It is incredibly depressing to realise that I have been asking the rulers of the state I live in to refrain from bombing Iraq for my entire fucking life.
There's an extent to which the 'it won't work' critique is entirely
valid as an objection to waging yet more war upon the Middle East.
Because the surface aim of the politicians is almost certainly to impose
'stability' on 'the region'. They like stability. No threats to
embarass them, no revolts to topple their friendly dictators, no threat
to Israel, no danger to neoliberal exploitation of local resources and
markets, etc. And, as has been shown, it doesn't work. They try and
try to bomb the Middle East into passive compliance, and all they
succeed in doing is generating more troubles for their empire.
This is,
of course, what empires have always done. Create the problems of
tomorrow by viciously conquering the problems of today.
But there's
another sense in which the 'it won't work' argument is fatally flawed,
because there's a sense in which it does work. It may never achieve
'stability' but it does keep the machinery of empire chugging, and the
fuel of empire flowing. Because the fuel of empire is as much war
itself as the resources extracted via war. The neverending war keeps
the military-industrial complex in work, the contracts coming, the
factories producing, etc. It keeps the corporate media busy and happy,
reporting yet more incomprehensible strife from 'over there' and 'our'
attempts to make things better. It keeps the endless circular debate
about intervention circling (the system can tolerate a tortuous and
muddled debate, what it doesn't want is clarity). It keeps the public
money flowing into the vast state run apparatus of military spending,
and into all the R&D that is done under the aegis of this and then handed
over (free) to private enterprise. It keeps the empire's power and
prestige in the ascendant, with the machinery of death inspiring the
fear - and projecting the apparent invincibility - that every empire needs.
No, the war never 'works' in the sense of achieving a stable imperium,
but it does 'work' - at least in the short term - in achieving a
powerful empire. One of the paradoxes of empire is that its power relies upon it never being stable. So even when the bombing doesn't work, it actually does.
Meanwhile, of course, people die. And die and die and die.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label humanitarian intervention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanitarian intervention. Show all posts
Friday, 26 September 2014
Tuesday, 15 July 2014
Force Decides
Israel
is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza. As they do from time
to time. To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an
opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. Though even that is too
kind to them. As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the
Israelis don't want peace. Give them everything they've ever wanted,
and it still isn't enough - because what they say they want isn't what they
want. What they really want is to continue the war until they have
finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and
eradicated the Palestinians. The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and
becoming more openly so by the day.
It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy. The idea is so commonplace it's become a sentimental truism in pop-culture. Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn't do in the process of getting where it is today. Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire. Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself. Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory. Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations. And so on. And yet the obvious - that 'what happened' to the Native Americans was terrible - doesn't seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you're talking about the Palestinians. People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it - rightly - in the context of the Native American's fight against territorial displacement and dispossession. Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp. Context be damned.
Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people - the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power. The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted - with a sigh and a tear - by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies. Sometimes 'we' are even allowed to be the baddies - as long as it was a long time ago, and we're all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today. We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.
Generally speaking, I'm very much against killing people. Why? Well, aside from the fact that it simply doesn't appeal to me, I'd be tempted to invoke a somewhat traditional ethical idea going back to Aristotle, which is that morality is about the good and enjoyable and fulfilling life... with the added Socialist wrinkle that everyone should have such a life, and no good life that is dependant upon the curtailment of the lives of others is ultimately justifiable, because the fundamentally social nature of humanity means that the more socially involved we are, the better. Killing someone is pretty much the ultimate way of curtailing their potential for development, self-creation, enjoyment, and the leading of a good life... which is, by definition, a social life, in society, in which one's contact with others helps them to also lead such a 'good life'. We end up at the basic question: why is 'good' good? And we might get somewhere by re-framing the question slightly, making it: why do we want 'happiness'? And, while I don't pretend that it's a perfect answer, we can probably fall back on a tautology (sometimes tautologies are allowed, via a materialist version of the ontological argument): 'happiness' is what we call that state of being that humans seek.
However, occupied and tyrannised people - like people who are refugees inside the tiny bits of their own country left to them, held under constant siege inside a massive concentration camp, subject to racist laws and persecutions, economically subjugated and constantly harassed, and periodically massacred - have the right to organise their own defence. Not that many of the rockets do much damage in Israel, certainly when compared to the wholesale slaughter and destruction rained down on Gaza. Israel, you see, has some pretty effective warning and defence systems against the rockets (unlike people in Gaza), partly owing to that pesky $3 Billion of 'aid' the Americans send them every year, despite the fact that they are an Apartheid state in clear breach of international law.
Ah yes, international law.
Bourgeois morality rests upon the polar twins of consequentialism and universalism, waxing and waning, and combining. At the crudest level, consequentialism is invoked when we need to justify something horrible; universalism when we want to condemn the evil of those we are attacking. China Mieville, in his work of theory Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, has adapted the ideas of the Bolshevik legal theorist Pashukanis and various postmodern writers. For Mieville, international law is a never-ending oscillation between consequentialist and universalist arguments (Mieville adapts the categories of 'Apology' and 'Utopia' developed by Koskenniemi), with imperial force always lurking in the background as a way of enforcing whichever kind of politico-legal-ethical argument is currently being employed. This gets at something built-in to bourgeois morality, in all its legalistic nebulousness. Such principles - consequentialist or universalist - tend to get cloaked either in mystical obscurantism, or somewhat impoverished (i.e. market-based) notions of 'rights', or universal 'maxims' (whether encoded as 'categorical imperatives' or whatnot) that are not really all that universal. The bourgeois revolutions undoubtedly had their virtues (or should that be 'Virtue'?), but their ethics tended to be universal in letter rather than in spirit, and consequentialist to the extent of considering the consequences for national bourgeois class formations.
