Nostalgia Feeding Fascist Dreams of Cackling Joy, Research Time, 21/06/2018

We’re in a fascist moment right now. I don’t have to tell you this. Not only is the United States government locking away families seeking asylum from war and violence, but the guards enjoy their jobs, there are already allegations of abuse in the children and infants’ detention camps, and there’s a pretty big minority who doesn’t care or believe any of this is going on.

Maybe they really do think that everyone ICE is arresting and throwing into prison camps are all thousands of MS-13 gang members who constantly stream into the country.

Very little about the Trump family is subtle. The Republican Party
apparatchiks like Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen may prefer to be
more slippery, cagey about what they're actually doing. They won't
say what they're doing. The Trump family is different. They tell you
what you say, but it's so ridiculous that you know it's a stupid excuse.

Maybe that’s just what they tell people who they suspect would be a little disturbed by their real thoughts. Maybe they’re genuinely happy that thousands of Central American Hispanic and Indigenous people are locked in prison camps, degraded, and beaten. Children and infants included.

Stare at that hatred. It’s a human desire. It is not monstrous. It is not somehow inhuman. It is ordinary.

Different trends of research examines the images that warp a personality to express such intense hatred against the ethnically different. Many of those research trends percolated through the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Jeremy Gilbert provided a damn good bibliography section for this end of my research.

An important set of fascist concepts is rooted in the appeal to stability. You could call it the desire for freedom from fear. Any change brings risk, and a major shift in the nature and makeup of your society is riskier than if little to nothing changed at all.* Fear is the most intuitive response to the notion that your world is growing riskier, more dangerous.

* This is, of course, not the actual nature of risk, which is way more complicated. The point isn’t about what risk is, but people’s intuitions about risk.

When our world feels more dangerous, we dream of peaceful times. If we associate our feelings of danger with the change happening all around us, we’ll idealize a time in our society before that change began. We’ll want to return to that state.

Make America Great Again.

That’s how nostalgia becomes the driving image of a fascist political movement. When you’re so motivated by a fear growing in the most important desires of your personality, you’ll condone whatever violence needed to make that dream come true.

He gives you permission to use his moronically stupid excuse so that
you have something to say when a less racist person talks to you at
a party. And you can, happily and relatively privately, sit back and
enjoy watching thousands of people you hate suffer and die.

If you fear a society where your ethnicity and cultural heritage will be a minority so much, you’ll be relieved those detention camps are booming. They’ll turn back the desperate civil war refugees by conclusively demonstrating that Central Americans will find no shelter here.

The imagery of nostalgia can turn to better purposes, of course. Nostalgic themes play an important role in the environmental movement. I find it naïve that people would think of a non-technological world as a Garden of Eden.** Simply false when you learn anything about the very turbulent history of Earth.

** As a cultural image of a peaceful, harmonious Nature before human corruption. Not some silly story about a naked couple living in the woods with a talking snake.

If you come from a culture and a community that’s treated ethnic minorities with terrible oppression for centuries, wouldn’t you fear becoming an ethnic minority? You’d associate being a cultural minority with oppression, unable to imagine people of different cultures and ethnicities living together peacefully.

When you’ve grown up hating by instinct, you have an instinctive feel for how terrible it is to be the object of that hatred. When you see yourself in danger of becoming that object, your survival instinct kicks in. Luckily, what you’ll do to survive supports your disgust at having to share space with them. You’ll be relieved that these disgusting creatures won’t come to find you so disgusting.

Reading Gilbert, he brings it back to neoliberalism. How all of this becomes a way to dupe people into supporting an oligarchic economic system. He’s not wrong. But let’s understand this aspect as well – an ethical phenomenology of the racist.

Real Republican Freedom III: Institutionalized To Keep Us Free, Research Time, 30/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . That title sounds a little bit ominous. A little bit too much like “Work Sets You Free.” It’s ominous because that’s the paradox of putting the insights of two correct groups of people together.

