Qlipoth

A Monologue: "Standards and Practices" by Jon Robin Baitz

2011-10-31T05:41:00.000-07:00

They say a lot about the “integrity vacancy” in my profession, which is television. Networks…that’s my particular area. Standards and Practices.

[shrugs]

You find yourself listening to these people. Decent people, but they don’t have to face the unwashed masses that I do in standards and practices. I mean, we’re lawyers, you know? I’m no artist.

[beat]

I have no pretensions about it. I have to deal with Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble and Nestlé and General Foods, and these are decent types, these are decent guys. Lawyers, okay, you get the picture.

[beat]

A little dry, maybe, a tendency to look at things as simply as black and white, but after years of having to go through law school, it’s not hard to lose your sense of humor.

[beat]

But ask yourself this: Who is out there calling the shots? You know? I mean, I really, really despise petty moralizing. I really do.

[beat]

And a lot of what I’m asked to do is fatuous even to me, and there is no doubt you could laughand me – a Jew - smart, you know, you can look at a guy like me and say “He inherited his liberalism,” because I have not lived through anything.

But I’ll tell you something, and please, anyone who disagrees with this is – gotta be living in another world...

When you reach the age of about twenty-seven to thirty-two, you basically -- you’ve had to make all the moral choices…

There is nothing you don’t have to confront. So listen – I want to ask you this – Who out there is calling the shots? Because met me tell ya’, if ya’ think it’s us guys at standards and practises, I can promise you this: You – are – wrong.

If you think it’s the guys at Proctor & Gamble, you – are – wrong.

[beat]

Because, basically, what we are, we are men and women who sell certain things. But let me tell you: We get letters, and I mean, they are filled with rage. They are filled with a…a…a passionate anger toward…this coast. This business. What we do. They hate us. So much. Letters from people offended by homosexual acts. AIDS on the Movie of the Week. There are people who are fueled by this.

[beat]

And I read these letters and I want to take a shower.

[beat]

People who have this agenda. But they get together, they send these letters to the decent lawyers at Proctor & Gamble, who get scared, and they call me.

[beat]

We get letters. There is a tide of hatred out there, and you cannot understand it, you cannot fathom the depths. This is a country filled with letter-writers, people who stay up all night, writhing and twisting, people who drive very old cars and have the strangest of habits, and people who have no real control over those habits. This country has a seam of absolute maniacal viciousness, and let me tell you – because you are all really – we’re in the same boat – it’s you and me against the treyf out there - - understand this:

They are stronger than us, they outnumber us, and they are angrier than we are; and they do not care about your – your “environment,” your “freedom of speech,” they want to kill. They want to kill your faggot brother, they want your sister to have that baby, and they – and they – are the people who buy all the shit I sell every night.

[beat]

I have to make the world smooth for them.

[beat]

That is my job.

When you hit – you know, age about twenty-eight, you have to make just about every moral decision there is to make.

[beat]

Like today. Two men kissing?

[beat]

I had them cut it.

[beat]

Anything that disturbs the beast out there. No way.

[beat]

Just think of me as one of the guardians of your safety; I keep the animals happy. Because they will take over the zoo if we let ‘em.

[picks up phone]

Get me Colgate.

Demands

2011-10-29T01:19:00.000-07:00

A good piece here defending the activity of making demands, but evading the fact that whether demanding is constructive or destructive, and whose interests it serves, depends on the demand.

"Protect our Christian Legacy", "British Jobs for British Workers" and “Zig Raus!” are all demands, and they've all been expressed with passion recently. Of course the demands which emerge from the Occupy movement include many which stress the illegitimacy of the state: "Stop Killing and Enslaving Us" or fcuk the pigs, burn the banks, "expropriate the expropriators", "Stop Stop and Frisk", "Decolonize Wall Street". The demands the authors of the piece list tend toward this type:

That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education?

These demands may not highlight as well as some others the violence, lawlessness and ruthlessness of the current ruling class and its absolute illegitimacy, but they don't tend to legitimize the state or the status quo of property and power. However, this list and the text in which we find it was probably written with the awareness of the debate into which it must enter, that is, in the knowledge that the concrete presently existing advocates of demands at OWS are rejecting (with contempt) these kinds of oppositional and accusatory demands (nixing for example reference to "the larceny of the 1%" as overly oppositional and likely to alienate someone of importance) and insisting on demands that do legitimize the state and that in fact require other people (not those who make the demands) to build things for the use and enjoyment and aggrandizement of those making the demands (the demand is the state put unemployed to work to secure the property and assert values belonging to those drafting the demands) and in all likelihood for expropriation as private property of the 1%.

Unfortunately around "the question of demands" has arisen a typical co-opting reaction - those whose efforts are principally to silence, mock, belittle, delay or deprioritize the demands of others are annointing themselves 'pro-demands' and denouncing their opponents, whose demands they are trying to gag or discredit, 'anti-demands', much the way those seeking to assert white supremacist patriarchal privileges do so by labelling feminists and anti-racists 'divisive' for objecting to the segregation benefiting the privileged and challenging their efforts to dominate and preserve these hierarchies. Though much is being done to combat it, and a great deal has been achieved in raising people's awareness and recruiting commitment to redress of these persistent injustices, one sees still everywhere the spectacle of all white groups or white individuals presenting themselves as universal and neutral, representatives of the norm and the commonweal, issuing dire warnings against the threat of and displaying eye-rolling impatience with insignificant raced people with selfish, unimportant concerns "muddying" this or that pure scene or analysis with their difference, undermining popular unity by spoiling uniformity, and hampering class struggle by challenging the domination or refusing obedience to the usual privileged petty bourgeois subjects.

It's in the unavoidable context of white supremacy and the US' particularly raced class society that the demands working group has specifically rejected suggestions they include any demands to protect those they recommend be employed providing services and rebuilding territorial US infrastructure (and US only, that is, not Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Haiti) from the repression and terror of the state or ensuring that this workforce who are proposed to be set to work making a better environment for those issuing the demands will be able to benefit from the wealth they create as well.

The demands working group at OWS have rejected the suggestion, most signficantly, of specifying debt amnesty for those to be employed by the public works scheme they demand be established. Without an insistence on debt amnesty, their demand in reality is that 25 million people be employed at their own expense and that of the rest of the public in order to guarantee (once again) the payment to the richest of the interest, fees, and debts to which those 25 million likely to take these jobs are currently obligated. Without debt amnesty, these “good union wages” must still fail to provide any kind of decent living standard, as all of those wages are already earmarked for the 1% via the indebtedness of the workers in question. The reason given for rejecting “debt amnesty” as a feature of this demand – this demand that is supposed to help the movement define the world it wants through the delineation of a policy that is actually practicable and desirable – is that it mars the “simplicity” of the scheme. That's a familiar defense of every kind of trickle down vision, and the proposal fits the pattern of trickle down in highlighting the inevitable consequences of the scheme to those least benefitting (but benefitting nonetheless, a little) and wholly ignoring that the bulk of the benefits of the scheme are monopolised by the ruling class and its courtiers and house servants.

That is, any measures that might ensure the 25 million workers benefit from the scheme are seen as an unnecessary complication - the scheme is a lovely machine one switches on and watches prosperity flow from, as is always appealing to bourgeois economists. This posture which defines all care to protect the interest of the propertyless as needless muddying and disfigurement of the beautiful simplicity of the Keynes/Fabian machine must be understood to confirm that the purpose of the scheme is the same as the purpose of every scheme inspired by this school of thought - to shore up the state’s legitimacy, secure property values, and boost growth to guarantee profits (and superprofits when the concrete products of the labour employed are privatised). The demand thus is objectionable with regard to content (the actual realization of the policy is not desirable, though it contains elements that would be part of many conceivable desirable policies) and as pedagogy (the demand as “impossible demand” tends to obscure rather than clarify present reality) and as political gesture (the demand is divisive and asserts the dominance of those who define themselves in opposition and distinction to “workers, the homeless, unemployed, undocumented” and who treat the expressed concerns of those groups as nuisances, the usual “laundry list” of particularist grievances, and needless “complexities”.)Without debt amnesty, the vision is one of effective enslavement of 25 million people set to work improving the public equity chiefly enjoyed by the richest 10%.

The Particular and The Particular

2011-10-18T19:14:00.000-07:00

Just can't seem to escape the question of the relationship between the particular and the universal. Or as this snippet of Marx seems to suggest, the relationship between the particular and the particular.

It comes from the Theories of Surplus Value in the discussion of Adam Smith, the subsection The Distinction between Productive and Unproductive Labour, and within that subsection, the subsection 17 on Nassau Senior. Unfortunately this link lands you far from the passage in question.

Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of every other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, modify plus ou moins all his functions and activities, and therefore his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities too. In this respect it can in fact be demonstrated that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever they may present themselves, influence material production and engage with it determinatively to a greater or lesser degree.

For such a short passage, I have revised the translation at MIA pretty seriously. Specially in the last clause. What I have translated as "engage" appears there as "have decisive influence on." The German eingreifen generally means "intervention," like a military intervention or what authorities do in general. A very literal translation would be "in-grip," stick your hand in and grab hold. So it denotes and connotes a very active and forceful imposition from the outside.

Marx says, the relationships of production, in other words class positions, are actively and forcefully shaped by all the circumstances, like race and gender, that affect humans.

Pace universalism/class reductionism.

The Secret of Secrets

2011-10-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

In the discussion about Zizek's strategic rhetorical confusion of source, content and attitude, the comment about 'secret connections' reminded me of a passage in The Holy Family in which Marx analyzed an example of the use of 'secret' as a Hegelian construct.

I have transcribed the passage from the MIA with a couple of revisions. The translation linked to there translates Geheimnis as "mystery" but "secret" is a more colloquial equivalent and the word I have used.

What Marx says of Hegel and Mr. Szeliga needs to be understood of the Hegelianism of Zizz and the Zizzniks too. Above all, the characterization of Hegel's method as "masterly sophistry." Then, how Hegel executes this sophistry through the subordination of the particular to the universal. Finally, how Hegel articulates this subordination, "in the speculative world are nothing but semblances." Zizzian sophistry does not need verbal legerdemain to effect this reduction of the material to the seeming. Images from movies and accounts from the media provide him with ready made semblances. As well as the ultimate conclusion, that all the complex mechanisms of the sophistry amounts to nothing more than self-dramatization. Even Zizzian stand up is consistent digital Hegelianism. But enough interpretation, let's get on to Marx.

The Secret of Speculative Construction

The secret of the Critical presentation of the Mysteres de Paris is the secret of speculative, of Hegelian construction. Once Herr Szeliga has proclaimed that 'degeneracy within civilization' and rightlessness in the state are 'secrets', i.e. has dissolved them in the category of 'secret', he lets 'secret' begin its speculative career. A few words will suffice to characterise speculative construction in general. Herr Szeliga's treatment of the Mysteres de Paris will give the application in detail.

If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea of "Fruit", if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea of "Fruit", derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc., then in the language of speculative philosophy - I am declaring that "Fruit" is the "Substance" of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea - "Fruit". I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc.,to be mere forms of existence, modi, of "Fruit". My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences as inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same thing as in the pear, and in the pear the same thing as in the almond, namely "Fruit". Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence in "the substance" - "Fruit".

By this method one attains no particular wealth of definition. The mineralogist whose whole science was limited to the statement that all minerals are really "the Mineral" would be a mineralogist only in his imagination. For every mineral the speculative Mineralogist says, "the Mineral", and his science is reduced to repeating this word as many times as there are real minerals.

Having reduced the different real fruits to the one "fruit" of abstraction - "the Fruit", speculation must, in order to attain some semblance of real content, try somehow to find its way back from "the Fruit", from Substance to the diverse, ordinary real fruits, the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. It is as hard to produce real fruits from the abstract idea "the Fruit" as it is easy to produce the abstract idea from real fruits. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at the opposite of an abstraction without relinquishing the abstraction.

The speculative philosopher therefore relinquishes the abstraction "the Fruit", but in a speculative, mystical fashion - with the appearance of not reliquishing it. Thus it is really only in appearance that he rises above his abstraction. He argues somewhat as follows:

If apples, pears, almonds and strawberries are really nothing but "the subtance", "the Fruit", the question arises: Why does "the Fruit" manifest itself to me sometimes as an apple, sometimes as a pear, sometimes as an almond? Why this semblance of diversity, which so obviously contradicts my speculative conception of Unity, "the Substance", "the Fruit"?

This, answers the speculative philosopher, is because "the Fruit" is not dead, undifferentiated motionless, but a living, self-differentiating, moving essence. The diversity of the ordinary fruits is significant not only for my sensuous understanding, but also for "the Fruit" itself and for speculative reason. The different ordinary fruits are different manifestations of the life of the "one Fruit"; they are cystallisations of "the Fruit" itself. Thus in the apple "the Fruit" gives itself an apple-like existence, in the pear a pear-like existence. We must therefore no longer say, as one might from the standpoint of the Substance: a pear is "the Fruit", an apple is "the Fruit" an almond is "the Fruit", but rather "the Fruit" presents itself as a pear, "the Fruit" presents itself as an apple, "the Fruit" presents itself as an almond; and the differences which distinguish apples, pears and almonds from one another are the self-differentiations of "the Fruit" and make the particular fruits different members of the life-process of the "the Fruit". Thus "the Fruit" is no longer an empty undifferentiated unity; it is oneness as allness, as "totality" of fruits, which constitute an "organically linked series of members". In every member of that series "the Fruit" gives itself a more developed, more explicit existence, until finally, as the "summary" of all fruits, it is at the same time the living unity which contains all those fruits dissolved in itself just as it produces them from within itself, just as, for instance, all the limbs of the body are constantly dissolved in and constantly produced out of the blood.

We see that if the Christian religion knows only one Incarnation of God, speculative philosophy has an many incarnations as there are things, just as it has here in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of "the Fruit", this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind. hence what is delightful in this speculation is to rediscover all the real fruits there, but as fruits which have a higher mystical significance, which have grown out of the ether of your brain and not out of the material earth, which are incarnations of "the Fruit", of the Absolute Subject. When you return from the abstraction, the supernatural creation of the mind, "the Fruit", to real natural fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the unity of "the Fruit" in all the manifestations of its life - the apple, the pear, the almond - that is to show the mystical interconnection between these fruits, how in each one of them "the Fruit" realises itself by degrees and necessarily progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence, the value of the ordinary fruits no longer consists in their natural qualities, but in their speculative quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of "the Absolute Fruit".

The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc. out of the unreal creation of the mind "the Fruit", i.e., by creating those fruits out of his own abstract reason, which he considers as an Absolute Subject outside himself, represented here as "the Fruit". And in regard to every object the existence of which he expresses, he accomplishes an act of creation.

It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determinng features invented by him, by giving the names of real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, "the Fruit".

In the speculative way of speaking, this operation is called comprehending Substance as Subject, as an inner process, as an Absolute Person, and this comprehension constitutes the essential character of Hegel's method.

These preliminary remarks were necessary to make Herr Szeliga intelligible. Only now, after dissolving real relations, e.g, law and civilisation, in the category of secret and thereby making "Secret" into Substance, does he rise to the true speculative, Hegelian height and transforms "Secret" into a self-existing Subject incarnating itself in real situations and persons so that the manifestations of its life are countesses, marquises, grisettes, porters, notaries and charlatans, and love intrigues, balls, wooden doors, etc. Having produced the category "Secret" out of the real world, he produces the real world out of this category.

The secrets of speculative construction in Herr Szeliga's presentation will be all the more visibly disclosed as he has an indisputable double advantage over Hegel. On the one hand, Hegel with masterly sophistry is able to present as a process of the imagined creation of the mind itself, of the Absolute Subject, the process by which the philosopher through sensory perception and imagination passes from one subject to another. On the other hand, however, Hegel very often gives a real presentation, embracing the thing itself, within the speculative presentation. This real development within the speculative development misleads the reader into considering the speculative development as real and the real as speculative.

With Herr Szeliga both these difficulties vanish. His dialectics have no hypocrisy or dissimulation. He performs his tricks with the most laudable honesty and the most ingenuous straightforwardness. But then he nowhere develops any real content, so that his speculative construction is free from all disturbing accessories, from all ambiguous disguises, and appeals to the eye in its naked beauty. In Herr Szeliga we also see a brilliant illustration of how speculation on the one hand apparently freely creates its object a priori out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the object, falls into the irrational and unnatural bondage to the object, whose most accidental and most individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general.

Thank You Naomi Klein Well Said As Usual

2011-10-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now
by Naomi Klein
I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

§ What we wear.

§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

§ Our courage.

§ Our moral compass.

§ How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

2011-10-04T02:32:00.001-07:00

2011-10-01T14:28:00.001-07:00

It's Always Football

2011-10-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

So that's what happened. Early October 2010, Angela Merkel attended a match in Germany against the Turkish national team. A large contingent of the fans were supporting Turkey, for which several ethnically Turkish German residents kept their nationality to play. And every time Mesut Özil had the ball, the Turkey supporters whistled - in a German home stadium!

So she basically made a beeline from the stadium to the television to tell the world MULTICULTURALISM HAS FAILED!!!!

It's always football.

Too Starkey

2011-09-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

So instead of a consistent critique of anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny, we get from the Zizney crowd a constant stream of anti-Semitism, racism, Islamophobia, heteronormativity, homophobia and misogyny punctuated by isolated, ad hominem, ceremonial public whippings and pillory of individual sinners (often, like Atzmon, some or other sort of troll or provocateur*) whose material it is suggested ought to be suppressed as it taints pure environments like The London Review of Books or ZeroBooks imprint. These ceremonies serve not only to implicitly certify Zizney's own product as racism-free and ideologically fit for consumption, but they protect that product from the perils of proximity to the blueprints or specs that such product, when not wrapped in the Radical Left packaging and its alibis, can resemble. Zizek's "half ape blacks", "orangutan" cousin, or "incredibly painful birth of African-American consciousness" in Sethe's act of "killing what is most dear to her - her progeny", (not to mention all the prime time tv examples of this animalisation) are easier for Zizney fans to pretend are unobjectionable or even insightful and "philosophically important" if not seen beside R W Johnson's baboons and the like. The Zizney pillory obstructs in fact the most effective and well-established pedagogical method deployed against racism in the culture wars, which is the exposure of themes and motifs and patterns across different works and media. A sincere commitement to anti-racism and against anti-Semitism would certainly involve using the occasion of Atzmon's new book to teach about the resurgence of these themes, which would mean showing the themes and motifs and tropes which connect Atzmon, Zizek, Mearsheimer and others. Instead, naturally, Zizney takes action to preempt and disrupt such an enlightening discourse - the kind that achieved in the first place everything against the old supremacist mythology and in favour of genuine truthful and emancipatory historiography that Zizney is trying now to dismantle - by isolating one of the most heuristically useful examples of the Zizney ideology (Atzmon's), which could be a really effective tool in exposing the resurgent discourse across many genres and national media, and insisting on viewing it as the opposite and enemy of the more successful versions of the discourse (Zizek's mainly). This theatre preserves the legitimacy of the anti-Semitic mythology itself against the threat posed by careless or too obvious versions (or versions that aren't designed to serve the main purpose, which is apology for US empire including Zionist colonialism and the usual displacement of public anger onto scapegoats).

The right wing or mainstream version of these things may even often be more subtle and less lurid and baroque than the "radical left" versions, but they tend to be issued from a stable instead of a floated point of view, and this is key to the danger they pose to the new digimedia age postmodern racist ideological products. The newest stuff, that really works and is very popular, floats the point of view (Reckless Tortuga is a vivid example) to give the consumer, who is reluctant to declare himself racist, the means of evading challenge or criticism. The floating, in text product, is accomplished by such tactics as un-assigned quotation marks ("scare quotes" are only one type) or preamble labelling like "the typical liberal counter-proposal is..." or "my first anti-Semitic reaction was...". This is an important innovation; the kinds of product Zizney attacks don't have it - in that product the point of view is stable: R W Johnson is himself observing/asserting/concoting in his own voice an analogy between baboons and Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, but Zizek offers his "half ape blacks" from an unidentified point of view that is actually several layers thick:

the innermost position of articulation is some imagined revolutionary soldiers in Saint Domingue during the Haitian war of independence. Zizek puts on a "you've-heard-this-all-before" voice which is intended to be the voice of soldiers: they are saying "you see we the primitive half-ape blacks..."

but he embeds this performance of those imagined revolutionaries within a caveat - in fact these imagined revolutionaries didn't say this. So what is he performing? This brings us the next layer of point of view in which the image is encased; there is another set of revolutionary black French soliders who are singing the Marseillaise and (Zizek informs us) "it didn't mean 'you see we the primitive half-ape blacks'". They sing the Marseillaise, like the soliders Zizek perfoms making some odd gesture, but they don't say what he performs them saying.

The speakers he does imitate are performed but disavowed; he shows them to us, he physically demonstrates some gesture of theirs, but denies they existed. What are they here for?

.... so whose point of view is this? Who is imagining soldiers singing the Marseillaise in order to say "you see we the primitive..."? The point of view of this subject, the subject who imagines the figures Zizek performs, is hazy.

...and yet further out from this hazy subject who imagines soldiers singing the Marseillaise to show that they, though primitive half-apes, "can also participate in your...' there is yet another subject, another point of view, making fun of that point of view. And with this other subject making fun of the unidentified subject who imagines soldiers singing the Marseillaise in order to show that they are primitive but still can participate in your [trails off] the "mocking voice" acquires a second layer. The sound of the mockery is doing double service. It is not only the tone indicating the attitude the unidentified misinterpreter of events assigns to the soliders singing the Marseillaise envisioning themselves as "half-ape blacks", it is the mockery directed at that unidentified subject who is mocking, by yet another unidentified point of view.

All this disguises the lack of sense or reason or excuse for the lurid racist imagery and permits the audience to enjoy it, but only if things like R W Johnson's baboons are not also part of this audience's diet of discourse.

The floated enunciating subject is a consistent feature of Zizney and it's key to its marketing to the audience it attracts: it allows that audience who takes pleasure in the symbolic racist violence to shift out of range when challenged and to present the racist discourse as a critique of itself. It evades all responsibility for the articulation by allowing the subject (Zizek and his audience, fashioned by this very complicity into a "we") to slip away into a labyrinth of perspectives built around the statements.

The operation is so convoluted the consumer can almost always avoid having to explain why such a critique of the figments of the critic's own imagination and obsessions would be necessary or what it accomplishes, because discussion gets diverted into chasing the position of the subject who articulates.

With this technique, which involves a heavy use of passive construction and generalisation, the text becomes interactive, malleable and immune to ordinary rebuttal (albeit not to rebuttal, although always the defender can accuse the critic of being "ungenerous", and this must almost always be for an evil, personal, possibly psychotic motive).