Even so, bourgeois civilisation has offered some laudable moral insights and principles, and certainly improved - if only at a rhetorical level - upon the morality of, say, the Roman Empire, or the automatically inherited dictatorship of certain inbred families. As Terry Eagleton has observed (following Benjamin), the task of the historical materialist is always to ask, again and again, "with a kind of faux naïveté" why such laudable bourgeois ethical ideals must seemingly always be deferred, compromised and betrayed, why bourgeois civilisation can never make good on them in practice. Bourgeois morality, we might puckishly suggest, is always very nice in theory but can't work in practice because of... well, we wouldn't want to say (following the high-handed transhistoricalism of the parrot-talking anti-communist) because of 'human nature'. We'd want to suggest that there is something in the very structure of bourgeois civilisation that generates universalising ethical ideals that can never be met, precisely because of that same structure.
As Marx pointed out, it is the nature of the bourgeois mode of production that it must always be based upon exploitation (directly or indirectly coerced wage labour, extraction of surplus value... and he's clear that this is wrong, even if - as Norman Geras observed - he doesn't always know that he is), and thus the curtailment of freedom for the many.
But, as an initially revolutionary movement overthrowing older forms of class society, the bourgeois revolutions depend upon offering freedom as an achievable goal, and even - so to speak - believing this promise itself. This is a perennial feature, but we see it begun and demonstrated perhaps most dramatically at those moments of bourgeois revolution, when the rising middle class enlists the much-needed numbers, sinew, passion, energy, grievance and courage of the poor and the peasantry, and does this by espousing the great universalising bourgeois promises of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité. (As I say, we might puckishly want to add Naïveté to that list.) Or when they declare "all men are created equal", very much meaning the 'men' and very much not meaning the 'all'.
This is an interesting issue in itself. The contradictions - and the attempts to resolve the contradictions - give rise, dialectically, to new material and ideological forces. Modern biological racism, for example, is partly a response to the fact that the bourgeois revolution in America rested upon both universalising promises (i.e. the Declaration of Independence, etc) and upon slavery. The inescapable, in-born, auto-segregating factor of skin colour can be used - when integrated into a new theory: modern racism - as a 'get out clause', a codicil of the promises of the new society. Pre-bourgeois societies in which slavery obtains - pre-C20th Tsarist Russia, for instance - don't need to explain why some are serfs and some are not. That's just the way it is. There's no document, signed by people who extol 'Liberty', which says "all men are created equal". So there is no need to wriggle off that hook. The hook simply isn't there.
And here we see the fundamental nature of bourgeois morality. It is self-righteous and self-exclupatory. And it is based on the assertion of power and, ultimately, force. This is the wider meaning of Marx's comment (adapted for the title of Mieville's book) that "between equal rights, force decides". Marx isn't offering that as a 'maxim', but as a critique.
Marx saw - even if he never developed this in a book of his own called Ethics, the way proper philosophers are supposed to do - that the constant oscillation in bourgeois morality between universal mysticism and pragmatic consequentialism is directly bound up with the nature of the system. It relies upon relative freedom for the majority, because the freedom of the boss to hire and fire is the flip side of the worker's relative freedom to buy, move, pursue a career, seek higher wages elsewhere, etc... so a universal declaration of rights is always useful. At the start, it helps to define emergent bourgeois culture in opposition to feudalism, to rally the support of the masses to the libertarian cause of the new middle classes, to open society for job markets and commodity markets, etc. At the same time, real human freedom is limited by the bourgeois conception of liberty as being the liberty to enjoy ones 'rights' in the market of life, by the conjuring trick that allows bourgeois culture to pretend that it has few enforced relations between people by relying upon the enforced relations between people and property (which is actually a social relation between people). This is why the whole idea of 'universal human rights', while undoubtedly a great improvement on previous ways of looking at life and worth defending on its own terms, nevertheless seems designed to limit the idea of freedom. Similarly, the corrective consequentialism comes in to limit the scope of such universal principles within the bounds of brutal pragmatism and 'realpolitik'. It must happen that way, because the actual consequences of the bourgeois ideas of inborn freedom (and natural rights and universal liberty, etc...) would, if actually and sincerely pursued to their logical conclusions, make the oppression built into capitalism untenable. If you really believe the declarations of universal liberty, it becomes hard not only to justify owning people with different coloured skin and using them as farm machinery, but also to justify forcing huge numbers of people to work for the profit of others, or to justify the unpaid domestic labour of women, the nature of education as preparation for the job market, the exploitation of less-developed economies for the benefit of imperialist powers, homelessness, unemployment, and sundry other moral obscenities that bourgeois civilisation rests upon as normal, everyday practice.