There is always the danger, as I said last time, that reliance on an institution for your survival will turn against you. By this, I’m talking about the government.

In my own era, government officials in the United States kill and arrest black Americans at disproportionately high rates. Many of these deaths are needless, brutal, and grotesque. We don’t talk about the names of murdered black people as often anymore because apparently the only newsworthy events on Earth today involve Donald Trump.

Not only does the state have the power to kill you horribly, the
institution itself is capable of laughing at you while you die. That
is the power of human cruelty.

The frequency of police murder and brutality toward black people in America has not gone down. Under the Trump administration, American state violence toward people looks set only to grow. But that’s no reason to forget their names. All the more reason to speak.

I started this post with a deliberate reference to Auschwitz because it is a real example of what can happen when evil people turn all the machinery of the state against its own population.

Mass state violence in the democratic West is a genuine danger of our time. But it’s no reason to turn against the institution of government. It’s a more profound reason to lament this political turn toward mass imprisonment and deportation.

Because our government institutions normally bring us incredible benefits. Real material foundations of our basic standards of living.

Governments build our roads and transit systems, maintain our public services like hospitals, welfare and public insurance systems, the mail. They’ve built or helped build all our telecommunications infrastructure. Governments fund massive amounts of scientific research, and use numerous ways to finance every industry in a country.

If all these services and infrastructures were to disappear, our civilization would collapse. Hell, if they were privatized, our economy would collapse from the weight of unrestrained profit-maximizing user fees on every step we take.

More than these immediately material goods, governments are responsible for the constitution of our culture. By building all these systems, they bring their users in contact with each other. By providing a common source for all these systems, they encourage communication and alliances across the country.

Machiavelli's Florence.

States didn’t do nearly so much materially for their people back in the 1530s – there wasn’t as much for them to do. But they still built the roads and walls, administered services, and provided the public venues to build a common culture and community. Machiavelli knows how important institutions are to human life.

Yet he also knows how dangerous a corrupted institution can be. So here’s the problem of politics* – How do you prevent an inevitably corruptible creature like people from corrupting the institutions that we need to live, but which are so dangerous?

* I feel comfortable making a stab at a universal definition for the first time in my writing career. I’ve only been working on the research and thinking for this book for four years.

One provisional definition he makes in the Discourses on Livy is that you can set up an institution that completely removes incentive from ambition. An institution where the most ambitious are stymied and blocked at every turn. Where everyone will always find someone to block their ego and desire.

For Machiavelli, the institutions of the Roman Republic achieved that. The balance of powers in government between the Senate, the Consuls, Magistrates, and Tribunes all prevented any one man, clan, or faction dominating the whole government.

The framers of America’s constitution in 1788 applied the same principle to their government, with the opposition of legislatures, the White House, and the judiciary.

Machiavelli's Rome.

However, an essential element of the current American crisis is that one group of politicians have figured out how to game the balance of forces in their constitution. One political party and ideology has come to dominate all branches and levels of government.

Rome itself fell. An alliance of ambitious military officers carried out a coup, and the most ruthless of them arranged dictatorial powers for himself within a few years. Julius Caesar neutered the power of the democratic institutions of Rome.

His assassination didn’t stop the long coup because his family and military partisans defeated and killed the democratic aristocrats who wanted to restore power to the institutions. But power came to rest with men instead.

Can you counteract humanity’s tyrannical gravity forever? . . . To be continued

Thinking Terror I: Peace in the Ruins Is Easy, Research Time, 07/06/2016

This biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello is one of the best biographies that I’ve read in quite a while. I think the last one I read that was as good as Samantha Power’s treatment of the murdered diplomat’s life was Louis Althusser’s autobiography The Future Lasts Forever.*

* Just check out Althusser’s Wikipedia page for how disturbing the last years of his life were. We’re talking some Lynchian-intensity psychological terror here.