The danger then the old fashioned material poses is that the floated-pov articulations can be pinned down, at least to a point, by comparison and situating within the context of the older material and the old fashioned current material. And removing the context for the reassertion of racist and supremacist material that is presenting itself as radical, fresh and insightful is essential. Each sentence must be considered, as Rodney King assailants' defence lawyers understood each blow must be evaluated, in isolation. In isolation from the statement it is rebutting, "it was not the Holocaust which left Ljuljana almost without Jews" becomes an assertion one can (just barely) defend. For example, Richard Seymour defends the statement by removing it from the context in which it actually appears and supplying it a new context - to suggest it is rebutting a statement like "the Holocaust was the first instance of anti-Semitism in Slovenia" -- and also a foil, that which it nobly doesn't say, which is "the Holocaust had no effect at all on Jews." Seymour deploys highly competent Zizney technique, providing this new context for the statement he's defending and suppressing the actual context (the statement is put forward to prove that Kirsch's assertion "Zizek was born and raised in a town the Holocaust had left almost without Jews" is false and that stating it is "despicable".)

This is the same technique Seymour used in his defence of Zizek's proposal to discuss whether exterminating gays would protect "us" from Nazism:

There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno – suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky’s infamous remark from his essay “Proletarian Humanism” (sic! – 1934): “Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear.”(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, “Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland,” in Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky’s inciting statement, as well as Adorno’s reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the “revolutionary” paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their “sexual depravity”… In order to function as the support of a “totalitarian” community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed “dirty secret,” shared by those who are “in.” Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of “Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless… (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)”? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the “essentialist” mistake of dismissing the Rightist “militaristic” homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the “authentic” subversive homosexuality.

To defend this he isolates the statement What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, and he supplies it a new context, one in which it is a rebuttal to a statement like "is the 'gay libinial economy' inescapably left wing?" and a foil to "all gays are necessarily Nazis."

So the individuals who must be pilloried and ostracised by Zizney interfere with this kind of evasion. They are those who produce the old low-tech type of discourse which do not have the wheels and gears that allow the defence against straightforward challenges - "Jews are plotting" not "this typical liberal position misses the irony that the paradox is that the very same Jews who are plotting once embodied what Kant called the public use of Reason" - the juxtapositon of which with the floated type can expose its effects.**

So the latest is Atzmon who, wishing to be as brutally clear with his "shocking" remarks as possible, instead of saying, as Zizney does, "the paradox is" that the very same "Jewish intellectuals" who demand "all others" give up "their ethnic particularity" are Jewish tribalists (with despotic powers comparable to Stalin's with which they persecute their critics like Mel Gibson, etc), merely states this without the "theoretical analysis" regarding "the paradox" which effectively creates the illusion that the enunciator recedes a slight distance from the fact he is offering as fact, which then allows for the whole apparatus of interactive flexibility to be initiated.

Atzmon delivers many of the assertions that Zizney promotes regarding "the Jews" but without the Lacanian packaging (the psychoanalytic-flavoured "explanation" for example of why anti-Semitic and racist discourses are truths uttered for naughty pleasure, and indeed have "performative efficiency", so at least in the case of those advanced by "whites", must be true). He is to Zizek's anti-Semitism (whom he really likes) as Starkey is to Zizney's white supremacism. Zizney/Zizek is actually more lurid, and the Zizney oeuvre (leader and acolytes) partakes of more of the fantastical and fabulous, while Atzmon's is closer in "realism" of setting to Mearsheimer, but Atzmon's discourse, especially when he evokes Zizek's psychoanalytic "theories" for support, is a danger to the carefully constructed but fragile inner mechanism of the Zizney versions which are intended to persuade not outrage. If you put the two side by side, the former serves to clarify the latter too visibly - like a drawing of an animal's skeleton placed next to the drawing of the great ball of fat and fur it appears from the outside - but also to halt its motion, to lock the gears. Atzmon, like Starkey, shows the bones if the apology for imperialism and the civilising mission of white supremacy of which the Zizney output consists, but he also contributes to a context that is difficult to ignore and therefore impacts the way the Zizney fables of "the Jews" - unique nation, ancient tribe, collective neurotic psyche - appears.

Starkey really offered the clearest fixed-pov example of the Zizney story of the perils of multiculturalism. Zizney tells us frequently of the "universal mingling, multi-culti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity" allegedly foisted by "the Jews" who are "the original multiculturalists" on Europe even while these same Jews "ironically" or "paradoxically" (for this is "the paradox of Jewish Identity") preserving their own tribal particularity, is easily identified when placed next to a unabashed "right wing" statement:

Starkey

There's been a profound cultural change...the whites have become black...a particular sort of violent, destructive nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion...and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois which has been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have the sense of literally a foreign country...this is the text sent by the young woman who was the olympic ambassador: "pigs shouldn't of killed dat guy last night innit, den dey wouldn't get blown up."

Zizney**

~~Alain Badiou~~ replaced by Angela Davis...women, race, what feminism did to communism, the proliferation of radical standpoints,.thinking with worms, alas poor Marx! communism from below, interspecies communism, weak communists, bell hooks: "Ain't I a commiunist?"

The list of Jewish corruption of Europe is all checked off - the White Male became the Black Female, the all white male elite was infiltrated by women and people of colour, and what flows from this is "universal mingling, multiculti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity" and of course the finale which exhibits this loss with the most sentimental alarm that the true Europeans have become foreigners in their own land and foreign speakers of their own tongue.

We can easily see when these are set beside one another the contours of the trope at work, and from then on we can recognise it everywhere it appears. It is not a static image, but a narrative of corruption and degeneration which, typically, culminates in this performance of the hideously disfigured English, the national essence defiled in the comically inept, contemptible but disturbing mimicky of the sacred tongue.

----------------------------------------------------------------

*
(I found it amazing at first that anyone would miss the tone of a guy who is suggesting we need to look into whether there is any truth to the blood libel, but then it occurred to me this must be perceived very differently by these hayseed devotees of the Slobbering Slovitzian who have had that thought actually pass through their heads and so are struck with panic and horror when everyone else is laughing.)

**

Zizek himself puts his propagandistic mechanism through all its paces, showing how to deny what he has said by shfting the position of the articulation.

Adam Kirsch reads this: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility" as representing the position of Alain Badiou (Zizek's sincere straightforward paraphrase of Badiou).

Zizek then claims, in high dudgeon, that it is not a paraphrase of Alain Badiou and does not represent his point of view, but he will not say whose thoughts he is advancing there. Instead he says, "what I do is provide a résumé of how the French Zionist critics perceive contemporary Europe."

What does this mean? The proposal about the 'final solution' (a phrase he does not quote but has introduced himself in quotes, to seem as if quoting, as if the term forced itself on his text from without, and then protests innocence of the suspicion it would be perceived as evocative of anything) cannot be accepted as the point of view of "French Zionists". Is he suggesting that "contemporary Europe" believes "the only true solution to the Jewish question is 'the final solution'..." or that French Zionists believe this is "contemporary Europe's" belief?

Let's look at it marking the point of view as we go:

[There] is an interesting struggle which has been going on recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France.

That's Zizek informing us from his knowledge.

The struggle concerns the status of the "One" as the name of a political subjectivity, a struggle which has led to many broken friendships (say, between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner).

Still Zizek speaking.

The irony is that this struggle is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Lévy, Miller, Regnault, Finkielkraut), and between "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" intellectuals.

Who is being quoted as labelling the intellectuals Jewish or non-Jewish? Or are these scare quotes? What do these words mean?

The question is, is the name of the One the result of a contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial particular identity?

This at first glance appears to be Zizek himself characterising a question that some unidentified intellectuals have asked. But it may be that it is Zizek's interpretation of the debate between the "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" intellectuals that some or all would not accept.

The position of Jewish Maoists is that "Jews" is such a name which stands for that which resists today's global trend to overcome all limitations, inclusive of the very finitude of the human condition, in radical capitalist "deterritorialiszation" and "fluidification" (the trend which reaches its apotheosis in the gnostic-digital dream of transforming humans themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one hardware to another).

Zizek himself is speaking his opinions about what the Jewish Maoists believe about someone else's idea. Who has the idea that "Jews is such a name which..."? It may be the Jewish Maoists own view that "Jews" is such a name, but it may be the Jewish Maoists idea of how other people perceive Jews. Or, it may be Jewish Maoists idea of how other people believe Jews perceive themselves or how other people believe Jews believe other people percieve Jews. That floated position means what follows has no definite point of view assigned but can be assigned as convenient to the defence of the text against challenge. Who is quoted as using "deterritorialization"? Is it that same subject who asserts that the trend of fluidication reaches its apothesosis in the gnostic-digital attitude? Who is the gnostic-digital attitude attributed to? Is it assumed to be correctly attributed? Is it the Jewish Maoist assigning attitudes to a subject with a gnostic-digital perspective? Is the Jewish Maoist reliable on this? Is it even the Jewish Maoist who assets this?

It continues:

The name "Jews" thus stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is.

Who is speaking? Is this the gnostic-digital thinker, according to The Jewish Maoist or to Zizek? Is it the Jewish Maoist's idea of what the name "Jews" stands for? Is it Badiou's idea of what the name "Jews" stands for for the Jewish Maoist? Is it Zizek's idea of what the digiera gnostic thinks the name "Jews" stands for for the Jewish Moaist? Or what Zizek thinks the name "Jews" stands for for the digignostic? Or is it for Zizek himself that the name "Jews" stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is?

Next:

Along these lines

What lines? This is the final erasing of the trail, reaching the maximum ambiguity, before a new assignment of pov:

Along these lines, François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jews (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they "yield with regard to their name" -- a reference to Lacan's ethical maxim "do not yield with regard to your desire"...[elipsis in original] One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer's later texts.

A point of view briefly emerges clearly Regnault says the "contemporary left" demands - only to vanish at once in the reference to some previous "shift from radical emancipatory politics to fidelity to the Jewish name". Who is recommending one remember here? We have a purported previous instance (to no specific later instance) of Jews repudiating universalism for Jewish particularism, but who thinks this appropriate to remember "here"? Regnault? Or Zizek? If Regnault, does Zizek agree? Is he suggesting that Regnault is making an insightful case for some intrinsic Jewish particularism? Or is he himself making that case?

Now all the shifting gears are set in motion to unmoor the text entirely with the next statement:

Jews here are the exception: in the liberal culturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity - except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism...[elipses in original]

Who is saying Jews here are the exception? Is what follows a complaint from Regnault? Or an observation of Zizek's? And where is here? Is this again the Maoist Jews as a group attributing views to the liberal multiculturalists? Is it Zizek attributing views to the liberal multiculturalists? Is the attribution accurate? Is Zizek himself declaring that Jewish self-assertion is Zionist racism or endorsing that view? Is he endorsing the Jewish Maoists perception of the liberal multiculturalists as correct but not the content of the view the former attribute to the latter? Is he identifying a new party who holds the view that liberal multiculturalists insist (only) Jews can't assert their identity because it is Zionist racism? Is he interpreting the (disavowed) implications of the liberal multiculturalists or is he paraphrasing their assertions? Where is Zizek's own point of view here?

In contrast to this approach

What approach? The approach of the Jewish Maoists complaining about the liberal multiculturalists complaining about the Jewish Maoists? Or the approach of the liberal multiculturalists complaining about the Jewish Maoists? Or the approach of the Jewish Maoists to Jewishness and Zionism?

In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic of religious roots).

In contrast to liberal multiculturalists who claim that Jewish self-assertion is Zionist racism but everyone else can assert their own identity, someone (Zizek or the Jewish Maoists or someone else) claim Badiou and others insist on something. What does Badiou insist on? Or are we still listening to Zizek's account of what the Jewish Maoists think? (This will all be characterised later as a résumé of French Zionists perceptions of contemporary Europe, recall). Is this statement regarding what Badiou insists on in fact the false accusation of the Jewish Maoists?

Anyway, either Badiou insists on fidelity to the One which emerges in political struggle for naming and has no ethnic or religious roots, or Badiou is accused of this wrongly by someone.

At this point I would say the text leans toward inviting the interpretation that Badiou is being accurately characterised by Zizek and not slandered by the Jewish Maoists, (but in his self-defense against Kirsch he will claim it is clearly the latter, and that this characterisation of what Badiou insists on is spoken from the point of view of Jewish Maoists and articulates their erroneous fantasy of what Badiou insists on.)

From this point of view

That is, from either Badiou's point of view or the point of view Badiou is falsely attributed by the Jewish Maosists, (this is important as we are nearing the Kirsch selection)

From this point of view, fidelity to the name "Jews" is the obverse (the silent recognition) of the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles.

Someone may think fidelity to the name "Jews" is associated with the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. Then again, Zizek may be suggesting that nobody thinks this, that "this point of view" - which is another instance of refusing commitment to content ("this point of view" could say "JM's pov" or "Badiou's pov" or "this approach" could say "the liberal multiculturalist approach" or "my approach" or "Regnault's approach"; "along these lines" could say "the lines of Badiou's reasoning" or "the linbes of Jewish Maosist's contentions"; the ambiguity is deliberate and necessary for the text's equivocations and malleability) -- is the non-existent point of view that the Jewish Maoists wrongly believe is Badiou's.

Whose point of view is it? one is forced to wonder fruitlessly. (In fact, we the readers know from material outside this text that this is the position Badiou has taken and which Zizek has reiterated often in a cruder racialised way that Badiou daintily avoids. So we can assume Zizek knows that's how most of his readers will interpret the sentence. But Zizek will claim that he is not paraphrasing Badiou at the crucial passage, and that this is obvious.).

Onward:

No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement.

Jeez, who is this now? Now we have a sudden proliferation of layers of subjectivity, as if a prism had been placed on the text. Is this sentence:

a) Zizek informing us the Jewish Maosists falsely claim Badiou says "no wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also.."? (That is, is Zizek still characterizing "this point of view" and is it Badiou's as seen by the Jewish Maoists? Could one accurately quote it "From this point of view [which Jewish Maoists attribute to Badiou]...[it's] No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" [Badiou's wrong idea of the Jewish Maoists according to the Jewish Maoists' paranoid fantasy] are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement"?)

b) Zizek informing us Badiou says "no wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews" are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement"? (Is if "from this point of view" that is Badiou's actual point of view as far as Zizek understands it?)

c) Zizek himself saying, given what he has learned from Badiou that it is no wonder to him that those who demand fidelity to the name Jews are also those who warn us etc? (Is it not "from this point of view" at all but a resumed direct statement from Zizek's own point of view after the digression into ventriloquism?)

d) Zizek himself saying that given the way the Jewish Maoists misconstrue Badiou it is no wonder to him that they also warn us against "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement?

All of these possibilities are made available for the convenience of the defender of this anti-Semitic screed.

Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins and Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror.

Now we are getting very close to Kirsch's excerpt, and where are we? Who is speaking? Zizek will claim to Kirsch that this is not his own voice or assessment, but that it is obvious that Kirsch has maliciously construed it as such, though he cannot say precisely what the quoted passage means and to whom it's contentions are attributed. What Zizek, under challenge for the exterminationist dreams offered by the text, will claim the sentence says:

"I Zizek claim that the Jewish Maoists falsely accuse Alain Badiou of believing falsely that their politics - the politics of the Jewish Maoists - consists in accepting the fundamnetal finitude..."

That is, contrary to what appears to be the dominant reading invited (but not unequivocally - the whole text is equivocal and this is one of the cagier sentences regarding the enunciating position) this stuff about finitude and Christian love and Jewish Maoists and Badiou and the One is all nonsense, is all air, senseless stuff referring to nothing, the bizarre phantasmagoria that is the content of the slanderous paranoiac minds of the Jewish Maoists now Zionists, and it has no relevance to anything but a personal spat between them and Badiou and unnamed other "non Jewish" Maoists, a spat about exactly nothing. That is Zizek's reply to Kirsch - this is a résumé of the meaningless nonsense in the heads of French Zionists who think Alain Badiou said something or other; what he may or may not have said Zizek won't waste time on.

And then, once this is asserted, Kirsch is scolded as despicable for supposing otherwise.

Yet we have seen these topics in Zizek over and over, even offered sometimes unequivocally in his own voice, and celebrated by his fans as brilliant radical Lacanian whatever and important philosophical insights.

But in defence of his loathsome and incoherent propaganda image barrage, Zizek will claim to Kirsch that his claim is that nobody's politics "consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins and Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror." Rather this is the insane vision that Jewish Maoists have of what Alain Badiou and "others" think the Jewish Maoists own beliefs are.

Now comes the passage Kirsch supposedly misreads:

To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the Jewish question is the "final solution" (their annihilation), because Jews qua objet a are the ultimate obstacle to the "final solution of History itself, to the overcoming of division in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.

Who thinks they are putting some succinctly? Is the speaker Zizek and is he putting his own views succinctly? Or Zizek putting the views of the Jewish Maoists succinctly. Or the Jewish Maoists putting their own views succinctly? Or the Jewish Maoists putting Badiou's view succintly?

Kirsch thinks it's Zizek putting Badiou's views succinctly. Why is that less plausible than the other possibilities? It would seem to be the most plausible in fact.

But in defence of his text, Zizek suggests (without stating or claiming clearly) this is a paraphrase of the paranoid fantasy the Jewish Maoists entertain regarding Alain Badiou's beliefs about Jews. It is part of "a résumé of how the French Zionist critics perceive contemporary Europe". But then who is speaking the next sentence?:

But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews, from Spinoza to Marx to Freud?

Kirsch is accused of engaging in "a pure manipulation to read my [Zizek's] praise of the “universalist” Jews as an argument for exempting them from annihilation." (Of course the reply has the same ambiguity as the original - to whom is Zizek attributing the belief in "universalist" Jews? If he is suggesting that the "annihilation" of "the Jews" means the the transformation of particularists (Jews) into universalists, what could annihilation have to do with universalists? How is there such a thing as a universalist "Jew"? Why does Zizek refer to Spinoza and Freud as "Jews"? Or to whom does he attribute this description?)

Who then is being quoted without quotation marks as saying "But is it not rather..."? Is this Zizek suddenly answering the Jewish Maosists? Or is he engaging a mock battle with their imaginary Badiou for their entertainment? Or is it still the Jewish Maoists speaking, now pleading with their imaginary Badiou not to exclude all Jews racially from the community of Christian and Stalinist universal love which they wrongly think he believes in and wished to exclude them from on the basis of his false belief in their fidelity to the name "Jews"?

The irony is...

- continues whoever, or interjects someone else -

The irony is that in the History of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a "homeless" and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms.

Who is talking (the Jewish Maoists notice an irony? They attribute the noticing of an irony to Badiou? Badiou notices this irony? Zizek notices the irony?) and about whose perceptions of what "the Jews" "stand for" (who have the anti-Semitism as a point of view? Zizek himself? Badiou? The Jewish Maoist's imaginary Badiou? Someone else? All?) And what has this to do with what came before?

The first thing to recall

-- says the Jewish Maoist, or their paranoid imaginary Badiou, or someone new, or Zizek --

The first thing to recall is that this struggle is also inherent to Jewish identity.

And so this assertion, against his critic, Zizek claims as his own:

all I do in the passage from which Mr. Kirsch has torn out a couple of words ("fidelity to the Messianic impulse,” etc.) is to point out the debt of political and theoretical universalism (of what Kant praised as the “public use of reason”) to the Jewish experience, claiming that the conflict between the defenders of and skeptics about the State of Israel is inherent to the Jewish identity.

Or does he? Who is "claiming" this about Jewish Identity?

And in all this of course what becomes impossible is to challenge all the many assertions, (since first one must figure out if they are asserted or reported, then evaluate whether they are reported accurately, etc) the refreshed anti-Semitic themes, imagery, motifs, the statements of pseudo-fact, etc.

The upshot of all this is Zizek had made no assertions or observations on his own account; he is not responsible for the content of the text. He has merely set up the text like a tent and watched in dismay as it was invaded by unruly chattering hordes of other assertions made by people wearing masks he was unable to penetrate to positively identify who said what. The text was transformed into a record of this cacaphony and he watched this helplessly.

The theme staged was The Jew and the motifs:

Jewish tribalism as an obstacle to Christian universal love and communism
that Christian universal love and communism require the annihilation of the Jews, which alone is a final solution to the Jewish question
the Jewish tribalists manipulate the desire of European others for Christian universal love for the purpose of fostering capitalist alienation while they preserve their ethnic cohesion and collective identity to achieve supremacy
the "liberal multicultural left" who fall under the sway of the self-styled "universalist" Jewish intellectuals is anti-Semitic in resenting Jewish tribalism while promoting the tribalism of the inferior races (those whose "very being "is inferior as Heidegger explained)
the rootless cosmospolitan "uncanny Jew" continues to operate and live in the "interstices" of nations, and is the object of the anti-Semitism of the National Jew (this Jew and that Jew are then the secret sinister forces behind both the "old" and the "new" anti-Semitism)
this Jewish tribalist particularism matched to the fomenting of a pseudo-universalism which renders the gentes vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and prevents Christian love and communism is an historically demonstrable pattern of which the Jew Horkheimer is an example before the Jew Milner

These motifs are paraded back and forth before the reader throughout the text but the author takes no responsibility for them appearing there. When challenged he suggests in fact the Jews are to blame for them - they are the figments of the imagination of Jews which have been forced into his book by mysterious powers.

***
*

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
"It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do" (B. Brecht)
ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
(Updated programme!)
13th/14th/15th March 2009
Logan Hall, Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
"The intellectual impulses of the 90s will come from women"
Annette Frick. Action with Gaby Kutz in front of Gerhard Richter's 48 Portraits
Ludwig Museum, Cologne, 8.8.1990
Communism in the 2010s: a world where many worlds fit?
In solidarity,
riverside cells
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
(Updated programme!)
13th/14th/15th March 2009
Logan Hall, Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
Friday March 13
Registration opens at 11.30am
Costas Douzinas Welcome to the people
2pm Stuart Hall Opening Remarks
~~Alain Badiou Introductory remarks~~
Angela Davis "Women, race and class"
Michael Hardt "The REproduction of the Common"
Lynne Segal "What Feminism did to Communism"
Bruno Bosteels "The Postcolonial Hypothesis: Frightened Communism?"
Nancy Hartsock "The Proliferation of Radical Standpoints"
Peter Hallward "Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Body"
Jean-Luc Nancy, Christine Delphy and members of migrant and feminist groups will be
present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.
6 pm End
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
(Updated programme!)
13th/14th/15th March 2009
Logan Hall, Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
Saturday March 14
Registration opens at 8.30am
10am Starhawk "Thinking with worms: Reclaiming the communist soil"
Alessandro Russo "Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?"
Subcomandante Marcos "Intergalactic Decentralized Communism"
Alberto Toscano "Communist Power / Communist Ignorance"
Toni Negri "Communisme: reflexions sur la pratique"
Silvia Federici "Creating Communities of Care"
1pm Lunch
3pm Vandana Shiva "Ecofeminism and the challenge to Western Communism"
Terry Eagleton "Communism: Leontes or Paulina?"
Jacques Ranciere "Communism without Communists?"
Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon "Communists without Communism"
Alain Badiou "Communism: an empty name"
Hilary and Steven Rose "Alas, Poor Marx"
6pm End
Drinks Reception and Street Party – Jeffery Hall and outside
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
ON THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
(Updated programme!)
13th/14th/15th March 2009
Logan Hall, Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
Sunday March 15
10am Slavoj Zizek "The view from up here: Communism from above is
no communism at all"
Sandra Harding "Communisms from below"
Donna Haraway "On Interspecies Communism"
Gianni Vattimo "Weak Communists"
Judith Balso "Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible
name for politics?"
bell hooks "Ain't I a Communist?"
12am Skill sharing workshop: Alter-communisms!
Bring your experiences and visions from local and transversal struggles
Concluding Collective Trance: Channelling Karl Marx
2pm End

Good form

2011-09-29T13:28:00.000-07:00

[I]s it not that, in the “post-modern” global empire, what was hitherto the “Jewish exception” is increasingly becoming the stardard rule: a particular ethnic group which participates fully in the global economy while simultaneously maintaining its identity at the level of Milner’s Fourfold, that is to say, through its founding cultural myths and rituals, which are transmitted from generation to generation? Milner misses this key point insofar as he fails to grasp the actual functioning of the emerging global pastout empire: in it, all particular identities are not simply “liquefied,” rendered fluid, but maintained – Empire thrives on the multiplicity of the particular (ethnic, religious, sexual, lifestyle…) identities which form the structural obverse of the unified field of Capital.

