setting up their respective zones of influence, economics and security. "
Unsolicited Book Recommendations
Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker
I stumbled across this book in a Building 19. If you hail from anywhere in central New England, you probably know that B19 prevents a lot of ersatz junk, misprints, irregulars and damaged packaging from going directly to the land fill. Plus, you can drink free "coffee" during the entire rummaging experience.
This book comes at the run up to World War Two with a clear disregard for prevailing myths of heroism. Baker doesn't just indict, in his oddly satisfying approach to history. He allows men like Churchill to condemn themselves, by revealing the motivations that never make it into hagiographic "great men" histories.
Resource Wars, Michael T. Klare
Klare got ahead of the curve (in a manner similar to that of Paul Roberts, with The End of Oil) and outlined the current geopolitical environment before many of the acts now playing out on the stage of history had even cast their leads and supporting players.
Especially important, I believe: his sections on the quiet water war waged by Israel, underlying the fight for colonial control of the West Bank, and his treatment of the foundational causes of the encirclement of Iran.
A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths
This book slaps you in the moral face - taking on no less than the Enlightenment itself. Griffiths never apologizes, as she savages Bacon, Franklin, the entire scope of Western time making, calendar conventions, and the occidental assault on all things natural. Reviewers often apply the term "uncompromising," when discussing stupid ghost written screeds by Sean Hannity or Regnery authors, when they want to convey hard-headed "toughness." They mean, instead, "thick headed nitwitishness."
Griffiths really doesn't compromise, and she goes after the unquestioned premises that assclowns like Hannity (and Obama) need to sell their case for continued occidental colonial hegemony.
The Transformation of War, Martin Van Creveld
A vital book, even where it works now only as recent history. Too many reviews of this work already cover the basics, so I'll keep it simple. If you want to understand why Clinton, Blair, Bush, Brown and Obama have spent so much time and capital getting around Geneva and domestic war crimes legislation, start with Van Creveld.
Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Kent Nerburn
My wife, who doesn't "do politics," handed this to me after she'd finished it. She never recommends books, or movies, preferring in her own quiet, beautiful way to let me stumble onto insights and delights that we can later share.
She never forces another person's hand. Rare. So damned rare.
She didn't insist that I read it, of course. She just handed it to me.
I didn't want Nerburn's tale to end. Unlike so many white writers who delve into indigenous concerns, he did not pretend detached objectivity. He undertook to tell an Indian man's story, the story of a friend, and how that story and his own life intertwined. He celebrated, and that love and care informs every page.
With sparse language, at turns more ellipsis than text, Nerburn brings Dan (a native elder) to life, transcending the page, to grant three dimensions to both his subject and his environment.
I stumbled across this book in a Building 19. If you hail from anywhere in central New England, you probably know that B19 prevents a lot of ersatz junk, misprints, irregulars and damaged packaging from going directly to the land fill. Plus, you can drink free "coffee" during the entire rummaging experience.
This book comes at the run up to World War Two with a clear disregard for prevailing myths of heroism. Baker doesn't just indict, in his oddly satisfying approach to history. He allows men like Churchill to condemn themselves, by revealing the motivations that never make it into hagiographic "great men" histories.
Resource Wars, Michael T. Klare
Klare got ahead of the curve (in a manner similar to that of Paul Roberts, with The End of Oil) and outlined the current geopolitical environment before many of the acts now playing out on the stage of history had even cast their leads and supporting players.
Especially important, I believe: his sections on the quiet water war waged by Israel, underlying the fight for colonial control of the West Bank, and his treatment of the foundational causes of the encirclement of Iran.
A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths
This book slaps you in the moral face - taking on no less than the Enlightenment itself. Griffiths never apologizes, as she savages Bacon, Franklin, the entire scope of Western time making, calendar conventions, and the occidental assault on all things natural. Reviewers often apply the term "uncompromising," when discussing stupid ghost written screeds by Sean Hannity or Regnery authors, when they want to convey hard-headed "toughness." They mean, instead, "thick headed nitwitishness."
Griffiths really doesn't compromise, and she goes after the unquestioned premises that assclowns like Hannity (and Obama) need to sell their case for continued occidental colonial hegemony.
The Transformation of War, Martin Van Creveld
A vital book, even where it works now only as recent history. Too many reviews of this work already cover the basics, so I'll keep it simple. If you want to understand why Clinton, Blair, Bush, Brown and Obama have spent so much time and capital getting around Geneva and domestic war crimes legislation, start with Van Creveld.
Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Kent Nerburn
My wife, who doesn't "do politics," handed this to me after she'd finished it. She never recommends books, or movies, preferring in her own quiet, beautiful way to let me stumble onto insights and delights that we can later share.
She never forces another person's hand. Rare. So damned rare.
She didn't insist that I read it, of course. She just handed it to me.
I didn't want Nerburn's tale to end. Unlike so many white writers who delve into indigenous concerns, he did not pretend detached objectivity. He undertook to tell an Indian man's story, the story of a friend, and how that story and his own life intertwined. He celebrated, and that love and care informs every page.
With sparse language, at turns more ellipsis than text, Nerburn brings Dan (a native elder) to life, transcending the page, to grant three dimensions to both his subject and his environment.
May 4, 2010
The Temptation Towards Punitive Asceticism
I don't know if I can demonstrate sufficiently that the lot of us come from some culture or community in force, or at least a recognizable subculture, that we emerge into our individual variations of adult social awareness in part by recognizing that greater culture to which we, like it or not, belong. We identify the experience of self because we experience others, others who came before us, who formed some aspects of us, and not always nicely.
