Grand Hotel Abyss

Well, l’affaire Rushdie returns to disturb the “world republic of letters,” to use Pascale Casanova’s somewhat ironic phrase. What to say? First, any religious bigots or political opportunists who call for assault on Rushdie can of course go take a jump. This should go without saying. However, what the U.S. and the U.K. cannot do, and what its representatives in the republic of letters should know better than to do, is to claim that “we” enjoy freedoms which fit us uniquely for confrontation with the forces of repression.

For one thing, “we” are aligned with the forces of repression—in Palestine, in Iraq, in Haiti, in Turkey, in Pakistan, in Egypt and in other places as well. Indeed, it is just this alliance that sometimes calls forth counter-forces, equally repressive or even moreso. The benighted mullah is recto to the verso of the enlightened imperialist. For another thing, in the wake of Norman Finkelstein’s denial of tenure by DePaul University and David Graeber’s dismissal by Yale University, not to mention the sheer impossibility of ever seeing Finkelstein or Graeber or Noam Chomsky or Amy Goodman or Howard Zinn or Tariq Ali or Naomi Klein on mainstream American TV, it’s simply laughable to claim that, just because our rulers are wiser than the commissars of old who shot or locked up dissidents, thereby winning sympathy to their cause, they allow all voices to be heard equally in a deliriously impure pluralism. From academia to publishing to television, anyone who knows anything can tell you that we in the U.S. live under a regime of de facto censorship which is, in its way, worse than that practiced by theocrats in that theocracy in its very crudeness naturally attracts opprobrium. De facto censorship is silent and thus harder to oppose because so many refuse to believe that it even exists.

I would like to see nothing more than a global united front against repression and exploitation in all its forms, but it appears unlikely in the current climate of belligerence from all quarters and amnesia about the old dreams of universal liberation that once animated both writers and workers, westerners and easterners. It brings to mind the saddest of political protest songs, The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” a satirical broadside against the censorious mullahs of Iran written and performed by a band unremitting in their attacks against their own government and the global system of oppression of which it formed a part. There once was a time when it was understood that, whatever proclamations they issued to the contrary, warmongering capitalist prime ministers and presidents were on the same side as theocratic ayatollahs, and that the proper place for an intellectual, artist or radical was on the other side. Alas, fatal confusion was sown, much of it, suspiciously enough, by al-Qaeda, that paramilitary wing of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and it will probably take centuries to recover.

Returning to pop music, it bears recalling that John Lennon came to live in the United States and risked deportation to oppose its murderous policies. He was able to do this without being a dupe of the forces of repression abroad, as he showed when he quite rightly chided those who would “[carry] around pictures of Chairman Mao.” I think he would be disturbed by the current use of his image and likeness by those who wish to “save Darfur.” What does it mean, after all, to save Darfur in the current context, when international law is either unenforcible or enforcible only in accordance with the wishes of individual states who stand to gain by concealing their drive for profit and power with reference to humanitarian concerns?

I do not for a moment doubt that the Khartoum government and its hired militias are vicious in the extreme and are bent on exterminating civilians whom they see as in the way of their territorial hegemony—though at the moment the situation is dynamic, it should be said. Nor do I doubt that the Chinese government, with its increasing need for oil, supports this vile policy. Whether or not this amounts to “genocide” (the word, like “antisemitism,” has been so cheapened by opportunists that I’m sorry to say I always regard it with suspicion), it’s certainly evil and ought to be opposed.

However, the United States is not the force to oppose it. The U.S. too has an interest in oil, just as the Chinese do, and great-power interference in profitable regions can result in an intensification and exploitation of conflict rather than de-escalation and a negotiated peace. Imperialism’s policy is always “Let’s you and him fight.” But, the humanitarian would object, wouldn’t you allow that U.S. intervention, however crassly motivated or barbarously pursued, might have unintended consequences? I suppose, and so might my immediate death, but that doesn’t give you the right to kill me. It is difficult enough to realize one’s own intentions; to claim to know or control the unintended results of one’s actions is the sheerest hubris and will be punished by the gods. To repeat myself: the United States has occupied a country, destroyed its state and civil society, and instigated and continues to meddle in a civil war that will probably lead to its partition. In the process, anywhere from half a million to a million people have been murdered and an entire culture destroyed. This is a body count in excess of that for which the Janjawid is responsible. A state which has done this has no moral credibility. It has no standing from which to tell others how to live. It ought not be allowed a military, if it comes to that.

