A voice from the past:

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden..In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends. the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become-the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war, of which J.P Jacks has spoken so unforgettably.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be learnt. Wearing home times are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, readapted to the purpose and used as the universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Govemrnent in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocio'us penalties, far exceeding severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. Loyalty, or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere ofthe intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach physics or to hold honorable place in a university-the republic of learning-if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything per taining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities or ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

If anything, the fact that similar objectives have been attained with a lesser degree of repression as occurred during and after World War I is particularly disturbing. Furthermore, unlike after World War I, the populace has become inured to a low level, perpetual state of global conflict, and the utilization of military force, or the threat of it, as one of the most common American responses to resistance of any kind. The acceptance of the primacy of vengence as a US foreign policy objective, as recently expressed in the execution style assassination of Osama Bin Laden in front of his family, is ominous.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Anarchism, Osama Bin Laden

UPDATE 1: As contemplated in paragraph 1 of the original post:

A Texas school district says a teacher won't return to work after being accused of mocking an American-born Muslim student by asking if she was grieving because her uncle had died, a reference to Osama bin Laden.

The teacher was put on leave after making the alleged remark May 2, hours after bin Laden was killed in a U.S. military raid.

INITIAL POST: The death of Bin Laden brings an old question to the forefront: why is it that people are willing to accept state violence, no matter how extreme and indiscriminate, while responding angrily to acts of individual or group violence that are minor by comparison? In the United States, it appears that many have a vicarious relationship with the violence of the government, exulting in a sense of collective superiority associated with its use against others, particularly those with whom they have developed a pre-existing bias. Socialists have always struggled to overcome this nationalistic sensibility, partially because of the gratification connected to such violence. Not surprisingly, to the extent that the people of another culture are different from the still predominately European, Christian one of the US, the use of violence against them is frequently considered an unavoidable necessity.

There are many examples: the near extermination of Native Americans, the continued support for the use of nuclear weapons upon the civilian populace of Japan to end World War II, the bombing of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and, of course, more recently, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a larger war on terror. During the 19th Century, European Americans believed that it was impossible for them to coexist with Native Americans on the North American continent unless Native Americans were violently suppressed and, thereafter, socially controlled, and such a perspective is central to the current approach to the peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, an approach that is an extension of prior European imperial practice. The US military made the connection explicit when it selected Geronimo as the code name for Bin Laden prior to the raid on his compound. Both constitute modernization projects based upon the principles of the Enlightenment, one in which the peoples of non-Eurocentric cultures must be forcibly incorporated into a neoliberal, nation state system that had its origins in, first, Western Europe, and then, in North America. Significantly, most people on the left supported this effort in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, and some still do, with people like Christopher Hitchens and Fred Halliday being prominent examples.

Of course, this is one of those binary oppositions that has little basis in social reality. The peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are not monolithic, and they do not live in inferior, debased societies that evolved as a result of a separation from the peoples of other parts of the world, such as Africa, Europe, South Asia and East Asia. In other words, this effort is based upon a mythology of social superiority that has no basis in fact. There were, and remain, less violent, more collaborative alternatives of transformation, ones that the proponents of the purist Eurocentric imperialist vision cannot accept. But, beyond such an academized, abstract discussion, there is a more immediate, direct problem. Why is it that so many people that otherwise have no connection to it so strongly support this violent enterprise? An enterprise, that, if Libya is an indication, is now gaining more and more European participation? If there is any possibility for Osama Bin Laden to be embraced as a martyr, despite his heinous qualities, it resides in his symbolic opposition to American and European imperial domination. To the extent that this domination becomes even more remorseless, the greater the prospect that Bin Laden's perverse failings will become less and less prominent in future representations of him.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, American Empire, Eurocentrism, Europe, France, Imperialism, Italy, Libya, Neoliberalism, Osama Bin Laden

The true extent of the hypocrisy associated with the celebration of Bin Laden's death is captured in this chart, one of several by government_employee (hat tip to the Angry Arab for directing me to it). Predictably, there are numerous comments to government_employee's post that attribute a unique propensity for violence solely to Arabs and Muslims.