The oscillating employment of universal and consequentialist justifications is not rigid, even or schematic. The forms of argumentation (or should I say, of ideology) are not mutually exclusive. Ideology simply doesn't need to make sense, as long as it seems to be sense. You get the two styles blended, or employed simultaneously by the same - or different - people, ignoring the fact that they clash. Or you will get one bourgeois employing a universalist argument against another bourgeois who wields a consequentialist one, or vice versa. Or one issue gets argued about, or agreed upon, using different versions of one type of argument, or two types, or whatever. An Abolitionist might condemn slavery on the universal grounds that the slave "is a man and a brother" (negating the existence of the female slaves, by the way) against an upholder of slavery who offers a consequentialist argument, i.e. "if we free them, the slaves will slaughter us in our beds". Or an Abolitionist might employ a consequentialist argument - "if we don't free them, they will slaughter us in our beds" - against a proponent who offers the universal word of the Bible, in which God explicitly tolerates the keeping of slaves. The rise of biological racism offers a fusion of the two styles. The idea that black people are inherently 'inferior' can be seen as universalist, because it is ostensibly based on eternal and fixed patterns of human nature. But it can be developed in a consequentialist way, via the claim that because the black people are incapable of anything much besides labouring for their white superiors, to free them would thus be to condemn them to useless starvation... which would, of course, be terribly wrong. This is an argument still to be occasionally heard today in new inflections (c.f. Fox News' hero Cliven Bundy and his views on "the negro" having been ruined by being taken out of the cotton fields and given welfare dependency as a substitute).
The same argument was the ideological basis for colonialism because it supplied a rationale that was brutally pragmatic and realistic, while also seeming to be attenuatedly altruistic. We all know the contours of the argument. "Give them independence and they'll starve out of sheer stupidity," says the Marshal of Solos. It's basically a rearguard re-tooling of the argument from the start of the colonial project, that the 'natives' are not entitled to their own lands and resources because they're not able to make proper use of them. You can give this a universalist spin in various ways - i.e. "they're inherently inferior" and the related claim that "the superior have the right to dominate the inferior" - alongside the basically consequentialist argument - i.e. "if we don't step in, loads of land and resources will go to waste". (You can "make the desert bloom" for instance.) Or you can modify the basis of the argument using a consequentialist logic of stages, development and progress. "We happen to be more advanced than them..." (whatever that means coming from colonialists and conquerors) "...so it's our duty to teach them and help them, and bring them civilisation". The boons you supposedly bring can be consequentialist - i.e. "trade, technology, a better life" etc - or universalist - i.e. Christianity, or whatever. Pretty much all these arguments have been used against the Palestinians at one time or another, by the way.
You see the point? The merry-go-round goes on and on, with infinitely possible permutations. Every developing need of bourgeois civilisation can be met by some ingenious fusion or opposition of these two obliging moral styles. That's the whole point: that the merry-go-round need never end. There will always be a moral point to debate, a moral claim to evaluate, a justification to ponder. Debate can be eternally contained and assimilated. Meanwhile, nobody ever has to admit that they're doing anything wrong. There is always a point-of-view. It works like international law - or like bourgeois law in general - in Mieville's conception. The debate never ends. It isn't supposed to. The process of constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the law is an industry in itself. And the basis of legality is the idea of the market actors debating their competing 'rights'... until, of course, between equal rights, force decides.
We're often told that terrorism is a weapon of the powerless. Actually, as Chomsky has said, most terrorism is perpetrated by the powerful, as long as we don't two-facedly redefine terrorism to mean something other than 'violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political objective'. By that definition, Israel's actions in Gaza are clearly terrorism, which makes the United States into the aiders and abetters of a 'rogue state'... if not a 'rogue state' itself... though I dislike the term 'rogue state' because it implies an otherwise hunkydory international order from which a state deviates. But that old oscillation of universalist and consequentialist moralising can be brought into play. Israel (an explicitly racist state) is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (never mind the Apartheid). Israel must defend itself. In Gaza, civilians supposedly have rockets in their bomb shelters. And so on.
The problem isn't that there are no universally applicable moral principles. I think there probably are, as long as we limit 'universal' to mean something like 'transhistorical to human cultures'. I'm not personally one to discount that, though we have to be very careful about what we identify as transhistorical or universal. Neither is the problem that there are no good arguments to be made about morality based on consequences. Of course there are. Trotsky said "the ends can justify the means as long as something justifies the ends". Nor is the problem even that you can't mix the two. You can. The universal right to resist occupation (formally recognised by the UN) presumably entails consequentialist justifications for violent acts in the cause of liberation. And the idea that liberation is an inherently good thing may trace back to one of those permissible transhistorical principles. Freedom from exterior domination is a pre-requisite for any society to allow all its citizens to achieve the 'good life'... even if that doesn't always follow from such freedom. The problem is that bourgeois civilisation rests upon either mystical ideas of the universal or employs the most cynical form of brutally pragmatic consequentialism. Universal arguments become so decoupled from society that they can be mustered for either side by appeal to mystical entities. Consequentialist arguments can be mustered by either side too, with 'good' defined by the needs of whichever powerful person is currently speaking, and with the violent force of nation states always lurking in the background, ready to decide the issue. The UN recognises the universal right to resistance, and the impermissability of acquiring territory by war, and then permits Israel to go about its nasty business for decades, while states such as Iraq or Iran get held to more urgent account because of the priorities of the United States. The problem crystallises in that phrase: 'humanitarian intervention'. A perfect illustration of the cynical, opportunistic marrying of spurious universal and consequentialist arguments, ultimately nullified by the priorities of Empire, and the brute reality of imperial force
The moral question of intervention in Iraq was 'settled' by force. The universalists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "we have a moral duty to help the Iraqis!" vs. "it's wrong and illegal to invade without provocation!" - and the consequentialists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "it'll be good for the Middle East!" vs. "it'll be bad for the Middle East... and for us!". Pretty much the only people saying anything like "Iraqis should be given the chance to free themselves and create their own new society!" were the far Left. Of course, the turn of history made mincemeat of such hopes, though the Arab Spring showed the essential correctness of the argument... But, of course, as we know, that all went wrong too. But why? Because imperial force was allowed to decide. In Egypt, a popular rebellion ended the decade-long tyranny of a US-backed dictator... until a US-backed coup overthrew the resulting new government, instituted a junta, and started executing people wholesale. A familiar story to anyone who knows the history of American foreign policy.