I can state this premise, speak it, put it into print.
But I'm not sure that this medium provides the best venue for demonstration. Anyway, Donne wrote it far better than I, "No man is an island."
With that limitation in mind, and accepting the consequences of it, I recently engaged in a debate with someone whose goals I share but who promotes methods with frankly give me cause for concern. An unfriendly debate, in all honesty, and so I won't link directly to it, because I do not wish to tar the author's premise with my a priori judgment of it.
I don't wish to expose the author's argument by way of my biases.
What troubled me during the exchange, and what troubles me still, I can reduce for brevity to: the will to punish.
We come to awareness within the confines of society. As mammals, we need other people - if only in the most extraordinary case, to survive infancy and early childhood. To develop language, to understand the cues of facial and body comminication, to interact with others, to complete any number of tasks, we need other people.
We inherit the skills and techniques developed over time, and ages, from people who have lived and died before us. That inheritance does not occur passively, like eye color. Some one or many others must teach us. Must teach at us, at a minimum, how to learn.
I know shared memory and exosomatic learning started somewhere, anthropologically distant from this present moment, within the known and unknown datum of our shared history. Reduced to zero, culture might start again. It also might not, though I'd wager hard and often on the tendency towards shared memory.
Whatever the origins, nearly every person who has the capacity to read and understand these words on the screen has come to some awareness within the net of culture, within a community of shared premises and memory.
And yet, even as inheritors of it, still sharing the languages and structures of thought, some of us have come to assume an existence - a standing out - which opposes the culture in which we live.
We can with little effort identify a number of those internally contained but nonetheless opposed sets of positions: feminism, black power, socialism, anarchism, communism, mutualism, indigenous awareness, and the host of more personal, more immediate rejections of the community in force, or aspects of it (as well as the many I simply have not named).
Still members, by that inheritance, of the society at large, still shaped by its structures, its premises, its arrangements of exchange and power - we have come from varying perspectives and uncommon experiences to inhabit similar positions within or against that predominant social arrangment.
Shaped by it, we reject it.
Which brings me back to that original and hostile discussion, mentioned above.
The two of us* agreed that the existing social structure promoted oppression. We both agreed that the consequences of the normal operation of these social arrangements resulted in daily reprehensible abuses of power, producing violent pornography, rape, the vast superstructure of patriarchy and any number of (for the purposes of that debate) unnamed violations of life and flesh.
I don't want to suggest that I had the superior position, and he the inferior. I don't believe that, one bit.
I just want to note that his prescription seemed to embody the errors of the society which he himself had come to reject.
His solution, at least as I read it, depends upon the repression of repression, on the punishment of punishers, on the suppression of punitive and crippling social arrangements (or the symptoms of them) by the creation of crippling and punitive social arrangements, on the crippling of cripplers.
As another interlocutor remarked, by the construction of an "Incorruptible Censor Board" tasked with dealing with the problems and persons who currently benefit from violent pornography, the oppression of women, et cetera.
A position which I believe depends on a very specific reaction to power: revolutionary asceticism. In rejecting patriarchy, he has come to embrace a view of the world which depends on withdrawal from contact with the sin of its possessors, a sin which righteous people must expurgate from the world, by repression and punishment, or else condemn themselves and others to the continuation of degradation.
That this did not work for the Inquisition, did not work for the early Christian ascetics, did not work for Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux, does not work for Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, does not work for Hindutva zealots in India, does not work for Christian terrorists in India, did not work for Bolsheviks or Maoists, did not work for fascists, falangists or conservative oppressors...
...well, perhaps you get my point.
A number of us have chosen, together and alone, to stand against the current social situation. Our reasons vary. Our objectives and goals differ. Our perspectives come and go.
But...
The moment we decide to embrace punishment, the will to punish and the purity of ascetic withdrawal** as the best way to oppose the totalizing effects of the current society, we set ourselves up (I believe) as future oppressors.
Our rejection of this destructive society, by heading down that path, becomes its latest validation. And a lasting one.
I don't know if the opposition to the abuse of power itself necessarily contains the seeds of future power. I don't know if the rejection of one society, to have any chance of success, requires the enforcement of another.
I don't know if the implied argument - that freedom requires the repression of repression - provides the best ground for opposing oppression.
I just don't know.
But, it seems to me that this will to punish, this temptation to use repression to address repression negates the very act of standing out against, in the first.
That by accepting as valid the urge to totalize society and one's opponents, believing that answering harm or the possibility of harm requires repression, it appears that those who do so undermine their original rejection of harmful society, itself.
I don't know. I might just not get it...
* - The debate involved more than one party. For the purposes of this post, I treat only with the exchange between he and I.
** - I don't intend a criticism of withdrawing from corrosive power arrangements.
I can state this premise, speak it, put it into print.
But I'm not sure that this medium provides the best venue for demonstration. Anyway, Donne wrote it far better than I, "No man is an island."
With that limitation in mind, and accepting the consequences of it, I recently engaged in a debate with someone whose goals I share but who promotes methods with frankly give me cause for concern. An unfriendly debate, in all honesty, and so I won't link directly to it, because I do not wish to tar the author's premise with my a priori judgment of it.
I don't wish to expose the author's argument by way of my biases.