This is the deepest irony that escapes Milner: he fails to notice the radical ambiguity about his thesis of the Jewish exception as resisting modern universality. When Milner posits the Jews as insisting on the Quadruple of the familiar tradition, against the dissolution of this tradition in the non-All of modernity, he thereby repeats [that is, he embodies] the standard anti-Semitic cliché according to which the Jews themselves [Milner himself being the representative Jew in this case] are always in the first ranks of the struggle for universal mingling, multi-culti, racial confusion, liquefaction of all identities, nomadic, plural, shifting subjectivity – with the exception of their own ethnic identity. The passionate appeal of Jewish intellectuals to universalist ideologies is tied to the implicit understanding that Jewish particularism will be exempt, as if the Jewish identity cannot survive when Jews live side by side with other people who also insist on their ethnic identity – as if, in some kind of parallax shift, the contours of their identity can become clear only when the identity of others is blurred. The alliance of the USA and the State of Israel is thus a strange cohabitation of two opposed principles; if Israel qua ethnic state par excellence stands for the (Quadruple) tradition, the USA – much more than Europe – stands for the non-All of society, the dissolution of all fixed traditional links. The State of Israel thus, in effect, functions as the small a of the US big A, the ex-timate core of tradition that serves as the mythic point of reference of the chaotic non-All of the USA.

...Does not the idea of the Jews forming a nation-state imply the end of Judaism – no wonder the Nazis supported the plan! The Jews stood for the “Fourfold” precisely in order to maintain their identity without a Nation-State. The only consistent position (theoretically and ethically) is to reject such alternatives, and recognise both dangers: “The critique of anti-Semitism or the critique of Zionist politics? Yes, please!” – far from being exclusive opposites, the two are connected by a secret link. There really is anti-Semitism in much of the contempotaty Left, for instance, in the direct equating of what the State of Israel is doing in the occupied territories with the Nazi Holocaust, with the implied reasoning: “The Jews are now doing to others what was doing to them, so they no longer have any right to complain about the Holocaust!” And there actually is a paradox in that the very Jews who preach universal “melting-pot” are all the more insistent on their own ethnic identity.

- Zizek, the Parallax View

So the Atzmon theatre reveals conclusively that in fact the Zizney members do understand after all that this is anti-Semitic propaganda and have understood this perfectly all along; they are entirely familiar with the themes and can recognise them even when they are packed in various distracting ornaments and paired with declarations of benevolence and left commitments.

2011-09-16T09:54:00.001-07:00

Angela Davis nous parle de son combat (Octobre... par Nzwamba

For Those Who Scoff at Heels and Sneaks

2011-08-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Nazim Hikmet in 1931

ON SHIRTS, PANTS, CLOTH CAPS AND FELT HATS

If there are those
who'd call
me
"an enemy
of a clean shirt,"
they should see a picture of my great teacher,
The master of masters, Marx, pawned
his jacket,
and he ate maybe one meal every four days;
yet
his awesome beard
cascaded
down a spotless
snow-white
starched shirt ...
And since when did pressed pants get the death sentence?
Wise guys
should read our history here, too:
"In 1848, as bullets parted his hair,
he'd wear
pants of genuine English wool
in true English style,
creased and waxed
à l'anglaise -
the greatest of men, Engels ...
When Valdimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin stood
like a fire-breathing giant on the barricades,
he wore a collar
and a tie as well ..."
As for me
who's just another proletarian poet
--Marxist-Leninst consciousness, thirty kilos of bones,
seven liters of blood,
a couple kilometers
of blood vessels,
muscles, flesh, skin and nerves,
the cloth cap on my head
doesn't tell
what's in it
any more than my only felt hat
makes me a tool
of the past that's passing ...
But
if I wear a cloth cap
six days a week
it's so that once a week
when I'm out with my girl
I can wear
clean
my only felt hat ...
Except
why don't I have two felt hats?
What do you say, master?
Am I lazy?
No!
To bind pages twelve hours a day,
to stand on my feet
till I drop,
is hard work ...
Am I totally stupid?
No!
For instance,
I could hardly be
as backward
as Mr. So-and-So ...
Am I a fool?
Well,
not
completely ...
Maybe a bit careless ...
But all the time
the real reason is that
I'm a proletarian,
brother,
a proletarian!
And I'll own two felt hats
- two million -
only when,
like every proletarian,
I own - we own-
the textile mills of Barcelona-Habik-Mosan-Manchester!
And if n-o-o-o-o-o-t,
NOT!

Reading Z in 1936

2011-08-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

This year New Directions reissued Louis Zukofsky's massive poem "A." I can't speak to the whole, but the first hundred pages deliver complex and, for Qlipothim, congenial compositions on revolutionary art and politics. Several times I have thought I should post passages here. But extracts from such a long and complex poem lose meaning in isolation.

But today I was reading those comments on the rebellions in England by the renowned Zzk. And thinking about how vacuous the self-packaging of the image-commodity celebrity leftist'is. Particularly it's self-celebration of the psychoanalytic complexities of its own relationship to corporate image-commodities, to misogynist movies and racist jokes, and its disappointment in the vulgar desires for tangible commodities evident in the rebellion.

Then I read Zukofsky, who has this to say in 1936:

Untiring action, but free
From the lie that it can take the place
of mass action.
We are not Xerxes who had the sea
scourged with chains.
But to determine the facts does not
mean to give up the struggle.
Learn, learn, learn!
Act, act act!
Be prepare, well and completely prepared
To make use, with all our forces,
Of the next revolutionary wave.
That is our job.

Good day,
The 'left' really
Thinks the International is a faithful Penelope.
Well, our International does not weave
during the day
To undo its work during the night. -
Thanks for such Marxism
Which immediately attributes all society
To its economic basis.

And I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles,
dissertations, pamphlets ..
In short that .. literature which
Flourishes in the dirty soil of society,
I mistrust those who are always contemplating
The several questions, like the Indian saint his
navel.
Arbitrary hypotheses .. personal need
To justify personal abnormality .. before
Middle class moralitym and to entreat its patience.

Sheer criminality

2011-08-11T04:33:00.000-07:00

A Fine Lung on the current outburst of ~~free private enterpr~~ ~~Thatcherism~~ ~~deregulated shopping~~ shocking, inexplicable selfishness in England:

You start with a society in which material wealth is the only way to get ahead. You follow with a culture in which fame and money dominate. You bombard people with images of luxury goods that you tell them they must have. You create a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 20% of the country’s wealth whilst the least wealthy 50% own just 7%. You make that gap wider. You tantalise and take away.

You remove educational allowances from the young. You put a higher percentage of them out of work than at any time in the last century. You tell them that they must sustain £30,000 of debt to go to college to get a degree that isn’t even likely to get them a job. You spend ten billion on a sports event a few miles down the road that they cannot afford to even attend. You talk of Olympic Dreams (TM) as you close their sports facilities. You cut local services and their parents’ jobs to pay for the debts and disasters of your banks. You condemn their lives through your economic ideology as you sit in your cabinet of millionaires. You criminalise them for socialising in groups that you say are ‘anti-social’. You stop and search them over and over and over again and when they react you punish them. You turn one against another. You individualise and marginalise and alienate them from their neighbours. You talk of community but make it an illusion. You give no hope.

You do all this.

And when they come out of the estates to which you confine them, to take the goods they cannot afford, from the shops that won’t let them in, on streets denied to them by the police who harass them, in defiance of the politicians who condemn them, organised on social networks and media from which you have made millions, filmed by your cameras for your corrupt media companies for our consumption; when they do all this, all you can say is: ‘This is sheer criminality’.

You bet it is.

Vile Logic In The Guardian

2011-08-08T23:00:00.001-07:00

Even in the context of CiF, the latest Ziz is amazing:

The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is "we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst".

The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first "multiculturalists": their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant.

But what if we are entering an era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion – that there is "no freedom for the enemies of freedom", as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle, this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, there was a vile logic to Breivik's choice of target: he didn't attack foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards intruding foreigners. The problem is not foreigners, it is our own (European) identity.

2011-05-29T14:49:00.001-07:00

Listen.

2011-05-24T12:25:00.001-07:00

2011-05-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

2011-05-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

2011-05-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

Sérénade d'un amoureux dans les Abruzzes

2011-05-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

2011-05-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

"The City"

2011-05-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

SF: Tales of the City

NYC: Sex and the City

Some Old Familiar Poxyclips

2011-04-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

From:

David Redles, Hitler's millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation

Chapter 2 "The Turning Point: Racial Apocalypse or Racial Salvation"

The total chaos of the Weimar period, particularly in the early years, elicited a profound sense of collapse for many Germans, outwardly and inwardly. Perched on the edge of an abyss, the Nazis in particular came to believe that Germany, and indeed Aryan humanity in general, had reached a historic turning point. The old order had collapsed, requiring the appearance of a New Order (a new perception of reality, what the Nazis termed Weltanschauung, or would view). In true apocalyptic fashion, Hitler explained to a journalist,

The day is not far off when we shall be living in great times once more. What we now need is that intelligent writers should make clear to the citizens of Germany the historic turning point at which Germany stands today. We are on the threshold of a unique new epoch in our history. We have reached the turning point when the bourgeoisie must decide whether it will choose Bolshevik chaos in Germany and therefore in Europe, or a National-Socialist Germany and a new order on our continent.

Alfred Rosenberg likened this turning point to those that ushered in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: “today is again a turning point in the history of the world. At the beginning of the sixteenth century one began in Europe; at the end of the eighteenth century another set in, at the beginning of the twentieth century is again decline and rebirth.” According to Rosenberg, it was a rebirth into a “new synthesis of life,” not simply a new form of government but an inner spiritual transformation: “today we are inwardly experiencing a collapse, and we have a deep longing for a new form of life.”

The testimonials of the Old Guard clearly reflect a sense of living at a time that would bring either apocalypse or salvation. Jakob Hoffmann states that “I always believed a union of the best forces of Germany must bring about a turning point in order to save Germany from chaos.” Wilhelm Scherer remarked that he was happy to have been “able to contribute” to what he termed “a world-historical epoch.” Describing this epoch, he explained,

A presentiment arose in me that only revolution must follow, like one that the glorious history of Germany had not yet experienced. Yes, like one world history had not yet, until now, produced. Germany put into effect a world turning point, brought about by our Führer, his movement, and many of our best who had sacrificed their sacred blood.

Heinrich Maxeiner exclaimed that “I, however, rejoiced that a benevolent fate had placed me in this great destiny and turning point of our Volk – to have allowed me to experience the striving and struggling for it.” Similarly, another minor Nazi states that “we are thankful to our Creator to be able to live in this age,” while yet another proclaimed that “the greatest fortune that could befall me was the circumstances that I was born into a time like no other.” Finally, Arno Belger, a local propaganda leader from Halle, described this “world turning point” in a language reflective of his role within the movement:

An over-strained, spiritually hollow age drew to its close, as antiquated and decaying liberalistic social orders and forms collapsed into themselves. Europe breathed with difficulty under the stifling nightmare of that Uncertain yet Inescapable which was summoned by the shot at Sarajevo as a purifying bath of steel closed upon the civilized world, and so produced the pre-condition for the evolution of the new man of community.

This turning point marked the death of one age and a rebirth into a new age. Rosenberg’s notion that out of the collapse of civilization there is rebirth is a significant and recurrent element of Nazi millennialism. For many Nazis, the death of their world necessitated the birth of a new world. According to Hitler, it was the Nazis’ mission to help finish off the dying old world so that the new one could be born. As he explained to Otto Wagener,

That is precisely the most profound secret of the entire revolution we are living through and whose leadership it is our mission to seize: that there has to be overthrow, demolition, destruction by force! The destruction must be meaningful not senseless, as under Bolshevism. And it can only become meaningful is we have understood the goal, the purpose, the necessity.

Hitler told Hermann Rauchning similarly, “They regard me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! It is an honourable title. We shall rejuvenate the world! This world is near its end. It is our mission to cause unrest.” While Rauschning and many later historians took such statements as proof of Hitler’s essential nihilism, he and they missed the central point that Hitler, like his beloved Richard Wagner, saw destruction as potentially regenerative, hastening the birth of the millennial Third Reich.

…

Rebirth symbolizes the psychological transformation that occurs when a new construction of reality replaces one that has collapsed, a function of the postconversion mentality that I discuss in the next chapter. Nazi rhetoric and propaganda reflected this psychological process in its presentation of contemporary times. A Völkischer Beobachter headline on February 26, 1930 stated plainly, “While the Volk Decays, A New Volk Arises Out of It.” Goebbels explained that “distress is the path to happiness. Disintegration and dissolution do not mean perishing but, rather, ascension and opening. Behind the noise of the day the strong powers of a new creation work in stillness.” Gregor Strasser noted that “in disaster the seed of the coming redemption is contained, and in death the seed of the coming life.” Rosenberg stated that “a new synthesis of state is arising from the collapse and chaos.” Ernst Röhm exclaimed that “the time in which we live, in which a world has collapsed in a roar and a young world struggles for life and light, will be designated by later generations as the birth of a New Age.” The Old Guard Nazi Karl Hepp described the Weimar period in a similar manner;

A world was forever submerged, and there was something new in the Becoming. A spiritual unrest had seized the world and especially the German people, and permitted men to experience the labor pains of a New Age. I also was strongly possessed by the inner unrest of the New Age.

2011-04-23T12:46:00.001-07:00

A while ago Zizek managed to pass off a kitchy, tacky, nasty little Goebbelsian quotation as Gramsci. The New Left Review actually printed:

In short, our situation is like what Stalin said about the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves. Or as Gramsci said, characterizing the epoch that began with the First World War, ’ the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

Since it sounds like something from a trailer for idiotic violent white supremacist fantasy, like Red Riding Hood, Zizek's fans loved it and repeated it everywhere, never for a moment suspecting that the communist revolutionary intellectual Antonio Gramsci would neither write nor think like a Nazi video game.

Around the same time, he picked up something similarly stinking of fish from an aryan supremacist website and has been popularising it with the help of Verso, The London Review of Books, the Guardian and the rest of the progressive press at which institutions there apparently are no longer any editorial skills whatsoever. This latest Zizek gag is a manufactured quote from the French Nazi collaborator Robert Brasillach. It is concocted from two sentences taken from articles published a year apart and spliced together to give an erroneous impression of Brasillach's position and output.

Zizek writes:

Brasillach put it this way:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism.

In fact the first sentence is from a piece published in February 1939 while the second is from April 1938. The sense created by this suturing of fragments torn from their context is grossly misleading.

In First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Zizek gives the source for this manipulated pseudo-quote as '"Challenging Mind" by Rodbod' which he claims is to be found on the website europa-landofheroes.com. What you can find from europe-landofheroes however is a tribute film to Arkan, and nothing about Brasillach. Zizek has directed his readers to something I suppose he imagines justifies his Slovene embezzlement through aryanist nationalism scam, but it is no source for his pseudo-Brasillach. That can be found, rather, posted in 2006 on an aryan supremacist forum called Skadi, devoted to "Germanic Leitkultur", where the two sentences are quoted in a single paragraph in this order, the later first, but not combined as if they were part of the same text.

Brasillach's "soft" faction lost a battle with a more virulent group at Je Suis Partout, and he resigned. Yet he still could write, "I have confidence in the Wehrmacht and in Adolf's patriotism." Brasillach saw himself as a "moderate" anti-Semite. "We grant ourselves permission," he wrote, "to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz." He declared that "fascism is anti-Semitic." As he put it in 1938, "We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism."

Now this pseudo-Brasillach is spreading out through the virtual land without factcheckers, the virtual land of the gulls, where the pseudo-Gramsci and the pseudo-Chomsky, the pseudo-Toussaint, the pseudo-Enron Insiders, the fictional Arthur Feldman Viennese Jooo, and other Zizekian fabrications have also been fruitful and multiplied.

Democracy, Raced = Dysfunction

2011-04-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

(This despotism is what The Wire creates the justifying mythology for.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In 2009, The University of Michigan held a conference on The Wire "as both a topic and a model of critique."

PBS radio in Michigan discussed the academic organisers' ideas of the importance of the series for real-world policy making:

"You know," says Tillet, "The Wire is one of those shows that, regardless of one's academic discipline, one can find a common language or a common interest to talk about the show. You can have sociologists coming together, or economists, or literary critics, or historians, all trying to wrestle with the questions that the Wire posed to its audience members."

That's exactly what Paul Farber is banking on. He's a grad student at the University of Michigan and one of the guys behind the Wire themed conference, which they're calling "Heart of the City." He thinks there's something in The Wire for everyone to talk about: from inner city students to scholars. Even a big time politician like President Barack Obama has gone on the record saying it's his favorite TV show.

"The show is unique," says Farber. "It offers not just compelling story lines, but also really focused and keen ideas about policy making. When we think about reform, oftentimes it's around single issues platforms. So you go in and fix the schools, or you go in and fix crime. What the show demonstrates to us is that you can't just intervene in one area without having a really sincere, deep impact in others. The idea is that all areas and sectors of society are intimately connected."

And since Obama has already gone on the record saying how much he likes The Wire, Farber hopes that when it comes time for the administration to talk about new policies or reform, Obama takes into account what he learned from watching the TV show.

Current fascistic praxis in Michigan reflects the significant success the show's producers, it's academic fans and the propagandists of their world-view across the culture industry have had in their anti-democratic, racist ideological assault.

2011-04-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

Vijay Prashad on Lybia

Glenn Loury on Mass Incarceration in the United States

2011-04-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

The rest

Inequality

2011-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

2011-04-14T20:41:00.001-07:00

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income...

...It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

So how did the government come to address a financial crisis caused by the collapse of a residential-mortgage bubble by giving the wives of a couple of Morgan Stanley bigwigs free money to make essentially risk-free investments in student loans and commercial real estate?

Just an exercise

2011-04-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Galeano - 2000

2011-04-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Eduardo Galeano, Reading, 3 November 2000 from Lannan Foundation on Vimeo.

Watch. Do.

2011-04-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

So both Beck and Zizek, the extremist neanderthals in their niches, have fallen a little from grace just as their years of labour are coming to fruition. Explosively. Even though it's been coming on so steadily for so long, the laborious restoration of the barbaric language, mythology and pseudo-science of white supremacist patriarchal domination, the sudden freedom and bravado with which it is all used now shock even some who have adopted some softer version of the reactionary revisionist discourse themselves.

But we have to remember that discrediting this and shaming it and stripping it of its respectability was the accomplishment of culture wars of the past, and if ground has been lost, it need not be lost forever. We can retake that territority if we wish.

KS:... Notice also that the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine or the utter destruction of Iraq by the American military, for instance, are marginalized in this culturalized framing, leaving us at the superficial-and I would argue, ideological-level of a Thomas Friedman-type worldview that tries to reduce all explanations of "what went wrong" in Iraq as a product of a time-immemorial culture of the Arabs that can or cannot be civilized or modernized. Notice how it blames "them" and "their" culture for all that is wrong and leaves untouched anything the US war and occupation of Iraq did to them. Second, and for me more significant, this culturalized talk reduces and produces subjects and identities to simple civilizational and cultural templates. I recently spoke to my older brother on the phone and he said something to me that highlights this well. He said to me, "Khaldoun, I feel like an object. All my opinions and everything I do is now seen by both friends and foe as stemming from my Muslimness. It's like that's all I am now..." This is something many of us so-called Muslims or Arabs-no matter how secular or complex may be our identity-have been more and more exposed to this simplification. Everything from our sexual and dating desires, our views on marriage or on gays and women, to our critical insights on Israel or other political issues-are all reduced to our Muslimness/ Arabness. Moreover, it produces what Ferruh Yilmaz calls a new social ontology of difference by reconstituting our political identities from a class or colonial based way of seeing to an ethnicized/civilizational one.

And, as I have already mentioned, it's not only crude racists that speak to you this way. Often, and more so now, it is the default language of some on the non-mainstream left as well. Indeed, in academia, Yilmaz and I have been noticing an increasing number of left scholars who are themselves slowly becoming interpellated by this civilizational discourse. Once the social divide becomes culturalized around categories like Islam and the West, it transforms the way we see social issues like inequality, conflict, human rights, and so on. So to your question of what kinds of strategy are emerging, first thing I would say is that we have to be careful and not to think about politics as coming from a particular discursive content. Rather we have to see how this discourse relates to power and what it does once it articulates itself in the public sphere. Often we judge someone's politics by the words contained in his or her worldview. So words like "patriarchy" or "homophobia" are usually seen as adopted by "progressive" minded folks. But I think this is very limiting, especially when the social divide has been transformed from a class and colonial divide to an ethnicized/civilizational divide. So in our times, often these words are used as adjectives that precede civilizational categories, so that when they come together (patriarchal culture/Islam) it particularizes these political and social offenses to a specific people or culture. This means we have to start looking at the fine work of some postcolonial feminists and queer theorists like Joan Scott, Uma Narayan, Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler and others who are doing creative critical work around these issues.

JC: You mentioned Thomas Friedman, whose particular perspective on the Middle East has been quite damaging in terms of how he contributes to the culturalization of political discourse. This goes all the way back to his bestselling book From Beirut to Jerusalem, in which he engages in some absurdly reductionist arguments. Obviously the news media play a key role in the circulation and legitimation of the discursive patterns you are describing here. Given that the Weave is an alternative media project, I'm feeling a need to ask you about mediatic spaces where one might find more critical voices - voices that try to resist being interpellated into the "good Muslim/bad Muslim" framework, for instance. For people who are looking for alternative sources of news and commentary, what do you recommend?