9/11 memorials, such as the one yesterday, serve a clear, odious purpose: to establish a hierarchy of death whereby American ones as a result of Islamic fundamentalist violence are elevated to a quasi-religious, saint-like status, while the deaths of others around the world as a consequence of subsequent US military violence are either repressed, justified as a legitimate response to 9/11 or dismissed as the inevitable result of warfare.

No one should participate in them absent an acknowledgement of all of the victims of such violence, and the perpetrators of it. Without such an acknowledgement, they are yet another instance of the persistence of the American narrative of victimization that elites have manipulated since the country's inception to their benefit, especially in regard to Native Americans and African Americans, people characterized historically by whites with the same moral deficiencies that many Americans currently ascribe to Arabs and Muslims. To the extent that there were members of families of 9/11 victims that refused to participate in the ceremony with the President yesterday, they deserve our profound respect, regardless of their motivation, as they declined to facilitate the jingoism interwoven into it.

Labels: 9/11, American Culture, American Empire, Barack Obama, Imperialism, Osama Bin Laden, Racism

Of course, I don't expect any better from Obama, but why do the families of the victims of 9/11 persist in allowing themselves to be exploited in such nauseating publicity stunts?

Labels: "War on Terror", 9/11, American Empire, Barack Obama, Imperialism, Osama Bin Laden

UPDATE 2: From Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist:

The radical-theological option that Bin Laden represented as a solution to the state of the Arab world has long been discredited. It was discredited before it even began, in that it was a result of the failure of the violent Islamist movements of the 1970s-1990s era. Also discredited, or at least on the ropes, are the pro-US reformist option of the moderate Arab regimes. Moderate, in the way Saudi Arabia or Mubarak's Egypt was, and reformist, because they are interested in changing to survive, not making a radical break. But the people spoke and they don't want reform, they want rupture.

UPDATE 1: From the Angry Arab, As'ad Abukhalil:

But what is not yet acknowledged here in the US is that Bin Laden is a product of horrific US policies in the Cold War: of their alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The people in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be relieved today: not because they hated Bin Laden (many do sympathize with him only to spite the US), but because scores of Afghans and Pakistanis have been killed over the years during the campaign to get and kill Bin Laden. Remember that time in late 2001 when the US incinerated a convoy there because a tall dark man was seen getting into one of the cars. The US intelligence analyst on the scene assumed that there were no tall people other Bin Laden. But the factors that produced Bin Laden and Al-Qa`idah are still there: the US is still very tempted to arm and fund fanatical groups if they think it is politically convenient for US national security interests. Look at that lousy Libyan Transitional Council: there are fanatics in the ranks and I assume that we will hear from some of them, especially once they declare the victory of their holy cause.

INITIAL POST: Osama Bin Laden is dead, and I am not particularly interested in whether it happened yesterday or was merely announced yesterday. After all, there are many who believe that he has been dead for years. Instead, I am more interested in how the public announcement of his death reveals, yet again, an inability by Americans to seize upon opportunities to reflect upon the interrelationship between violence and US policy.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I expressed the hope, however misguided, that Americans, having experienced such traumatic acts of violence, would now empathize with many others around the world who have suffered similarly. For example, the 9/11 attacks took place on the same day in 1973 that the Chilean military, with the support of the US, forcibly removed President Salvador Allende from power and subsequently killed thousands of Chileans. Shortly thereafter, Chile, along with other US backed dictatorships in the region, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Peru, launched Operation Condor, a covert intelligence operation with the express purpose of exterminating the left in the southern cone of South America. With the support of the CIA, these countries killed, at minimum, 40,000 people and incarcerated 200,000 others. In other words, the destabilization of Chile by Nixon and Kissinger and subsequent military coup by Pinochet were preconditions for a more ambitious effort to erase the left in much of South America. The coincidence that both 9/11 and the Chilean coup occurred on the same date could have served to provoke Americans to reflect upon the horrible consequences of the infliction of such violence for political purposes. Beyond South America, we could have understood the horrible suffering that resulted from US military and covert operations all over the world.