What troubled me during the exchange, and what troubles me still, I can reduce for brevity to: the will to punish.
*
We come to awareness within the confines of society. As mammals, we need other people - if only in the most extraordinary case, to survive infancy and early childhood. To develop language, to understand the cues of facial and body comminication, to interact with others, to complete any number of tasks, we need other people.
We inherit the skills and techniques developed over time, and ages, from people who have lived and died before us. That inheritance does not occur passively, like eye color. Some one or many others must teach us. Must teach at us, at a minimum, how to learn.
I know shared memory and exosomatic learning started somewhere, anthropologically distant from this present moment, within the known and unknown datum of our shared history. Reduced to zero, culture might start again. It also might not, though I'd wager hard and often on the tendency towards shared memory.
Whatever the origins, nearly every person who has the capacity to read and understand these words on the screen has come to some awareness within the net of culture, within a community of shared premises and memory.
And yet, even as inheritors of it, still sharing the languages and structures of thought, some of us have come to assume an existence - a standing out - which opposes the culture in which we live.
We can with little effort identify a number of those internally contained but nonetheless opposed sets of positions: feminism, black power, socialism, anarchism, communism, mutualism, indigenous awareness, and the host of more personal, more immediate rejections of the community in force, or aspects of it (as well as the many I simply have not named).
Still members, by that inheritance, of the society at large, still shaped by its structures, its premises, its arrangements of exchange and power - we have come from varying perspectives and uncommon experiences to inhabit similar positions within or against that predominant social arrangment.
Shaped by it, we reject it.
Which brings me back to that original and hostile discussion, mentioned above.
The two of us* agreed that the existing social structure promoted oppression. We both agreed that the consequences of the normal operation of these social arrangements resulted in daily reprehensible abuses of power, producing violent pornography, rape, the vast superstructure of patriarchy and any number of (for the purposes of that debate) unnamed violations of life and flesh.
I don't want to suggest that I had the superior position, and he the inferior. I don't believe that, one bit.
I just want to note that his prescription seemed to embody the errors of the society which he himself had come to reject.
His solution, at least as I read it, depends upon the repression of repression, on the punishment of punishers, on the suppression of punitive and crippling social arrangements (or the symptoms of them) by the creation of crippling and punitive social arrangements, on the crippling of cripplers.
As another interlocutor remarked, by the construction of an "Incorruptible Censor Board" tasked with dealing with the problems and persons who currently benefit from violent pornography, the oppression of women, et cetera.
A position which I believe depends on a very specific reaction to power: revolutionary asceticism. In rejecting patriarchy, he has come to embrace a view of the world which depends on withdrawal from contact with the sin of its possessors, a sin which righteous people must expurgate from the world, by repression and punishment, or else condemn themselves and others to the continuation of degradation.
That this did not work for the Inquisition, did not work for the early Christian ascetics, did not work for Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux, does not work for Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, does not work for Hindutva zealots in India, does not work for Christian terrorists in India, did not work for Bolsheviks or Maoists, did not work for fascists, falangists or conservative oppressors...
...well, perhaps you get my point.
A number of us have chosen, together and alone, to stand against the current social situation. Our reasons vary. Our objectives and goals differ. Our perspectives come and go.
But...
The moment we decide to embrace punishment, the will to punish and the purity of ascetic withdrawal** as the best way to oppose the totalizing effects of the current society, we set ourselves up (I believe) as future oppressors.
Our rejection of this destructive society, by heading down that path, becomes its latest validation. And a lasting one.
I don't know if the opposition to the abuse of power itself necessarily contains the seeds of future power. I don't know if the rejection of one society, to have any chance of success, requires the enforcement of another.
I don't know if the implied argument - that freedom requires the repression of repression - provides the best ground for opposing oppression.
I just don't know.
But, it seems to me that this will to punish, this temptation to use repression to address repression negates the very act of standing out against, in the first.
That by accepting as valid the urge to totalize society and one's opponents, believing that answering harm or the possibility of harm requires repression, it appears that those who do so undermine their original rejection of harmful society, itself.
I don't know. I might just not get it...
* - The debate involved more than one party. For the purposes of this post, I treat only with the exchange between he and I.
** - I don't intend a criticism of withdrawing from corrosive power arrangements.
Two readings on oil, and a third more than superficially related...
"For the past century or so, the great game in geopolitics was exerting influence, or leverage, on energy flows. The U.S. did not want to horde the oil for itself, nor did we invade countries or otherwise meddle in their affairs to take their gas. This is a common misunderstanding. The U.S. wanted oil selling states to be satellite states of U.S. policy, as closely aligned and controlled as possible while remaining economically linked with other powers through the sale of fossil fuels. We did not want to prevent the Chinese from buying oil from countries the U.S. was allied with, the opposite was true; we wanted the Chinese (or whoever) to buy all their oil from countries that the U.S. had more influence on politically. This gave the U.S. leverage over states by threatening to use their political ties to choke off the oil supply. We did not invade Iraq to take their gas, in other words, we invaded Iraq to create a government that we could control and sell their gas to the Chinese. With peak oil, we may be entering a new phase in the Great Game within the next two decades where we actually do need to invade countries to kick their ass and take their gas.
