Grand Hotel Abyss

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”

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.

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.

One sentence from Michiko Kakutani’s summary of the new DeLillo:

Lianne attends sessions of a writing workshop she runs with a group of Alzheimer’s patients.

Extremity is no guarantee, and this anyway is self-parody. Hang it up, Don. The future belongs to crowds.

Come now, surely this is hidden-camera comedy! This is Ashton Kutcher, not the world’s most prominent cultural critic! But no, it is Slavoj himself:

Zack Snyder’s 300, the saga of the 300 Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopilae in halting the invasion of Xerxes’ Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq - are, however, things really so clear? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations.

There are two points to be made; the first concerns the story itself - it is the story a small and poor country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much larges state (Persia), at that point much more developed, and with a much more developed military technology - are the Persian elephants, giants and large fire arrows not the ancient version of high-tech arms? When the last surviving group of the Spartans and their king Leonidas are killed by the thousands of arrows, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today’s US soldiers who push the rocket buttons from the warships safely away in the Persian Gulf? Furthermore, Xerxes’s words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire. All he asks from him is a formal gesture of kneeling down, of recognizing the Persian supremacy - if the Spartans do this, they will be given supreme authority over the entire Greece. Is this not the same as what President Reagan demanded from Nicaraguan Sandinista government? They should just say “Hey uncle!” to the US… And is Xerxes’s court not depicted as a kind of multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise? Everyone participates in orgies there, different races, lesbians and gays, cripples, etc.? Are, then, Spartans, with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice, not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion? The Greeks main arm against this overwhelming military supremacy is discipline and the spirit of sacrifice - and, to quote Alain Badiou: “We need a popular discipline. I would even say /…/ that ‘those who have nothing have only their discipline.’ The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power - all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization.” In today’s era of hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology, the time is coming for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “Fascist” about these values.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: whenever someone starts ranting about “hedonist permissivity,” run fast and far. My only objection to hedonist permissivity is that it implies a permission-granting authority. Anyway, this is the intellectual leader of the liberal-bourgeoisie-hating academic Far Left? Jesus Christ, even Lionel Trilling would have allowed a little hedonism to penetrate his liberal imagination. I guess Uncle Joe and Fidel both outlawed queers, which just goes to show you that even in the glorious and classless future we will still inhabit the cramped, repressed and seamy brains, such as they are, of Mr. and Mrs. Church-on-Sunday, god fucking help us all.

But by far the worst thing about this essay as a piece of cultural criticism is just how wrong it is. He seems literally not to understand how this movie, a grievously and mind-numbingly simplistic allegory, signifies in American culture. The American target audience for this film is, needless to say, not made up of the European social democrats against whom a figure like Alain Badiou typically polemicizes. Americans do not congratulate themselves on pluralism, pleasure, orgies, cynicism, lesbianism, tolerance of “cripples” (nice word there, Slavoj; it’s so radical to be anti-P.C.!).

In US internal propaganda, at least since the mid-’90s canonization of “the greatest generation,” the American people are the noble, self-sacrificing Spartans warring against an overweening global empire. The Persians in the film represent not only “Asiatic” despotism and luxury as in classic Orientalism, which is actually not a very active discourse nowadays, they mainly stand in the American popular imagination conjured up by the corporations for some nightmare Eurabian empire constituted by “Arab tyranny and violence” and “French excess and decadence.” In other words, Zizek agrees with the Christian right on what we should be afraid of, and proposes much the same solution, both of them quoting from Saint Paul in unison.

Cool if you like that sort of thing. (As a permissive hedonist, I would say that.) But you should know that it’s really very stupid.

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

Your thesis that these rage murders are effectively failed slave rebellions takes you back in your book to consider in some depth the circumstances of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. At what point did the parallels start to dawn on you?

I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn’t exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the ’90s. No one in the “liberal” Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called “privatization” programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the ’90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would “have to die off” before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia.

Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil. Later I looked at the details of these American rage murders — they were all similar, mostly normal Middle Americans attacking seemingly “at random.” If they weren’t psychopaths, which they aren’t, then that meant their attacks were very deliberate, that they were attacking something as a response. That’s when I decided that it was the culture which was viewing the murders “at random,” the culture which refused to see the purpose.

I simply assumed, from experience in Russia, and from looking at modern rage rebellions, that early slave rebellions would be completely misunderstood in their day as random acts of crazed evil just as modern “rage rebellions” are, and from the evidence I uncovered, it seems they were.

How much blame do you place on Reaganomics for the changes in the workplace that you argue lead to rage attacks?

Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America’s Heart of Vileness — its penchant for hating people who didn’t get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

—interview with Mark Ames

Mind now what the therapists and cops on television say now: keep your eye on your neighbor. If he’s acting funny, you’d better tell a teacher, parent, coach or cop. Always be ready to tell a cop. Keep your eyes open. Your neighbors are nuts. You need protection. You need a king, a priest and a corporation to keep the hordes off your doorstep. What’s that? You think we’d all be a lot less crazy if the king and the priest and the corporation just left us the fuck alone? Ah, but this is the first sign of pathology. Don’t you know? You’re all sick. You had better just keep your head down and work hard and try not to think about it. We will protect you. You are the barbarians mired in earth and we are the civilizers from Planet X. On your knees!

And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilization, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated “the root of diversity.” No more dikes, no more bulwarks. The hour of the barbarians is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

The other day Alexander Cockburn was on C-Span 2’s three-hour interview show In Depth. (Watch it here.) I have my complaints about Cockburn—it seems to me that Counterpunch has veered dangerously into the territory of anti-semitism over the last few years by publishing the writings of “anti-war” conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts, Ray McGovern, Bill and Kathleen Christison and other such people who believe not that capitalism is exploiting and oppressing the majority of people in the world, but that the United States is a fundamentally good country betrayed into evil by a minority of rootless-cosmo types who exercise their power through something called “the Jewish lobby.” It used to be understood on the left that anti-semitism was the socialism of fools, and too that the socialism of fools is usually fascism waiting to happen. I don’t see why Cockburn fails to understand this, especially at a time when the right-wing is so free with the usually spurious charge of anti-semitism, directed against anyone who dares to call apartheid and ethnic cleansing by their right names when those crimes are committed—as they are every day—by the Israeli government, and excused every day in the country sponsoring these atrocities.

But anyway, I like Cockburn very much as a writer and as a personality. Everybody should get themselves a copy of his great published journal, The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994. Whether he’s inveighing against Gorbachev’s reforms, Clinton’s capitulations or Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theories, he’s always fun, and occasionally moving, as when he mourns the death of his mother and of the Soviet Union. A great book.

About an hour into the show, they showed Cockburn on his farm out in Petrolia, California, talking to his horses and his dog. He wore a large-brimmed black hat with a feather in it and gave the cameras a tour of the different buildings and cars on his property. In his office, he chattered to his dog. It was so strange and refreshing to see a real human being on television. A human being is in this case someone who is indifferent to how he might appear on television, unlike the “reality” human beings with which television is now chiefly concerned. It almost makes me feel churlish for pointing out Cockburn’s obvious flaws, as I have above. Such fault-mongering perhaps bespeaks that very desire for (a suitably ironic) purity of heart and intention that television provokes and gratifies.

After their little tour of Cockburn’s property, they listed his favorite writers. I scribbled down the list out of curiosity. Here it is:

Marcel Proust
Stendhal
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
Thomas Love Peacock
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce
Flann O’Brien
Theodor Adorno
H.J. Massingham
Edward Abbey
Ezra Pound
Jean-Paul Sartre
P.G. Wodehouse

That’s a pretty good list, even if it is all white dudes. It’s got variety of mood, mode and affect, and balances a respect for the old canon with an endearing quirkiness (I had to look up Massingham) and even local color (O’Brien and Joyce representing Cockburn’s native Ireland, Adorno and Sartre representing the political left). It’s even got one of my particular favorites on it—Stendhal. You might think me insane for copying this down and commenting on it, but the truth is that I love lists like this—people’s favorite books, movies, albums, writers, etc. These cultural monuments have colors and tones about them, and to see one person’s individual list of cherished items is to see a composite of the colors and tones that make up that nebulous thing called a self. I also like lists in general—what can I say, I was born in postmodern conditions.

Some literary critic once said that the greatest list in all of literature was Miss Flite’s list of the names of her birds in Bleak House:

Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

Could be. I was reading something recently and found a list that gave that a run for its money, but now I can’t remember what the list was or what book it was in. Tristram Shandy perhaps, in which case I’ll probably never find it again.

Anyway, what the hell’s my point? I don’t know, something about variety, humor, complexity, a little self-implicating irony. Cormac McCarthy is now famous, having been plucked like an impoverished South African adolescent from obscurity and granted the imprimatur of Oprah, pope of the New Age Church of Global Corporate Stalinism. But I wax furious about the world and I meant only to complain about Mr. McCarthy, a writer of aggressive fatuities on the awful meaninglessness of it all. I base this, I grant, only a reading of one half of one of his books, the celebrated Blood Meridian. I did read that first half twice, though, in deference to McCarthy’s pre-fame adulation by the literary in-crowd (Harold Bloom, etc.), but I was twice repelled by a discomfort brought on by alternating spasms of laughter and drowsiness.

