Grand Hotel Abyss

My life has only just ceased to be scored by the insectoid hum of news helicopters. I sit here typing a mere and disconcerting ten blocks from the televisual catastrophe I suppose you’ve all been enjoying.

People here in the land of “Minnesota Nice” are certainly enjoying it: I’ve never quite experienced the peculiar giddiness, the high spirits and festiveness that enters a population in a moment of public calamity. I was reporting this last night to a friend who called from Chicago to check in, and we concluded that if this was the psychological state of Minneapolis, then Baghdad must be a laugh riot. Nobody went to work today, and everyone rushed, camera in hand, to the site of the disaster, hoping to snap that perfect shot. I, unemployed, walked by but did not pause, so firm is my integrity.

The response of the liberal blogosphere and commentariat has been coordinated and strong. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that this country is physically disintegrating, and the occurrence of this collapse in a city rightly renowned for its quality of life and public institutions ought to be a startling reminder of the price of endless foreign wars, disestablishment of the public sphere and a sick fetish for sports stadiums.

Oh yes, we have the stadium problem here in Minneapolis. It reminds me of my vanished youth in Pittsburgh PA, where the government put the prospect of two new stadiums to a referendum. The voters, looking around them at a city many parts of which were and are coming to resemble something out of the old Second World, rejected the measure. The city swiftly implemented what they called Plan B. Plan B was, “Fuck you, we’re doing it anyway.” Things are no different up here. I say, if you want to privatize something, privatize sports in all its aspects.

Speaking of privatization, we already see the old shell game being played. Tucker Carlson today advocated having all bridges sponsored by corporations! What a trick: defund public infrastructure, wait till it falls apart, when it falls apart blame government inefficiency, then hand everything over to private interests.

Where, by the way, are all of these super-efficient corporations of neoliberal mythology? Corporations are in my experience vast, grey, faceless, wasteful and arbitrary bureaucracies, dehumanizing and inefficient beyond the wildest dreams of Lenin. (Hence my preferred phrase: Corporate Stalinism.) Enough of this bullshit.

Anyway. A commenter on The Nation’s blast against defunded infrastructure accused the left of not coming to terms with the fact that one cannot have everything. I may not be public-spirited; I may not even plan to vote for Barack “Invade Pakistan” Obama or Hillary “Don’t Say You Won’t Nuke ‘Em” Clinton or any other member of that wretched party; I may want to vomit when Senator Amy Kloubachar says that bridges should not fall down in America, thus implying that it’s just fine and what you’d expect for bridges to fall down in Peru or Indonesia; I may even be some kind of anarchist. But surely, surely, we mustn’t despair so much that we cannot even imagine a collective effort to ensure that the very ground does not fall away from beneath our feet.

I saw at Rigorous Intuition the news that Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake had evidently committed suicide. My first thought was, “Who is Theresa Duncan?” But after two minutes’ poking around her blog I learned that she wrote for Artforum a comparative piece on Kill Bill and Lost in Translation that I long ago clipped out of the magazine and taped into a notebook that I’ve been carrying around with me for the last three years.

This particular issue of Artforum was given to me by friends who lived in Portland, ME, and whom I was then visiting immediately after my graduation from college. This was around the time of the beheading of Nick Berg, an event used by the right-wing to bolster the case that “we” were at war with wicked barbarians in Iraq. However, a number of bizarre events surrounding the murder raised suspicions about its perpetrators and their motivation. At the time I recall even moderate liberals wondering aloud if Berg’s murder were not staged by agents of the US government.

While in Maine, I drunkenly opined that Berg was probably involve in the whole unfolding catastrophe, from September 11 to Iraq. On my return home, I took a newspaper article on Berg and, without reading it, cut it into its constituent paragraphs, put them in a carrying case for M&Ms, shook them up, drew them at random and taped them into the same notebook in which I had saved Duncan’s article. (This practice was based on the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, in which a text is randomly re-arranged in order to take advantage of chance’s capacity for revealing hidden or implicate meanings.)

My reading of the re-assembled, disjointed article issued only one surprise: the frequency with which Berg was recalled by relatives as being interested in repairing electrical towers. “He was a tower guy,” one relative recalled. This means sweet fuck all, of course, and I am, on most days of the week, a rationalist and an anti-cabbalist, though I have been known to frequent occult bookstores, and my adolescent heroes were the PoMo warlocks Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Anyway, Berg was a tower guy, and this information sat a few papers’ widths’ from Theresa Duncan’s masterful demolition of Sofia Coppolla’s hymn to the patriarchy (which, by the bye, you can read here.)