"I happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico last week. A few miles offshore, while blissfully sunning and having fun with friends whom I have known for about a decade, a busted oil pipeline spewed thousands of [barrels of] petroleum into the sea water. The news reports are revising the number of barrels upward. All hint, or say outright, that the flow is going to be an indefinite condition for weeks, perhaps months. The slick just continues growing larger, expanding, slowly creeping toward the coastline like the science fiction monster, The Blob, where it will raise mindless havoc on the ecosystem over the next few decades.
"This disaster, on the surface, at least, reflects badly on the drill, baby, drill crowd. On the other hand, the nuclear energy lobby is actively working on rehabilitating its image and would do well to exploit this disaster for their cause, by explaining that every source of energy has the potential for catastrophe. It will take some finesse, nothing those slick backroom-boys and girls down on Madison Ave and K Street couldn’t handle in their sleep, but they’d be smart to equate ambient nuclear radiation and waste for greenhouse gases, an Exxon Valdez for a Three Mile Island and ask the question as to whether any form of energy is cleaner or safer than another."
http://americancrackpot.blogspot.com/2010/05/still-waters.html
"We face a dangerous future when the oil reserves around the world start to dry up. Those that have oil may find themselves faced with an American war machine ready to murder and destroy in order to take it. The myriad of products we depend on that require oil will start to become less and less available. The alternative energy sources that we need now will not be available or strong enough to carry our energy burden. Expanding our dependence, even domestically, only perpetuates a myth we have coaxed ourselves into believing and doesn’t prepare us for this sobering reality.
We can’t expect this to stop our country’s determination to exploit every ounce of oil and push off serious investment into alternative energy sources. The president will make an appearance, maybe wash the oil off a sea turtle or two (photo op!), proclaim that those involved in the clean-up are doing a great job, wait a few weeks for this to recede from the nation’s collective memory, and proceed with pushing for more drilling. After all, he has to if he expects to be able to count on the oil corporations’ donations for his reelection, and that is clearly what is important here."
http://forwantofanail.com/2010/05/oil-spills-are-now-chocolate-milk/
"The concept of diminishing returns is quite simple for most people to understand and to observe, but notoriously difficult to detect for the person who is at the point of achieving them. The point of negative returns is even harder to detect, because by that point we tend to be too far gone to detect much of anything. If you already had N drinks, can you tell if you are at the point of diminishing returns yet? Will another drink make you happier and more sociable, or will it not make much of a difference? Or will it cause you to embarrass yourself and spend the next day nursing a debilitating hangover? Or will it send you to the emergency room to be treated for vomit inhalation? As a general rule, the more you imbibe, the more difficult it becomes for you to draw such fine distinctions. This rule does not seem to be limited to drinking, but applies to almost all behaviors that produce a feeling of euphoria rather than the simple satisfaction of needs. Most of us can stop ourselves from drinking too much water, or eating too much porridge, or stacking too many bales of hay. Where we do tend to run into trouble with self-control is when it comes to things that are particularly pleasurable or addictive, such as drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and rich and delicious food. And we tend to lose it completely when it comes to euphoria-inducing social semi-intangibles: satisfaction of greed, status-seeking, and power over others."
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/04/collapse-competitively.html
"I happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico last week. A few miles offshore, while blissfully sunning and having fun with friends whom I have known for about a decade, a busted oil pipeline spewed thousands of [barrels of] petroleum into the sea water. The news reports are revising the number of barrels upward. All hint, or say outright, that the flow is going to be an indefinite condition for weeks, perhaps months. The slick just continues growing larger, expanding, slowly creeping toward the coastline like the science fiction monster, The Blob, where it will raise mindless havoc on the ecosystem over the next few decades.
"This disaster, on the surface, at least, reflects badly on the drill, baby, drill crowd. On the other hand, the nuclear energy lobby is actively working on rehabilitating its image and would do well to exploit this disaster for their cause, by explaining that every source of energy has the potential for catastrophe. It will take some finesse, nothing those slick backroom-boys and girls down on Madison Ave and K Street couldn’t handle in their sleep, but they’d be smart to equate ambient nuclear radiation and waste for greenhouse gases, an Exxon Valdez for a Three Mile Island and ask the question as to whether any form of energy is cleaner or safer than another."
http://americancrackpot.blogspot.com/2010/05/still-waters.html
"We face a dangerous future when the oil reserves around the world start to dry up. Those that have oil may find themselves faced with an American war machine ready to murder and destroy in order to take it. The myriad of products we depend on that require oil will start to become less and less available. The alternative energy sources that we need now will not be available or strong enough to carry our energy burden. Expanding our dependence, even domestically, only perpetuates a myth we have coaxed ourselves into believing and doesn’t prepare us for this sobering reality.
We can’t expect this to stop our country’s determination to exploit every ounce of oil and push off serious investment into alternative energy sources. The president will make an appearance, maybe wash the oil off a sea turtle or two (photo op!), proclaim that those involved in the clean-up are doing a great job, wait a few weeks for this to recede from the nation’s collective memory, and proceed with pushing for more drilling. After all, he has to if he expects to be able to count on the oil corporations’ donations for his reelection, and that is clearly what is important here."
http://forwantofanail.com/2010/05/oil-spills-are-now-chocolate-milk/
"The concept of diminishing returns is quite simple for most people to understand and to observe, but notoriously difficult to detect for the person who is at the point of achieving them. The point of negative returns is even harder to detect, because by that point we tend to be too far gone to detect much of anything. If you already had N drinks, can you tell if you are at the point of diminishing returns yet? Will another drink make you happier and more sociable, or will it not make much of a difference? Or will it cause you to embarrass yourself and spend the next day nursing a debilitating hangover? Or will it send you to the emergency room to be treated for vomit inhalation? As a general rule, the more you imbibe, the more difficult it becomes for you to draw such fine distinctions. This rule does not seem to be limited to drinking, but applies to almost all behaviors that produce a feeling of euphoria rather than the simple satisfaction of needs. Most of us can stop ourselves from drinking too much water, or eating too much porridge, or stacking too many bales of hay. Where we do tend to run into trouble with self-control is when it comes to things that are particularly pleasurable or addictive, such as drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and rich and delicious food. And we tend to lose it completely when it comes to euphoria-inducing social semi-intangibles: satisfaction of greed, status-seeking, and power over others."