This is an important issue because the key to the fate of Palestine lies in the working class of Egypt, the largest (and most recently radicalised) working class in the Middle East. The military junta in Egypt has redoubled the siege of Gaza by re-tightening the border - a border the Egyptian revolution threatened to weaken, thus weakening Israeli control over the besieged Palestinians, and thus also American-imposed 'stability' in the whole Middle East. As I write this it is being reported that Egypt is trying to broker a peace deal or ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has supposedly 'rejected' the deal. As usual, the media reports within the ideologically-policed parameters of the thinkable. Apparently you can have a 'truce' or 'ceasefire' or 'deal' between a massively powerful military power and the hostages they're dropping bombs on. Quite apart from anything else, the 'deal' being offered will inevitably mean nothing to the Palestinians beyond 'more of the same'. The deal will allow the Israelis to step back a bit (thus hopefully allowing the protests - which make them look bad - to die down). Hideous normality will resume. They can carry on attacking the Palestinians a bit, keep on holding the population of Gaza hostage and under siege, keep on with the Apartheid, keep on with the blockade, keep on with the economic subjugation, keep on with the relentless theft of land for new Jewish 'settlers', keep on with the control of water, keep on with the relentless and humiliating inspections at checkpoints, keep on arresting people for protest... etc etc etc. The 'deal', as far as the Palestinians are concerned, will just mean 'more of the same'. It always does. It will mean ' back to how things were last week... apart from the hundreds of us that are now dead, or bereaved, or maimed'. It always does.
And the consequentialists and universalists on both sides can go back to the debate.
Meanwhile, the only thing that will ever break this endless, genocidal situation will be the resistance that the Palestinians are condemned and demonised for ever daring to show... joined by the organised, militant resistance of millions of workers all across the Middle East. We saw it start in Egypt, and get suppressed. We saw it start in Libya, and the 'humanitarian interventionists' of NATO jumped in to co-opt and control it (odd how we never hear the humanitarians advocating NATO airstrikes on Tel Aviv on the grounds that "we've got to do something!!!").
It will, ultimately, come down to force. The force of resistance. We in the imperialist countries need to actively work to prevent our rulers from intervening. A decade of protest, activism and agitation led to widespread public anti-war sentiment that finally penetrated the Commons to the point where that vote about intervening in Syria was defeated. We forced them to back down. (This, incidentally, is why we have to fight through these centenary years to stop the Tories rewriting the history of World War I until it becomes a narrative of patriotic glory and heroism in the name of a noble cause. If many of us have failed to see the ideological utility of such a rewrite, the staunchly neo-con Tories certainly haven't. The connection is more then just general. WWI was partly an imperialist scramble for the Middle East.) One of the reasons Israel wants to descale its most recent murderous attack is probably the worldwide protests, part of the growing public revulsion at their antics, visible despite the near-blackout in the mainstream (corporate) media. Combined with popular resistance in the Middle East, popular resistance in the West to empire and 'humanitarian intervention' will be key.
Force will decide, one way or another. But not, in the end, between equal rights. Because the desire of the many to lead good lives, uncurtailed, self-creating, happy, with the free development of each being a prerequisite for the free development of all (and vice versa) should trump the desire of the few to rule, plunder and kill.
ADDENDUM, 20/07/14: Far from backing down, Israel has since launched a ground assault on Gaza.
It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy. The idea is so commonplace it's become a sentimental truism in pop-culture. Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn't do in the process of getting where it is today. Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire. Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself. Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory. Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations. And so on. And yet the obvious - that 'what happened' to the Native Americans was terrible - doesn't seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you're talking about the Palestinians. People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it - rightly - in the context of the Native American's fight against territorial displacement and dispossession. Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp. Context be damned.
Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people - the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power. The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted - with a sigh and a tear - by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies. Sometimes 'we' are even allowed to be the baddies - as long as it was a long time ago, and we're all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today. We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.
Generally speaking, I'm very much against killing people. Why? Well, aside from the fact that it simply doesn't appeal to me, I'd be tempted to invoke a somewhat traditional ethical idea going back to Aristotle, which is that morality is about the good and enjoyable and fulfilling life... with the added Socialist wrinkle that everyone should have such a life, and no good life that is dependant upon the curtailment of the lives of others is ultimately justifiable, because the fundamentally social nature of humanity means that the more socially involved we are, the better. Killing someone is pretty much the ultimate way of curtailing their potential for development, self-creation, enjoyment, and the leading of a good life... which is, by definition, a social life, in society, in which one's contact with others helps them to also lead such a 'good life'. We end up at the basic question: why is 'good' good? And we might get somewhere by re-framing the question slightly, making it: why do we want 'happiness'? And, while I don't pretend that it's a perfect answer, we can probably fall back on a tautology (sometimes tautologies are allowed, via a materialist version of the ontological argument): 'happiness' is what we call that state of being that humans seek.
However, occupied and tyrannised people - like people who are refugees inside the tiny bits of their own country left to them, held under constant siege inside a massive concentration camp, subject to racist laws and persecutions, economically subjugated and constantly harassed, and periodically massacred - have the right to organise their own defence. Not that many of the rockets do much damage in Israel, certainly when compared to the wholesale slaughter and destruction rained down on Gaza. Israel, you see, has some pretty effective warning and defence systems against the rockets (unlike people in Gaza), partly owing to that pesky $3 Billion of 'aid' the Americans send them every year, despite the fact that they are an Apartheid state in clear breach of international law.