What does this have to do with the untimely demise of Ms. Duncan? Well, it seems that she was caught up in some spooky shit of her own. One blog post in particular details her and her partner’s harassment both by a certain “church” which starts with a Scient- and ends with an -ology and by persons associated with a certain rich guy connected with the mob and possibly also with higher powers than that.

There is, I would caution you, no point to my observing these tenuously connected events. I trawl conspiracy theory websites to scare and entertain myself, and only half believe what I read there. I don’t know what happened to Ms. Duncan; I will probably never know; and to be honest with you I don’t want to know. There is that famous moment in The Red and the Black when Mathilde de la Mole elects Julien Sorel to be her lover because he is the only man in the room who might plausibly do something daring enough to warrant his decollation by the powers that be. I am not Julien Sorel. My rebellion against society goes only so far as my commitment to spend as much time unemployed as possible. More and more, I lose my public-spiritedness. More and more, I come to think that revolutionaries talk as much rubbish as reformists.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the only two professors I’ve ever had who showed any interest in conspiracy type matters were quite opposed on the question.

One was a Marxist, an old-fashioned Leninist type, and though he never came out and said so, he seemed to believe that the rise of deconstruction in U.S. academe in the late ’70s/early ’80s, spearheaded by ex-Nazi de Man and inspired by the Nazi Heidegger and the proto-Nazi Nietzsche sure was suspicious. I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when he mentioned CIA funding of abstract expressionism.

On the other hand, my other conspiracy-minded professor was himself part of the deconstruction in-crowd, BFF with JD, the Dark Lady and others. He was more or less an anti-Marxist, or anti-Hegelian anyway (”Lukacs is boring!” he once declared), and yet he would frequently mention weird goings-on in the Middle East and even once entertained us with a large excursus on Leo Ryan, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones etc.

As for me, I’m convinced that all the more plausible conspiracy theories are true. But this is not really what I meant to say. RIP Theresa Duncan.

He made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
—XTC

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.

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.

If you’ll forgive me for citing a crazy right-wing Rand-quoting libertarian, here is Justin Raimondo speaking good sense:

Which is why I have to laugh when I hear criticisms from the Democrats and the growing number of antiwar Republicans in Congress who complain that we don’t belong in Iraq any longer because, you know, it’s a civil war. This is largely seen as an unintended consequence of the American invasion – but what if it was intended?

It would, after all, make perfect Bizarro “sense.” If, instead of trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq, you’re trying to wreak as much destruction as possible and turn Arab against Arab, Muslim against Muslim, and the Kurds against everyone else, then the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the right thing to do. And please don’t tell me that none of these dire consequences – blowback, for Rudy Giuliani’s benefit – were known or predicted in advance. The recent release of the much-awaited “phase two” [.pdf] of the Senate Intelligence report – detailing prewar assessments of what was likely to occur in Iraq if we invaded – shows we knew all along what would happen. Yet we went ahead and invaded anyway.

As Ayn Rand once put it, don’t bother to examine a folly – ask yourself only what it accomplishes. If we look at the public reasons for the Iraq war, it is clear that none of these have been accomplished, nor are they likely to be achieved in the near or even distant future. Iraqi “democracy” is a bizarre mutation of clerical domination, unimaginable corruption, and rule by death squads, and those “weapons of mass destruction” have returned to the netherworld of the neoconservative imagination from whence they emerged onto the front page of the New York Times.

Exactly right. I don’t think people really understand the radical nature of the neoliberal challenge to moral, legal and political norms of the past. The invasion of Iraq is to be understood in the light of Thatcher’s notorious proclamation, “There is no such thing as society.” We are talking about elites who have a deep hostility to the state understood as anything other than a private security force for the rich. The goal in Iraq is chaos. The model is not the British or Roman Empires, with their “enlightened” proconsuls and extensive collaboration with local elites. The model is gangland warfare, with the U.S. President as the godfather playing one family against another. When liberal imperialist types claim that traditional imperialism is preferable to this loosing of anarchy, they are only wrong insofar as traditional imperialism is morally repugnant, if less overtly destructive.