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/04/collapse-competitively.html
May 1, 2010
A War Crime In My Living Room
I
He grows weary, tiring easily. He sundowns. Sometimes he aches, whispering to me of pain in each joint. It comes in waves, and then for weeks, nothing. It has never manifested as badly as the first episode, the one which scared us so, and taught me a whole new kind of nausea.
That doesn't make it any better. I know too much; I don't know enough.
His physician assures us of his health. “The antibiotics worked,” he told me, in disapproving tones. The doctor had the laptop, and charts. I came with questions, and mistrust. Judging from the nurse's glare, I also came with the stupid questions. The nurse smiled pleasantly, busying herself with the habits of her profession. Until I started with my concerns, my own research. She clucked at me, “Not everything on the Internet...”
I wanted her to shut up. I don't care if a hundred nitwits used a thousand pages of stupid speculation. That doesn't mean I did. I don't care if she's got better things to do with her time.
I don't.
I loathe her, and I cannot apologize for that. I despise the doctor, too. Not for his training, or his education. Not even for the paternal condescension from the man-boy with a plastic smile.
For their incurious dismissal of my love, my fear, my insecurity.
They move on, dispensing drugs and smugness.
I cannot. I fucking won't.
II
1925. The world still lays fallow with the blood of millions, dead from war, from plague, from starvation, from expulsion and genocide. Dead from the too common abuses of power. World War One, following on the naiveté of 1899, and 1907.
Passchendaele, Loos, Ypres, Riga, the Somme. Xylyl bromide, chlorine, phosgene, mustard gas and white star.
Gathering in Geneva, representatives of the surviving states assemble to produce a single page document.
To make law, international.
To make law, international.
Kropotkin did not err – law protects property. Criminal statutes define offenses against property, or against people so long as they belong to a state, as property. Humanitarians may draft laws. Pacifists may propose them. But the agents of states will use them. Will use them against each other, and their subjects.
A subject, a citizen, enfolded in the webs of law, becomes as property to those who rule the state, and those who benefit most from it. Becomes property to dispose of, or protect.
III
1899 and 1907, the Hague. The various European and emerging powers assemble, to put to code their protections of their property, of subjects, citizens and productive non-combatants. Tsar Nicholas the Second saw the bright modern future, and worried. So many ways to kill his officers and his peasants. So many ways to die more, and more brutal, deaths. A rampart, for Westphalia. For the preservation of the states themselves.
The machinery of war, and its operators, could rip apart bodies, lay fields of mines, poison laborers and crops, destroy whole countrysides. Bombardment from the sea, from the air, from hill top redoubts. Chemical weapons could sear flesh, turn the eyes to goo, and the lungs to jelly. Hollow point bullets could create a leaded latticework of death, shredding organs.
The Tsar feared. As did his cousins, on the thrones of Europe. And rightly. The old nobility had nothing on the capitalized death machines of the bourgeois states which everywhere subsumed them.
Kropotkin made a better case, but who listened to him?
The world didn't do away with states, and the laws of property. The machinery of war did not disassemble itself.
Hague meant nothing, in the face of that.
IV
Still, 1925. After men choked on gas, across the once fertile fields of Europe, burning from the inside out, after Germany and the USA pursued extensive biological weapons programs, after the weaponization of anthrax, long after Sherman poisoned water supplies with rotten animals, after disease blankets, and the conquests of Indian Country and the Philippines - an addendum, in Geneva:
“...That the High Contracting Parties, so far as they are not already Parties to Treaties prohibiting such use, accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration.”
No prohibition, of course, on developing, storing or experimenting with them. Just no using them against another state's property...
V
He experiences a distinct exhaustion, as if he has labored all day, relentlessly drudging through the hardest work. His attention wanders. He lingers on the edge of this bleariness, fighting it. He daydreams to escape it, losing himself in future delights. I can't blame him, but I want to. I want him to beat this, to prove its better.
I seethe at the unfairness of it, pushing him harder than I ought, attempting to break its spell, as if my will alone can supplant his, give him energy, give him focus, allow him to overcome.
He accepts it better than I. He always has, even that first awful day, starting off with a little nausea, ending it with half his face sliding downward, towards his shoulder.
He has a fine memory, better than mine. I remember the injustice, and rage. He remembers his joys, and smiles. He can recount a full story, the details which captured his thought, and then his imagination. Or a scene in a film which brought him to cramping laughter. Or the day I first told him of my pride, his secret place in my heart. That, more than any other, he kept my heart within my chest, allowing me a sense of proportion.
VI
I take no comfort in the law. I reject the categories of crime, and criminality.
I fell from the grace of the middle class embrace, believing I'd never return to it.