McCarthy writes like H. P. Lovecraft and on some of the same themes, but without Lovecraft’s redeeming schlock. Lovecraft, despite his haunted personal life and occasionally grotesque personal views, never stoops to somnolence. His excesses have always seemed salutary to me, a little jab in the ribs to say, “Hey, fellow white dude, we’re working through some unhealthy fantasies here, but don’t fall too deep into it.” McCarthy has fallen too deep into it, and it’s turned out to be all the pretty horseshit. Various bloggers have been commenting on the first paragraph of his Oprah-selected novel The Road. It goes like this:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Now I won’t bitch about the commalessness, because I have no a priori objection to such a defamiliarizing device. James Joyce used it, Gertrude Stein used it. McCarthy might well have done us the favor to be as amusing as Joyce and Stein, but I grant him his right to chuck the commas. I draw the line at over-emotional adjectives though: “precious breaths”?—is this a poem by Jewel? And “dark beyond darkness,” well, those are just words. How about “the inward parts of some granitic beast”? Which parts? Can one be in outward parts? And what fable features pilgrims and rock-monsters? And is a rock-monster-swallowed pilgrim’s biggest problem that he or she is lost? Finally, bypassing the affectedly affected diction (“room where lay…a lake”), those “eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders” have taken us right out of the realm of serious consideration. We might indeed be in an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I know that novels, being the privileged artform of the era of land enclosure, commons privatization and the creation of domestic space, are meant to be read silently, but I’ve always thought that a writer ought to try his lines aloud to make sure they’re presentable. One really must read McCarthy aloud! As Harrison Ford told George Lucas, “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it.” The fame of McCarthy will, I believe, go down in the annals of American credulity—not so funny when you consider that antiquarians will behold McCarthy issuing his tough-guy messages about the rottenness of human nature in an era of extraordinary political and social reaction.

So I will just have to take the part of unusual radicals who talk to dogs and admire a bewildering variety of literary possibilities. Oprah can keep her turgid chronicler of the wasteland that Africa and increasingly America are becoming under not some gothic primordial curse but under the very real reign of the wealthy that she represents. You have to laugh.

I must confess that there’s one inflammatory word that I would like to reclaim from the right-wing.

Ecofascism. No joke.

I saw in the library this book called Endgame, Volume I by an environmentalist named Derrick Jensen. Jensen was generous enough to include a list of premises at the front of his book. If only all writers were this considerate, one would have to read fewer books of opinion. For if the premises are foolish or false, why read the rest?

Anyway, Jensen is of the (old) opinion that “civilization” is to blame for all the ills of the world, and that it must go, and most of us with it. This, while a couple thousand people die each day not from an excess of civilization, but rather from a viciously unequal distribution of its fruits. Do you know why U.N. “peacekeeping” forces are murdering Haitians? Not because the Haitians—who voted in large majorities for the basically social democratic government of forcibly-exiled Jean-Bertrand Aristide—want to opt out of civilization, but because the Haitians want to participate in civilization on equal terms. And more power to them. When ecofascists like Jensen criticize “civilization,” they advertise for the world according to neoliberalism. Hospitals? Medicine? Universities? Water treatment plants? You don’t want them. Better off without them. It’s a more authentic life, you know!

Goes back to Rousseau, of course. Recently, I read Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise in the newest translation, a volume published by a university press and filled up with scholarly treats. The notes in the back of the book did us the favor of tracking Rousseau’s debates with Voltaire. I am not an uncritical admirer of Voltaire, and will say something about him in a future post, but in all of these debates, I was with Voltaire against Rousseau—even when Voltaire was taking what would look to us like a right-wing position.

Rousseau, it seems, thought it was morally improving to have beggars around, lest the rich get too full of themselves and disconnected from the charitable impulse. Voltaire balked at this. It’s quite disgusting, he said, to have beggars around, and he would like to see them banned from the city centers.

I grant that, at first glance, Rousseau’s position looks like the more humane one. However, can one not perceive in his view of the poor a disguised master-morality that has no trouble consigning people to poverty because poverty is picturesque and in the nature of things and edifying for the (obviously non-poor) spectator? Voltaire’s moral failing was to recoil from the poor, but he was in no way wrong to recoil from poverty. To find poverty a repugnant condition that must be eliminated—this is the beginning of a progressive politics.