Ah yes, international law.
Bourgeois morality rests upon the polar twins of consequentialism and universalism, waxing and waning, and combining. At the crudest level, consequentialism is invoked when we need to justify something horrible; universalism when we want to condemn the evil of those we are attacking. China Mieville, in his work of theory Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, has adapted the ideas of the Bolshevik legal theorist Pashukanis and various postmodern writers. For Mieville, international law is a never-ending oscillation between consequentialist and universalist arguments (Mieville adapts the categories of 'Apology' and 'Utopia' developed by Koskenniemi), with imperial force always lurking in the background as a way of enforcing whichever kind of politico-legal-ethical argument is currently being employed. This gets at something built-in to bourgeois morality, in all its legalistic nebulousness. Such principles - consequentialist or universalist - tend to get cloaked either in mystical obscurantism, or somewhat impoverished (i.e. market-based) notions of 'rights', or universal 'maxims' (whether encoded as 'categorical imperatives' or whatnot) that are not really all that universal. The bourgeois revolutions undoubtedly had their virtues (or should that be 'Virtue'?), but their ethics tended to be universal in letter rather than in spirit, and consequentialist to the extent of considering the consequences for national bourgeois class formations.
Even so, bourgeois civilisation has offered some laudable moral insights and principles, and certainly improved - if only at a rhetorical level - upon the morality of, say, the Roman Empire, or the automatically inherited dictatorship of certain inbred families. As Terry Eagleton has observed (following Benjamin), the task of the historical materialist is always to ask, again and again, "with a kind of faux naïveté" why such laudable bourgeois ethical ideals must seemingly always be deferred, compromised and betrayed, why bourgeois civilisation can never make good on them in practice. Bourgeois morality, we might puckishly suggest, is always very nice in theory but can't work in practice because of... well, we wouldn't want to say (following the high-handed transhistoricalism of the parrot-talking anti-communist) because of 'human nature'. We'd want to suggest that there is something in the very structure of bourgeois civilisation that generates universalising ethical ideals that can never be met, precisely because of that same structure.
As Marx pointed out, it is the nature of the bourgeois mode of production that it must always be based upon exploitation (directly or indirectly coerced wage labour, extraction of surplus value... and he's clear that this is wrong, even if - as Norman Geras observed - he doesn't always know that he is), and thus the curtailment of freedom for the many.
But, as an initially revolutionary movement overthrowing older forms of class society, the bourgeois revolutions depend upon offering freedom as an achievable goal, and even - so to speak - believing this promise itself. This is a perennial feature, but we see it begun and demonstrated perhaps most dramatically at those moments of bourgeois revolution, when the rising middle class enlists the much-needed numbers, sinew, passion, energy, grievance and courage of the poor and the peasantry, and does this by espousing the great universalising bourgeois promises of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité. (As I say, we might puckishly want to add Naïveté to that list.) Or when they declare "all men are created equal", very much meaning the 'men' and very much not meaning the 'all'.
This is an interesting issue in itself. The contradictions - and the attempts to resolve the contradictions - give rise, dialectically, to new material and ideological forces. Modern biological racism, for example, is partly a response to the fact that the bourgeois revolution in America rested upon both universalising promises (i.e. the Declaration of Independence, etc) and upon slavery. The inescapable, in-born, auto-segregating factor of skin colour can be used - when integrated into a new theory: modern racism - as a 'get out clause', a codicil of the promises of the new society. Pre-bourgeois societies in which slavery obtains - pre-C20th Tsarist Russia, for instance - don't need to explain why some are serfs and some are not. That's just the way it is. There's no document, signed by people who extol 'Liberty', which says "all men are created equal". So there is no need to wriggle off that hook. The hook simply isn't there.
And here we see the fundamental nature of bourgeois morality. It is self-righteous and self-exclupatory. And it is based on the assertion of power and, ultimately, force. This is the wider meaning of Marx's comment (adapted for the title of Mieville's book) that "between equal rights, force decides". Marx isn't offering that as a 'maxim', but as a critique.
Marx saw - even if he never developed this in a book of his own called Ethics, the way proper philosophers are supposed to do - that the constant oscillation in bourgeois morality between universal mysticism and pragmatic consequentialism is directly bound up with the nature of the system. It relies upon relative freedom for the majority, because the freedom of the boss to hire and fire is the flip side of the worker's relative freedom to buy, move, pursue a career, seek higher wages elsewhere, etc... so a universal declaration of rights is always useful. At the start, it helps to define emergent bourgeois culture in opposition to feudalism, to rally the support of the masses to the libertarian cause of the new middle classes, to open society for job markets and commodity markets, etc. At the same time, real human freedom is limited by the bourgeois conception of liberty as being the liberty to enjoy ones 'rights' in the market of life, by the conjuring trick that allows bourgeois culture to pretend that it has few enforced relations between people by relying upon the enforced relations between people and property (which is actually a social relation between people). This is why the whole idea of 'universal human rights', while undoubtedly a great improvement on previous ways of looking at life and worth defending on its own terms, nevertheless seems designed to limit the idea of freedom. Similarly, the corrective consequentialism comes in to limit the scope of such universal principles within the bounds of brutal pragmatism and 'realpolitik'. It must happen that way, because the actual consequences of the bourgeois ideas of inborn freedom (and natural rights and universal liberty, etc...) would, if actually and sincerely pursued to their logical conclusions, make the oppression built into capitalism untenable. If you really believe the declarations of universal liberty, it becomes hard not only to justify owning people with different coloured skin and using them as farm machinery, but also to justify forcing huge numbers of people to work for the profit of others, or to justify the unpaid domestic labour of women, the nature of education as preparation for the job market, the exploitation of less-developed economies for the benefit of imperialist powers, homelessness, unemployment, and sundry other moral obscenities that bourgeois civilisation rests upon as normal, everyday practice.