Down in the shadows of Boston's high towers, deeper yet, into the subway tunnels, panhandling and stealing autonomy, I struggled against the deep colonization of my nascent mind. Renegade monks running revolutionary shelters, and high prophets of chemistry, broken veterans and Latino narco-saints, black Jesus with his sage advice, whispering, whispering, “sleep with one eye open, own nothing, never trust the law.” Homeless Nigerians with briefcases, spread out tidily on shelter beds; destitute Kenyans with wood alcohol. The queer boy from Southie, protected by those same Latin saints, proudly sheltering the proud maricón; they, collecting lost cases from the edge of rape and violence, armed with the classics, their machete wounds and a fiercer loyalty than I'd ever known before. We spread the gospel of the shared match, of bad liquor and temporary community.
I love them still, those geniuses of crime and labor.
I crawled my way out of degradation, shed my whiteness, shed my identity, peeled away the weight of my history, and yours.
I thought I'd freed myself of Europe, of European America, which spreads the bourgeois law and the war machine in machinations and violence, in structural adjustment programs and facile entertainment. White culture, taught by dutiful nuns and struggling mothers, brought me in infancy and adolescence to a fealty to law, and order, and obedience.
No brown sister or brother has ever asked or demanded that slavery of me.
Working, laboring, I thought I'd freed myself, like Hemmelrich at the end of Man's Fate.
I could not have predicted my own future worse, or with a greater fidelity to error.
I left them, left those streets behind me. I forgot.
I left them, left those streets behind me. I forgot.
I dragged myself up, to fall prey to good conduct and obedience, all over again. I didn't escape the gravity sink. I didn't get far enough away. Sordid, all that. Degradation.
And now, a war crime embeds itself in the flesh of my son.
Not the war crime merely described in the legacy of law. Not the definition of crime, and punishment, enacted to protect the subject-property of the state.
A violation of his life, his flesh.
VII
“Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes. Under a top-secret program code-named Project PAPERCLIP, the U.S. Military pursued Nazi scientistific talent 'like forbidden fruit.,' bringing them to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. Citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi pasts.
American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis' vicious treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best financial deal in exchange for their services. Dr. Erich Traub was trapped on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project PAPERCLIP employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to 'do scientific work in the U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian reprisals.'
As lab chief of Insel Riems – a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea – Traub worked directly for Adolf Hitler's second-in-charge, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials.”
Lab 257, pps. 7-8, Michael Christopher Carroll, 2004
VIII
“August 1945: Operation Paperclip, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program to import top Nazi scientists into the United States. Linda Hunt relates in her book, Secret Agenda, that Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer) Dr. Kurt Blome, was saved from the gallows due to American intervention. Blome admitted he had worked on Nazi bacteriological warfare projects and had experimented on concentration camp prisoners with bubonic plague and sarin gas at Auschwitz. After his acquittal at the 1947 Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, Blome was recruited by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and advised the Pentagon on biological warfare. Walter Paul Emil Schreiber, a Wehrmacht general who assigned doctors to experiment on concentration camp prisoners and disbursed state funds for such experiments was another Paperclip recruit; in 1951, Schreiber went to work for the U.S. Air Force School of Medicine. Hubertus Strughold, the so-called "father of space medicine" discussed--and carried out--experiments on Dachau inmates who were tortured and killed; Strughold worked for the U.S. Air Force. Erich Traub, a rabid Nazi and the former chief of Heinrich Himmler's Insel Riems, the Nazi state's secret biological warfare research facility defects to the United States. Traub was brought to the U.S. by Paperclip operatives and worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute and gave "operational advice" to the CIA and the biowarriors at Ft. Detrick.
September 1945: General Shiro Ishii's Unit 731, a secret research group that organized Japan's chemical and biological warfare programs is granted "amnesty" by Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur in exchange for providing America with their voluminous files on biological warfare. All mention of Unit 731 is expunged from the record of The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. During the war, Unit 731 conducted grisly experiments, including the vivisection of live prisoners, and carried out germ attacks on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. According to researcher Sheldon H. Harris in Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, Unit 731 scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and other infectious diseases. Their work led to the development of what was called a defoliation bacilli bomb and a flea bomb used by the Imperial Army to spread bubonic plague across unoccupied areas of China. The deployment of these lethal munitions provided the Imperial Army with the ability to launch devastating biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and populated areas with anthrax, plague-infected fleas, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Rather than being prosecuted as war criminals, Unit 731 alumni became top bioweapons researchers. Ishii himself became an adviser at USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick.”
September 1945: General Shiro Ishii's Unit 731, a secret research group that organized Japan's chemical and biological warfare programs is granted "amnesty" by Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur in exchange for providing America with their voluminous files on biological warfare. All mention of Unit 731 is expunged from the record of The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. During the war, Unit 731 conducted grisly experiments, including the vivisection of live prisoners, and carried out germ attacks on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. According to researcher Sheldon H. Harris in Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, Unit 731 scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and other infectious diseases. Their work led to the development of what was called a defoliation bacilli bomb and a flea bomb used by the Imperial Army to spread bubonic plague across unoccupied areas of China. The deployment of these lethal munitions provided the Imperial Army with the ability to launch devastating biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and populated areas with anthrax, plague-infected fleas, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Rather than being prosecuted as war criminals, Unit 731 alumni became top bioweapons researchers. Ishii himself became an adviser at USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick.”