Speaking of liberal imperialist types, this aggressive sowing of destruction has been a bipartisan effort in the U.S. When the newly-unified German government rushed to recognize Slovenia after its secession from Yugoslavia, Bush I’s Secretary of State James Baker thought they were crazy for taking an action that would lead to a bloody civil war. The Kissingerian realist paradigm to which Baker subscribed was more traditionally imperialist: the goal was to find some local strongman (the Shah, Pinochet, etc.) to support who would funnel the profits and the resources back to his patrons. He was hard-pressed to see the wisdom of provoking a bloodbath that would be hard to control, much less of taking sides in a such a struggle. A few short years and a million words by Sontag & Son later, Clinton and Blair eagerly threw in with Iran and bin Laden to rain depleted uranium down on the unlucky heads of the “neo-Nazi” Serbs in a grisly prologue to the destruction of Iraq. The intellectual wheels greased here by a flood of post-1989 verbiage on the obsolescence of the nation-state and the great good of identity politics and so-called “respect for difference” (a philosophy that, for all its high-minded liberal-ish intentions, upholds the intellectual underpinnings of racism). The only surprising thing about Christopher Hitchens’s support of the Iraq invasion is that a hundred other prominent liberals and leftists didn’t join him. He was not wrong when he cited the precedent of Kosovo.

In this context, we should recognize the roots of this foreign policy strategy in the intelligence service’s manipulations of radical organizations in the late ’60s and ’70s, when the FBI, CIA and NATO infiltrated these groups and provoked them to commit terrorist actions (or else entirely faked such actions). For this reason, I find the Leninist left’s nominal support for groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or various Iraqi resistance groups short-sighted. It’s hard to see who in the Middle East is not working for the Man at this point. The best thing to do in terms of political action right now for citizens of the imperial center is to push the anti-war, even pacifist and isolationist line as hard as they can.

This has the added benefit of being comprehensible to most middle- and working-class people; I know, because I am one such person. People tend to look at you funny if you preach world revolution, but if you preach against blowing people up and for leaving other countries the hell alone, most people will understand where you’re coming from, even if they disagree. Here, even the latter-day conservative impulses of American culture will be helpful. Imperialism has always been a liberal project, rooted in a desire to “help” which is actually a sublimated will-to-domination for the intellectuals who want to “help” and an unsublimated fig leaf for the profit-taking of big business. There is a reason that working people find persuasive the opportunistic conservative propaganda line that liberalism is an ideology of elitist condescension and feel-good power-grabbing.

But I do not want to “help,” for instance, Africa. Africa is in the sorry shape that it’s in precisely because of all the “help” it has received over the years from Europe and the U.S. What Africa needs is to be left entirely alone: to have its debt cancelled, the IMF off its backs (and off the face of the earth) and western aid brought to an end. Our “obligation” to assist them has done enough damage. What they need is nothing more than the freedom to develop the strength and intelligence of their civilization.

(That may sound like identity politics; it isn’t because I don’t believe that cultures and civilizations are discrete. Of course, all cultures are mixtures of elements diverse in their origin and character and that’s a good thing. By contrast, western domination destroys that vital diversity by imposing one economic model on everyone. Western elites love identity politics because, by holding up such foolish ideas as Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, this politics is hostile to the vital internal diversity of all cultures and keeps all the mental categories of racism open.)

The new imperialism of today is an attack of elites against all civilizational restraints on their power. The aim of the imperialists is to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven. History records no example of heaven on earth being achieved by means of extreme violence and domination.

The road to one America, according to Mr. Edwards:

Edwards also called Monday for spreading the burden of serving the country by mandating national service.

“One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America — not just the poor kids who get sent to war — are serving this country,” he said.

After the event, Edwards said he had not meant to imply that only the poor go to war, only that everyone should serve in some way.

“We have people from all walks of life in America who are serving, including Reservists and National Guard,” he said. “What we want to do is to have all Americans to have a chance to serve their country.”

If were without the grave dignity of a scholar and an artist, I would say that John Edwards could suck my cock until his phoney head caved in, and that Hillary and Obama could get in line behind him.

Not a single one of those soldiers over in Iraq is serving anything other than the bottom line of the energy and arms companies. Some of the gentle souls among us like to point out that economic circumstances compel these men and women to undertake these kinds of indefensible slaughters. In fact, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation:

By assigning each recruit the median 1999 household income for his hometown ZIP code as deter­mined from Census 2000, the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dol­lars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Cen­sus 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on aver­age, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.