Primitivists have nothing to do with progressive politics. They are reactionary absolutists who would return humanity to a condition in which people are eaten by bears and women regularly die in childbirth. Their dirty little secret is that they dislike their fellow human beings. Here is the ninth of Jensen’s hideous premises:

Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

All I can say to that is, “Come and get me, motherfucker.” Advertising for the grand die-off of surplus peoples—think he’s working for the World Bank? This is Jensen’s premise; maybe I should read the book, but I can see no conclusion for it to lead to other than Ayn Rand’s: the best thing we can do for a starving man is let him starve.

Right, I know he said that the problem is the movement of resources from rich to poor. But who does he think is going to die if we bring civilization down? That is, if we blow up the factories and the parliaments rather than putting the people in charge of them? No, Jensen won’t have that. Whenever he hears the word “civilization,” he reaches for his gun.

I think we’ve all read this book before.

Three quotations. The last two are journal articles only accessible online through academic servers. If you have no way of getting to them, leave a comment and I’ll pirate them for you—but you must never tell!

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality?

—Mahmood Mamdami, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”

I shall hazard a prognosis: why else should anyone be concerned with the reasons people have for getting involved with the most far-going criminality? The risk that this prediction might turn out to be wrong is not so high—in fact, not high at all. The NATO-West union will not cease its bombing until every last crucial godforsaken under- or anti-developed little corner of the rest of the world of human cockroaches has been tarred with democratization, human rights, and free-market ideology. Or, to make an additional prediction: one of these corners, an opposition fundamentalist one, will have gotten it together for a big-time response, such as the launching of an A-bomb or of one of its biotechnical supplements bought on the well-stocked global consumer supermarket, and thus finally will have extinguished something larger to an exponential degree than the real-symbolic twin democrats of Lower Manhattan’s grid.

Against all too many human rights imports only the God-link promises relief. This is no longer prognosis, but simply a description of the means for communication among the total idiots of all countries…Christians…Islamists…Human Rightists…all of them of the same gene pool, namely, the militarist-economist-masculinist- transcendental…who have not yet assimilated the most fundamental doctrine of civilization: that taking the life of others is simply not done…and furthermore that you don’t go for the other’s throat…or instigate such things…with anyone, anywhere.

—Klaus Theweleit, “Playstation Cordoba, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan”

What is occurring in Darfur may very well be initially indexed with Achille Mbembe’s neologism necropolitics, where the authority to kill is distributed throughout civil society and no longer the exclusive prerogative of the state. The advent of necropolitics may very well indicate a transformation in civil society itself that entails the wholesale abandoment of all modalities of persuasion (whether reasoned argument or political parties and their instruments for securing lasting majorities) in favor of brutal coercion. Some might even regard this situation to indicate the corruption of civil society, brought about by the preemption of any intellectual formation other than that of the state. Of course, it is not at all established that the absolute preemption of independent intellectual initiative among the masses has been accomplished yet. To the extent that the systematic analysis of situations as Darfur can somehow generate an adequate understanding of necropolitics, however what has been accomplished is the creation of a societal arrangement in which thinking divorced from corporate blocs is rendered extraordinarily rare. There are other relatively well-known situations akin to that of Darfur—Egypt and Algeria, for instance—where thinking in this way is fatal. In such situations of violence, that class of individuals whose formation and social function has been to perpetuate the inistitutions and modes of persuasion—and what this refers to are the intellectual traditions of modernity, particularly those of secular humanism—is among those populations that are constituted in disposal. In this context, the production, or facilitation, of the emergence of humans can no longer be seriously conceived of as the inevitable consequences of the forces of historical change—this was precisely the point behind the coining [in Argentina] of población chatarra, that neoliberalism has completely rendered the Hegelian account of human development, even in its Marxian adjustment, beside the point. Harir’s [a Sudanese intellectual who went on to advise the Sudan Liberation Army] eventual embrace, no matter how tentative, of the very racialism he set out to oppose is a cautionary tale. His formation as an intellectual, or rather a dominant tendency of that formation, tends toward a way of thinking about societal organization that presumes the agency of world making as an inalienable aspect of the species. In this way of thinking, the historical world is what humans make, and that capacity is absolutely universal in the species. This sense of species history is one of the essential steps toward a materialist account of historical general intelligence. What is learned from the Sudan crisis is that this consciousness is still quite vulnerable before the onslaught of the ancient force of ethnographic dogma, which presumes the only viable social function of the intellectual is either as an apologist for raciology or an advocate for some form of theodicy. In the face of what may very well be the extermination of the intellectual as the embodiment of humanism, the challenge is to try seriously and rigorously to take up the question, Who could act for the human in these circumstances and how?

—Ronald AT. Judy, “Provisional Note on Formations of Planetary Violence”