KS: First I would recommend that you read the fine works of folks like W.E.B. Du Bois and study others like Ida B. Wells. Over the past couple of years, for instance, I've learned much from Ida B. Wells campaign to stop the lynching of black men who were accused of raping white women. The similarity between that campaign and what is emerging in our times was very shocking for me. And I was absolutely amazed by how Ida B. Wells, noticing northern liberal white complicity in the lynchings, maneuvered to fragment the racial hegemonic formation of her time by finally turning liberal whites against the white lynchers. I think this is the project of our time: is it possible that we can intervene in this new hegemonic bloc-making in such a way that liberals can be tugged away from this new racial magnet (let's call this de-interpellation)? Is that possible or is it wishful thinking and naïve on my part? I can see why some folks may think the latter, but from the few talks I've made to the public I'm always energized by liberals who come to speak to me later and tell me that they needed to hear what I said. So I would recommend finding folks that can speak in such a way to fracture this hegemonic formation. This would mean that you would have to refuse to abide by the constraints of the debate manufactured by our mainstream political and media institutions. Don't let them frame the issue. They will try to frame the issue around free speech or something of that sort, between Muslims who come from a culture that does not yet have experience with free speech (or gender equality or gay rights...) and "our way of life." You have to be diligent and find other frames, like searching the chains of incitements and locating the nodes that produce the debate in the first place and showing its racial element. Many academics and experts do not recognize this and proceed to pontificate upon the axioms of this politically constructed and politically manufactured debate

2011-04-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

Wallace Shawn, Reading, Part 1, 15 December 1999 from Lannan Foundation on Vimeo.

Wallace Shawn, Reading, Part 2, 15 December 1999 from Lannan Foundation on Vimeo.

2011-04-11T23:23:00.001-07:00

Conservative Jones, Boy Detective

2011-04-11T11:15:00.001-07:00

Tom Tomorrow

2011-04-11T03:03:00.001-07:00

2011-04-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

2011-04-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

Socialization of losses and...

2011-04-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

"Privatization of profits and socialization of losses": from goldbugs to Keynesians to trots and anarchists, the chosen syntagma to abbreviate the sequence of events that led us to where we are now. As if socialization signified some definite end to the process of enrichment. The financier stuffs himself, bails out on the check, calls a cab, and goes... where? Monte Cristo?

Even leftists are buying the idea that 'socialization' means the financiers lie in bed all day, waking only at two in the afternoon to pick up their welfare cheque. The lazy scrounging bastards are hoovering up entitlements.

That fiction will be maintained for as long as one believes that the crisis was created by greed-blinded stupidity: the Credit Default Swap cooked up over a boozy weekend in Boca Roca; Quant-fetishism; or the 'ideological' inflexibility of people who have read too much Ayn Rand... all explanations propounded by the popular press and novelistic accounts of the crisis. Those are all reasons put forward for the "shocking" neglect of the "miscalculated" risks incurred by finance before the crash.

The simple fact is that risk was allowed to be miscalculated to an insane degree precisely because crisis had been prepared for so efficiently.
"Socialization of losses" isn't the end of the story, it's just the beginning.

Riots

2011-04-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

Black Power Revolt of the 1960's - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from RedReel on Vimeo.

After the Watts riots, 58% of participants polled said they thought the effect of the riot would be favourable. 54% of those arrested though the riot would "help the Negro cause". 51% thought the riot would make whites more sympathetic to the problems of blacks. More than 80% thought the riots would make whites more aware of the problems facing the African-American community.

2011-04-05T11:39:00.001-07:00

Amiri Baraka on Obama, circa 2008
In an October, 2008, radio interview, poet-activist Amiri Baraka accused leftist critics of candidate Barack Obama of being afflicted with “some kind of egotistical self-regard as the perfect radical.” Today, in his latest poem, Baraka calls President Obama a “yapping Negro” who would sell his own folks “into slavery.”

2011-04-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

...
What would you identify as the central insights of Academic Choice theory?
The theory begins by identifying three principal ways in which economists try to maximize their utility. First, they receive salaries from universities, which can be increased if their course enrollment increases. Course enrollment is primarily driven by students with future careers in business and the financial sector, so an economist has an incentive to propound theories that CEOs and financial institutions find attractive. Even if adoption of these theories leads to substantial public costs, these costs will not be shouldered by the economist personally. Second, by developing such theories an economist can open the door to future wealth as a lobbyist or consultant. Third, the support of economists is critical to creating and maintaining special privileges for the financial services industry and for top corporate officers. By threatening to withdraw this support, economists can engage in rent-seeking. I call this last practice academic entrepreneurship.

Is it really plausible that economists threaten top banks that in the absence of some kind of payoff, they will change the theories they teach in a direction that is less favorable to the banks?
There are certainly cases in history of the following sequence:

a. Economist E espouses views that are less favorable to certain special interest groups S. Doing so threatens the ability of S to extract rent from the public.
b. Later, E changes his view, thereby withdrawing the prior threat.
c. Still later, E is paid large amounts of money by representatives of S in exchange for services that do not appear particularly onerous.

For example, let E = Larry Summers and let S = the financial services industry. In 1989 E was (a) a supporter of the Tobin tax, which threatened to reduce the rent extracted by S. This threat was apparently later withdrawn (b), and in 2008 E was paid $5.2 million (c) in exchange for working at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw (an element of S) for one day a week.
...

Isn’t it offensive to assume that economists, for motives of personal gain, shade their theoretical allegiances in the directions preferred by powerful interest groups?
How could it ever be offensive to assume that a person acts rationally in pursuit of maximizing his or her own utility? I’m afraid I don’t understand this question.
...

Manning Marable 1950-2011

2011-04-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

Jared Ball on Marable's Malcolm X bio which he did not live to see published.

And down a few posts here, Marable's lecture Living Black History. There are two other lectures on the original site.

video platform
video management
video solutions
video player

Michael Eric Dyson: Manning Marable, A Brother, A Mentor, A Great Mind

The Great Wells of Democracy and others at googlebooks, including Beyond Black and White with the celebrated and enduringly important reply to Adolph Reed's essay The Current Crisis of the Black Intellectual.

The Disgusting Jean-Luc Nancy

2011-04-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

What the Arab peoples signify to us

Disgusting right from its tortuous opening, which some will forgive as a dilletantist flourish, but which in fact is doing yeoman’s work in defining a narrowly eurocentric perspective on events in north Africa:

The Arab peoples are signifying to us that resistance and revolt are with us once again, and that history is moving beyond History.

Nothing that Arabs do can have significance unless it is signifying to “us”.

Meanwhile, other States strike at their own rebels quite forcefully, sometimes with the help of a powerful Arab neighbour.

Would be kinda vulgar to name the actors, or give geographical specifics (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan). I’m poeticizing here!! “Canaan’s ancient land”, that’s my level.

Benghazi insurgents are asking for help

Erm, okay, well that was pretty specific, but we can verify: we’ve spoken to most of them, it really is what they want.

the heavy guilt of a “West”

White man’s burden.

It is fine for the beautiful souls of the left and the sophisticated operators on the right to sigh or protest;

Smelling a nineties revival here: remember Zizek used this line repeatedly during the bombing of Belgrade? And ended up screaming in caps, “not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE”? We are in the presence of Euro-geist: it’s sophisticated shit.

We are no longer just simply in the world of Western arrogance, self-confidence and imperialism.

Reality refutes this at every point. The most outrageous lie in this piece.

it is simply in the process of melting in the fusion that begets another world, without sunrise or sunset, a world where it is day and night everywhere at the same time and where it is necessary to reinvent the act of living together and, before all else, the act of living itself.

Logorrhoea. Nothing intelligible is being said here.

So, yes, it is necessary to keep a close eye on the strikes that are aimed at undermining the vile assassin of the people; sure, it is necessary to strike - him, of course, not the people.

Imagining Prof. Nancy here, anxiously overseeing the computer monitors at the command control of the French airforce, shouting ‘Non, zat iz not Qadaffi’s harem, zat iz a wedding party! Keep going!”

It is up to the people in question and to all others, including us, to ensure then that the oil, financial, and arms dealing game that installed and maintained this puppet (among many others) in power does not start over.

Yeah, this time is different. We’re gonna get rid of all that nasty shit. Once the smoke clears.

It is the responsibility of the peoples, yes: and it is also of course to us, the peoples of Europe or America, that this is addressed.

Is there anything that happens in this world that is not addressed to ‘us’, in the final instance? Is there anything in this world that doesn’t ultimately demand the response of a West whose sheer depravity and savagery has been demonstrated again and again over several hundred years?

It is a delicate task.

Uh-huh.

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Oompa Loompas

2011-04-03T09:51:00.001-07:00

To expose the game plan of the reactionary culture warriors of this revived "universalism", scourge of "multiculturalism", one can usefully compare Zizek's revision of Haitian history to the Oscar-honored film the Blind Side, (the dignity of which Barbara Walters vociferously defended against the gentlest, most cautious, understated and non-aggressive criticism of Vanessa Williams) described here at Bitch Flicks:

imdb synopsis, as composed by Anonymous:
The Blind Side depicts the story of Michael Oher, a homeless African-American youngster from a broken home, taken in by the Touhys, a well-to-do white family who help him fulfill his potential. At the same time, Oher's presence in the Touhys' lives leads them to some insightful self-discoveries of their own.

Living in his new environment, the teen faces a completely different set of challenges to overcome. As a football player and student, Oher works hard and, with the help of his coaches and adopted family, becomes an All-American offensive left tackle.

The real synopsis, as composed by me:

The Blind Side depicts the story of a white woman who sees a Black man walking down the street in the rain. She tells her husband to stop the car, and he obliges—oh, his wife is just so crazy sometimes!—then, out of the goodness of her white heart, she allows him to spend the night in their offensively enormous home.

Unfortunately, she can’t sleep very well—the Black man might steal some of their very important shit! But the next day, when she sees that he’s folded his blankets and sheets nicely on the couch, she realizes that, hey, maybe all Black men really aren’t thieving thugs.

Then she saves his life.

There’s a way to tell a true story, and there’s a way to completely botch the shit out of a true story. Shit-botching, in this instance, might include basing the entire film around an upper-class white woman’s struggle to essentially reform a young Black man by taking him in, buying him clothes, getting him a tutor, teaching him how to tackle, and threatening to kill a group of young Black men he used to hang out with.

However, a filmmaker might consider, when telling the true story of Michael Oher’s struggles to overcome his amazing obstacles, to actually base the film on the true story of Michael Oher’s struggles to overcome his amazing obstacles.

Instead, we get Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) as the adorable southern heroine. We get the white football coach’s unwillingness to stand by his Black player, until one day, he has a revelation on the field and screams at a referee for making yet another terrible call against Oher. The result? The viewer gets to cheer—not for Oher, mind you—but for the lesson the coach finally learned: racism is bad! Yay white people! We rock!

Zizek's revisionist history of Haiti is remarkably similar. He insists, as does this odious film, that he is telling "a true story", but he modifies the historical record to transform the history of white European expropriation, domination, opppression and exploitation of Haiti and Haitians into a treacly tear-jerker fable of its opposite, white European civilisation, salvation and emancipation of Haiti and Haitians. As in the touching tale of rich white benevolence, in Zizek's pseudo-histories ideology is truly reality on its head, as Zizek switches the places of producer and expropriator of all values as well as of victim and perpetrator of wrongs, erasing imperialist violence and in its place inserting white superiority and benevolence, erasing the biases of Eurocentric and Eurosupremacist history and replacing it with the biased "politically correct" "liberal multiculturalist" cultural-ideological oppression and intimidation of "we white leftists", and erasing European expropriation and appropriation and replacing it with African and African-Caribbean imitation, gratitude, emulation.

The formula to which Zizek resorts to provide the old colonialist framework and imply what still cannot be stated explicitly is quite simple, familiar from countless stories of white fulfillment and self-improvement attained by saving black people from themselves. (This is something even very flawed white people are qualified to do). Zizek's version (unlike say the cagier one here, where McNulty has failed to save D'Angelo from his depraved savage unnatural welfare queen mother) is as pure as the Blind Side's. The fears of Oher that keep the Touhys up at night are matched in Zizek's Speilbergian scenario by white soldiers' fear of "some tribal war chant" coming from "the black army":

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom – but only for rational, “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality…). This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the “Marseillaise,” and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category.

There are no grounds in the historical record for this detail. It is expertly camouflaged as some kind of thoughtlessly ejaculated - and thus insignificant - "excess" and "sloppiness", but it is a precisely calculated to be thus defended against objection (as too small and unpremeditated a point) and to allow for the plausible deniability of the pleasures the fans derive. The fiction is packed with revisionist hints that replace history with throwback colonialist adventure stories for boys. It would be odd for French soldiers to be surprised that French citizens should be singing French songs. But Zizek's fable manages to cloud the (amply documented) reality to suggest instead a 19th century colonial cartoon, and to excuse his invention by implicitly attributing it to some unnamed soldiers from the metropole modelled on characters one would expect to find in such popular propagandistic stories. This imaginary foil expectation ("some tribal war chant" issuing from "primitive blacks" which he intensifies elsewhere as "half-ape blacks") is arranged to situate the Marseillaise, and the white soldiers' epiphany of universalism it triggers, as proof of the efficacy and virtue of the European white supremacist civilising mission. This epiphany is of course defined as white men realising black men can be their equals - or nearly - if put through a sufficiently stern but generous apprenticeship. This packet of hints combine with the previous hint offered by visions of black Haitians, simple as they were, taking white French Ideas too "literally", to produce history as a minstrel show skit. The 19th century stereotype of childlike, imitative "negroes" is evoked to transform the history of African-Caribbean freedom struggle into one of successful and magnanimous, if comical, colonial tutelage, within a fictionalised context governed by the unquestioned assumption that "equality" and "liberty" were actually concepts invented by white French bourgeois men. Contact with this incomparably creative intellectual force, German spirit, white genius, inspired the enslaved to revolt, Zizek insists - and thus to attempt "premature" liberation and self-rule. Failure was inevitable, Zizek assures us, but the attempt is proof of the worthiness and validity of the civilising mission.

The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint 'Ouverture, it was clearly "ahead of his time", "premature" and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an event than the French Revolution itself.

It is not, as some defenders of Zizek will insist, that Zizek is evoking some other racist's ideas about the barbarism and immaturity of the Haitians and the precipitant haste of their slave revolt and later war of independence. Rather it is Zizek himself asserting the accuracy of this Hegel-ish take and bringing forward history as proof. Of course, he explains, Haitians could not effectively seize the liberty and self-govenrment of which the French white bourgeoisie taught them to dream, but how touching and remarkable that they even tried to imitate their masters! (This is again a repeat of the same narrateme...Mrs. Touhy fearing theft and violence but elated to see the folded sheets; the French soldiers fearing "the black army" singing "some tribal war chant" but astonished to hear the Marseillaise; "you white leftist men and women" and Zizek not expecting much from "half-ape blacks" and breathlessly impressed with the astonishing attempt to realise French principles! And of course your joy at the sight evidences your white virtue.)

This all is designed to give Zizek's readers the same pleasures the white Blind Side audience derives from the infantilized Oher and the wondrous efficacy of his simple-minded "literal" interpretation of his white guardian's directive to protect his team as he would his white family.

The invention of the averted menace of "some tribal war chant" and the ensuing proof of "universality" (black men can also attain the demigodlike condition of "French-ness") is Zizek's white-entitled Hollywoodizing of events beyond recognition (and anarchronistically infusing his tale with the image vocabulary of a 19th century race theory he is devoted to reviving) using for pretext the well-known passage from Pamphile de Lacroix' memoires of the campaign (cited by CLR James and others). His fictionalising works in precisely the same way as The Blind Side and aims for the same effects, titillating a white audience with a brush with savage black danger and its overmastering by white dominance, encouraging and affirming this audience's white supremacist contempt, while allaying its fear and stroking its vanity.

That "some tribal war chant" which Zizek envisions his white protagonists fearing they hear from, in his words, "half-ape blacks whose grandparents jumped in trees like apes in Africa," evokes a whole scenario from colonial propaganda's imagery of savage blackness which continues to be exploited by Hollywood (for example elaborately in Blood Diamond and Amistad) though usually not with as open a relish and bravado as one finds in Zizek and his fans. (Though these scenes have been provided with a similar alibi: Speilberg's inexcusable opening Amistad sequence was frequently defended, just like Zizek's endless stream of racist imagery, as some other racist's vision offered only to be "subverted" and repudiated by the subsequent joyful revelation of the gentle nature and educability of Cinqué and the other Amistad escapees). Like Mrs. Touhy's elation as her fears are proven unfounded (at least in this instance, and the implication, as with Zizek, is that the relief is exceptional good luck, and a lesson that not all Young Black Men are wilding superpredators or irredeemable), Zizek stages the joyous discovery - the savage "blacks" are civilised after all, they sing French songs!

Unsurprisingly, Zizek further lards his Haitian History fable, freely adapted from "a true story" and ending with a celebration of Haiti's post-Independence liberty and prosperity that was the gift of French colonisation and Enlightenment, with other Hollywood formula scenes, uplifting, "sublime moments" exhibiting white "authenticity", heroism and goodness. Inviting his reader/audience to share in the tearful sentimentality of white self-celebration, Zizek parades the true greatness of "white culture" and its emancipatory Enlightenment while all the inconvenient details of history are washed away in the deluge of emotional fluids provoked. His aim is to confirm his audience's feeling - not to convince but to seduce and massage - that white supremacist empire's violence (which yes yes must be acknowlegded) is merely accidentally factual, not of the essence, while its justice and benevolence are manifestly destined Truth. So very soon Zizek shows us Toussaint Louverture on a victory tour in Paris surrounded by a wildly cheering audience of Jacobins...

Arguably the most sublime moment of the French Revolution occurred when the delegation from Haiti, led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, visited Paris and were enthusiastically received at the Popular Assembly as equals among equals.

...see it, the steadycam whirl about him, the jubilation all around, with this vindicated and triumphant black hero at the centre.

(It didn't happen quite that way, you say? Killjoy, hater?)

And Zizek takes pains, as does the Blind Side, to stress the (special) black object of proper and successful white civilising mission is not to be feared. The carefully chosen primitive pupil can be awed and made loyal, trained to put the interests of "the family first", as Oher lives to "protect the family" and excells as a lineman.

It was the first time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to their pre-colonial "roots", but on behalf of universal principles of freedom and equality.

The message and its powerful appeal to white supremacist sentimentality is the same - protecting the quarterback, protecting the European "enlightement project". True superiority will earn respecta and subservience. Not only are actual African, African-Caribbean and indigenous American culture and history erased from the revolutionary history of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, their absence is openly applauded as a civilisational advancement: Zizek applauds the Haitian rebels specifically for purportedly discarding African culture, hopelessly backward and parochial, for supposedly indigenous French/European culture labelled "advanced" and "universal". The "particularism" of the exploited revolting against the exploiters, self-emancipating and unified as a class, is demonised as backward and savage, while history is revised into fictions to offer reassurance that properly mastered by white civilisers (preposterously credited with inventing justice and liberty and democracy), black objects of benevolence (ludicrously portrayed as needing to have their consciousness modernised by a beleaguered slaveowning capitalist bourgeoisie trying unsuccessfully to throw off a decrepit feudal and Absolutist cultural and political superstructure) will be grateful and willingly subordinate. But in order to tame the black savages and teach them their duty to fight for the protection of the "universal Man" that are the white bourgeoisie, the white civilisers have to understand and accept their own superiority, their universality as entitlement to own the universe, their Hegelohistorical mission, and, today as before, the truth of their/our history:

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past…

...[Once having grasped that great white intellect liberated the black Haitians], we white Leftist men and women are free to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt.

Zizek's harrangue is an old one: White guilt and fear, stoked by race traitors and (Jewish) infiltrators into the white elite ("liberal multiculturalists" from "the big cities" who infect the homeland of "local people" with the proximity of "immigrants" etc.) stand in the way of completing the civilising mission. The decline into superstition and bestiality that results from the compromising of white seperatism and supremacy is plain - knowlegde is discarded for a celebtration of ignorance, alas poor Marx!, everything lowly, degraded and weak, is championed over what is noble and high and strong, women and worms are cherished in the place of will and intellect, the very seperation of Man from Ape is blurred, the inferiors demand recognition and inclusion ludicrously: "Ain't I a communist?". This catastrophe is familiar - it is the evil consequence of slave morality. "Whites", the glorious blond beasts, the strong, have been attacked by the banded forces of defectives who artificially support the weaker species ("gays with AIDs, black single mothers") in a "Darwinian" struggle. The "whites" have been deceived into the belief that they must repudiate rather than vindicate and bolster white supremacy and its benevolent world order. They have been convinced they must give up trying to raise up by enslaving and educating, gradually, not "prematurely", the lower races, gradually extinguishing their inferior "cultures" (their "fascinating dances" and "wife beating") and instead sink to their level, tolerate their superstitions and violence, allow them into the most elevated assemblies to mingle with Great Thinkers, to drag down the whole society into absurd rituals, "collective trances" and "channeling", in an attempt to enact a perverted notion of equality. Like the Blind Side, Zizek's pseudo-history of Haiti, selling the white civilising mission as an orgasmically sappy success, offers a flow of white supremacist kitch in sentimental erruptions that a certain audience can never get enough of. The history of European capitalist imperialism is not one of crimes (and justice therefore could not demand reparations, a menace Zizek goes on to attack again and again), but a tale of genuine white moral and intellectual superiority of which "whites" can be proud and for which they/we deserve the gratitude of all those recipients of the gift of our/their superior European culture and white "intellectual tools".

To provoke people when I’m asked about racism, I like to do my line I love racism, I can’t imagine my life without racism, there there’s no progressive movement now without racism. I’m not crazy…Now comes the preacher part, the real….what do I mean by this is that there is something false about this respectful multiculturalist tolerance…my God, for me political correctness is still inverted racism…let’s cut the crap, let’s say we want to become friends, there has to be a politically incorrect exchange of obscenity. You know, some dirty joke or whatever, whose meaning is “cut the crap we are now real friends”. And I can tell you this from my wonderful experience here, you want a shocking story you will hear it. How did I become here a friend, a true friend, am not advising anybody to do it because it was a risky gesture, but it worked wonderfully with a -with a -with a black, African-American guy. No? How did I become? We were very friendly, already, but not really, but then I risk and told him, it’s a horrible thing I warn you, is it true that you blacks you know have a big penis, no? but that you can even move it so that if you have on your leg above your knee a fly you can Boff! smash it with your penis. The guy embraced me and told me dying of laughter “now you can call me a nigger.” Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?

Let us not lose sight of what all this is for. The ruling class is accelerating attacks on the lifestyle of the "first world" majorities, which includes most white folks. And the catastrophe that results in the rich world is to be blamed on the collapse of white supremacy, on the revolt of the inferiors and slaves and white mingling with the lowly. The immiseration of the majority in the rich world is going to be explained, by the ruling class through its mass media, by a formula that a pseudo-left has been as hard at work installing as common sense as the fasho right. The current world system is crumbling, and some kind of new imperial white supremacist neofeudalism or neofascism is what the ruling class are attempting to transition to. (A wild-eyed petty bourgeois pseudo-left, evangelists of abstraction as petty bourgeois radicals always are, has already declared itself content to envision a future "communism" as Plato's Republic, the same left which defends a historiography classing Herrenvolk democracies as egalitarian societies with merely concrete minor defects.)