Vieira de Mello’s life is a catalogue of lessons about the potentials and limitations of seeking peace in our violent world. And he was willing to take incredible risks for the sake of peace. 

Sergio Vieira de Mello in Cambodia, where he was in
charge of making sure hundreds of thousands of refugees
returned to the country, even on barely functional buses
that could barely run on what was left of the roads.

Here’s an example. It’s 1991. Vieira de Mello’s first major global assignment was overseeing the peace settlements in Cambodia, and the return of refugees there from camps on the Thai border in time for elections. That peace settlement were between the forces of the country’s dictator Hun Sen and the Khmer Rouge guerrilla organization.

You know, the Khmer Rouge who killed more than two million people in a three-year period. The literal Killing Fields. Vieira de Mello’s job was to get them to sign a peace treaty. Hun Sen – standard authoritarian dictator that he is – was no fun either, as he rarely hesitated to kill and torture political enemies. 

Vieira de Mello hiked across dangerous stretches of Cambodia to Khmer Rouge territory on the first outreach of the international community. Welcoming horrifyingly violent men who purposely set about systematic class-based genocide to the table for peace talks.

That's the terror of what the United Nations’ policy of impartiality in conflicts was built to accomplish. The thing is, it’s a necessary terror. You have to deal with monsters, because monsters can rarely be beaten by force. You have to deal with monsters so that they return to our society and everyone comes to understand that we’re all people.

When I sit down and write Utopias, it’ll include many chains and threads, different ways to understand how we develop, use, and relate to our ideals. Stories about Vieira de Mello will be narratives of how the United Nations embodies so many paradoxes of putting ideals into practice. 

That’s the United Nations as an institution as well as Sergio Vieira de Mello the person. 

The overall purpose of the UN is to progress humanity along the road to genuine world peace. In that sense, it’s a pacifist organization, at least in its founding ideals. But it’s also an organization that was formed in the shadow of the Holocaust. So the institution is also invested – from its birth – with the knowledge of the true horror we can all accomplish.

Ieng Sary, the old guy in the white, looks like any
annoying old guy you might run into at a convenience
store complaining about the ATM's service fees. He
was one of the central planners of the torture and murder
of millions of Cambodians in the name of building a
utopian vision of his country as a giant collective farm.

The United Nations – a global diplomatic institution born in the knowledge of humanity’s most horrific monstrousness, yet imbued with the faith that peace is possible through though work in the gritty material of the world.

Yes, that sounds like a very good strain to include.

A couple of chapters after Vieira de Mello shakes hands with Ieng Sary, one of the architects of the Cambodian genocide, he’s meeting Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia. To anyone who paid attention to cable news in the 1990s, those names are chilling. They’re the face of ethnic cleansing and the terror of nationalism.

Even though Cambodia fell into dictatorship just a few years after the 1993 elections that Vieira de Mello’s work helped make possible, he arrived more than a decade after the 1975-8 genocide. 

The Khmer Rouge still made insurgent attacks against Hun Sen’s government, but the war was over. By the 1990s, politics in Cambodia was a power game played in the ruins of a country.

His relationships with the Bosnian Serb leadership was very different. The UN was one of the last lines of defence against a genocide in progress. Bosnia, particularly the capital Sarajevo, was in the middle of a war that would reduce that country to ruins.

You can be impartial when the most brutal fighting is over and all sides have something of an interest in brokering something resembling peace. Impartiality is still an ethically good stance – you’re the negotiator settling the end of a conflict.

A morality of impartiality can’t work for a war in progress, particularly a war where one side (or even worse, both) is dedicated to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Yet going into Bosnia, that was all Vieira de Mello had. . . . To be continued

The Limits of Resistance, Research Time, 26/04/2016

Antonio Negri is a man of deep and abiding faith. I’m not talking about any particular religion like Christianity or Judaism. I’m talking about his faith in people to resist authoritarian power and build a better world. 