When comparing these wartime recruits (2003– 2005) to the resident population ages 18–24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999. (See Chart 2.) Though the mainstream media continue to portray the war in Iraq as unpopular, this evi­dence suggests that the United States is not sending the poor to die for the interests of the rich.

The point these right-wing think-tankers wish to make is that the compostion-by-income of U.S. army recruits maps almost perfectly onto the income distribution of the general population. While we certainly must allow that this distribution is hideously unjust—$43000 really isn’t much considering the cost of living—we cannot claim abject desperation as the macro cause of military enlistment. I certainly did not come from a household that made much more than the median, particularly during my early childhood, yet it never occurred to me or almost anyone else I knew to “serve” in this barbaric way. The people I know who did choose to “serve” were neither poor nor particularly uneducated. For the most part, the incentives the army held out beat the alternatives—uncertain success at an overpriced university or in the job market—but the preponderance of people that I knew chose these hardships over what are, after all, in many ways the far graver hardships of military “service.”

The truth is that the United States has, without any justification, destroyed an entire society, engineered a state of chaos and slaughtered more than half a million people and counting. This is not a secret. The only barrier to understanding this is ideology. Ideology is not watertight, and the brain does not naturally take its shape. I do not support the troops. I do not think that everyone should “serve” in one way or another, because the cause, even if one were to define the cause so broadly as the continued survival of this polity in its present state, is deeply evil. Justice demands that the “service” be abolished.

Edwards’s call for universal “service” is parallel to Zizek’s call for discipline. And here is a fine time to recall Zizek’s support for the ’90s crusade of Edwards’s party: the Iraq-presaging manipulation of and lethal participation in the break-up of Yugoslavia. I used to have considerable sympathy for both the progressive resurgence in mainstream American politics and for the Leninist revivalism of the Theory class, but now I see both as dangerous charades, new masks for power. The world is plagued by gangs of men with guns. Still more gangs of men with guns will not provide a cure. And I for one will not serve.

The conservative imagination—I’m not talking just about the political right here, though most of them go in; but so do Zizek, Maoists, etc.—most abhors art, abortion and gay sex because these are three images of human freedom from purposeful activity.

If you’re writing a poem, aborting a fetus, getting it from another dude up the ass or getting eaten by another chick, then you’re not going to produce anything socially useful (or, in the case of the poem, not necessarily—the poem, I suppose, could reproduce some kind of “hegemonic discourse”).

When this topic comes up, I sometimes feel a twinge of sympathy for those eco-fascist anarcho-primitivists, who at least like to emphasize how much leisure time the hunter-gatherers enjoyed.

Anyway. Have you heard about the UK’s latest foray into Corporate Stalinism?

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.

The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

“We are not intending to have any play time,” said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.”

I can just about hear him say that. I know the type—though the commissar I’m imagining/remembering is a full-dress nun, an ironically-named Sister of Mercy, who was the principal of my grade school.

I dig the euphemism “unstructured time” too, for that thing which we must not enjoy at all. Will they next monitor our dreams? Can we get a little peace on the toilet, or will they now need to examine our excrements for traces of what they can’t control? What a world! And, hell, I can’t even blame this on capitalism either; communists did this kind of shit too when they were in charge of countries. The sickness that is the desire to dominate goes deeper than local economic manifestations.

So a toast to unstructured time! To fetus-killing, ass-fucking, rug-munching, poem-writing, picture-painting and generally running out of control! These pigs want to suck our souls and we’ve got to keep away from them as long as we can!

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.

—Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

For Sarkozy, “rupture” reflects both mundanely tactical and deeply personal choices. The 12 years of Jacques Chirac‘s presidency, together with France’s tradition of alternation in power, suggests a victory for the left. Positioning himself as the candidate who represents a sharp break with today’s unpopular politics is the only means to escape that fate.

This is reflected in Sarkozy’s openly pro-American stance – an act of political courage in a France where anti-Americanism is running high. Sarkozy’s message is that Chirac and Villepin were right in substance to oppose America’s military adventure in Iraq, but that their style was disastrously wrong. Thus, his deep admiration for “American values,” while sincere, implies no embrace of President George W. Bush. It also reassures the French business community, which was shocked by Dominique de Villepin’s flamboyant opposition to the United States when he was Chirac’s foreign minister.