John Lennon well knew this about his adopted country, back when it was carrying out another mass sacrifice to the god of democracy, and when he sang of a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, he did not confuse it with the present, with capitalism, with the United States or with “the international community.” He did not spend his time denouncing foreign devils from a position of comfort and moral superiority but worked to exorcise those evils in front of his face, even at cost to himself. Sadly, he’s gone. We are left with a back-handed tribute to him, and with the annoying vision of his old partner McCartney selling iPods on TV with a song so meretricious and second-rate that I half suspect it to have been written by the author of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. All souls’ day. Twentyseventh I’ll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death’s door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman’s with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren’s. The great physician called him home. Well it’s God’s acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hu! Not a budge out of him. Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder. Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve.

—”Hades”

And then my favorite of the book’s many profundities:

STEPHEN (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but modern philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

—”Circe”

From the Wikipedia entry on Muriel Spark:

In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark “had pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic … that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do.”

I am not a Catholic, though I was brought up that way. In fact, I am the kind of sturdy rationalist atheist who would write a book called something like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, except that I think the people who write those books 1.) wittingly or unwittingly provide aid and comfort to those murderers who would prosecute a “clash of civilizations” and 2.) demonstrate a misunderstanding of human culture that would be put right by a quick review of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” if nothing else.

No, it’s not the Catholicism in that quotation that I appreciate, but rather its refutation of a certain cliché about novels and their writers. What is this cliché? Well, here is Jonathan Rée, who supported the Iraq war because of his dialectical understanding of history, writing about recent essays on “the novel” by Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa. Here he summarizes the views of Kundera and Coetzee:

Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.” And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the “Manicheism” that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic “battle between good and evil,” but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) “Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History’s heels,” Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. “The novel alone,” as he puts it, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.”

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is “not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros.” Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply “an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.” And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin’s Marxism—”something forced about it, something merely reactive”—it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. “As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people,” Coetzee says; he had “no talent as a storyteller,” and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

On this view, which funnily enough couples its typical anti-Communism with a Marxist understanding of cultural history, the novel is the literary form par excellence of the bourgeoisie and its liberal values. Being somewhat contrary, I have less of a quarrel with the content of this concept of the novel than with its ubiquity, especially when it comes with moralizing reference to l’affaire Rushdie, as if this were the key to understanding what novels are and what they do (Rée blessedly neglects to mention Rushdie here, but Kundera, Sontag and Coetzee have insisted on it before).

The example of Muriel Spark shows us that, in fact, one need not be a secular liberal to write a good novel. One might be an agrarian conservative, a Latin Mass Catholic, a Communist, a fascist—I believe William Gibson once opined that a fascist couldn’t write a good novel, but I don’t see why not. Look at Dostoevsky, patron saint of the dialogic. He was, in his extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism, at the very least a proto-fascist, and yet who can match his burning sympathy for the exiled and the oppressed? It might be that the best novelists are precisely those who do not feel themselves to be at the center of their culture or its professed values. They have a clearer view from their distant prospect, and more sympathy for their fellow outcasts from life’s feast, in Joyce’s phrase. They can take a truer measure of the deed as against the word. Again, a little Marx could put us right: he famously preferred the conservative Catholic royalist Balzac to the good socialist Zola.