We could have taken responsibility for our actions even as we grieved over those who died on 9/11, and strove to induce other countries to resolve political disputes non-violently. But this would have required Americans to relate to 9/11 as an act of violence, as opposed to an act of nihilistic resistance to American hegemony, and identify with others who have experienced such violence as well, regardless of their nationality, religion and political ideology. Unfortunately, most Americans responded vengefully, villifying those around the world who objected to the militaristic response to the attacks and the exploitation of them to extend the reach of US imperial influence. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq followed, and, to this day, despite the lack of any significant al-Qaeda presence in either country, US troops remain, as Bush and Obama have discovered new enemies to justify their presence. Needless to say, the death and destruction associated with these occupations far exceeds that related to 9/11. Sadly, in Iraq, the US has relied upon the same kind of death squad activity that was such a prominent feature of Operation Condor, as well as covert operations in Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. And, under Obama, the US has expanded its military and covert operations in Pakistan, Yemen and Libya.

In this, Bin Laden succeeded in his one of his primary objectives, to reduce much of the relationship between the US and the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia to one of military violence or the threat of it. But, as Baudrillard predicted, this effort to overcome the vulnerability revealed by the 9/11 attacks merely increased the perception of US weakness. US troops are mired in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan without any prospects for success by any recognizable standard, other than the perpetuation of conflict indefinitely. To the extent that people are euphoric over Bin Laden's death, this is a measure of the permanence of his achievement. Paradoxically, though, one of the consequences has been an eruption of more secular, more inclusive activism throughout North Africa and the Middle East, an eruption in which al-Qaeda has been conspicuously absent. Hence, Americans are celebrating success in a struggle that has already been rendered largely irrelevant.

Bin Laden often expressed his belief that this objective would lead to the attainment of another, more serious one, the economic decline of the US, a decline so pronounced that it would no longer be capable of imposing its will upon other countries. Here, the record is mixed. Admittedly, countries in Asia and South America have a freedom of maneuver that they did not possess prior to 9/11. About seven months later, in April 2002, Hugo Chavez survived a coup supported by the US, signalling to the rest of South America that the door was now open to the emergence of center-left governments. It is still uncertain, however, as to whether US economic influence is been impaired globally. The US, with the assistance of Germany and the United Kingdom, has successfully imposed a program of extreme austerity upon Europe, marked by the evisceration of historic social welfare programs, as a means of addressing the severe global recession of 2008 and 2009.

Meanwhile, within the US, the ongoing war on terror serves to ring fence spending on the military and the intelligence services, despite substantial budget deficits, thus empowering those who aspire to eliminate the remaining vestiges of social protection initiated during the New Deal and the Great Society. At this time, it would be more accurate to say that Bin Laden indirectly participated in the creation of circumstances that have made it possible to reconfigure the global economy in ways even more amenable to finance capital. It is tempting to say that Bin Laden lacked a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the US and global capital, but this is doubtful. Rather, it is more likely that he considered the aggressive neoliberalism of recent years as compatible with his social philosophy and beneficial to the future of al-Qaeda. In this, there is a perverse, unacknowledged alliance between al-Qaeda, neoliberals and neoconsevatives, as all three groups are in agreement about the urgency associated with the need to marginalize and impoverish workers even if it is in the service of strikingly different visions of the future.

Labels: "War on Terror", Al Qaeda, American Empire, Barack Obama, Chile, Hugo Chavez, Neoliberalism, Obituaries, Osama Bin Laden, South America, Venezuela

MEXICO, AGAIN: More about the turmoil in Mexico, as John Ross describes the certification of Calderon as President:

In an epiphany of how he might have to govern Mexico if the left opposition allows him to assume the presidency December 1, right-winger Felipe Calderon had to be helicoptered to the bunker in the deep south of this conflictive capital where the nation's top electoral tribunal, doing business as the TRIFE, was to hand him the certificate attesting that he had, in the judges' less-than-august opinions, won the July 2 election from leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO.).