IX
On Borrelia burgdorferi, known commonly as Lyme disease:
"Dr. Burgdorfer: The similarities that I know of are associated with the infection of the brain , the nervous system. The syphilis spirochete, Treponema pallidum has an affinity for nerve tissues. The Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete very likely has that too.
Children are especially sensitive to Borrelia burgdorferi.
The Lyme disease spirochete is far more virulent than syphilis. We don’t know the end yet. And [we] can’t even make a [blood] smear with Borrelia burgdorferi and see the organism. It’s there. But you don’t see it. You cannot find this spirochete. Why not? After all, I have a sick person here. He is trembling all over. His spinal fluid is full of spirochetes. But when it comes to blood, it’s not there. So there is something associated with this organism that makes it different...
X
I write these words. I quote researchers and scientists. I want to hate. I want to pursue the monsters who devote their lives to tweaking bacteria and viruses, to make weapons of war.
I want to shake them. I want to strike through the layers of their culture, their acculturation in dominion, want them to understand what happens when your child sundowns like an eighty year old. I want to shake them hard, but I know they already have their rationalizations in order.
I also know I wouldn't stop at that...
XI
We picked our son up from school that day, his face distorted by Bell's Palsy. I didn't know anything about Dr. Traub, the lab he helped to found at Plum Island, or Operation PAPERCLIP. I knew about anthrax scares and a bit about weaponized diseases.
I knew a little about Lyme disease, as well.
My father also has it. For two years, doctors refused to call it Lyme disease. One told him his pain, his neuralgia, his headaches could be chalked up to his imagination. “In your head,” the rat fuck said.
He got the spinal tap.
After that, his insurance company refused to pay for extended treatment. Two weeks of antibiotics, and a “good day to you.”
Now he lives with the chronic suffering, and prescription opiates.
XII
Our son received twenty eight days of antibiotics, and then his own good day to you, sugary sweet and reeking of professional condescension. As for the changes in his energy and focus, as for the pain in his joints, we can go fuck ourselves. The doctors don't put it that way, of course.
What they say, instead: “The infection is gone. He was treated in time. He got good treatment, he doesn't have the Bell's Palsy anymore. The other symptoms could be anything...” you fucking working class simpletons, now shut up, I have a golf game, and after that, quail for dinner and a charity benefit.
XIII
I don't know if PAPERCLIP Nazis, and their corporate-state sponsored American brethren at Detrick, Plum Island and the various CDC sites mucked with Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria.
I don't know if they produced new strains, or perfected delivery methods.
I do know that they bred ticks at Plum Island, and that various factions in the military, in the federal government and in academia employed men who had already worked on tick borne biological weapons.
I know that an outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, across the sound from Plum Island, has spread to encompass all of the Northeast, radiating outward from a known biological weapons research lab, founded by a Nazi germ warfare scientist, working for the federal government.
XIV
“A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled 'African Swine Fever' notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, “the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus.' In layman's terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick – feeding them viruses and testing them on pigs – during the ground zero year of Lyme disease...The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at the time, the Lone Star tick's habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas.”
Lab 257, pps. 23-24
XV
Ceteris paribus, my son has a disease which showed up just across a narrow band of water from a biological weapons lab, with an epidemic pattern radiating outward from that lab, where war criminals tested the delivery of infectious diseases.
XVI
Those who run the state, and the corporations which fund it and benefit from it, set themselves on top of us, above us, a human latticework of power, control and enforcement. They claw their way out of the families, and the communities, from which they come. Or, born to privilege, they reap the benefits of an education in the mastery of others.
They rule, and we live lives that feed that power. Our daily defeats, our less-than existences – the grist for their supremacy.
They wield the state, and the law, as an instrument. Against us. They haul matter up from the earth and the oceans, using our labor to remake it, shaping it into machines of war, into wire fences and projectile bombs, into court house chairs and a prisoner's chains, into the policeman's baton, into the stone and steel cages of the prison industry, into the soft distractions of entertainment, into the alienation of cheap porn and bitter liquor, into their privilege and our submission.
They wage the quiet war of law and order against us, and the long, hot war against those who live atop the resources they want, the raw matter they need to build the machines, and the societies, which maintain their privilege and their power.
XVII
Sometimes it comes close enough to home, to a small and insignificant life, already on the margins. Yesterday, the random search. Tomorrow, the street corner camera. Sometimes it skips right past you, to lodge itself in the flesh of your child.
Or it falls as death from the skies, to kill her quickly in a rain of fire.
My child sundowns, the bioweapon revenant; Ahmed's turns to superheated human goo, gone forever. Gone always now from the flesh and left only in the film of memory.
XVIII
I dragged myself up from the muck of mere labor. Or so I told myself. No Hemmelrich, I, in the end. Not yet. I had a taste of the half-human liberty, the extra income, the disposable pleasures.
I recovered my bourgeois eyes. Started voting. Republican, then Democrat. As if an honest observer can discern a difference, in goals, however occasionally varying the methods.
Some colonizations, like spirochetes, resist the immune response.
XIX
He loves me in ways I do not and cannot deserve. He doesn't see my compromises, my lineage of defeats, submissions and capitulations.
I do not deserve him. I fail him, as I fail my wife and our younger son, simply by breathing.
So many compromises.