The oscillating employment of universal and consequentialist justifications is not rigid, even or schematic. The forms of argumentation (or should I say, of ideology) are not mutually exclusive. Ideology simply doesn't need to make sense, as long as it seems to be sense. You get the two styles blended, or employed simultaneously by the same - or different - people, ignoring the fact that they clash. Or you will get one bourgeois employing a universalist argument against another bourgeois who wields a consequentialist one, or vice versa. Or one issue gets argued about, or agreed upon, using different versions of one type of argument, or two types, or whatever. An Abolitionist might condemn slavery on the universal grounds that the slave "is a man and a brother" (negating the existence of the female slaves, by the way) against an upholder of slavery who offers a consequentialist argument, i.e. "if we free them, the slaves will slaughter us in our beds". Or an Abolitionist might employ a consequentialist argument - "if we don't free them, they will slaughter us in our beds" - against a proponent who offers the universal word of the Bible, in which God explicitly tolerates the keeping of slaves. The rise of biological racism offers a fusion of the two styles. The idea that black people are inherently 'inferior' can be seen as universalist, because it is ostensibly based on eternal and fixed patterns of human nature. But it can be developed in a consequentialist way, via the claim that because the black people are incapable of anything much besides labouring for their white superiors, to free them would thus be to condemn them to useless starvation... which would, of course, be terribly wrong. This is an argument still to be occasionally heard today in new inflections (c.f. Fox News' hero Cliven Bundy and his views on "the negro" having been ruined by being taken out of the cotton fields and given welfare dependency as a substitute).
The same argument was the ideological basis for colonialism because it supplied a rationale that was brutally pragmatic and realistic, while also seeming to be attenuatedly altruistic. We all know the contours of the argument. "Give them independence and they'll starve out of sheer stupidity," says the Marshal of Solos. It's basically a rearguard re-tooling of the argument from the start of the colonial project, that the 'natives' are not entitled to their own lands and resources because they're not able to make proper use of them. You can give this a universalist spin in various ways - i.e. "they're inherently inferior" and the related claim that "the superior have the right to dominate the inferior" - alongside the basically consequentialist argument - i.e. "if we don't step in, loads of land and resources will go to waste". (You can "make the desert bloom" for instance.) Or you can modify the basis of the argument using a consequentialist logic of stages, development and progress. "We happen to be more advanced than them..." (whatever that means coming from colonialists and conquerors) "...so it's our duty to teach them and help them, and bring them civilisation". The boons you supposedly bring can be consequentialist - i.e. "trade, technology, a better life" etc - or universalist - i.e. Christianity, or whatever. Pretty much all these arguments have been used against the Palestinians at one time or another, by the way.
You see the point? The merry-go-round goes on and on, with infinitely possible permutations. Every developing need of bourgeois civilisation can be met by some ingenious fusion or opposition of these two obliging moral styles. That's the whole point: that the merry-go-round need never end. There will always be a moral point to debate, a moral claim to evaluate, a justification to ponder. Debate can be eternally contained and assimilated. Meanwhile, nobody ever has to admit that they're doing anything wrong. There is always a point-of-view. It works like international law - or like bourgeois law in general - in Mieville's conception. The debate never ends. It isn't supposed to. The process of constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the law is an industry in itself. And the basis of legality is the idea of the market actors debating their competing 'rights'... until, of course, between equal rights, force decides.
We're often told that terrorism is a weapon of the powerless. Actually, as Chomsky has said, most terrorism is perpetrated by the powerful, as long as we don't two-facedly redefine terrorism to mean something other than 'violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political objective'. By that definition, Israel's actions in Gaza are clearly terrorism, which makes the United States into the aiders and abetters of a 'rogue state'... if not a 'rogue state' itself... though I dislike the term 'rogue state' because it implies an otherwise hunkydory international order from which a state deviates. But that old oscillation of universalist and consequentialist moralising can be brought into play. Israel (an explicitly racist state) is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (never mind the Apartheid). Israel must defend itself. In Gaza, civilians supposedly have rockets in their bomb shelters. And so on.