This project to reinstate and reinvigorate discredited and debunked white supremacist assumptions involves the pervasive iteration, under cover of varying degrees of flexible postmodern irony and disavowal, of the paradigm that Zizek and posse disseminate in their mocking "alternative" nightmare vision of an intellectual culture polluted with "toxic" primitives and which David Simon promotes to the mesmerised ecstatic delight of the same ressentimental white supremacist audience in The Wire.

The ruling class aggression is accelerating. The population has been really "softened up", since the flowering of altermondialist anticapitalist militancy (after decades of culture war successes for de-colonial radical pedgagogy) at the turn of the millenium, by years of "world-altering" ("game-changing") "crises" coming ever more rapidly after one another. In the US, a significant portion of white population will blame "the Black President" for the transformation of the US into a "Third World" country. It may take five years but this is how the history of the completed privatisation and final asset stripping of the US Treasury will be remembered. Obama came in, a cinematic episode (which even those who recognised the ersatz nature of the event dared not entirely repudiate, out of fear of the perpetual state of emergency associated with Bush as much as owing to an awareness of the reality of his supporters' aspirations and energies) popularly viewed as crowning a long period of anti-imperialism and the dismantling of white supremacist patrarchy, and by the time he left office, the country looked more like Latin America than like Scandinavia. (Remember the meme of how devastated New Orleans looked "like Africa"). All the damage of the ruling class offensive now will be attributed to Obama as The Black President, to black rule. Or this, in any case, is the hope of Zizek and Simon and their followers, fans, protégés and spawn, the outcome toward which their ideological labours are directed. The Wire, the new "Leninist Eurocentrism" and "universalism", the barbarisation and de-civilisation of culture and moeurs, and all the popular historical revisionism and "daring" "courageous" new analyses - weren't "the blacks" better off in slavery/colonialism? weren't "women" better off in the 50s supported by "breadwinner" husbands? - have prepared the frameworks. This is the project served by the "failure of multiculturalism" genre of punditry, which David Simon's "decline of the American Empire" enlarges and illustrates as soap opera. The postwar boom and the brief period when the fruits of the victories of social movements, revolutions and anti-colonialist wars of independence were enjoyed, is to be written by the "new universalist" white supremacists as the golden age of white rule. This golden age is to be chronicled as victim of barbarian invasions...the egoist, competitive, masturbating, empty-headed, consumerist feminists, the fetishist particularist violent animal anti-intellectual anti-racists, the exploitative victimologist sentimental goddess-worshipping anti-imperialists.

Bob Roberts was taken to Sundance to get a distributor. The producer recalled how between writing and release, it had become less satire and more topical lampoon. In the writing stage, the spectacle of neocon right wingers blaming economic inequality on welfare and the social programs initiated in the 60s was a stretch, an exaggeratiion; the producers worried it would seem extreme. When the film was being shot this was extreme satire, like Woody Allen's height-of-paranoia "impeach Reagan" button in Annie Hall. But reality was catching up and would overtake satire. A week before Bob Roberts' Sundance screening, this meme (which now seems so ordinary it is difficult to recall how shocking it was when it was thrust into the mainstream) was actually introduced by the Republicans into the political pundit vocabulary. So when it was stated in the film, there was "an audible gasp" from the audience (and afterwards, a bidding war for the rights to distribute.) Still when the film was released it was seen as "over the top". Then a few years later it appeared "prophetic". Now it seems understated; all that was nearly implausible is now routine; the portraits of corruption and ruthlessness seem mild. A young viewer might have a hard time detecting the tone or even getting what its supposed to be about.

2011-03-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

2011-03-20T16:02:00.001-07:00

2011-03-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

1972

2011-03-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

There are more ways than one in which the women’s movement can be co-opted and be cut off from the possibilities of becoming an autonomous and revolutionary political movement. One is that we will assist capitalism to introduce and integrate women into new facets of its exploitative relations. The FINANCIAL TIMES of March 9, 1971, has made clear to those backward capitalists who have not realised it yet, how useful we can be•
…The thousands of trained girls who come out of the universities every year are desperately anxious to escape from the triple trap of teaching, nursing, or shorthand-typing…
Many of these girls are clearly of high ability, and they constitute a pool from which skilled middle management could be drawn. They would be as hard working and conscientious as only a grateful outsider could be. and it is conceivable that, in spite of the equal pay legislation, they might not cost as much as male equivalents, at least in the first instance. We will use such women, in increasing numbers, when we realise that they exist and feel able to recognise their qualities. Until then. a good deal of talent that is costing a lot of money to train in our universities will continue to be wasted, and British industry will have failed to see a source of renewed energy and vitality that is before its very eyes.
This use of rebellion, to co-opt the most articulate minority for the purpose of developing capital, with “renewed energy and vitality”, is not new and not confined to women. It is the overriding principle of capitalist development. The ex-colonial world whom the British “educated” to selfgovernment, for example, is ruled by “grateful outsiders”. We need to examine how we are to be “used” closely and carefully if we are to prevent ourselves from organising only to assist capitalism to be less backward and in the process further enslaving ourselves, rather than organising to destroy it which is the only possible process of liberation.
Another, but connected, way of co-option has in some measure already taken place, and its agent has been left organisations. They have effectively convinced many of us that if we wish to move to working class women it must be either through them or, more pervasively, through their definitions of the class, their orientations and their kind of actions. It is as though they have stood blocking an open door. They challenge the validity of an autonomous women’s movement either directly or (by treating women, a specially exploited section of the class, as marginal) indirectly. For them the “real” working class is white, male and over thirty. Here racism, male supremacy and age supremacy have a common lineage. They effectively want to make us auxiliary to the “general”-struggle -as if they represented the generalisation of the struggle; as if there could be a generalised struggle without women, without men joining with women for women’s demands.
A major issue on which we have swallowed their orientation and been co-opted to defeat our own movement has been on the question of unionising women.
We are told that we must bring women to what is called a “trade union consciousness”. This phrase is Lenin’s and it comes from a pamphlet called “What is to be done.In many ways it is a brilliant pamphlet, but it was written in the early days of the Russian movement, in 1902. Lenin learnt from the workers and peasants of Russia in 1905 and 1917 and repudiated a good deal of what he wrote before these two revolutions. Left people do not speak of Lenin’s labor conclusions, and in my view much of what passes for left theory (and practice) today is pre-1902. In 1972 this is a serious charge, and I think it can be proved. They can read Lenin and quote him. But unlike Lenin, they are not able to learn from the actions that workers take.

If "multiculturalism" is not just a code for "too many f&#s, n!##&s and k*!&s"

2011-03-17T05:13:00.001-07:00

...is the whites-only Midsomer Murders policy now seen as the practise of "multiculturalism" or its refusal?

Anyway, ching chong, ling long, to all yall.

White Memes And White Dreams

2011-03-15T03:39:00.000-07:00

Prologue:

1970s - Empire as Country and City:

1. "Political Correctness Gone Mad"

New Left Project, 2011:

This is why “PC” and “PC gone mad” are virtually identical – a combination of misunderstood hypersensitivity and Newspeak jargon, resulting in apparently euphemised and politically protected identities that politicians can appear paradoxically (and even hypocritically) to prioritise in the name of equality. In this way, PC risks stigmatising differences by placing the possibility of offence as the foremost concern in a pluralistic society, and may prevent an individual distinguishing themselves positively from their negative, implicitly problematic collective identity. Consequently, cultural homogeneity is seen as an attractive oppositional remedy.

Given all this, it is easy to see why PC is such a popular right-wing sounding board. The right has the additional advantage of its legions of shrill crusading evangelists of ‘Widdy-Wisdom’; the resulting contrast with the more cautionary, dovish left compounds the sense of traitorous effacement of ‘national identity’ that many perceive in PC.

Clifford Geertz, 1984:

What the relativists, so called, want us to worry about is provincialism – the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by the overlearned and overvalued acceptances of our own society. What the anti-relativists, self-declared, want us to worry about, and worry about and worry about, as though our very souls depended upon it, is a kind of spiritual entropy, a heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, thus as insignificant, as everything else: anything goes, to each his own, you pays your money and you takes your choice, I know what I like, not in the south, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.

As I have already suggested, I myself find provincialism altogether the more real concern so far as what actually goes on in the world. (Though even there, the thing can be overdone: “You might as well fall flat on your face," one of Thurber’s marvellous "morals" goes, “as lean too far over backward.”) The image of vast numbers of anthropology readers running around in so cosmopolitan a frame of mind as to have no views as to what is and isn’t true, or good, or beautiful, seems to me largely a fantasy. There may be some genuine nihilists out there, along Rodeo Drive or around Times Square, but I doubt very many have become such as a result of an excessive sensitivity to the claims of other cultures; and at least most of the people I meet, read, and read about, and indeed I myself, are all too committed to something or other, usually parochial. “‘Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil”: anti-relativism has largely concocted the anxiety is lives from.

But surely I exaggerate? Surely anti-relativists, secure in the knowledge that rattling gourds cannot cause thunder and that eating people is wrong, cannot be so excitable? Listen, then, to William Gass, novelist, philosopher, précieux, and pop-eyed observer of anthropologists’ ways:

Anthropologists or not, we all used to call them “natives” – those little, distant, jungle and island people – and we came to recognize the unscientific snobbery in that. Even our more respectable journals could show them naked without offense, because their pendulous or pointed breasts were as inhuman to us as the udder of a cow. Shortly we came to our senses and had them dress. We grew to distrust our own point of view, our local certainties, and embraced relativism, although it is one of the scabbier whores; and we went on to endorse a nice equality among cultures, each of which was carrying out its task of coalescing, conversing and structuring some society. A large sense of superiority was one of the white man’s burdens, and that weight, released, was replaced by an equally heavy sense of guilt.

Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:

…[Once we understand that the intellectual aspect of the Haitian revolution was supplied by white Frenchmen, w]e white Leftist men and women are free to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt. Although Pascal Bruckner's critique of contemporary Left often approaches the absurd, this does not prevent him from occasionally generating pertinent insights--one cannot but agree with him when he detects in European politically correct self-flagellation an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defence but self-probing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man's Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man's guilt): if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating what their colonial masters used to do, and so on):

We need our miserabilist clichés about Africa, Asia, Latin America, in order to confirm the cliché of a predatory, deadly West. Our noisy stigmatizations only serve to mask the wounded self-love: we no longer make the law. Other cultures know it, and they continue to culpabilize us only to escape our judgments on them.

Zizek, 2009:

To provoke people when I’m asked about racism, I like to do my line I love racism, I can’t imagine my life without racism, there there’s no progressive movement now without racism. I’m not crazy…Now comes the preacher part, the real….what do I mean by this is that there is something false about this respectful multiculturalist tolerance…my God, for me political correctness is still inverted racism…let’s cut the crap, let’s say we want to become friends, there has to be a politically incorrect exchange of obscenity. You know, some dirty joke or whatever, whose meaning is “cut the crap we are now real friends”. And I can tell you this from my wonderful experience here, you want a shocking story you will hear it. How did I become here a friend, a true friend, am not advising anybody to do it because it was a risky gesture, but it worked wonderfully with a -with a -with a black, African-American guy. No? How did I become? We were very friendly, already, but not really, but then I risk and told him, it’s a horrible thing I warn you, is it true that you blacks you know have a big penis, no? but that you can even move it so that if you have on your leg above your knee a fly you can Boff! smash it with your penis. The guy embraced me and told me dying of laughter “now you can call me a nigger.” Like when blacks tell you “you can call me a nigger” means they really accept you no?

Kai Chang, 2006:

As it's commonly used, "PC" is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn't to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me "Asian American" rather than "chink" is seen as a concession to "the PC police", an unsettling infringement on the free-wheeling conversation of, I suppose, "non-chinks". Having to refer to black folks as "African Americans" rather than various historically-prevalent epithets surely strikes some red-blooded blue-balled white-men as a form of cultural oppression. Having to refer to "women" rather than "bitches" lays a violent buzzkill on the bar-room banter of men preoccupied with beating on their chests and off other body parts.

Obviously these examples fall on the simplistic side of things, but I think they illustrate the shaky philosophical foundation of today's usage. Underlying every complaint of "PC" is the absurd notion that members of dominant mainstream society have been victimized by an arbitrarily hypersensitive prohibition against linguistic and cultural constructions that are considered historical manifestations of bigotry. It's no coincidence that "PC"-snivelers are for the most part white men who are essentially saying, "Who the hell do these marginalized groups think they are to tell me how I should or shouldn't portray them? I'm not going to say 'mentally challenged' when it's my right to say 'retard', goshdarnit there's only so much abuse I'll take!"

Gary Younge, 2011:

On 18 February 1943, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, took to the stage at Berlin's sports palace calling for "total war". "Two thousand years of western civilisation are in danger," he said, before going on to blame his favourite scapegoat. "Things have gone so far in Europe that one cannot call a danger a danger when it is caused by the Jews."

Hari: Can We Talk About Muslim Homophobia Now?

When gay people were cruelly oppressed, we didn't form gangs to beat up other minorities. We organized democratically and appealed to our fellow citizens' sense of decency.

What Hari does with the identities in this piece is very important to observe. He constructs white gays as a category signifying innocence, belonging to which erases individual crimes (for example his own enabling of aggressive war, mass murder, maiming, rape and torture); in contrast he constructs Muslims as a guilty category, belonging to which implicates an individual in all the crimes other members of the category perpetrate (despite the impatient "concessions" that of course not all Muslims...) because the individual Muslims' crimes are explicitly attributed to the environment that is the community. Persisting in being a Muslim, part of a "Muslim community," crucially enables the production of criminal deviant individuals who inevitably emerge from the specific deviant characteristics of this community permeated with Islam. In the three card monty trickery of his prose, Hari establishes that "Muslims" are to (implicitly white male) "Gays" as an individual Muslim guilty of gaybashing is to Harvey Milk, rather than "Muslims" are to "Gays" as say Hanife Karakus is to Roy Cohen, Ernst Rohm, or Pim Fortuyn, or "Muslims" are to "Gays" as one of the Iraqis Hari arranged to have raped and tortured in Abu Ghraib is to Hari who assisted in delivering him or her to the torturers there (torturers Hari naturally gave the benefit of the doubt for kindness and trustworthiness, being of the innocent, civilised types they are, and thus judged perfectly fit to enjoy despotic control over conquered Arabs.)

Establishing "gays" as a group imbued not only with innocence but with civilisation, bearer and corollary of "democracy", "solidarity with fellow citizens" and "decency", immune to the criminality of individual members of the category "gay", Hari employs and revitalises the ideology of white supremacy and individualism to distinguish the members of his group designation from the horde-being of the socially toxic orientals on the subject of whose evil he claims he is being silenced in an outrageous manner that compounds the portrait of their "community" as the opposite of all the lovely things characteristic of "gays", here, evoked as Hari's own tribe, representing a familiar figure often referred to as "the West", European civilisation, white culture. In addition to democracy and decency, Hari and "gays" are associated with liberty and self-expression in contrast to the repressive, silencing, threatening Muslims who menace him and declare their loathing openly, a thing harmless "We Gays" simply would never do.

Hari easily conjures the white supremacist paradigm - which can be activated by very few words - which divides humanity into the raceless and the raced, the self-fashioning and the wool-dyed cultured (who also, however, are responsible for the choice of belonging), to support his insinuations about the degeneration of Western Civilisation brought about by a minority Muslim presence, and strengthen his assertions regarding the connection between homophobic and misogynist violence in the UK and contamination by a foreign culture. He practises what is by now a set of common evasions alongside the deployment of motifs which serve as shorthand for this Heimat/heathen worldview, for example the image of a foreign, murky, infectious invasion establishing regions plagued by an evil miasma, an insalubrious environment around the Muslim nests where homophobia will "incubate". An enlightened journalist like Hari, who must respect facts and data (and avoid making statements too easily debunked), is bound to concede that all Muslims may not individually be homophobes, and all Muslims homophobes may not be violent criminals, but he can nonethless suggest compellingly that if they were not protected and nourished by their flourishing hives, and insulated from the wholesome, democratic, tolerant, nonviolent, decent host society, Muslim individuals would not dare to be violent criminal homophobes. Hari is careful to explain, in few words of inarguable confidence, that the whole community's existence is vital for the criminality to be sustained and defended against criticism. Violent homophobic individuals, whose ghastly acts are vividly presented, sprout from the unhealthy overgrowth of their fellow Muslims, all of whom seep Islam. Therefore in 'tolerating' the community as a whole, in failing to master it, tend and weed it, to civilise and supervise it, Hari and his fellows have allowed the seeds of evil it breeds to effloresce. Each Muslim in these infestations may not be him- or herself a violent reactionary criminal, but all contribute to the population density of their hive which is the condition for the growth of the poison mushrooms:

These [acts of horrific anti-gay violence] are not isolated incidents. East London has seen the highest increase in homophobic attacks anywhere in Britain, and some of the worst in Europe. Everybody knows why, and nobody wants to say it. It is because East London has the highest Muslim population in Britain, and we have allowed a fanatically intolerant attitude towards gay people to incubate there, in the name of 'tolerance'.

Hari would not of course dream of explaining the staggering violence, chemical poisoning, immiseration, terrorism and sadism to which he eagerly submitted the majority Muslim population of a whole country, straight, gay, lesbian and trans, with reference to our lack of vigilance as the white nests expanded. He really, I think, cannot imagine any meaningful connection to be made between the homophobic tortures (unto death in cases) which he considered an acceptable risk to force others to take for his benevolent dream of "a better Iraq" and the density of atheist whites among whom pernicious qualities ferment into imperial intentions, in the community in which he lives and works, and which infected him as part of this white infestation, a toxin and deadly parasite on the global host society, and whose hives incubate - as everyone knows, and few dare to say because of the ridicule, ostracism, career sacrifice, abuse it provokes - sadistic patriarchal white supremacy and myths of white collective innocence to seduce those from lesser rungs of wealth to assist in the adventures spurred by the cupidity of the higher eschelons of the elites. While it is certainly true that not all white gay men are as depraved as Karl Rove or as willing to abet profitable crimes against humanity as Johann Hari, would Hari suggest it is the overgrowth of white hives that produces and emboldens the individual imperial aggressors, their soldiers and propagandists, their courtiers and accessories?

Slavoj Zizek, 2010:

Socially, what is most toxic is the foreign Neighbor—the strange abyss of his pleasures, beliefs and customs. Consequently, the ultimate aim of all rules of interpersonal relations is to quarantine (or at least neutralize and contain) this toxic dimension, and thereby reduce the foreign Neighbor—by removing his otherness—to an unthreatening fellow man. The end result: today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality while features like wife beating remain out of sight.

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2. Whitewash

It's instructive to compare the anxiety of racial contamination and the decline of the American Empire (patriarchal white supremacy) of these successful and influential American 80s films, (Back to the Future, Blue Velvet) and how they conceal, provoke and allay it (this is one of those bizarre Zizney style speaking-for/as-to-speak-against Caveman-Reckless Tortuga-toned things but it states the case) to the infantile, fan-focussed, feverishly hardworking fantasies of whiteness that have developed in the new century, from Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain to Red Riding Hood.

Amélie

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell:

In this novel, a fanastic "alternative history" of England (and an English Britain) is constructed, equipped with a parallel magic universe, solely to expell the problems of slavery and white supremacy - these features of real history which taint the mythology and prevent the decent contemporary reader's pure pleasure in entertainments steeped in it - to this magic otherworld. The removal of Stephen the black slave to another world, a marvellous underworld constructed solely to accomodate him, cleanses the mythic history - the immensely popular Regency Austen fanastyland - marred by the requirement ("politically correct") to acknowlegde not only his presence but some of the terrible reality to which his figure refers, for renewed guiltless enjoyment (indeed for enjoyment with enhanced self-congratulation). Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell performs an operation on the chauvinist, and childish, fantasy of Regency England much like that which the spectacle has performed on the white race - whiteness is all the sturdier for being digitised, coded for mobility, detached from any crude materialism or biologism, just as the Europe of Derrida's Eurosupremacism is rendered invulnerable to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism by abstraction, spectralisation, flexibility. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, mythical English history and glory is affirmed, as entertainment saved from the soiling of anti-racist, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialist critique, and the wish for goodness and self-approval of white nostalgic English readers (discursively constituted in spectacle like Europe and whiteness) is gratified by the narrative arranging to accord the victims of real English history (represented by a black slave) a seperate kingdom, a dark realm of magic, over which to rule. This other realm, where magic reigns and is produced for use in the "ordinary" world, is presented as the magical forge of glorious English history, at once conceding and concealing the fact of the exploited African labour engine of Englishness and Empire. But it is not a realm of suffering; rather this Faerie - like all such realms an enchanted idea of fecund and unfathomable nature, to which the black slave is appropriately consigned in the white supremacist scheme - is flaunted as the compensation to Stephen (and those he represents) who must be evicted from the vision of history to sustain the chauvistic and childish delight taken in more naïve versions; it is recompense to those who spoil the pristine fantasy of Regency England for their expulsion - again - from the pleasant stories of romance and adventure, and on another plane for the exploitation and expropriation in concrete history as well. It is a compensation designed to set the English reader's mind at ease, free it to take pleasure in the fables of national past and simultaneously to gratify that sentimentality associated with Dickens and seeming to do and delight in providential justice. This delivery of Stephen the black slave out of slavery to a kingdom of his own is offered as a relief from an alternative with which the author has menaced her readers throughout the text - an alternative imaginitive justice which sees a black slave rising to the throne of the alternative Britain and which enthrones servant/slave as hero of novels, dethroning white gentlemen and their gentleladies. That idea - that vision of an African king on a British throne brought about by the whirligig of history - is suggested, or really paraded as a danger with tremendous anxiety, and finally rejected and evaded with the help of "English magic" (associated with a genre of children's literature) which preserves English patriotic myth and an alternative history which alters nothing of the nationalistic fantasy. "English magic" is finally nothing other than the white supremacist imagination.

Stardust, a comic big budget fairytale film, can be compared to its predecessor (as the promotional material had it) The Princess Bride to bring out this same style of pandering to the same kinds of impulses, supplying itself with the alibi of tradition (it's about childhood and wonder, the stories we loved as children seen through the simple Jungian schemes we loved as adolescents) for the sin of reaction and nostalgia, as are catered to by Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain:

From here, the inevitable trajectory for Hollywood would be through Disney rides and children's classics, to infantilised, attenuated, kiddieporny, violent videogame versions of folktales.