XX
He wrote this. So much wisdom, discovering his own language, his own words. Mute, I stopped acting his father, found no fault, no tired dissection of grammar, or tone. I hesitated on the cusp of my usual role, seeking the edge of his potential, pulling him toward his own revelations, the best expression, the cleanest cut.
I stopped myself, absorbing his truth instead.
So young, and already wiser than I:
“Ode to life
Life brings much to the world
It is rare in this universe
when it happens it takes on amazing shapes.
It would be foolish for man to squander the beauty.
For all life sustains each other.
Plant supports animal and animal supports plant.
Man kills both, and in return pollutes this delicate world.
Yet life still manages, surprisingly resilient, and deceptively so.
But few people care, most pretend this mess will fix itself, some think it to be fiction.
It is my hope that humankind awakens from this folly and steps out of ignorance.
While life boldly presses on in the face of its greatest oppressor, us.”
I did not teach him this. I fear my own influence, holding back my own cultivated sense of justice, and injustice. My heart's predilection for the language of retribution.
He exceeds me, and I go mute, humbled; my joy, tempered on the anvil of sorrow, the indelicate truth of the spirochete invader, the weary look in his eye, the rabid worry about the next time. And the next.
He exceeds me, and I go mute, humbled; my joy, tempered on the anvil of sorrow, the indelicate truth of the spirochete invader, the weary look in his eye, the rabid worry about the next time. And the next.
XXI
We learned the facts, slowly. The wrath built fast upon them.
A weapon of war, a war crime in our living room, embedded in his beautiful flesh, burrowing, hiding behind his eyes, persistent like any oppression, like bombs over Baghdad, Sarajevo, Khartoum, like the long, slow starvation of Cuba, Haiti and the poor of Iraq and Iran, like disease blankets at the Tsalagi hearth fire. Like the dead and broken and diseased falling behind the footfalls of Empire.
His brotherhood with the victims of the world.
Through him, my own. Our own.
XXII
My beautiful boy, so proud, so kind, so wise.
For him, now – my truth.
Uprising, filling me, more than any rage, or the ribbon strips of pain that follow on injustice.
Facing the war machine come close to home.
Facing the war machine come close to home.
The spirochete in his living flesh - the fruit of obedience, of following orders, of taking profit and murdering the land, of twisting the shape of life to the ends of murder, war and death.
XXIII
Against these lies, and these designs, I will stand.
For his flesh.
For the mind that blossoms outward, from it.
For his love. And all those who love him, or some day will.
For his life.
For the unseen, the unknown, the unwitnessed.
For the living.
Against the oppression of the state, against the business of empire, against the industries and the imperium of the death cult of capital, against the priests and the prophets of law and obedience...
Against the oppression of the state, against the business of empire, against the industries and the imperium of the death cult of capital, against the priests and the prophets of law and obedience...
XXIV
No more obedience. No more compromise.
Rise up.
Shocked Liberals
I don't understand the liberal shock at Arizona's racist "papers please" law. I understand revulsion, disgust and condemnation.
But not shock.
The US interventionist state handles the people of Afghanistan and Iraq in this manner, already. Its predecessors handled countless millions of people before, in the same ways - used slaves and murdered off the First Nations, employed bonded servants, and smashed unions, broke uprisings and strikes, and protected the bankers, corporations and the rich for the entire history of the American Republic.
This state edifice, run by their beloved Hopey Changey, differs little from the Bush regime that came before. Or from Clinton's time at the helm, before that. And so on. And so on.
They use the state, with its countless armed staffers, for precisely these ends. They employ those staffers to live fuller lives for themselves, to enjoy their wealth and power. From asking "papers please" to flying murder drones over the Kush, to manning check points in Baghdad, to standing guard outside a courtroom proceeding, to taking photos of teen aged protesters, to keeping files on grandmothers - the armed staffers of the state work so that capitalists can dig stuff up out of the ground, using people as instruments to turn it into commodities, this to better deprive them of the greater part of the value they create with that labor, so that they can in turn sell the stuff back to them, or to others, using the language of money to steal even more of their labor, so that capitalists and their hangers on can continue to accumulate wealth and power, in a deliberately closed system of production, scarcity and control.
Shock, from liberals, in the face of this available history, seems a wee bit more than disingenuous...
But not shock.
The US interventionist state handles the people of Afghanistan and Iraq in this manner, already. Its predecessors handled countless millions of people before, in the same ways - used slaves and murdered off the First Nations, employed bonded servants, and smashed unions, broke uprisings and strikes, and protected the bankers, corporations and the rich for the entire history of the American Republic.
This state edifice, run by their beloved Hopey Changey, differs little from the Bush regime that came before. Or from Clinton's time at the helm, before that. And so on. And so on.
They use the state, with its countless armed staffers, for precisely these ends. They employ those staffers to live fuller lives for themselves, to enjoy their wealth and power. From asking "papers please" to flying murder drones over the Kush, to manning check points in Baghdad, to standing guard outside a courtroom proceeding, to taking photos of teen aged protesters, to keeping files on grandmothers - the armed staffers of the state work so that capitalists can dig stuff up out of the ground, using people as instruments to turn it into commodities, this to better deprive them of the greater part of the value they create with that labor, so that they can in turn sell the stuff back to them, or to others, using the language of money to steal even more of their labor, so that capitalists and their hangers on can continue to accumulate wealth and power, in a deliberately closed system of production, scarcity and control.
Shock, from liberals, in the face of this available history, seems a wee bit more than disingenuous...
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