I do think that to measure the word against the deed requires a stable metric, in Donald Rumsfeld’s felicitous locution. Thus, Don Quixote, which always gets pulled into these discussions, and which Nabokov, lately read by the good liberal ladies of Tehran, thought a very cruel book. It is cruel, but not gratuitously so; it pictures the tragicomedy (which an anti-Communist ought to appreciate!) of a man who causes havoc in his attempt to impose upon a miserably recalcitrant world a global scheme of justice. The novel permits us neither to be easy in our sympathy for his crusade nor to dismiss it as lightly as his torturers do. That (take note: a dialectic!) is its genius and the reason it should always be read, as Coetzee seems to imply. But whatever this has to do with liberalism, it has nothing to do with the cant phrases of the present day, which itself has, as anyone can see, no premium on empathy and liberality. Homer can do these as well (or as badly) as any contemporary novelist.

Perhaps he could even do them better:

In this book, the events aren’t enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few writers in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building—or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets—but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, which is to show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing Square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of September 11, 2001, could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject to both the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.

I haven’t read DeLillo’s novel, though I admire many of his other novels, particularly Underworld. I won’t comment on this paragraph at length except to say that I find its second sentence disturbingly true. Perhaps it’s to do with the paucity of commies and Catholics and witches scared away from novel-writing by the liberal/secular dogma!

A few posts ago, I speculated incautiously on the congruence of terrorist groups/militias with the aims of empire, saying that I found the support of organizations like Britain’s Trotskyist SWP for the Iraqi resistance or for Hezbollah to be short-sighted given the symbiotic relationship between great powers and their armed resisters.

Now Nafeez Mosadeq Ahmed reminds us of “the strategy of tension” in which the CIA and MI6 conspired (oh yes, conspired! it happens, you know!) to destabilize western European governments by conjuring a non-existent Communist threat. This conjuring also took the form of carrying out terrorist attacks under the auspices of radical leftist groups—the 1980 Bologna bombing is the most famous example here, and the jury is of course still out on who killed Aldo Moro, but let’s say that I have my suspicions.

Right now we should understand that the strategy of tension is global. Any terrorist attack strengthens the hand of the empire. Oppose terror, oppose violence. Pacifism is the only true radicalism now, and here in the imperial center that means a word as dreaded as “conpiracy”—isolationism, or non-intervention. If you have an imprimatur to lend, don’t lend it to any armed militias: you don’t know whom they’re working for! And hell, they might not know whom they’re working for either!

Anyway, here is Ahmed:

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

Ganser was a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, before he moved to Basel University to teach history. Citing the transcripts of European parliamentary inquiries; the few secret documents that have been declassified; interviews with government, military and intelligence officials; and so on, Ganser shows how intimately the British were involved.

In fact, it wasn’t even an American idea – it was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.” (p. 40) By 4th October 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch of MI6 directed the creation of what Ganser describes as a “skeleton network” capable of expansion either in war or to service clandestine operations abroad: “Priority was given in carrying out these tasks to countries likely to be overrun in the earliest stages of any conflict with the Soviet Union, but not as yet under Soviet domination.” (p. 41) In the ensuing years, Col. Gubbins’ Special Operations branch of MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisner’s CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret armies across western Europe. (p. 42)

Among the documents Ganser brings to attention is the classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to train thousands of stay-behind officers around the world. The field manual was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist activities of “P2”, the CIA-MI6 sponsored Italian anti-communist network. As Ganser observes: “FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence.” In the manual’s own words:

“There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise extreme leftist organizations for one’s own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret. Only those persons which are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the US Army…” (p. 234-297)

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

The Strategy of Tension simply isn’t part of our historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics working in international relations and political science. This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental role in physically constructing a threat, projected into the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.

The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of the Operation Gladio phenomenon throughout western Europe was instrumental in legitimizing the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance in the South, throughout the Cold War period. Although the Soviet Union was supposed to be the real threat and source of terror, and thus the ultimate object of the over 70 military interventions conducted since 1945 [see William Blum’s Killing Hope (London: Zed, 1995)] the Soviet threat was in fact actively exaggerated ideologically – and even physically constructed through clandestine operations – to mobilize the comprehensive militarization of western societies. This does not mean that many government officials did not believe their own propaganda. But we now know that there was a secretive sub-section of the Western intelligence community, known only to very few members of elected governments, that was involved in this.