The problem isn't that there are no universally applicable moral principles. I think there probably are, as long as we limit 'universal' to mean something like 'transhistorical to human cultures'. I'm not personally one to discount that, though we have to be very careful about what we identify as transhistorical or universal. Neither is the problem that there are no good arguments to be made about morality based on consequences. Of course there are. Trotsky said "the ends can justify the means as long as something justifies the ends". Nor is the problem even that you can't mix the two. You can. The universal right to resist occupation (formally recognised by the UN) presumably entails consequentialist justifications for violent acts in the cause of liberation. And the idea that liberation is an inherently good thing may trace back to one of those permissible transhistorical principles. Freedom from exterior domination is a pre-requisite for any society to allow all its citizens to achieve the 'good life'... even if that doesn't always follow from such freedom. The problem is that bourgeois civilisation rests upon either mystical ideas of the universal or employs the most cynical form of brutally pragmatic consequentialism. Universal arguments become so decoupled from society that they can be mustered for either side by appeal to mystical entities. Consequentialist arguments can be mustered by either side too, with 'good' defined by the needs of whichever powerful person is currently speaking, and with the violent force of nation states always lurking in the background, ready to decide the issue. The UN recognises the universal right to resistance, and the impermissability of acquiring territory by war, and then permits Israel to go about its nasty business for decades, while states such as Iraq or Iran get held to more urgent account because of the priorities of the United States. The problem crystallises in that phrase: 'humanitarian intervention'. A perfect illustration of the cynical, opportunistic marrying of spurious universal and consequentialist arguments, ultimately nullified by the priorities of Empire, and the brute reality of imperial force
The moral question of intervention in Iraq was 'settled' by force. The universalists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "we have a moral duty to help the Iraqis!" vs. "it's wrong and illegal to invade without provocation!" - and the consequentialists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "it'll be good for the Middle East!" vs. "it'll be bad for the Middle East... and for us!". Pretty much the only people saying anything like "Iraqis should be given the chance to free themselves and create their own new society!" were the far Left. Of course, the turn of history made mincemeat of such hopes, though the Arab Spring showed the essential correctness of the argument... But, of course, as we know, that all went wrong too. But why? Because imperial force was allowed to decide. In Egypt, a popular rebellion ended the decade-long tyranny of a US-backed dictator... until a US-backed coup overthrew the resulting new government, instituted a junta, and started executing people wholesale. A familiar story to anyone who knows the history of American foreign policy.
This is an important issue because the key to the fate of Palestine lies in the working class of Egypt, the largest (and most recently radicalised) working class in the Middle East. The military junta in Egypt has redoubled the siege of Gaza by re-tightening the border - a border the Egyptian revolution threatened to weaken, thus weakening Israeli control over the besieged Palestinians, and thus also American-imposed 'stability' in the whole Middle East. As I write this it is being reported that Egypt is trying to broker a peace deal or ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Hamas has supposedly 'rejected' the deal. As usual, the media reports within the ideologically-policed parameters of the thinkable. Apparently you can have a 'truce' or 'ceasefire' or 'deal' between a massively powerful military power and the hostages they're dropping bombs on. Quite apart from anything else, the 'deal' being offered will inevitably mean nothing to the Palestinians beyond 'more of the same'. The deal will allow the Israelis to step back a bit (thus hopefully allowing the protests - which make them look bad - to die down). Hideous normality will resume. They can carry on attacking the Palestinians a bit, keep on holding the population of Gaza hostage and under siege, keep on with the Apartheid, keep on with the blockade, keep on with the economic subjugation, keep on with the relentless theft of land for new Jewish 'settlers', keep on with the control of water, keep on with the relentless and humiliating inspections at checkpoints, keep on arresting people for protest... etc etc etc. The 'deal', as far as the Palestinians are concerned, will just mean 'more of the same'. It always does. It will mean ' back to how things were last week... apart from the hundreds of us that are now dead, or bereaved, or maimed'. It always does.
And the consequentialists and universalists on both sides can go back to the debate.
Meanwhile, the only thing that will ever break this endless, genocidal situation will be the resistance that the Palestinians are condemned and demonised for ever daring to show... joined by the organised, militant resistance of millions of workers all across the Middle East. We saw it start in Egypt, and get suppressed. We saw it start in Libya, and the 'humanitarian interventionists' of NATO jumped in to co-opt and control it (odd how we never hear the humanitarians advocating NATO airstrikes on Tel Aviv on the grounds that "we've got to do something!!!").
It will, ultimately, come down to force. The force of resistance. We in the imperialist countries need to actively work to prevent our rulers from intervening. A decade of protest, activism and agitation led to widespread public anti-war sentiment that finally penetrated the Commons to the point where that vote about intervening in Syria was defeated. We forced them to back down. (This, incidentally, is why we have to fight through these centenary years to stop the Tories rewriting the history of World War I until it becomes a narrative of patriotic glory and heroism in the name of a noble cause. If many of us have failed to see the ideological utility of such a rewrite, the staunchly neo-con Tories certainly haven't. The connection is more then just general. WWI was partly an imperialist scramble for the Middle East.) One of the reasons Israel wants to descale its most recent murderous attack is probably the worldwide protests, part of the growing public revulsion at their antics, visible despite the near-blackout in the mainstream (corporate) media. Combined with popular resistance in the Middle East, popular resistance in the West to empire and 'humanitarian intervention' will be key.
Force will decide, one way or another. But not, in the end, between equal rights. Because the desire of the many to lead good lives, uncurtailed, self-creating, happy, with the free development of each being a prerequisite for the free development of all (and vice versa) should trump the desire of the few to rule, plunder and kill.
ADDENDUM, 20/07/14: Far from backing down, Israel has since launched a ground assault on Gaza.
Thursday, 21 November 2013
5
"I know it sounds mad," says Martha, "but when the Doctor became human, he took the
alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It's not
really a watch, it just looks like a watch."
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
33
Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends. They now look human. A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew. Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable. They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde. The Jet Set.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Thursday, 29 August 2013
Humanitarian Intervention
TW
Okay, so there's a house. Inside, an abusive husband is in the process of beating up his wife and kids.
"We've got to do something" says a concerned passer-by outside.
"I agree," says a liberal onlooker.
"Right," says the concerned passer-by, "wait here a mo..."
The concerned passer-by reappears in a suspiciously short amount of time with a fleet of bulldozers armed with wrecking balls, some petrol in a jerry can and a box of matches. The bulldozers set about demolishing the house while the concerned passer-by sets light to it.