This is a major theme in Commonwealth, and I admit that I haven’t worked through its argument to the end yet. But he returns again and again to different aspects of this power: that we all have the power to resist authority, and that the resistance of the most abject is the most powerful.

In the early chapters of the book at least, Negri has talked about slavery. This is part of Commonwealth's historical argument. The book is, in part, an argument that another world than the capitalist modernity we’re all accustomed to is possible. 

Paul Robeson as Toussaint L'Ouverture.

So he looks into the history of the West and its economic processes to find contradictions, paradoxes, and contingencies. Ways that our whole globe’s economic system schizzed out in its development. Or particular decision moments where things could have gone differently.

And the most important factor in those early stages of modernity’s global solidification, which Negri keeps coming back to again and again, is slavery.

Slavery was the great contradiction of modern capitalism’s development. The profits of the global agriculture trades in Earth’s imperialist years built the great financial and economic centres of the modern era. Those profits depended on mass imported slave labour in the United States, Brazil, and around the Caribbean.

And it kind of got swept under the rug. This is why Negri always harps on the Haitian Revolution as the only one of all the revolutions in that era which really went all the way with the true spirit of revolution against authority and authoritarianism. The Haitian Revolution was the only one that freed slaves.

All the other revolutions in France, America, and later Germany and Italy, were primarily about protecting property and property holders from authoritarianism. Not people. They were bourgeois revolutions, or landowners’ revolutions. 

They spoke the values of freedom, and believed in them too. But those other revolutions passed over the most horrible aspect of authoritarianism in their societies in silence. They never liquidated people’s human property. They never freed the slaves.

The possibility that even slaves have the freedom to revolt is the central concept of what Negri wants to teach us about human nature. It’s the centrepiece of the proof of freedom as the essence of humanity. The desire to live without oppression, without limitation – freedom from authority and from poverty. 

It’s humanity’s universal desire to be free. The spark of any tiny possibility of resistance. Slavery is the most abject and defamed position a human can be in, because being a slave denies all your humanity and the singularity of your personality, to reduce your entire value to a price. 

The greatest folk heroes of Western cultures have always
been rebels and resistance leaders, freedom fighters
against tyranny and oppression.

If even that most abject state of humanity can contain a seed of resistance, then human freedom can never truly be crushed, can it? Authority can never be absolute. 

Thinkers like Giorgio Agamben are lurking on the margins of Negri’s argument. He refers to their ideas periodically, but only and always as something to reject. But they – and more explicitly freedom-minded writers like Hannah Arendt – address a human reality and situation even more abject than slavery.

The death camp. The situation where authority is so absolute, it would appear no resistance is possible. This is a place where humanity isn’t just reduced to the absurd simplicity of a market price and a productivity index. Death camps reduce their victims to garbage, waste to be disposed of.

If authority can never be absolute, then there have to be seeds of resistance and rebellion even here. Not just in our memories or reconstructions. That’s why a movie like Roberto Begnini’s Life Is Beautiful is so insulting – it makes a death camp into a place where the resistance of clowning, humour, and subversion is possible. 

For Negri’s argument to succeed, there has to be a spark of resistance even here. I’ll get back to you on that. 

Trampled Under Feet III: Bulldozing People, Research Time, 15/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . America's problem was several initial institutional corruptions that prevented them, from the start, of ever realizing that beautiful democratic ideal. To become an American, all you had to do was contribute to building America. 

Literally, join us and labour with us. Our work building our country will set us free!

Quite literally a government of and by the people. The people’s work builds the state, the institutions, the government, the whole country. In building the country, you established your freedom, and it was as simple as working. Anyone who could work could be part of the American project.

An artistic depiction of the Trail of Tears, the forced
relocations – via death marches – of Cherokee, Muscogee,
Seminole, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw people
from their homes in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas
to designated "Indian Territory" in the centre of the
continent from Oklahoma through Colorado,
Missouri, Kansas, and the Dakotas.