Abyss

2011-03-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

Jaime Semprun writing in 1986 about the nuclear lobby:

The problem addressed by these fanatics has thus absolutely nothing to do with the placing of restraints, however limited, on the appalling capriciousness of their deadly machinery. On this point, at least, they are unshakeable. No, the only thing that disturbs whatever they have for minds is the fact that their hapless victims have the temerity to rebel against their state of ignorance and demand access to precise knowledge of what is being inflicted upon them. Such persistence is liable to compromise the chief advantage enjoyed by nuclear energy as compared with other power sources such as coal. Despite oil's efforts to hold its own, at Maracaibo or elsewhere, radioactivity remains unarguably superior to the side-effects of all other technologies in that its main results become tangible only long after the egregious sets of circumstances that make the front pages of the newspapers. In this sense, too, radiation is marvelously adapted to the needs of the spectacle: we talk about it, forget it, then we suffer its effects, and die from it, in silence. Thus what needs to be concealed -- the essential reality of the phenomenon -- is conveniently relegated to a hypothetical future time, there to dissolve into statistical abstraction in company with the dangers of smoking and the death toll on the roads. This is what makes it possible to compare the Chernobyl catastrophe to a football riot.

Clifford Geertz "Anti Anti-Relativism"

2011-03-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

PDF here. Via.

victim of moral equivalence

2011-03-14T06:55:00.001-07:00

Bungled benevolence:

Evil:

He wants to write about how he is victimised by these stickers but he's terrorised by the political correctness Gestapo into always having to almost write about how his generosity to others doesn't always succeed perfectly, as if there were a moral equivalence between deliberate offensive stickering and regrettably necessary aggressive war.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

2011-03-12T06:43:00.000-08:00

As a Tunisian, I was already tired of the haughty contempt of those, always from important bourgeois universities, who have never stepped foot in a dictatorship but nonetheless think, from a distance, that Chinese concentration camps–they’re just great, the same thing as Lacan’s couch. I had had enough of the position typical of seventies’ leftism, the contempt for the Law, this way of saying that when all is said and done capitalist dictatorship is the same everywhere. At best it’s ridiculous, at worst obscene. This “hatred of democracy,” as Rancière puts it, which for the last few years has been eating away at the French intellectual extreme-left and beyond. This haughty contempt, as you put it, for formal “freedoms.” It’s always from within a democracy that one plays the trendy provocateur thumbing his nose at democracy. It’s always when one is protected by the Law that one can say, from the perspective of “the” political truth dreamed up in one’s office or some prestigious academic chair, that Law has no importance. It’s always when one already enjoys formal freedoms that one can scorn them elsewhere. There are no fewer rich on the side of “radical chic” than on the right, and in both cases, as if by chance, all those who make these kinds of remarks come from the grand bourgeoisie, and so give themselves away, even if they brandish the little red book to shock the gallery. Those who make these kinds of remarks are no better than those who, during the Tunisian revolution and now elsewhere, claim to see Islamism everywhere.

That’s what Adorno said to the Frankfurt students when they would quote Mao to him, “just like your grandparent’s quoting the Prince of poets.” He would tell them that he knew “what it was like to have someone ring at your door at six o’clock in the morning, not knowing if it’s the baker or the Gestapo.” The Tunisians have ended twenty years during which every day they knew what Adorno meant....

...If Badiou and Zizek make fools of themselves with their reflections on the event, it’s because they haven’t understood that a crucial event has made it such that Tunisia in 2011 is in a state of philosophical-political awareness and in a more advanced state in general, if I may say so, than post-Maoist China and post-Stalinist Russia are today.

The Tunisian Revolution is an event because the whole Tunisian people, as a people, are experiencing freedom, here and now. All the social barriers are falling away, just like in ’68. Every voice is free. The Russian or Chinese people, in 2011, as a people, have still not experienced freedom. They went directly from a medieval system to an armed dictatorship of equality–what Adorno called “left fascism.” That’s the reason why the Tunisian event is already a historic event: the Tunisians are collectively experiencing freedom and, in the truth of the event, we see that a people that experiences freedom also experiences equality. That’s the hard lesson that the Tunisian event gives to our academic Stalinist dinosaurs.

Kojève said, rather humorously: “They take me for a leftist Hegelian. But I’m a right-wing Marxist.” He said that Fordism was part of Marxist politics and that he’s the one who thought up the Marshall plan. I’d rather be that kind of right-wing Marxist than a postmodern leftist fascist.

...

Il suffit, même inculte en philosophie, même très peu lettré, d’égrener mon lexique pour savoir quel inconscient forclos travaillait cette philosophie. « Torture ». « Surveillance ». « Persécution ». « Mal ». « Droit ». « Mort ». Et quel « même » inconscient m’a poussé, fatalement, à la brouille subjective avec Alain B. La révolte philosophique, elle, couvait depuis longtemps ; seuls ceux qui ne lisent que du quatrième de couverture ne s’en doutaient pas.

Une grave dépression, de février en juin 2010, fut salutaire, de me pousser à m’avouer ce que je ne supportais plus. L’anti-démocratisme de comptoir gauchiste. Le mépris, très poseur gauchiste aussi, pour la question du Droit. L’anti-féminisme. L’égalitarisme abstrait, c’est-à-dire concrètement tyrannique. L’absence absolue de la question de la liberté, au cœur de ma dialectique propre qui a renversé la manière dont la métaphysique abordait communément le lien unissant transgression et législation. Du scandale obscène que constitue l’héroïsme grand bourgeois abstrait de qui n’a jamais fait la guerre, mais se livre à une agonistique permanente, et administre, à soixante-quinze ans, que la mort n’est rien, qu’il faut y être indifférent, et qu’on doit être prêt à verser autant de sang qu’il faudra pour la bonne cause. Les événements récents, l’héroïsme effectif du peuple tunisien, les sueurs froides que moi et ma compagne tunisienne avons endurées vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre pendant des semaines en songeant à nos familles et à nos amis, ont achevé de ce que cet « héroïsme » universitaire m’apparaisse dans toute son obscénité.

esmiss esmoore

2011-03-12T03:09:00.000-08:00

Billionaire wit and philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein's reputation in danger from his ties to sleazy British crime family.

"Logic", "structure", "patriotism" & "right-brained persons": Bradley Manning's father speaks

2011-03-11T11:52:00.000-08:00

Transcript

JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, we turn to the interview with the father of accused WikiLeaks source , Pvt. Bradley Manning. Kwame Holman puts it in context.

KWAME HOLMAN: Pvt. Bradley Manning is the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst accused of stealing thousands of classified government documents and providing them to WikiLeaks. He is in custody at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Va., where he is confined to his cell 23 hours a day under what's called a prevention-of-injury watch.

Last week, there was a change in his imprisonment. Manning was stripped of his clothing at night. Manning's attorney, David Coombs, has reported the brig's action followed his client's complaint that the so-called prevention-of-injury restrictions on him were absurd. Manning said if he wanted to harm himself, he could do so with the elastic waistband of his underwear. In an exclusive "Frontline" interview this week with correspondent Martin Smith, Bradley Manning's father, Brian Manning, talked for the first time about his son's incarceration.

MARTIN SMITH: You decided that you wanted to sit down and talk today because you want to complain publicly about the conditions of his imprisonment.

BRIAN MANNING, father of Pvt. Bradley Manning: Yes.

MARTIN SMITH: And those conditions are?

BRIAN MANNING: Well, he's being -- his clothing is being taken away from him, and he's being humiliated by having to stand at attention in front of people, male or female that I -- as far as I know, you know, that are fully clothed.

MARTIN SMITH: Who tells you that?

BRIAN MANNING: I read it in the statement that was put out by his civilian attorney. I mean, this is someone that has not been -- you know, gone to trial or been convicted of anything. And that's prompted me to -- you know, to come out and go forward. I mean, they worry about people down in -- you know, in a base in Cuba, but here they are, have someone in, you know, on our own soil and under their own control, and they're treating him this way. I mean, it's -- you know, I just can't believe -- you just can't believe it. I mean, it's shocking enough that I would come out of, you know, our silence, as a family, and say, you know, now then this -- you know, you have crossed the line. This is wrong.

KWAME HOLMAN: Today, the NewsHour asked the military for a response to Brian Manning's assertions. A statement from the Department of Defense said in part:
"The circumstances of PFC Manning's pretrial confinement are regularly reviewed, and complies in all respects with U.S. law and Department of Defense regulations.
"In recent days, as the result of concerns for PFC Manning's personal safety, his undergarments were taken from him during sleeping hours. He was not made to stand naked for morning count, but on one day, he chose to do so. There were no female personnel present at the time. PFC Manning has since been issued a garment to sleep in at night. He is clothed in a standard jumpsuit during the day. None of the conditions under which PFC Manning is held are punitive in nature."

In his interview with "Frontline," Brian Manning says he saw no signs
of suicidal intentions in his son.

MARTIN SMITH: How many times have you visited him?

BRIAN MANNING: Approximately eight or nine times.

MARTIN SMITH: During those visits, has he ever mentioned any complaint of any kind to you?

BRIAN MANNING: No. I always, you know, am conscientious enough to look him straight in the eyes and ask him a direct question. How are they treating you? Are you sleeping? Is the food OK? And he's always responded that: Things are just fine.

MARTIN SMITH: How does he look?

BRIAN MANNING: He looks good.

MARTIN SMITH: And he doesn't complain about being shackled?

BRIAN MANNING: No. He doesn't complain at all about anything.

MARTIN SMITH: It wouldn't be surprising for somebody in solitary confinement to be suffering a bit.

BRIAN MANNING: Oh, I'm sure.

MARTIN SMITH: It's surprising to me that you described him as somebody who's doing well.

BRIAN MANNING: He comes across to me as doing well.

MARTIN SMITH: He's in solitary confinement. That's tremendously difficult, psychologically and physically.

BRIAN MANNING: I understand that.

MARTIN SMITH: So, are you surprised that he's doing as well as he is?

BRIAN MANNING: I'm happy that he's doing as well as he is.

MARTIN SMITH: So, is there any reason that Bradley wouldn't confide in you if things were tough for him there?

BRIAN MANNING: No.

KWAME HOLMAN: Brian Manning was himself in the service, the Navy, where he held a security clearance. Stealing and sharing classified information is wrong, he says, and the whole WikiLeaks situation angers him. But he told Martin Smith he does not believe his son did what the Army has accused him of doing.

MARTIN SMITH: Does it surprise you that Bradley had access to this much information?

BRIAN MANNING: Yes.

MARTIN SMITH: And what will you say if it turns out that he leaked these documents?

BRIAN MANNING: I don't know. I mean, I'm not even -- I'm not even letting those thoughts come into my head. I'm thinking positively.

MARTIN SMITH: Is that always easy to do?

BRIAN MANNING: Yes.

MARTIN SMITH: You don't think he had it in him to do this?

BRIAN MANNING: I don't think that the amount and the volume of things and the environment he worked in, no, I don't think so.

MARTIN SMITH: You don't think it's possible he -- he could have had this kind of intent?

BRIAN MANNING: I don't know why he would do that. I -- I really don't.

MARTIN SMITH: Was he patriotic?

BRIAN MANNING: I don't think he followed any regime of any kind.

MARTIN SMITH: You don't think he was a patriot of the United States?

BRIAN MANNING: I imagine he was just as much as you and I.

MARTIN SMITH: Well, you knew -- he's your son. You knew him. Was he patriotic?

BRIAN MANNING: It never came up. I mean, he never said anything anti-American.

MARTIN SMITH: He joined the Army.

BRIAN MANNING: At my twisting his arm, yes.

MARTIN SMITH: So, he joined the Army because you made him do it?

BRIAN MANNING: I didn't make him. I twisted his arm and urged him as much as a father can possibly urge somebody.

MARTIN SMITH: He didn't want to join the Army?

BRIAN MANNING: No, he did not. And he had expressed that.

MARTIN SMITH: Why did you make him -- or why did you twist his arm to join the Army?

BRIAN MANNING: Because he needed structure in his life. He was aimless. And I was going on my own experience. When I was growing up, that's the only thing that, you know, put the structure in my life was by joining the Navy. And everything's been fine since then.

MARTIN SMITH: From talking to you, it doesn't seem -- I mean, you don't wear your emotions on your sleeve. If you're feeling something about his situation, I'm not hearing it.

BRIAN MANNING: There's a certain point, you know, when -- you reach where you can either accept things, you know, and -- and try and do as much as you possibly can, and then there's no point in dwelling upon it. I mean, there relatively is nothing I can do at this point, except support him, you know, as a father would support a son that -- that's in this situation.

MARTIN SMITH: But that's a very rational [sic] answer. Emotions don't respond to that kind of logic.

BRIAN MANNING: Well, I guess I'm just a right-brained person. You know, I think logically.

MARTIN SMITH: But you raised this kid. You played with him. Now he's sitting in a prison...

BRIAN MANNING: Right.

MARTIN SMITH: ... facing severe penalties, very, very serious charges pending.

BRIAN MANNING: That's correct.

MARTIN SMITH: I would guess that that is very hard to -- to square.

BRIAN MANNING: Well, as I said, once -- once you make the -- the -- can rationalize it to the point is that they're -- as I said, they're -- all the things I could possibly do, you have done, OK, and just wait for the next move on the chessboard. I mean, all's I can do is support him.

KWAME HOLMAN: More of Brian Manning's interview will appear in a
profile of his son Bradley in a special "Frontline"
broadcast March 29, ahead of a documentary on WikiLeaks coming in May.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june11/wikileaks_03-10.html?print #

2011-03-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

"Totalitarian" aesthetics

2011-03-10T02:03:00.000-08:00

The thing is, the appeals of styles, forms and narratives are not universal. People are in different situations. White citizens of Empire (identifying themselves as "the West", "Western Civilisation" and "Modernity"), especially men produced by a violent patriarchal process of socialisation, can be comforted by the ubiquitous erections, the displays of power and authority of a ruling class and state they identify as more or less parental, the animating spirit of their patria. Visions of vast resources marshalled to fulfill design can seem beautiful to those who "belong" to the power manifested. Others - the victim populations, subjected to exploitation, expropriation, terror, torture and murder by the same dominant forces which the white citizens look to for security, provision and protection in exchange for collaboration - may find these same styles and forms and the concrete objects which embody them hideous, repellant and threatening. Expropriation underlies all these identifications and claims of cultural ownership/origins, and re-expropriation always remains an option, but not everyone will accept the same criteria for beauty, and those which are so evidently ideologically charged and propagandistic may be most widely rejected, loathed, and dismissed. There is no point (beyond the assertion of one's own superiority, and the reiteration of threat) in scolding those who are appalled by these forms and styles for their poor taste, their prejudices against the "universal" ideal of beauty, their insufficient appreciation for the erections of the barbaric white supremacist capitalist imperial powers; there is no point insisting they look upon themselves as white or potentially whitened after sufficient striving - potentially "westernised".

Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”

2011-03-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

If we give credence to the research detailing the centrality of affection in father-son relations and the relative irrelevance of the father’s “masculinity,” it becomes clear that boys don’t hunger for fathers who will model traditional mores of masculinity. They hunger for fathers who will rescue them from it. They need fathers who have themselves emerged from the gauntlet of their own socialization with some degree of emotional intactness. Sons don’t want their father’s “balls”; they want their hearts. And, for many, the heart of a father is a difficult item to come by. Oftentimes, the lost boy the depressed son must recover is the one not he but his father has disavowed.

- Terrence Real, quoted by Allegro at the Rigorous Intuition discussion board.

Orion, Zipangu, Siddartha

2011-03-08T03:34:00.000-08:00

Reality TV

2011-03-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

One of the effects of pervasive self-conscious self-consiousness and reflexivity in postmodern-period narrative is that passages like this:

[Rosa Luxemburg] had a sharp eye for incongruity. Announcing to Zetkin on 2 April 1911 that Lenin had visited for the fourth time, she declared: "I enjoy talking with him, he's clever and well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at." Lenin, the consummate politician, paid court to Luxemburg's beloved cat, Mimi, declaring that "only in Siberia had he seen such a magnificent creature, that she was a barskii kot – a majestic cat". Mimi had "rolled on her back and behaved enticingly towards him, but when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a tiger".

striving openly to "humanize" towering historical figures, and charm with the reassuring revelation of their frail mortality, have the opposite effect - suggesting that the scene of Lenin playing with Luxemburg's cat, superimposed on the scene of Luxemburg writing of this scene to her friend, is worth recounting because marvellous, miraculous, the enchantment of everyday life by contact with divinity, that is, with lasting fame. The result is a pungency of contrivance and what feels like deliberate triviality. Rowbotham is merely following old rules for such pieces of light arts journalism, laying out fragments of fact chosen to give an impression of a vibrant and fascinating character sketched on the fly. But the environment has changed since these customs were developed, and she inescapably finds herself narrating Luxemburg and Lenin within an episode of celebrity Big Brother.

How we got here...

2011-03-05T03:30:00.000-08:00

Neverending painful shitzek

2011-03-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

I wish Johann Hari could be cured of his bigotry and imperialist ideology; some of his critics I know insist that bigotry and racism is just lack of education, just ignorance, and that all you have to do is explain to people like Hari that we're all the same deep down, and it goes away. Would it were so, because he's done some valuable reporting, and he wrote one of my favourite antizizek lines ever:

Zizek is fond of riffing on objects from everyday life, and talks in the film about a "chocolate laxative" he recently bought in a chemist. It's an apt image, because Zizek himself is like a chocolate laxative - sweet at first taste, but ultimately leaves only a torrent of painful shit.

And it keeps flowing, as today in the New Statesman on Israeli expansionism and apartheid:

A. There is no seige of Gaza, there have been no bombardments.... The "main form terror takes" in the region is anonymous "pressure" on the West Bank, described so vaguely as even to confuse an uninformed reader about who is poisoned and who poisoning: "Now that the attacks have fallen greatly in number, the main form that terror takes is continuous, low-level pressure on the West Bank (water poisonings, crop burnings and arson attacks on mosques). Shall we conclude that, though violence doesn't work, renouncing it works even less well?"

B. "Although neither side wants it (Israel would probably prefer the areas of the West Bank that it is ready to cede to become a part of Jordan, while the Palestinians consider the land that has fallen to Israel since 1967 to be theirs), the establishment of two states is somehow accepted as the only feasible solution" What can one say? There were folks who were sceptical when I pointed out how weasly and propagandistic that "Israel Can't Win" letter was, with its abbreviated demands, not even adequate to satisfy international law, posing as radical extremism on "the Palestinian side" and hostile to Israel, its insinuation that humanitarian aid was a kind of despicably soft issue, no urgent concern, and its seeking to frame the issue in such a way as to suggest a view that should Israel "win" - succeed in imposing its will - then this would have to be accepted as legitimate, the outcome of a political struggle between rivals and enemies, and not a crime. This paragraph should put doubts about the justice of my reading of those ambiguities, omissions and implications to rest.

C. And of course we have the usual smattering of creepy, icky old imagery: right from the start, "Arab men" and "Jewish girls" (the difference expressed as racial not confessional). It's women who are the objects of raids to retrieve them from "hostile" villages (what is he quoting "hostile" - that "Wild West" word - from?), but in the next sentence it's girls again, confirmed "seduced" by adults:

The guardians of Jewish purity are bothered that Jewish girls are being seduced by Palestinian men. The head of Kiryat Gat's welfare unit said: "The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab."

d. Finally the scourge of "identity politics", the chammpion of an (aryanism in disguise as) universalism requiring, so he says, the "elimination" of "the Jews" who are the particularist, multiculturalist, tribalists par excellence laments: "What is saddening is that many Israelis seem to be doing all they can to transform the unique Jewish nation into just another nation..... As for the Israeli defenders of Jewish purity: they want to protect it so much that they are ready to forsake the very core of Jewish identity."

Never take the hand.

2011-03-04T07:36:00.002-08:00

Two seconds later he yanked her with that seemingly oh so well-intentioned hand she so trustingly clasped and ripped that shmata from her head.

That's why you always have to remember, my sisters, don't clasp the hand.

Internationalism

2011-03-04T06:28:00.000-08:00

Sort of related to the conversation below about the tormented David Foster Wallace, and the fêted Jonathan Franzen, the "tribal writers" the one wrote to the other of, enviously and disdainfully, the purported appeal of purportedly "universal" themes in literature (such as Madeleines and Memory), the ease with which bourgeois white brevetted intellectuals claim universalism and accuse others of particularism even as they discuss among themselves what the whites should do about and with those tribes, whether they don't exist at all or just at a very low intensity, and how they should be read, what they mean, what part of whiteness and white experience they represent, and Oprah's book club...here's an excerpt from The Heart of a Woman:

The Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage had its second meeting at Abbey's luxury penthouse apartment on Columbus Avenue, Several weeks before, we had agreed on a charter, a policy statement and a name: CAWAH, It sounded exotic We agreed, The newly founded organization included dancers, teachers, singers, writers and musicians, Our intention was to support all black civil rights groups, The charter, as drawn up by Sarah Wright and signed unanimously by the membership, stated that since the entire power of the United States was arrayed in fury against the very existence of the Afro- mericans, we, members of CAWAH, would offer ourselves to raise money for, promote and publicize any gathering sincerely engaged in developing a just society, It further stated that our members, multitalented, would agree, after an assenting vote, to perform dance concerts, song fests, fashion shows and general protest marches.

Abbey's living room filled with strident voices, Should we or should we not insist that every member show her commitment to being black by wearing unstraightened hair. Abbey, Rosa and I already wore the short-cut natural, but it was the other women, with tresses hanging down like horse's manes, who argued that the naturals should be compulsory.

"I've made an appointment for next Friday. I'm having all this shit cut off because I believe that I should let the world know that I'm proud to be black." The woman placed her hands on the back of her neck and lifted years of hair growth.

I said, "I don't agree." I would miss seeing her long black pageboy.

Abbey said, "I don't agree either. Hair is a part of woman's glory. She ought to wear it any way she wants to. You don't get out of one trick bag by jumping into another. I wear my hair like this because I like it and Max likes it. But I'd dye it green if! thought it would look better."

We all laughed and put that discussion aside, addressing ourselves to plans for an immense fashion show based on an African theme and showing African designs. Abbey said, "In Harlem, I'm sick of black folks meeting in white hotels to talk about how rotten white folks are." So Rosa and I were assigned to find a suitable auditorium for the affair.

Rosa and I met on 125th Street and the first thing she said was "Lumumba is dead." She continued in a horror-constricted voice, saying that she had learned of the assassination from Congolese diplomats, but that there would be no announcement until the coming Friday when Adlai Stevenson, the United States delegate to the United Nations, would break the news.

I said nothing. I knew no words which would match the emptiness of the moment. Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure were the Holy African Triumvirate which radical black Americans held dear, and we needed our leaders desperately. We had been abused, and so long abused, that the loss of one hero was a setback of such proportion it could dishearten us and weaken the struggle.

We were walking aimlessly, in a fog, when the sound of people talking, moving, shouting, broke into our stupor. We allowed ourselves to be drawn to the corner where the Nation of Islam was holding a mass meeting.

The street corner wriggled with movement as white policemen nervously guarded the intersection. A rapt crowd had pushed as close as possible to the platform where Malcolm X stood flanked by a cadre of well-dressed solemn men. Television crews on flatbed trucks angled their cameras at the crowded dais.