The number of people who were killed across the “Third World” as a consequence of this militarization process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb. According to Dr. J. W. Smith, a US development economist who runs the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona, in our glorious self-evidently noble fight to defend the “Free World” from imminent Soviet attacks, invasions, and general inconceivably irrational hell-bent pure evilness, Western states:

“… were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990” [Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (2003)]

12 to 15 million people from 1945 to 1990.

I have to repeat these figures to myself to absorb their implications.

Repeat these figures to yourself.

Six million Jews in the Second World War, and now 12 to 15 million innocents in the post-WWII period. The former in the name of German lebensraum. The latter in the name of the free market.

A final word here, partially to explain my extreme impatience with “liberal internationalists.” Very few leftists nowadays have anything nice to say about Joseph Stalin. Stalin is known first and foremost as the murderer of twenty million, rightly enough, though, as Ken MacLeod reminds us in his “Open Letter to an Open Enemy,” Stalin is as defensible as any of western history’s great modernizing statesmen (Cromwell, Napoleon, Lincoln, etc.), which perhaps is a point against them rather than for him. I mention this, though, because today’s “liberal internationalists,” speaking so blithely of the blessings of empire and of humanitarian bombs and the promise of globalization are the equivalents of Stalinists. They contort a liberatory philosophy until it serves no end but power and profit for elite groups, while issuing copious denials that these groups have ever done anything untoward. But they have raised a mountain of corpses to rival those of Stalin and Hitler. It doesn’t matter what warmongers say. What they do is murder.

1. Abolish the automobile.

2. Abolish the prison system.

P.S. Also expropriate all heiresses and the like…

People always quote that Auden line about how writing negative book reviews is bad for the soul. I submit that the proposition is false: instead, criticism purges one’s soul of the bad book that has unfortunately been read.

Some books are so bad that you can’t read them all the way through. I’ve been looking at some Iraq war books, and I thought that, given its acclaim, I might try George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. I cleared the first hundred pages before deciding that the book was ruining my day. This is the kind of journalistic account about which newspaper reviewers say, “It reads like a novel,” thus calumniating the chosen genre of Cervantes, Stendhal and Eliot. They say it reads like a novel because of sentences like this:

In a charcoal jacket and gray shirt open at the collar, he leaned forward with an apologetic smile and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to strike a discordant note.”

Worthy of Michael Crichton or, if we really want to be mean about it, Dean R. Koontz. The man described in this sentence is none other than Kanan Makiya, professional Iraqi exile and fanatic for the destruction of a country he hasn’t lived in for thirty-five years. He serves as one of the heroes of Packer’s book; Packer brings to bear all the novelistic techniques of irony to show just how uselessly abstract and creepily megalomanical were Makiya’s plans for Iraq, all the while maintaining Makiya’s nobility in tilting at windmills. Meanwhile, Packer peppers his book with other sentences, such as these:

Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War.

Isn’t life mysterious? Perhaps if Packer hadn’t spent the first hundred pages of his “novel” profiling the likes of Makiya, Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, he might have noticed what the U.S. actually did in Iraq. They did what they have long wanted to do domestically: they privatized everything. As in the dreams of teenage anarchists, they smashed the state. The difference is that teenage anarchists want to smash the state so that decentralized self-rule can take hold in human-scale communities, while the neoliberal vanguard instead cleansed Iraq of any public or collective holdings in order to allow their pet corporations to run riot in a gangster’s paradise. I fear that, whether we get Rudy or Hillary, they will bring this show to American soil.

Anyway, Packer portrays the anti-war movement as irresponsible, fanatical and subtly reactionary—as, in fact, the mirror image of Bush:

It embraced the full spectrum [just try to embrace a spectrum, gentle reader!] of opposition, from the banners of extremist groups that proclaimed “No Blood for Oil!” to the moderate calls for weapons inspections and international law of the far larger Internet-based organization Moveon.org. The message, though, like that of most protest movements, was a simple one: Stop the war. All the difficult questions raised by the prospect of a war in Iraq were erased by these three words.