Well, not anyone.

The first people excluded from the productivity of American inclusion that I want to discuss are the indigenous. The existence and deep economic integration of slavery results in an even more damning paradox than the indigenous genocides of the American frontier. But more on that later.

The exclusion of indigenous Americans from the productive project of America went according to a script we all basically know. But we rarely recognize how terrifying this racism really is.

America’s genocides against its indigenous peoples* were often through direct violence: raids and massacres, biological warfare of purposely exposing them to diseases like smallpox, mass starvation, forced relocations that amounted to death marches halfway across the continent.

* And these are peoples we’re talking about here. One aspect of anti-indigenous racism is considering all native peoples to be a homogeneous population: natives. This ignores the massive diversity and variety of cultures, governance models, and languages of all the different indigenous societies of North America. Just look through this list and think to yourself that each of these was a society comparable to modern groups like the Lao, Catalan, Bavarians, Tartars, Tamil, or Gikuyu. Your heart will sink.

My own country, Canada, also participated in a genocide against its various indigenous peoples, and in many of our institutions, the genocide continues. Canada has rarely approached the genocide of the indigenous with the incredible speed or brutality of America’s death marches and mass murders. 

But our genocide has been even more insidious. Nominally keeping to our treaties with the different indigenous nations of Canadian territory has, for a long time, convinced many indigenous people – up to and including even the current generation – from participating in our democratic processes.

Canadian indigenous have historically seen their primary governance relationship as with the Crown of England, because their treaties pre-date the creation of the Canadian state. 

But this relationship never protected them from our own instances of biological warfare and mass starvation, as well as the slower genocide of economic marginalization through isolation on decrepit reserves, the denial of political rights, and the destruction of their culture** through our residential school system.

The explicit purpose of Canada's residential school system
in the mid-20th century was the total destruction of all
the country's indigenous cultures.

** As well as constant, inescapable subjection to sexual violence and murder by their teachers. Only a few decades ago, it was Canadian state policy to rip indigenous children from their communities, then rape and murder them, and casually dump their bodies in unmarked mass graves. 

So that’s a brief catalogue of the violence. What was the reasoning behind it? The concept that made it ordinary, acceptable, and even good to visit all this terror on millions of people for centuries?

Indigenous Americans weren’t considered human. They were considered other than human, aspects of nature.

A major concept of Western modernity is the categorical separation of humanity from nature. This concept is a major subject in my book Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, where I considered how it facilitated mass-scale ecological destruction.

It was also the concept that made it morally acceptable to kill indigenous Americans. Indigenous people weren’t considered human, but instead part of nature. The image persists, even among people who promote indigenous rights. 

That’s the image of the indigenous person as closer to nature than self-degraded Western man (or rather Man™) who debases himself with technology. It simply takes the same dehumanizing, Othering concept that was originally applied to indigenous peoples to justify their destruction – they’re more animal and akin to nature than humanity – and makes it a virtue. 

But it’s just as racist and disgusting. 

Conceptually speaking,*** the most horrifying part of the American destruction of the continent’s indigenous peoples is that the country’s radically democratic constitution made it logically necessary.

*** And not viscerally speaking, because the horror of massacres, sexual violence, biological warfare, mass starvation, and death marches is more than viscerally violent enough for anyone.

Wet'suwet'en leaders in modern British Columbia.
Canada, specifically the environmental activism of
indigenous people across the country, is the
epicentre of Idle No More, a mass movement of
indigenous people agitating for an end to North
American institutions to manage their populations
whose founding purpose was cultural and violent
genocide.

I praised this concept yesterday, that America’s constitution and philosophical context in The Federalist Papers put the productive power of the people as the constitutive power of America itself. America wasn’t a country or administration, it was a project whose people themselves would build.

But if there are already hundreds of societies and cultures living throughout the North American continent, then the expansion project that allowed the American people to build the country couldn’t have happened. 