Malcolm stood at the microphone.

"Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom."

His voice, deep and textured, reached through the crowd, across the street to the tenement windows where listeners leaned half their bodies out into the spring air.

"The black man has been programmed to die. To die either by his own hand, the hand of his brother or at the hand of a blue- eyed devil trained to do one thing: take the black man's life."

The crowd agreed noisily. Malcolm waited for quiet. "The Honorable Elijah Muhammad offers the only possible out for the black man. Accept Allah as the creator, Muhammad as His Messenger and the White American as the devil. If you don't believe he's a devil, look how he's made your life a hell."

Black people yelled and swayed. Policemen patted their unbuttoned holsters.

Rosa and I nodded at each other. The Muslim tirade was just what we needed to hear. Malcolm thrilled us with his love and understanding of black folks and his loathing of whites and their cruelty.

Unable to get close to the platform, we pushed ourselves into Mr. Micheaux's bookshop and watched and listened in the doorway.

"Talk, Malcolm."

Malcolm roared back, his face a golden-yellow in the sun, his hair rusty-red.

"If you want to live at any cost, say nothing but 'yes, sir' and do nothing except bow and scrape and bend your knees to the devil. But if you want your freedom, you'd better study the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and start respecting your women. Straighten out your home affairs and stop cheating on your wives. You know who you're really cheating?"

Female voices shot up like arrows over the crowd. "Tell these fools, brother Malcolm." "Tell them to stop acting like little boys." "Explain it. Explain it on down." "Break it down."

Malcolm took a breath and leaned toward the microphone. "You are cheating your fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers and-you-are-cheating-Allah."

A man on the platform lifted his hands, showing copper palms, and chanted in Arabic.

After a burst of applause, Malcolm paused and looked solemnly at the crowd. People stopped moving; the air became still. When he spoke again his tone was soft and sweet.

"Some of you think there are good whites, don't you? Some good white folks you've worked for, or worked with or went to school with or even married. Don't you?"

The listeners exchanged a grumble of denial.

Malcolm continued speaking low, nearly whispering. "There are whites who give money to the SCLC, the NAACP and the Urban League. Some even go so far as to march with you in the streets. But let me tell you who they are. Any white American who says he's your friend is either weak"-he waited for the word to have its effect and when he spoke again his voice growled-"or he's an infiltrator. Either he'll be too scared to help you when you need help or he's getting close to you so he can find out your plans and deliver you back in chains to his brothers."

The street corner exploded with sound as anger and recognition collided. When Malcolm finished speaking the crowd yelled their approval of the fire-hot leader. Rosa and I waited in the bookstore until most of the people left the corner.

We walked without speaking to Frank's Restaurant. Again there was no need to talk. Malcolm's words were harsh, but too close to the bitter truth to argue. Our people were alone. As always, alone. We could not expect protection from whites even if they happened to be our relatives. Slave-owning fathers had sold black sons and daughters. White sisters had put their black sisters in slave coffins for a price.

Rosa and I drank at the bar, not looking at each other.

"What can we do?"

"What do you think?" Rosa turned to me sadly as if I had failed her. She had been counting on me to be intelligent. She continued, frowning, "What the shit do you think? We've got to move. We've got to let the Congolese and all the other Africans know that we are with them. Whether we come from New York City or the South or from the West Indies, that black people are a people and we are equally oppressed."

I ordered another drink.

The only possible action that occurred to me was to call the members of CAWAH and throw the idea out for open discussion. Among us we would find something to do. Something large enough to awaken the black American community in New York.

Rosa didn't think much of my idea but she agreed to go along.

About ten women met at my house. Immediately the tone was fractious and suspicious. How did Rosa know Lumumba was dead? There had been no announcement in the newspapers.

Rosa said she had gotten her news from reliable sources.

Some members said that they thought our organization had been formed to support the black American civil rights struggle. Weren't we trying to swallow too much, biting into Africa? Except for Sekou Toure and Tom Mboya, when had the Africans backed us?

One woman, a fashion model, hinted that my husband and Rosa's diplomat boyfriend made us partial to the African cause. Abbey said that was a stupid attitude, and what happens in Africa affects every black American.

One woman said the only thing Africans had really done for us was to sell our ancestors into slavery.

I reminded the conservatives in our group that Martin Luther King had said that he found great inspiration and brotherly support on his recent trip to Africa.

Rosa spoke abruptly. "Some of us are going to do something. We don't know just what. But all the rest of you who aren't interested, why'n the hell don't you get your asses out and stop taking up our time?"

As usual when she got excited, her West Indian accent appeared and the music in her voice contradicted the words she chose.

Abbey got up and stood by the door. A rustle of clothes, the scraping of shoes, and the door slammed and six women were left in the living room.

Abbey brought brandy and we got down to business. After a short, fierce talk our decisions were made. On Friday, we would attend the General Session of the United Nations. We would carry black pieces of cloth, and when Adlai Stevenson started to make his announcement on Lumumba's death, we six women would use bobby pins and clip mourning veils to the front of our hair and then stand together in the great hall. It wasn't much to do but it was dramatic. Abbey thought some men might join us. She knew Max would like to come along. Amece, Rosa's sister, knew two West Indian revolutionaries who would like to be included. If men joined us, we would make elasticized arm bands, and at the proper moment, the men could slip the black bands up their sleeves and stand with the women. That was the idea. No mass movement but still a dramatic statement.

As the meeting was coming to an end, I remembered a piece of advice Vus had given a few young African freedom fighters:

"Never allow yourself to be cut off from the people. Predators use the separation tactic with great success. If you're going to do something radical go to the masses. Let them know who you are. That is your only hope of protection."

I quoted Vus to the women and suggested that we let some folks in Harlem know what we intended to do. Everyone agreed. We would go to Mr. Micheaux; he could pass the word around Harlem faster than an orchestra of conga drums.

The next afternoon we went back to the bookstore, where posters of blacks covered every inch of wall space not taken up by shelves: Marcus Garvey, dressed in military finery, drove forever in an open car on one wall. W. E. B. DuBois gazed haughtily above the heads of book browsers. Malcom X, Martin Luther King and an array of African chiefs stared down in varying degrees of ferocity.

Mr. Micheaux was fast moving, quick talking and small. His skin was the color of a faded manila envelope. We stopped him on one of his spins through the aisles. He listened to our plans impatiently, nodding his head.

"Yeah. The people ought to know. Tell them yourselves. Yeah, you tell them." His short staccato sentences popped out of his mouth like exploding cherry bombs. "Come back this evening. I'll have them here. Not nigger time. On time. Seven-thirty. You tell them."

He turned, neatly avoiding customers In the crowded aisle.

A little after seven o'clock at the corner of Seventh Avenue, we had to push our way through a crowd of people who thronged the sidewalks. We thought the Muslims, or the Universal Improvement Association, were holding a meeting, or Daddy Grace and his flock were drumming up souls for Christ. Of course, it was a warm spring evening and already the small apartments were suffocating. Anything could have brought the people into the streets.

Mr. Micheaux's amplified voice reached us as we neared the bookstore.

"A lot of you say Africa ain't your business, ain't your business. But you are fools. Niggers and fools. And that's what the white man wants you to be. You made a cracker laugh. Ha, ha." His voice barked. "Ha, ha, crackers laugh."

Because of my height, I could see him on a platform in front of the store. He held on to a standing microphone and turned his body from left to right, his jacket flapping and a short-brim brown hat shading his face from view.

"Abbey, these people"-the human crush was denser nearer to the bookstore-"these people are here to hear us."

She grabbed my hand and I took Rosa's arm. We pressed on.

"Some of your sisters are going to be talking to you. Talking to you about Africa. In a few minutes, they're gonna tell you about Lumumba. Patrice Lumumba. About the goddam Belgians. About the United Nations. If you are ignorant niggers, go home. Don't stay. Don't listen. And all you goddam finks in the crowd-run back and tell your white masters what I said. Tell 'em what these black women are going to say. Tell 'em about J. A. Rogers' books, which prove that Africans had kingdoms before white folks knew how to bathe. Don't forget Brother Malcolm. Don't forget Frederick Douglass. Tell 'em. Everybody except ignorant niggers say 'Get off my back, Charlie. Get off my goddam back.' Here they come now." He had seen us. "Come on, Abbey, come on, Myra, you and Rosa. Come on. Get up here and talk. They waiting for you."

Unknown hands helped us up onto the unstable platform. Abbey walked to the microphone, poised and beautiful. Rosa and I stood behind her and I looked out at the crowd. Thousands of black, brown and yellow faces looked back at me. This was more than we bargained for. My knees weakened and my legs wobbled.

"We are members of CAWAH. Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. We have learned that our brother, Lumumba, has been killed in the Congo."

The crowd moaned.

"Oh my God."

"Oh no."

"Who killed him?"

"Who?"

"Tell us who."

Abbey looked around at Rosa and me. Her face showed her nervousness.

Mr. Micheaux shouted. "Tell 'em. They want to know."

Abbey turned back to the microphone. ''I'm not going to say the Belgians."

The crowd screamed. "Who?"

"I won't say the French or the Americans."

"Who?"

It was a large hungry sound.

"I'll say the whites killed a black man. Another black man."

Privilege And Safety

2011-03-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

Jessica Hoffmann's Letter to White Feminists, about white privilege and "safety" as attained in proximity to power, remains food for thought (brought to mind by the Johann Hari controversy):

My comments here are hugely influenced by critiques of white feminism put forth over generations by women of color, critiques I'm guessing you're familiar with. Maybe you're even nodding because you feel like you've reckoned with them. Maybe it bums you out that past generations of white feminists had such a white-supremacy/class-privilege problem. Maybe This Bridge Called My Back was required reading in your first women's studies class and you know all about "intersectionality," making a point in your feminist projects to "include" the voices and issues of women of color, working-class and poor white women, and maybe even trans folks and members of other groups historically marginalized by dominant feminisms. I'm pretty sure about all this because many of you have told me so -- in personal conversations and workshops, in your books and blogs and â€¦

Yet it doesn't look to me like you've really reckoned with those critiques. It looks more like you appropriate or tokenize them, using their language while continuing to center white, class-privileged women's experiences in your "feminism" and engaging in political work that upholds and strengthens white supremacy and economic exploitation -- sometimes directly undermining the social-change work of feminists of color.

And, yes, you deserve some concrete examples of that, which is why I'm writing. My intention isn't to repeat the critiques of feminists of color, but to offer some specific instances in which I, a white, class-privileged feminist who is often privy to your conversations and who can identify with the experiences and perspectives of privilege, have recently seen this playing out. At this particular historical moment, it seems to happen frequently around the disconnect between white feminists' notions of "safety" as an ideal we should organize around, and, on the other side of the not-so-fun funhouse mirror, organizing by feminists of color around policing/prisons and immigration/borders -- issues that expose the fantasy of "safety" as a product of privilege; issues that feminists of color have increasingly centered in their activism while white feminists seem to be struggling to understand whether they are feminist issues at all.

Prisons (or, Safety for Whom?)

In recent years, members of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence have incisively and repeatedly critiqued the white-feminist-led antiviolence movement for its reliance on (and, thus, complicity with) the U.S. criminal-legal system, which uses the rhetoric of "safety" to destroy communities of color, squash dissent, and create profit for private corporations. Yet the primary macro-level strategies of the white-feminist-led movement against domestic violence and sexual assault continue to rely on this system, with a major focus on legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act and the push for hate-crimes laws to include gender and sexual orientation. On the micro/personal level, I have repeatedly seen white, class-privileged feminists unhesitatingly call upon police to protect and serve them; have listened to white feminists advise each other on which "authorities" to go to for protection from stalkers and other abusers; and so on.

At both the macro level of feminist movement strategy and the micro/personal level of individual actions, I'm struck by the apparent lack of awareness of the prominent critiques made by feminists of color of law-and-order approaches to ending (or, even, finding "safety" from) violence. To be a self-identified feminist activist apparently unaware of (or, worse, deliberately skirting) the current work of not only INCITE! but also feminist icons like Angela Davis and numerous other voices calling for abolition of the prison industrial complex as a key element of social change seems to me to be part of a movement that is not only disconnected from but also damaging to some of the most vibrant and potentially liberating social-justice organizing happening today.

2011-03-03T03:35:00.000-08:00

Jared Ball talks to Dr. James Turner about the development of Africana Studies in the academy, and Black Consciousness, Black Arts Movement, the black student movement, and other matters in the struggle for social justice and against white supremacy in culture.

He reads from the Institute for the Black World pamphlet by Lenore Bennet:

It is necessary for us to develop new frames of reference which transcend the limits of white concepts. It is necessary for us to develop and maintain a total intellectual offensive against the false universality of white concepts, whether they are expressed by William Styron or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By and large reality has been conceptualized in terms of narrow points of view of the small minority of white men who live in Europe and North America. We must abandon the partial frames of references of our oppressor and create new concepts which will release our reality, the reality of the overwhelming majority of men and women on the globe. We must say to the white world that there are things in this world that are not dreamt of in your history, in your sociology, in your philosophy.

2011-02-28T02:22:00.001-08:00

video platform
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Living Black History: Resurrecting Intellectual Tradition
April 20, 2004
Manning Marable

2011-02-28T01:07:00.001-08:00

via flipfloppingjoy

The Mythology Of White Supremacist Patriarchal Revanchism

2011-02-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

Identity Politics and Class Struggle.

RATHER THAN WORRY ABOUT OFFENDING “MAJORITARIAN SENSIBILITIES,” the labor movement must make antiracism, antisexism, and anti-homophobia foundational. The absurd argument that minority aggressiveness is responsible for white male backlash at the tail end of the 1960s masks the fact that it has been white racism that has tragically inhibited the growth of most progressive movements in the U.S.

...Although identity politics sometimes act as a fetter on genuine multiracial/multicultural alliances, I believe it has also enriched our conception of class. Indeed, there are many serious scholars — I count myself among them — trying to understand how various forms of fellowship, racial solidarity, communion, the creation of sexual communities, and nationalism shape class politics and cross-racial alliances. We are grappling with how self-love and solidarity in a hostile context of white supremacy, the embrace of certain vernaculars, can be expressions of racial and class solidarity, and the way class and racial solidarity are gendered. Not to recognize this is to wonder why more West Indian workers participate in Carnival than in the Labor Day Parade, or why District 1199 had the foresight and vision to maintain an 1199 float and/or banner in the West Indian Day parade. Those who pine for the good old days before identity politics, when class struggle meant rough guys who understood that simply fighting the bosses united us, forget that Yiddish was a source of solidarity within the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, to the point where union leaders were offering courses in Yiddish for black and Puerto Rican workers in the late 1950s, to their dismay. Identity politics, in other words, has always been central to working class movements, from minstrelsy on up.

More important, a careful examination of the movements dismissed as particularistic are often “radical humanist” at their core and potentially emancipatory for all of us. We need to seriously re-think some of these movements, shifting our perspective from the margins to the center. We must look beyond wedge issues or “minority issues” and begin to pay attention to what these movements are advocating, imagining, building. After all, the analyses, theories, visions emerging from the black liberation movements, the Chicano and Asian American movements, the gay and lesbian movements, the women’s movements, may just free us all. We simply can’t afford to abandon the subway, with all of its multicultural messiness to jump on board the Enlightenment train of pure, simple, color- and gender-blind class struggle. Neither Locke nor Jefferson offer a truly emancipatory vision — not then and certainly not now. Attempts to “transcend” (read: outgrow) our race and sex does not make for a unified working class. What does is recognition of the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives and a willingness to struggle on all fronts — irrespective of what “the majority” thinks. Recognizing the importance of environmental justice for the inner city; the critical role of antiracism for white workers’ own survival; the necessity for men to fight for women’s rights and heterosexuals to raise their voices against homophobia. It’s in struggle that one learns about power and how it operates, and that one can imagine a different world. And it’s in struggle, not in the resurrection of ideas that have also provided the intellectual justification for modern racism, imperialism, and the traffic of human beings, that we must begin to develop a new vision.

2011-02-26T01:59:00.000-08:00

Meme

2011-02-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

Is effectively not the ultimate horizon of the postmodern “identity politics” Darwinian – defending the right of some particular species of the humankind within the panoply of their proliferating multitude (gays with AIDS, black single mothers…)? The very opposition between “conservative” and “progressive” politics can be conceived of in the terms of Darwinism: ultimately, conservatives defend the right of those with might (their very success proves that they won in the struggle for survival), while progressives advocate the protection of endangered human species, i.e., of those losing the struggle for survival.

Kloncke

2011-02-24T16:54:00.000-08:00

Interdependence, Colonialism, and Commodity Fetishism:

In his newest book, The Boddhisattva’s Embrace: Dispatches from Engaged Buddhism’s Front Lines, Hozan Alan Senauke of the Clear View Project cuts to the core of exploitative interdependence in the conclusion of a beautiful essay on the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh.
Karma simply means action, which calls forth result. In a world of action and result, denial is no refuge. If my eyes are open, I can see that the labors of shipbreakers, the labors of poor people around the world, are not freely offered. Not to us. Foremen, supervisors, bosses, corporations, ultimately you and I compel them. This is a kind of theft hiding behind the lies that we think of as economics or politics as usual. (108)
Setting aside some disagreement about who “ultimately . . . compels” exploited labor (I don’t think it’s helpful or accurate to say that it’s “you and I,” unless we’re part of the capitalist ruling class; but, you know, I’m feeling the point about complicity), I’m grateful for this strong, candid look at karma and interdependence. Interdependence can be, and often is, dysfunctional and oppressive.
For instance: colonialism.
The year I was born, Maria Mies published Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women In the International Division of Labour. In its first chapter, she stresses the importance of recognizing interdependence between the First and Third Worlds: “two sides of the same coin” of capital accumulation.
These relations are based on exploitation and oppression, as is the case with the man-woman relation. And similar to the latter, these relations are also dynamic ones in which a process of polarization takes place: one pole is getting ‘developed’ at the expense of the other pole, which in this process is getting ‘underdeveloped.’ (39)
Exploitation is always the fulcrum between imperialist powers and colonies. In our neo-imperialist times, it is a primary mechanism of interdependence in terms of global divisions of labor: the reasons why I’m sitting in Oakland typing words on a MacBook Air, and halfway across the world someone is toiling on an assembly line to produce more Apple gadgets. But often, even in cases of domestic exploitation right under our noses, it is difficult for us to remain aware of the fulcrum, and of the mechanisms. Why?
One reason, famous from Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1, is “commodity fetishism.” Frequently misinterpreted as “consumerism,” or putting too much stock in consumption and commodities, commodity fetishism actually refers to the ways that the objects that we buy and sell hide the human life and work that went into creating those objects.
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of [people's] own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves . . . Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. (164-165, emphasis mine)
And so, getting back to Alan’s point about hidden theft, one of the best hiding places for exploitation under capitalism is within commodities themselves. I buy a computer. I buy a pair of shoes from Zappos. I compare prices. I might even look for tags that say “Fair Trade,” but this tells me very little about the life conditions of the people producing the commodity, and even less about the systemic forces that push and pull “fair traders” according to the imperatives of capital (a.k.a. “the global economy”). Objects, commodities, compete in the market, while human competition, class struggle, is portrayed as a separate matter altogether.
So much is hidden, then, within interdependence! And so it’s our responsibility and calling, I think, to de-mystify and de-fetishize the systems of commodity production, the division of labor, and the worldwide processes of exploitation. As Alan puts it, “If shipbreaking is work we all depend on, can we see past ourselves, and look at each other eye to eye?” (109)
In our quest to “look at each other,” we need to be real about the differences and power dynamics that separate us. We can’t sugar-coat interdependence, pretending it’s all a glorious matter of Indra’s bejeweled net. Mies even raises this point (I loved that she brought it up!) about the dangers of Orientalist, superficial, New-Age perspectives ignoring the shadow side of interdependence:
An emphasis on these colonial divisions is also necessary from another point of view. Many feminists in the United States and Europe have, together with critical scientists and ecologists, begun to criticize the dualistic and destructive paradigm of Western science and technology. Drawing their inspiration from C. G. Jung’s psychology, humanistic psychology, non-dualistic ‘Eastern’ spirituality, particularly Taoism and other oriental philosophies, they propose a new holistic paradigm, the New Age paradigm (Fergusson, 1980; Capra, 1982; Bateson, 1972). This emphasis on the fact that in our world everything is connected with everything and influences everything is definitely an approach which goes along with much of the feminist rebellion and vision of a future society. However, if this desire ‘to become whole’ again, and build bridges across all the cleavages and segmentations White Man has created is not to be frustrated again, it is necessary that the New Age feminists, the eco-feminists and others open their eyes and minds to the real colonies whose exploitation also guarantees them the luxury of indulging in ‘Eastern spirituality’ and ‘therapy.’ In other words, if the holistic paradigm is nothing but an affair of a new spiritualism or consciousness, if it does not identify and fight against the global system of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, it will end up by becoming a pioneering movement of the legitimization of the next round of the destructive production of capitalism. This round will not focus on the production and marketing of such crude material commodities as cars and refrigerators, but on non-material commodities like religion, therapies, friendship, spirituality . . . (35)
Eerie, huh?

Mies adds: "...non-material commodities like religion, therapies, friendship, spirituality, and also on violence and warfare, of course with the full use of the 'New Age' technologies."

detroit2dakar

2011-02-24T16:48:00.001-08:00

Blogging the WSF.

Same Old Authoritative Bullshit

2011-02-23T18:14:00.000-08:00

Females are nasty!

Arbitrariness

2011-02-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

2011-02-20T21:48:00.000-08:00

In this section - two - she speaks about Chavez, comparing him to Lenin, and the arrogance of UK leftists regarding him; she also discusses corporations' genocidal activities:

[Global Women's Strike demands] food security for breast-feeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks. It's a great struggle against multinationals to keep breastfeeding...the things that they're doing are unspeakable. We saw them first hand when we went to this breastfeeding conference in Tanzania. And they're really genocidal. And I think not only the result is genocidal, but the purpose is genocidal. In other words they set out to kill babies. They do. What they do is, you know, the multinationals want to sell milk. And they also want to kill a lot of children in third world countries. They do. So what they do is they give you free formula. And you give it to the baby and very likely the baby will thrive on it, although not all babies will. But then your own milk dries up and they say now it will cost you. But you can't reorganise - it's very hard to renew breastfeeding.

2011-02-20T21:31:00.000-08:00

2011-02-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

These kids of Oedipus have endured a lot but now...

Antigone: Have you heard about how those nearest to us are to be treated? With the contempt that we reserve for traitors? People we love....