We find ourselves here in the liberal topos of uncertainty, nuance and gradualism. That situations are more complex and variable than any moral judgments that can be made about them is a truism. However, in the realm of action one must in the end decide what to do and what not to do. This usually takes the form of an either/or choice, which can, I understand, be painful to make, but as anyone who has ever done anything (e.g., gotten married, chosen a major, quit a job, accepted a job, had a child, gotten a divorce etc. etc.) understands, choices must be made if life is to be lived. The anti-war movement, of which I am proud to say that I was a very small part back in the bleak winter of 2002-03, evaluated the case made for the war, the actors involved, the prospects for a good outcome, the history of American involvement in the region, and the general morality of war, and they decided that the Iraq war was unjust and worthy of being opposed, and they decided moreover to act on this decision.

Packer finds this intolerable because he finds politics intolerable. He is, to such a comic extent that one might think the book a hoax, the feckless liberal mocked by conservatives and radicals alike, the self-congratulating buffoon of the old Phil Ochs song. “My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when no one else was around,” he agonizes. Eventually, though, he decides to take the position of the “ambivalently prowar liberals,” explaining that “[o]ne doesn’t get one’s choice of wars” (a comment ill befitting the citizen of a democracy, I should think). He elaborates his position, telling us that it descends from his belief in the “interventions of the last decade in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo,” which only proves that he has a lot of nerve. He bizarrely seems to think that Iraq differs from these “humanitarian” escapades: “The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits.” Recall now that Packer does not know what this “other” thing that so concerns the warmakers is, though he finds laughably extreme those who think it has something to do with energy resources or corporations.

In order to appear fair and balanced, he profiles Eli Pariser, in charge at the time of Moveon.org, since Pariser is a self-described patriot who, though he does oppose the war, has more or less repudiated the left tradition in his own family. Packer just doesn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, he admires Pariser’s prudential non-radicalism. On the other hand, “[t]he antifascist wars of our own time—in Bosnia and Kosovo— never strongly resonated with Pariser’s generation of activists.” He’s got a point there. Pariser’s generation of activists should have been out on the street in force opposing our government’s murderous neo-Nazi support of the old Ustashe, but alas, I don’t think that’s what Packer had in mind.

For guidance, Packer turns to Leon Wiesletier of The New Republic, who solemnly informs us, “The Second World War still makes me cry.” World War II, you see, is his model for American force, while the anti-war movement fixates on Vietnam: “‘It’s sort of the isolationism of the wounded or the of the traumatized,’” he condescends. That there were real wounds and real traumas, and that the anti-war movement of the time was dead right about Vietnam, he does not stoop to mention. Nor does it occur to him that if Woodrow Wilson had not dragged this country into the pointless slaughter of World War I, against the advice of an anti-war movement whose members he simply jailed, then Hitler and Stalin might never have come to power at all, thus sparing the tears of Mr. Wieseltier.

From the reviews, it seems that Packer will go on to narrate how the Bush administration’s “incompetence” and “cynicism” and whatever else is short of “malice aforethought” betrayed Iraq and the fond liberal dreams of Kanan Makiya and Paul Berman. The first hundred pages are so poorly written and so poorly reasoned, however, that I don’t think I will stay for the rest of his tale. Though he professes to be an ardent democrat, the truth about Packer is that he hates politics and does not understand power. The masters of war understand power well: they want it all for themselves and will kill those who stand in their way. The anti-war movement too understands power: they see how the warmakers lust for it and how destructive their lust is, and so they try to block their access to more power by curtailing their ability to make war. This struggle is what politics is, fundamentally, but Packer finds that such a view sullies his exquisite mind. In the end, he chooses to believe the moral claptrap adduced by warmongers. Finding that they’ve created a hell on earth unrelated to any recognizable morality, he has nowhere to turn but back to his own pretty little consciousness, wafted hither and yon by events and personalities that he can describe but cannot understand.