Upon emerging from the chopper which had been accompanied by a military gunship, the stubby, balding Calderon was quickly hustled into the TRIFE headquarters by the back door a full 90 minutes before the actual ceremony was to commence, a subterfuge necessitated by the presence by thousands of AMLO's enraged supporters, some of whom had already stripped naked.

Calderon's witnesses -- members of his campaign team and functionaries of the archly-rightist PAN party who had the misfortune to arrive by land -- were greeted by clods of earth and screams of "Rateros!" (Thieves) and "Fraude!" (Fraud.) The ritual unfolded under a steady barrage of rotten eggs and tomatoes which AMLO's people kept hurling at the TRIFE bunker, a kind of Aztec version of a U.S. missile silo, to express their unhappiness with the seven-judge panel that had neither heard nor seen any evil in the maladroit machinations of President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the PAN to steal the election from their candidate.

As with most of Ross' articles, it proceeds to provide a riveting account of the contentious faultlines within Mexican society.

BRZEZINSKI THE BAPTIST: Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has always been an anomaly, a blunt spoken person in a field, foreign policy, where subtlety and indirectness is normally prized. But, in an interview with the German publication Der Spiegel, he outdoes himself to an extent to where the simplicity of his speech takes on the aphoristic quality of prophecy:

SPIEGEL: Are there any conditions under which America could lose its current political supremacy?

Brzezinski: One would only have to continue the current policies and, also, in future not give a serious response to increasingly louder complaints of global inequality. We are now dealing with a far more politically active mankind that demands a collective response to their grievances from the West.

SPIEGEL: Is your demand to eradicate global inequality not as illusionary as Bush's demand that America free the world from evil?

Brzezinski: Achieving equality would indeed be an illusionary goal. Reducing inequality in the age of television and Internet may well become a political necessity. We are entering a historic stage in which people in China and India, but also in Nepal, in Bolivia or Venezuela will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition. That could well be the collective danger we will have to face in the next decades.

SPIEGEL: You call it a "global political awakening."

Brzezinski: Yes, and it is essentially a repetition, but now on a global scale, of the societal and political awakening that occurred in France at the time of the revolution. During the 19th century it spread through Europe and parts of the Western hemisphere, in the 20th century it reached Japan and finally China. Now it is sweeping the rest of the world.

A global political awakening! Brzezinski invokes the rhetoric of 19th Century Protestant evangelicalism, while simultaneously channeling Mike Davis, as American Leftist readers will recall this passage from his recent book, Planet of Slums:

In summary, the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go: down the road that logically follows from the abdication of urban reform. As in the past, this is a "street without joy," and, indeed, the unemployed teenage fighters of the "Mahdi Army" in Baghdad's Sadr City--one of the world's largest slums--taunt American occupiers with the promise that the main boulevard is "Vietnam Street." But the war planners don't blanch. With cold blooded lucidity, they now assert that the "feral, failed cities" of the Third World--especially their urban outskirts--will be the distinctive battlefield of the twenty-first century. Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor. This is the true "clash of civilizations".

Say, perhaps, someday in Mexico? In any event, I strongly encourage people to read the interview in its entirety, as Brzezinski addresses a broad spectrum of topics, including the necessity of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the variegated nature of Islamic fundamentalism and the absurd inflation of Bin Laden into a figure of global influence:

SPIEGEL: So it is exaggerated rhetoric which ensures that Osama bin Laden is elevated to the level of a Mao or Stalin?

Brzezinski: Correct. And that is of course a distortion of reality - notwithstanding the fact that bin Laden is a killer. He is a criminal and should be presented as such, and not intentionally elevated into a globally significant leader of a transnational, quasi-religious movement.

Here is the link again for anyone who wants to enjoy Brzezinski's ability to simply communicate complex ideas. Or, is it the inability of others to convey them in a straightforward manner that makes them appear complex?

Labels: American Empire, Elections, Mexico, Neoliberalism, Osama Bin Laden, Zbigniew Brzezinski