A neighbouring society with the same rights to self-determination as the American settlers would have stopped the country’s expansion. At the same time, this wasn’t an imperialist affair because they weren’t conquering their neighbours. 

American authorities, leaders, and people were literally clearing the indigenous away, exterminating cultures and people like pests so Americans could have the space to build their freedom.

America was to be built from nothing. That’s the foundational ideal of American productive democracy of the Jeffersonian period. So the indigenous cultures had to be treated as if they weren’t really human societies. 

That way, American settlers – the builders of the country – could clear them away like brush and weeds from farmland. And feel just as neutrally about mass murder as they do about a brush fire.

And there is more horror, the horror of slavery.  . . . To be continued.

Everyday People and Totalitarian Actions, Jamming, 17/04/2014

If you remember my posts about my reading through Hannah Arendt’s work, you remember that I spoke a lot about the structure of totalitarianism, which is fundamentally important to my Utopias project. Even though that project has moved to the back burner, it remains in my thoughts. I read some news out of Ukraine last night that made me recall some of the core ideas from Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian politics, and my own uptake of those thoughts.

The flag of the Donetsk People's Republic, the most
recently declared pawns in the new Russia-Europe
geopolitical games.

The Donetsk People’s Republic is the world’s newest unrecognized state. This seems to be the model for Russia’s desperate attempt at imperialist expansion – encouraging Russian nationalists in the area to form a breakaway government of some region of a country, which would be loyal to the Russian government, who would then advocate on the separatists’ behalf. Putin seems to have adopted the model of Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova, as his central means of intimidating his European cold enemies and expanding Russia’s military influence beyond its borders. As for the country where Russian influence is expanding, the proxies of that expansion essentially form guerrilla militias to start a civil war.

He did the same with separatist regions in Georgia, having invaded that former Soviet republic in 2008, ostensibly to protect the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It’s only becoming an issue for Western politicians and journalists now that it’s breaking up a large country that was integrating with the European Union. Nobody who matters in our society really cares that much about Georgia of Moldova, which is pathetic and hypocritical on the part of our leaders and media elites. But we could have seen this mess coming.

Now Russian separatists in Ukraine are getting especially disreputable and terrifying. It’s been reported across Israeli media that gangs of armed militiamen gave out flyers to Donetsk’s Jewish people as they left Passover services that they were to register the families and property with the breakaway government, or have everything they owned confiscated. The written orders were signed by the breakaway government’s president, and he’s stood by them, and backed their legitimacy.

I know using the word makes me sound hysterical, but these anti-Semitic actions on the part of Donetsk-Russian nationalist militias indicate a definitely ugly turn. It recalls the ideas that I found in Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Orders like those that the Donetsk Jewish community received are preludes to ethnic cleansing, actually informing the targeted community that the new government has authorized that they be ethnically cleansed. The confiscation order indicates that the cultural and ethnic purity of Donetsk as Russian is now a priority for the breakaway government. Jews in eastern Europe have historically been treated as exceptions from the social order, their presence a plurality in a culture that otherwise sees itself as uniform.* 

* Of course, no culture is ever genuinely uniform, because all cultures are composed of individuals, and individuals are inherently variations from the norm. No one ever precisely conforms to any general cultural model. A conception of a culture is a phenomenon only on a macroscopic scale, and mesoscopic or microscopic scales always reveal variations and irregularities that are rarely statistically significant on the macroscopic. Even then, they’re only significant in aggregate, never as an individual, unless you’re talking about charismatic leaders of genuinely dictatorial governments, the type of Leader that Arendt capitalized.

Ethnic cleansing is a violent movement whose central premise is that a culture is linked with the land on which it lives, and must be entirely uniform to be in perfect health. It prioritizes the purity and uniformity of the group on a macroscopic level to the point of erasing all singularity on the microscopic level of individuals. It is the political destruction of singularity. In other words, totalitarianism.