Why write about this? you ask. Water under the bridge, you say. Quite false. The discrediting of the far right means the rise of the center, and Packer is the center. The Packers of the world will be upon us in any future Democratic administration, complaining like Clinton and Obama about Bush’s “incompetence” and vowing to do it up right the very next time we need to drop “humanitarian bombs,” in the odious phrase of Saint Vaclav Havel.

Two posts ago, I wrote about Edward Said. Packer drags Said into his account for a bit of roughing up, largely because the late, great critic had Makiya’s number way back in 1991. Our author brings up the usual charges—Said blames everything on western imperialism, Said is an out-of-touch mandarin, etc.—and even adds a new one: Said envies Makiya, because Makiya might do for Iraq what Said could never do for Palestine! Truly, we are beyond satire. Said knew this shortly before his death, which is why he wrote an article in March 2003 about the Iraq war that ends with the Wordsworthian apostrophe: “Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” In the middle of this essay, Said clarifies his own position for the benefit of Makiya and his ilk, before concluding with a sentence worthy of Johnson. Again, I give him the last word, with my emphasis:

I have been criticised recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba’athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam’s war against “the Persians”, as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait, but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush’s commitment to democracy Professor Makiya is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba’athi government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching the gods whom they worship politically there’s no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.

Diana Johnstone, who wrote the book on NATO’s ill intentions in former Yugoslavia, writes in Counterpunch today on the present sorry state of Kosovo and the extraordinary arrogance of its imperial overlords. She notes in passing that the rule of “the international community” in Kosovo parallels the rule over European countries of the vast EU bureaucracy. Needless to say, the US in the era of “terror” suffers many of the same problems. What will the future look like? An archipelago of armed fortresses amid a wasteland of suffering and war-of-all-against-all.

Johnstone:

The post-Cold War capitalist West, needed to drape itself in a noble cause. “Human rights” did the trick. To preserve and expand the U.S.-led Cold War military machine after the dismantling of its official adversary, the Warsaw Pact, NATO was endowed with the new mission of “humanitarian intervention”. The 1999 “Kosovo war” was the trial run for this new mission.

Thus hatred and prejudice must be perpetuated.

And, for good measure, Gabriel Kolko returns us to end of the nineteenth century, where the imperial manipulation of identity politics began:

Vienna was surely the most intellectually creative place in the world at the end of the 19th century. Economics, art, philosophy, political theories on the Right as well as Left, psychoanalysis – Vienna gave birth or influenced most of them. Ideas had to be very original to be noticed, and most were. We must understand the unique and rare innovative environment in which Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew who became the founder of Zionism, functioned. For a time he was also a German nationalist and went through phases admiring Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state – especially those in Russia – would become revolutionaries.

It was scarcely an accident that in November 1917 Lord Arthur Balfour was to make Britain’s historic endorsement of a Jewish homeland in their newly mandated territory of Palestine in a letter to Rothschild. Some of these Englishmen also shared the Biblical view that it was the destiny of Jews to return to their ancient soil. Others thought that this gesture would help keep Russia in the war, and that nefarious Jews had the influence to do so. Most saw a Jewish state as a means of consolidating British power in the vast Islamic region.

Forget Left and Right. Let us posit two other approaches to truth and community: there is the party of the Inner Light and the party of Tradition. The former believes that truth lies not “out there” because “out there” does not exist and/or presents only a lying aspect unless it is transformed by the understanding emanating from within the self, which in its turn is a shard of the golden reality submerged beneath the dross constituted by that which the unillumined take to be “reality.” The latter believes that the individual self exists in darkness, blind and ignorant, and that its task, which can only be completed in unison with others, both the living and the dead, is to beat back the darkness which hides our understanding of the world by careful attention to it, uneclipsed, insofar as this is possible, by the intrusive self—the self is only good insofar as it is augmented by the accumulated wisdom of the past.