Structural Liberalism: State, Market, and Family

2011-02-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

(PDF)

Angela P. Harris
THEORISING LAW AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
A Seminar on Law, Markets and Culture

Schmittian Fictions

2011-02-19T21:45:00.001-08:00

The thing about Schmitt is his lucubrations tap fictions and produce powerful and compelling images of worlds and societies that are absurdly unrealistic - absurdly wrong about reality - but which can be made to seem very "believable" because their simple mythology is pleasureable in many ways, like action movies or other conspiracy theories in the anti-semitic mold. One can picture the mechanics and inhabitants of his imaginary worlds vividly, as film noir buffs can picture femmes fatales, and this promptness of fantasy to produce variations on inputs is easily mistaken for persuasiveness about history and human affairs. His pronoucements are all wrong and mainly ridiculous, ("identity politics" of an extreme Star Trekky sort, everyone motivated by tribal affiliations and tradition/ideology no matter how inconvenient to material interests and situation) but to an uncritical consumer they have, like stereotypes, an instant ring of truth or plausibility. As historical knowledge and understanding has declined in formally educated circles and critical faculties have been eroded by the spectacle blitz, Schmitt's "theory" has come into fashion.

An interesting problem regarding this impact of Schmittian/cocaculture attraction to overcome reasoned critique with essentially emotional appeals that feel intellectual, that fool you into thinking you smell something real when you only see an odorless image of it, becomes enlighteningly clear after an engagement with Joel Olson's compelling examinations of fanaticism.

He began this work before 9/11 and as a result of extended engagement with the Garrisonian abolitionists during the writing of a Duboisian study of race and US democracy. By the Rethinking Marxism conference in 2005 his case about extremism had assumed its present shape (the paper was called "Fanaticism and Communism"). As an anarchist who shows more inspiration from Schmitt than Marx (though some of both), Olson developed it seems a focus on the white abolitionist fanatics as the movers of abolition in the US in a way that marginalises the non-fanatical structural enemies of slavery, the enslaved themselves, who can be considered intransigent opponents of the institution of slavery without being definable as "abolitionist fanatics" (or locked into the prioritizing of a rigid friend/enemy distinction) in any meaningful sense. (It is even possible that Turner was some kind of mystic provided by his spiritual beliefs with grandiosity and assurance of divine aid/destiny that emboldens, but even if that were the case one would not call his opposition to slavery itself "fanatical". Nothing can be more reasonable than the enlightened self-interest of a class/caste of slaves' - or an individual's - abolitionism.) Olson's justified fascination with the committed, voluntary white accessories of black rebellion leads him to overemphasise their impact until the abolition of slavery seems to be principally their cause the way the settlement of Hebron is the cause of radical right Zionists. The Garrisonians were important, absolutely - perhaps more important than the more widespread abhorrence and sympathy of basically all of humanity excluding those with direct benefits from slavery - but they were secondary to the non-fanatical, much broader based resistance of the enslaved.

This focus on the committed volunteer warriors already justifies itself as a glamourisation, that is, as a pleasure for the reader or listener, the pleasure of a kind of narrative made possible by the exaggeration of the primacy of Brown, Phillips, Garrison, Foster (truly heroic men all) in the abolition of the peculiar institution in the US.

Once this role for the heroic white volunteer abolitionists is secured, Olson goes on to group their activites with others, dispersed in time and place, that seem to be of the same type on a number of counts. In one notable essay, he forefronts Randall Terry and Operation Rescue. Looking beyond the US one could add radical ultraZionist Israeli settlers and the Taleban. But what should become apparent to Olson is overlooked - that because the Garrisonian abolitionists were joining an existing popular movement of the structural antagonists of what was opposed, they differ enormously from these other movements that seem to be driven solely by voluntarism and zeal. (Fetuses put up no resistance to abortion; there is no population of unwilling women upon whom abortion is forced for Operation Rescue to join in struggle). Olson speaks of the importance to these fanatical movements of building a constituency - he excludes from his definition violent zealots who may inspire some copycats but don't seek to, and cannot, change "common sense" - but one cannot really deem the enslaved in the US a "constituency" of white abolitionists won over to abolitionism by The Liberator and the boldness and righteous fearlessness of the white volunteers. With this implication he seems to make a common anarchist error when he moves to taking the Garrisonians as models for the kinds of fanatics - devoted revolutionists - who will be required for revolutionary change today in the US: he seems to marginalise the class struggle and the variously intensified and relaxed but never-lapsing resistance of the structural antagonists (not volunteers who need special personalities but just ordinary people of varying degrees of consciousness and zeal in a determined position) to stage a more glamorous vision and more appealing narrative of social transformation which seems to hold out something of an answer to the question of how one sparks a significant potentially revolutionary upheaval.

Moreover - and this is most important - these other movements with which Olson wishes to categorise abolitionism (which is nothing but the class struggle of slaves) are, fanatical as the rank and file may be, the pawns and tools of a cynical, and indeed a liberal, ruling class.

There is a superficial similarity to be noted between the passionate commitment of some Garrisonian abolitionists - noticeable because it could not be attributed to self-interest in any proximate sense - and the passion with which Israeli settlers staking out "illegal" outposts in "Judea and Samaria" express themselves and conduct their project. But what makes these right wing puppet movements fanatical - and white American abolitionism is the only example of a "fanatical" movement in modernity that is not right wing - is not the passion for the content of their conviction, but the facing of opposition and the willingness to obliterate it. There is a social element - the element of structural conflict - the centrality of which to his own definition (fanaticism as "the political mobilzation of the refusal to compromise" depends on certain conditions) Olson gives insufficient importance in order to fulfill the Schmittian requirement for political storytelling which demands a central caricature of "liberalism" (as formlessness, amalgam, deriving from the paradoxical figure of money as every and no commodity, all-absorbing capital and universally alien Jew) as villain.

It is unsurprising then that in his talk, Olson pictures the enemy of anarchists today as people who "own yachts" and who might reprehensibly encourage others to acquire them - a description which occults the essential exploitative relation which subjects labour to capitalists by staging in a showy, immediately recogniseable way the resulting inequality, an object of moral opprobrium and a display of unfairness within a bourgeois framework, with confused hints about how it comes about and no consideration of the real relations of power which might permit the transformation of the situation. In this vacuum of material reality, the powers of decadent insatiable luxury on the one hand, and of righteousness and conviction on the other, seem to have no rivals and no obstacles to action but the lethargy and apathy of the majority of humanity.

...

Whiteness as Property

2011-02-19T20:33:00.000-08:00

If you don’t understand race, you know nothing about the United States. The catastrophes that descend on Black America must be seen “as a violent result of an ideology which results in economic and social policies predetermined to this effect.” Even the best off African Americans can’t save themselves. “The nation’s richest Black community, Prince George’s County, Maryland, is also home to the highest Black foreclosure rate.”

...George Taylor once described the work of Critical Race Theorists as recognizing how this society sees “Whiteness as a property right” which is “an essential element of American [that is White] social stability.” Whiteness as a property right. The point has been made many times but in this particular phrasing and in this particular time it seems even more appropriate. If we see Whiteness as property we also see its necessary opposite, the absence of access, or the absence of Black opportunity for ownership. And if property, be it Whiteness or any other form is essential to social stability, it also means that Black access to property is anathema to the social order.

Joel Olson

2011-02-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

5
6
7
8

Olson, "The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionists and The Democratic Uses of Zealotry"

The Abolition of White Democracy

Liberalism, Bad Faith and Interpretation

2011-02-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

A lot of crappy culture product is made to deliver gratifying white supremacist, misogynist, queeraverse messages in a kind of crude code which invites and supplies the material for defensive misreadings. The exculpatory mis- or dis-interpretations however require a certain willful stupidity and are not really about convincing so much as smugly refusing reason. They are themselves a secondary aggression which the works enable, added on to the initial symbolic violence - the pleasure of impunity flaunted.

This is one perfect example of a piece designed to communicate offensive and aggressive content in an unmistakeable way while permitting defensive misinterpretation, but requiring that misinterpretation to be ostentatiously stupid, to refuse, for example, to know there are two images, not one, that are "not feminism"; to refuse to acknowledge chronology and the implication of consequence in sequence; to refuse to see the images not only in a fixed sequence but simultaneously, as juxtapositions and comparisons in such features as the contextualising of the figures and the celebrity of the women. (Kahlo's image, labelled "pre-feminism", associated with an era before feminism and a female life untouched by feminism, is her own renowned artistic product; she pictures herself in a context of nature, flora and fauna; the image itself is of great beauty and enormous value, etc.. Greer is a celebrity whose angry recognisable face crowds the frame blotting out all context and thus expressing egotism as well as aggression; her image is bereft of value as image; she is envisioned, in contrast to the others, as not silent and not in the act of submitting herself to a gaze for the pleasure of the gazer. The porn image of a minor or non-celebrity is a reproducible commodity image; it is taken looking down at the subject in contrast to Greer whose photographer looks up; in contrast to the others it is signifying an immediate past that is more important than the captured moment and indispensible for understanding the present portrayed...).

In "defence" of the picture, one "feminist" interpreter wrote:

I don’t particularly like this man’s work, but I don’t think he was saying that taking a load is a punishment for being a feminist – I think he was saying that it is the inevitable result of NOT being one...

It is a comment remarkable for the unembarrassed obtuseness and superficiality of the engagement with the piece that requires so little interpretive sensitivity it is a labour to supply less than is wanted, and also for the careful addition of an assertion of independent and free thought ("I don't particularly care for..."). Though this text does not have a great deal to it, "Bebe" has to cut one third of it off entirely - the idyllic pre-feminist image of and by the pre-feminist artist - and obliterate most of the picture's content (chronology and implied consequentiality, comparison by juxtaposition) in order to suppress the portion of the obvious she wishes to deny. This response is made possible by the crudeness of the work itself but also by doctrinal liberalism which validates her interpretation, however idiosyncratic, nonsensical and groundless, as personal and "an opinion" to which she has "a right". (In several respects this response recalls the standard liberal Kauffmanite readings of Nietzsche.)

Spectacular violence against women is increasingly accompanied by these kinds of reception accessories.

This really is worth watching

2011-02-17T22:53:00.000-08:00

Dean Spade from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Everyone who wants to participate in a public leftist pedagogy could learn from this talk.

2011-02-17T22:52:00.001-08:00

Michele Goodwin: Policing Wombs from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

2011-02-17T22:48:00.001-08:00

Leith Mullings: Race and Reproductive Stratification from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

2011-02-17T22:25:00.000-08:00

Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

If we divide issues up - these are feminist issues, these are racial issues, these are war and peace issues over here, these are bread and butter issues over here - if we do that, which is what a certain kind of neoliberal politics encourages us to do, then we will be self-defeating.

...

The biggest successes will lie in our ability to connect our struggles to the struggles of people in Palestine, to the struggle of people in Iraq, to the struggles of people working in unsafe working conditions, all of these contexts are deeply connected to me.

....

It's not just about gender equality anymore because we're asking - equal to what? equal to dominate? Equal to exploit? Equal to oppress? No I think we're talking fundamentally about social transformation so that people can live in a free and just and safe world.

....

We spent twenty years talking about how interests that look as if they are divided are connected. That questions of gender and sexuality and questions of economics look as if they are divided, and that they actually are connected in various ways. But we also have to look at the ways in which people have interests that do seperate them, and how are we going to overcome those. And take seriously - conflict.

A History Lesson

2011-02-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

Episodes of Class Struggle and Women's Liberation in the Bay Area

For Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T20:24:00.000-08:00

since I love you all so much I will give you this week's Zizney adventure.

I'm sure we were all happy to hear the few bars of his almost forgotten "Vague Hague" psyop, like that snippet of Figaro at Don Giovanni's dinner, played right in the middle of the inane Guardian stuff on Egypt (in which he managed also to stuff the assertion that "hostility to Israel"=antisemitism. Just like he's not sure he's coming back to the Guardian, he was so upset they wouldn't publish his paen to Aryanism last month, now he's grabbing while the grabbing is good, like your wino uncle stuffing the bread rolls, spoons, shot glasses and salt shakers from the restaurant you are not taking him back to ever, so vilely did he treat eveyone, into his coat pockets.)

But the Vague Hague* is last season's bullshit - lately Zizz has been devoting himself to historical revisionism about Afghanistan. His rewriting of history is confined to the chronology - he wishes to disseminate as the official left, "Marxist" historical knowledge - which he represents - a tale from an alternative universe wherein the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan provoked the US to hire Bin Laden and import foreign fighters trained in terrorism to back the Mujahadin. He packages this bullshit into the kind of sacharine lefty candy coating that has for years proven irresistible to his addicted audiences:

Look, Afghanistan, I’m sorry to tell you, I’m old enough to remember, forty years ago, Afghanistan was arguably the most tolerant Middle East Muslim country, with a pro-Western technocratic king, with a very strong local communist party and so on. And then, we know what happened. Communist party tried to took power. They did. When they started to fail, Soviet Union intervened. Then Americans backed the Muslim fundamentalists. - DemocracyNow

I'm old enough to remember 40 years ago, Afghanistan was a very open, secularized country with a pro-Western, democratic model, strong local Communist Party. Then we know the story: Communists made the coup d'etat, Soviet Union intervened, America intervenes against..Al Jazeera

Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics (first through the Soviet intervention).

And there are many many more instances, all the same, like a cold caller's pitch, delivering the disinfo in this sharp, confident, bullet points way - we know, we all agree, it's uncontroversial, first Soviet invasion, then US response. Every repeat now sees this sequence preceded and succeeded and bundled this same way, introduced with the claim that he is remembering the history first hand - very reliable then, not like his youthful audience who have to derive their information from books and old newspapers - and paying off with the self-congratulation for worldiness and honesty and bigness-enough-to-acknowledge-they-weren't-always-this-diabolical and We the Politically Correct Multiculturalist Liberals, We the Vile Hypocritical Left, We the West, We Aryans are! We are! (to blame) and lessons in who we are he knows his audience never tires of hearing.

Why is this revisionism suddenly so important to Zizney? We can understand why his Haiti revisionism was useful to US imperial rulers, and of course why he put so much energy into the "Hague" ICTY=ICC propaganda, and why his Enron revisionism would have been welcome as well to the ruling class even though it was so silly, just as it's always appreciated when he promotes infantile blockbusters to elite audiences that still avoid a lot of those ads.

But this is odd, since nobody in the US establishment really ever denies what Brzezinski famously explained to all, that the US hired Bin Laden to recruit from the Gulf states and run terrorist paras in Afghanistan against a civilian population in order to provoke the Soviet invasion. But it seems a matter of immense importance and even urgency to Zizek to convince his dazed and credulous "left" followers - young and ignorant to be sure - that the Bin Laden operation was created in response to the prior Soviet invasion. It appears that even his first celebratory article about Egypt in the Guardian included this little meme, caught however by the Guardian editors and excised.

Why is this little imperialist apology disinfo campaign so important now that Zizz manages to work it into every television and radio appearance?

*US representatives simultaneously demanded of the Serbian government that it deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Court at the Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global Empire which demands a trans-state global judicial institution) and that it sign a bilateral treaty with the USA prohibiting Serbia from ever delivering to any international institution (that is, to the same Hague court) any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with nation-state logic). - Zizek, Iraq, the Borrowed Kettle. (Zizek is always a bit bolder with the lies and the racism etc in books; in the newspaper versions of this text, as below, he's more careful to be ambiguous, to get past fact checkers and editors one supposes. In the newspaper, he states that the US demands Serbia hand criminals to "the Hague Tribunal" - a phrase which could describe both the ICTY and the ICC. Then one sentence later he is again referring "the Hague Tribunal" as the subject of remarks by Timothy Garton Ash, as if they were the same tribunal, when the US demands Serbia hand suspects to the ICTY, and Timothy Garton Ash's quote referred to the ICC.)

And again; The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him?

And again: This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the intervention of people’s justice.’

League of Revolutionary Black Workers

2011-02-14T18:12:00.000-08:00

FINALLY GOT THE NEWS

They give you little bullshit amounts of money in exchange for your working – wages and so forth – and then they steal all that shit back from you in terms of the way they got this other thing set up – his whole credit gimmick society man, consumer credit, buy shit buy shit on credit, he give you a little bit of shit to cool your ass out and then steal all that shit back with interest – the price of money. Motherfuckers in non-existent, non-producing…motherfuckers who deal with paper. There’s a cat, he’s “in mining”, and he sits in an office man on the hundred and ninety ninth floor in some motherfucking building on Wall Street, and he’s “in mining” and he has paper, certificates, which are embroidered and shit you know, stocks, bonds, debentures, obligations, you know, “he’s in mining”, and he’s sitting up in Wall Street and his fingernails ain’t been dirty in his motherfucking life; he went to Phillips Andover or Exeter, he went to Harvard, he went to Yale, he went to the Wharton School of Business, and he’s in mining? The motherfuckers who deal with intangibles are the motherfuckers who are rewarded in this society. The more abstract and intangible your shit is, come on stocks? What is stock? Stock certificates is evidence of ownership in something that’s real. Ownership. He owns and controls and therefore receives you know the benefit from, that’s what they call profit. He's fucking with shit in Bolivia, he’s fucking with shit in Chile, he’s Anaconda, he’s United Fruit, he’s “in mining”, he’s in what? He ain’t never in his life produced shit. Investment bankers, stock brokers, insurance, man, it’s motherfuckers who don’t do nothing. We see that this whole society man exists and rests upon workers and that this whole motherfucking society controlled by this ruling clique is parasitic, vulturistic, cannibalistic and is sucking and destroying man the lives of motherfucking workers and we have to stop it because it’s evil.

2011-02-14T17:48:00.001-08:00

"We Used To Eat Lunch Together": The Title Alone Grabbed Me

2011-02-14T11:11:00.001-08:00

Advance the Struggle reports on some theatre in Jamaica High School, Queens, NY:

It’s a badass play, and as they were getting ready to perform it–and this is NOT a joke–the principals of the students’ schools actually forbade the performance! Translation: these stupid chumps (school-bureaucrat-politicians) got punked by some savvy proletarian high schoolers; they were embarrassed and afraid, and they turned authoritarian, censoring the students’ creative political expression! But after protests from students and allies, the admin backed down and the play went on for an audience of students that were feelin’ it.

Loosely based on Antigone, the play is titled “Declassified: Struggle for Existence (We Used to Eat Lunch Together).” It addresses how bureaucrats implement whack policy agendas in the name of educational accountability (based on their unreformable subjugation to the needs of capital), which disrupt students’ lives and communities, starve their resources, subordinate all concerns to questions of financing and testing, pave the way for privatization, increase authoritarian control and supervision of youth, and generally suck a lot. And of course, these “reforms” (cuts and reorganization) are part of the overall pressures on poor, working families and part of the systematic way in which the state and capital attempt to divide oppressed peoples against each other. These insights are developed within the play, reflecting an organic, political consciousness amongst the writers.

The play also addresses the most pressing question of our day: As our world is rapidly dismantled by the hungry Frankenstein of late capitalism in crisis, how can we respond?! According to the play, we should catalyze our organic social relationships, reinforce and mobilize our egalitarian principles, and organize ourselves to oppose the beast! This involves conversations (in schools, workplaces and families), organization (of outreach and literature), and some ingenuity and fearlessness. It’s called…communism–the living movement to change the course of history!

2011-02-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

"Wear a red flower, tonight."

This was his invitation to the thousands of conscious workers who flocked to hear Gershuni a few years ago, Gershuni, the Russian Revolutionist, who escaped from Siberia, arrived in New York and was to speak in Carnegie Hall that night--but a short while before he returned to the land of the Tzar; to die.

"Wear a red flower, tonight."

And when Gershuni stood before his vast audience in the evening, and saw Nature flaunting her scarlet beneath the multitude of pale faces raised eagerly for his message; he said:

"I wanted you to wear this symbol of the joy and the beauty of life because we demand not only bread, but roses."

Big Bad Society

2011-02-14T09:17:00.000-08:00

For 31-year-old Findlay, state support represents a lifeline, allowing her the freedom to exist independently. If it was taken away, Findlay said she would kill herself. "When I am not able to live independently then there's nothing to live for," she said. "I'll be leaving people behind that love me and I love them, but at the same time they understand that I don't want to be in position where I cannot do things for myself."

Disability charities say Findlay represents a small but disturbing number of disabled people saying they will kill themselves if their benefits are cut. Last month a poll for campaign group Disability Alliance, found that 9% of recipients said losing DLA "may make life not worth living".

2011-02-13T16:12:00.001-08:00

The stories problem is really a problem with the spectacle saturated populations

2011-02-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. There is a reason for these clowns going after Think Progress and unions, just like there is a reason they are targeting wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald, Planned Parenthood, and Acorn. To a lesser extent the fail parade that was the Daily Caller expose on Journolist was more of the same.

You have to understand the mindset- they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn’t enough. They want it all. Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. They don’t care if they poison every stream or crack the foundation to your house or if your daughter dies getting a back alley abortion or if every one in your mining town has an inoperable tumor. They just don’t give a shit.

And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them. They’ve even created their own mythical ideology in which they are superhero Galtian overlords, and this lets a few rubes who babble ignorantly about the free market get to feel like they are playing along, when they are really just being played. It’s these guys versus all of us, yet half the people being rogered (Republicans and glibertarians and hell, half the Democrats) have been convinced the other side is a bigger threat to their well being than the people with all the power, money, and resources. Hell, even in this post I can guarantee that at least five shitheads will come in and tell me they don’t like Glenn Greenwald because he uses too many words or that Jane Hamsher is shrill or because neither of them fellate Obama to satisfaction. Talk about not fucking getting it.

I don’t even know why we bother to hold elections any more, to be honest, the game is so rigged. We’re a banana republic, and it is just a matter of time before we descend into necklacing and other tribal bullshit.

They Want It All

2011-02-13T05:20:00.000-08:00

Greenwald:

What is set forth in these proposals for Bank of America quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws.
Yet these firms had no compunction about proposing such measures to Bank of America and Hunton & Williams, and even writing them down. What accounts for that brazen disregard of risk? In this world, law does not exist as a constraint. It's impossible to imagine the DOJ ever, ever prosecuting a huge entity like Bank of America for doing something like waging war against WikiLeaks and its supporters. These massive corporations and the firms that serve them have no fear of law or government because they control each. That's why they so freely plot to target those who oppose them in any way. They not only have massive resources to devote to such attacks, but the ability to act without limits. John Cole put it this way:
One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. There is a reason for these clowns going after Think Progress and unions, just like there is a reason they are targeting Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald, Planned Parenthood, and Acorn. . . .
You have to understand the mindset- they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn't enough. They want it all. Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. . . . And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them . . . .
I don't even know why we bother to hold elections any more, to be honest, the game is so rigged. We're a banana republic, and it is just a matter of time before we descend into necklacing and other tribal bullshit.
There are supposed to be institutions which limit what can be done in pursuit of those private-sector goals. They're called "government" and "law." But those institutions are so annexed by the most powerful private-sector elites, and so corrupted by the public officials who run them, that nobody -- least of all those elites -- has any expectation that they will limit anything. To the contrary, the full force of government and law will be unleashed against anyone who undermines Bank of America and Wall Street executives and telecoms and government and the like (such as WikiLeaks and supporters), and will be further exploited to advance the interests of those entities, but will never be used to constrain what they do. These firms vying for Bank of America's anti-WikiLeaks business know all of this full well, which is why they concluded that proposing such pernicious and possibly illegal attacks would be deemed not just acceptable but commendable.