—A French Presidential Primer

I wrote this essay yesterday and on a whim sent it off to Counterpunch, but evidently they didn’t want it. I reproduce it here, where some 2 million fewer readers will find it than would have had I made the big time!

……………………….

“This crazed, narcissistic worst mass murderer in American history.”

That was how NBC anchor Brian Williams described…not George W. Bush, but Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Williams read from the “manifesto” that Cho had sent to NBC: “Generation after generation, we martyrs, like Eric and Dylan.” The press will seize on Cho’s allusion to the Columbine killers, but more fascinating is the Nietzschean locution. “We knowers,” Nietzsche would write bitterly, or “we moderns.” Is it ironic or is it only predictable that the philosopher who wrote out of an aristocratic contempt for the moralizing mediocrity of bourgeois Europe just before its wreck in World War I should provide a literary style to a student whose fury at the wealthy might have been termed by Nietzsche a sickly resentment?

Cho reportedly wrote the name “Ishmael” on the return address of the package sent to NBC. Network president Steve Capus was unable to tell Chris Matthews the provenance of the name. It comes from Genesis, where Ishmael is the first son of Abraham, borne to his servant Hagar in defiance of God’s instructions. God prophesies that Ishmael’s “hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him” (Genesis 16:12) Tradition holds that Ishmael’s descendants were the Arabs—thus giving early credence for the Christian and Jewish prejudices that continue to animate the violent assault on Muslims that make up the so-called “War on Terror.” Closer to Nietzsche’s time, Melville adopted the name Ishmael for the alienated narrator of Moby-Dick, who took to sea because he felt “a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul.”

Cho’s allusions—including the Hamlet-like plot of his play Richard McBeef, reproduced on thesmokinggun.com—are to a tradition of alienation and despair in Western culture that has been present since Biblical times, but was first valorized and made central in the Romantic era. The isolated, lone, potentially violent young man stalking modern society is a figure not of contemporary films or video games, but of great nineteenth-century European novels like The Red and the Black, Pére Goriot, Crime and Punishment or The Secret Agent. He is an archetype of the individualism and desperation that mark much of the modern era, when the energy of intelligent, restless young men has nowhere to go in a society that values material wealth, business and sensationalism. The image of the “violent young man with nowhere to go” is our pop-psychological cliché about Middle Eastern societies, but wave after wave of school and workplace shootings that have plagued the U.S. for the last two decades prove that this random violence and alienation come directly out of the matrix of modernity. Cho, who was an English major (as the humanities-hostile media keeps reminding us ominously), merely does us the favor of providing footnotes to his appalling activity, even if the NBC president cannot understand them.

“Why weren’t we warned about Cho’s disturbing behavior?” is the question on everyone’s lips. “What are the warning signs?” Unfortunately, there is no fool-proof method consistent with a free society to prevent individuals from committing murder in every case, and creating a culture in which “loners” or “weird people” or “outcasts” are demonized and placed under surveillance will not help. Neither will banning violent video games, movies or music, which are themselves symptoms rather than causes of an unequal and brutal war culture. In any event, as we’ve seen, Cho seems to have been as influenced by classic literature and philosophy as by Tarantino or the Wachowski Brothers. This is not because culture induces violent behavior, but because culture, whether Tarantino or Stendhal, expresses the violence and pain of a society. Cho’s actions are not singular; they fit a pattern of mass murder going back decades, and his words recall an older tradition.

Many pious commentators have admonished us that it’s too soon to begin interpreting the massacre. This anti-intellectual attitude represents a cowardly surrender to the power of chaos and hate to arrest thought. It is an outrage to the human spirit, and perfectly encapsulates the nihilism not only of Cho’s crimes, but of the society in which such crimes are so appallingly frequent. “No one deserves a tragedy,” poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni declaimed to students at a convocation on Wednesday. No one deserves a tragedy, but tragedies are inflicted every day by young people just like Cho. Unlike Cho, those young people are not deemed psychotic by pundits: instead they are celebrated and supported as our brave men and women in uniform. Their official targets too are mostly young men like Cho, considered just as brave and worthy by the beleaguered populations that support them in the absence of viable alternatives. Global capitalism, sweeping all traditions, cultures and institutions before it, fragmenting societies and exacerbating inequality, has brought us to this abyss, and this abyss stares back in the ubiquitous image of a gun-wielding young murderer. The nightmare of the nineteenth century is not over. The nightmare of the twenty-first is just beginning.