These two parties are not political parties. Many a right-wing Protestant fundamentalist believes that a personal experience of Jesus outweighs all fact and reason, and one would be hard-pressed to claim that the great left-wing philosophy of Marxism is not a self-denying, outward-focussed tradition. These two examples should clarify the obvious truth that the party of the Inner Light can tend toward mad irrationalism and solipsism that militate against sympathetic engagement with the world, while the party of Tradition can tend toward sterile and lethal doctrines that hammer the human into unnatural angular shapes. Extremes meet, and the Nazis, whose distinction is to have held every bad idea simultaneously, provide our worst example of iron-clad tradition wedded to wild subjectivism and relativism.

Is there any more fertile common ground for the opposed parties? Let us take an example.

Probably the greatest American humanist of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Edward Said, was a radical who nevertheless prefaced his masterpiece Culture and Imperialism with a quotation from Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In the early ’80s, moreover, he wrote a a series of essays in which, with great tact and subtlety, he inveighed against the creeping religiosity that he saw overtaking literary studies with the embrace of deconstruction, a philosophy of language that turned from language and literature’s essential imbrication with the world and with ideology in favor of an understanding of the Word as an inscrutable alien essence pure in its expression of itself. For Said, “Secular Criticism” is that which is hostile to such self-aggrandizing self-referentiality. To this extent, he is hostile to the claims of the world-eating, world-dismissing “I.”

But Said was also the inveterate scourge of incurious, imperialist America, sectarian, racist Israel and the zealot-plagued, tyrant-burdened Muslim world, as well as the defender of the intellectual’s right to stand apart from all traditions. He in no way subscribes to a view that the individual must bow to tradition, and indeed in one of his last pieces of writing, the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Auerbach’s Mimesis, he reminded us that a critical or creative project is only ever going to be personal. He seemed to agree with George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch, who describes Dorothea Brooke, partisan of the Inner Light, stupified by Rome because she lacks the “quickening power” of that knowledge which would enable her to unite the fragments of the city’s history into a meaningful narrative.

The self is all we’ve got, but it alone is no reliable guide to anything. We need others.

Said never lost faith in the possibility of attaining the truth through a sympathetic understanding of the reality outside the self. People forget that Orientalism attacks its eponymous target not primarily as an impersonal Foucauldian discourse emanating from power, but as an outward projection of a spurious western identity, an untoward and basely-motivated over-reliance on an Inner Light which is an ignis fatuus.

Eliot wrote, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” which is all any of us can say for ourselves, and as long as we do this in good faith and with a trust in the agency and autonomy of other people, then we will produce that which is alive and worthwhile. In so doing, we will not retreat into the idiocy of mere egotism, but neither will we accept the claims of those authorities who would foreclose the imagination’s outward flow into the larger world of people and things and time.

If I may conclude with a bit of polemical business, Said’s example should provide the artist/intellectual with an alternative to all of those things I’ve been complaining about: Leninist revivalism, liberal imperialism, identity politics, global corporate capitalism and Enlightenment fundamentalism. It is a universalist vision of community that remains suspicious of all collectivities, a scholarly understanding of history that distrusts all determinist narratives and a call to liberation that does not fetishize violence or authority. A vision suspicious of visions, an understanding nervous about our ability to understand, and a call not to rally or to arm but to respond.

Left? Right? Who knows, maybe we should call it “Tory Anarchy.”

The last word goes to Said. The concluding lines of his essay, “Swift’s Tory Anarchy”:

A real event is projected into the fictive element of language and submitted bravely to the chaos of gossip and transience, until what must be lost cedes to the assertion of posterity’s “impartial” gain. In the process Swift the man, of course, dies, buried in the trivia of an age that neither could nor would let him live. This must be the source of the persistent legend of his madness—his alienation from the prescriptive canons of decency that he himself yearned for but which the unendurable honesty of his last years forced him to believe were lost. So he believed himself to have lived and died in that loss. Yet the poem demonstrates how his Irish exile is reinstated as a subject of discourse, but not at all as a personality, nor as a body of works, but rather as a presence for those who can simultaneously accept, as he did, waste and power. It is in that condition, between the world and the archive, sharing both, that Swift lasts. His imagination was the transactor of that difficult business, and an extraordinarily difficult challenge for the twentieth-century reader.