Once all is quiet, the concerned passer-by and his mates raid the smoking ruins of the house for all the valuables that are still in one piece and unscorched, treading over the burned corpses of the wife and children as they go. They strike a deal with the husband (it turns out they are old mates of his and actually sold him the knuckle-duster he was using to punch his wife). In return for letting him live, he gives them his bank account details. (He's secretly quite pleased to be rid of the wife and kids.)
"Hmm," says the liberal onlooker, "that didn't go quite how I imagined."
Two weeks later, the liberal onlooker is passing another house in which another abusive husband is beating up his wife and kids.
The same concerned passer-by as before appears next to him.
"We've got to do something," says he.
"I agree," says the liberal onlooker.
"Right," says the concerned onlooker, "wait here a mo..."
Okay, so there's a house. Inside, an abusive husband is in the process of beating up his wife and kids.
"We've got to do something" says a concerned passer-by outside.
"I agree," says a liberal onlooker.
"Right," says the concerned passer-by, "wait here a mo..."
The concerned passer-by reappears in a suspiciously short amount of time with a fleet of bulldozers armed with wrecking balls, some petrol in a jerry can and a box of matches. The bulldozers set about demolishing the house while the concerned passer-by sets light to it.
Once all is quiet, the concerned passer-by and his mates raid the smoking ruins of the house for all the valuables that are still in one piece and unscorched, treading over the burned corpses of the wife and children as they go. They strike a deal with the husband (it turns out they are old mates of his and actually sold him the knuckle-duster he was using to punch his wife). In return for letting him live, he gives them his bank account details. (He's secretly quite pleased to be rid of the wife and kids.)
"Hmm," says the liberal onlooker, "that didn't go quite how I imagined."
Two weeks later, the liberal onlooker is passing another house in which another abusive husband is beating up his wife and kids.
The same concerned passer-by as before appears next to him.
"We've got to do something," says he.
"I agree," says the liberal onlooker.
"Right," says the concerned onlooker, "wait here a mo..."
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to...
This article - from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian - is really great. It's about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism... and all that kind of stuff. Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty - all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes. Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies... just in a way acceptable to liberals.
Here's a snippet:
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Here's a snippet:
The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don't shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can't get enough of them. Perhaps it's because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don't know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Bombs for Peace (Again)
So, Western imperialist powers (especially the US and UK) spend years trying to undermine, attack and destabilise Gaddafi... presumably because his regime engaged in some nationalisation and brought some economic independence, not to mention his support for various "anti-imperialist" groups. The West indulges in occasional homicidal bombing raids that achieve nothing but the slaughter of innocents (including Gaddafi's own baby daughter).
(Don't get me wrong, by the way - I'm no fan of the evil old bastard... though, if we're doing body counts, he's probably less blood stained than most leaders of the "free world".)
Then Gaddafi starts making grovelling offers to deactivate his own WMD programme... which the Western powers repeatedly ignore until they can paint it as a victory for the Bush/Blair moral crusade...
As part of his new chumminess with Blair & Co., Gaddafi opens Libya up to foreign banks, foreign corporations and the IMF. As per the usual script, along comes structural adjustment, i.e. privatisation, austerity, etc. Gaddafi is announced as a reformed character now that his regime is becoming integrated into neoliberal globalisation.
Then the Middle East ignites. The people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up and topple their dictators. The Libyans follow suit and launch a revolution that staggers in its bravery and bloody costliness. But, of course, it's only a more dramatic and intense demonstration of the cruelty and brutality of the regime that the West now considers an ally.
So what is the response of the political/ideological system that has been snuggling up to Gaddafi for several years? Why, use the Libyan people's revolution as an excuse to dig up the rotting corpse of "humanitarian intervention" (a corpse that I hoped these new revolutions might bury forever) as a way of crowbarring US imperial influence into a process that needs it like mice need cats.
So... we bomb the Libyan people when we don't like Gaddafi (because he's an evil terrorist, etc.), sell him weapons when we like him again (because he's gonna let the IMF in), and then start talking about bombing the Libyan people (again) when they rise up to topple Gaddafi after we've cuddled him to our bosoms.
Irony overload. And bloody typical. And absolutely fucking outrageous.
(Don't get me wrong, by the way - I'm no fan of the evil old bastard... though, if we're doing body counts, he's probably less blood stained than most leaders of the "free world".)
Then Gaddafi starts making grovelling offers to deactivate his own WMD programme... which the Western powers repeatedly ignore until they can paint it as a victory for the Bush/Blair moral crusade...
As part of his new chumminess with Blair & Co., Gaddafi opens Libya up to foreign banks, foreign corporations and the IMF. As per the usual script, along comes structural adjustment, i.e. privatisation, austerity, etc. Gaddafi is announced as a reformed character now that his regime is becoming integrated into neoliberal globalisation.
Then the Middle East ignites. The people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up and topple their dictators. The Libyans follow suit and launch a revolution that staggers in its bravery and bloody costliness. But, of course, it's only a more dramatic and intense demonstration of the cruelty and brutality of the regime that the West now considers an ally.
So what is the response of the political/ideological system that has been snuggling up to Gaddafi for several years? Why, use the Libyan people's revolution as an excuse to dig up the rotting corpse of "humanitarian intervention" (a corpse that I hoped these new revolutions might bury forever) as a way of crowbarring US imperial influence into a process that needs it like mice need cats.
So... we bomb the Libyan people when we don't like Gaddafi (because he's an evil terrorist, etc.), sell him weapons when we like him again (because he's gonna let the IMF in), and then start talking about bombing the Libyan people (again) when they rise up to topple Gaddafi after we've cuddled him to our bosoms.
Irony overload. And bloody typical. And absolutely fucking outrageous.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)