Whither Capital II: The Toughest Reparations, Research Time, 31/05/2018

Here’s something interesting and troubling that Jeremy Gilbert points out in his history of Cultural Studies integrating with anti-capitalist social movements. It starts from the fact that this social movement was against globalization.

From that perspective, you could almost co-opt that branch of the movement into an intense nationalism. After all, when political leaders across many ideologies call for slowing down globalization, or how globalization has hurt us and our industries, the call to build more walls becomes implicit.

Canadians are now rushing to defend NAFTA, but when it was being written, it was protested and mocked just as vigorously as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Those actions against the TPP, by the way, are still going on.

From a protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Santiago, Chile.

See, globalization is a powerful force for improvement in people’s lives across human civilization. Now, there’s plenty of Victorian-style mass poverty and exploitation. But the sweatshops of Bangladesh and Indonesia are a few labour movements away from proper reform. Democracy is a powerful social force – its fuel is human frustration with injustice, and that’s never going to run dry.

Globalization’s harm to the working class populations of the West was a form of reparations. The Western countries no longer had a monopoly on industry. So they were undercut by the competition. We were undercut by the competition.

This was the economic end to colonialism. The countries that European militaries used to occupy, control, and loot were free to become capitalistic themselves. They’d industrialize on their own terms as much as they can. Old-fashioned trade links have taken some time to fray. But many countries now hold economically dominant positions that used to be prostrate.

Ask a Chinese person about the Opium Wars, and you’ll see someone immensely proud of how his country has succeeded after such colonial degradation. Even if in the next breath, they call Xi Jinping a dictatorial megalomaniac and the Communist Party a living disaster area.

So that aspect of globalization is good. It’s the first time the Earth has had a globally integrated economy without the overpowering dominance of a single pole by military domination.

The problem is that it broke the possibility of the 20th century social democratic bargain. The welfare state – especially as it existed in Europe – required high taxes and full employment. Otherwise, it became unsustainable. But people had no problem working good jobs in diverse industrial economies, with generally solid benefits and wages, if that also got them cheap medical and welfare services from their governments.

Statist social democracy, in its traditional form, requires full employment. Otherwise, its tax base disappears. The employment rates of the West took a serious hit as globalization took full effect and local industries were opened to competition with Asian cities for the first time. A lot of those European firms didn’t make it through the heat.

So it had become impossible to return to the old answers. As Gilbert argues, Cultural Studies – those activist university scholars – were one of the few people to see how this would happen in the 1970s and 80s.

It remained an open question what you’d do about it.

You Don’t Know When It Happens But You Know When It Has, Research Time, 15/05/2018

A few paragraphs about a curious metaphor. It might be a metaphor, and it might be an application. I’m honestly not sure, because it only comes up for a couple of pages. Even though it could be a whole book.

What am I actually talking about? It’s a passage in Paul Patton’s book Deleuzian Concepts. It shows up about halfway through the book, as he’s working through different ways to explain the nature of iterability.

I’m not going to get into Patton’s concept of iterability in much detail. In very short form, he understands becoming and change as the repetition of a process with a few chance variations each cycle. What I found interesting was how he used this concept to describe a complex political and historical process.

Too much philosophy forgets the real suffering of the people caught up
in the radical transformations of the real world. If philosophical
thinking remembers them, it would become epochal again.

Colonialism. It’s impossible to say for sure, in the middle of a colonization process, when the place truly transitions from a free land to a colonized space. Some white dude showing up in the middle of a forest in Gaspé and saying, “I claim this land for France!” as he plants a flag in the ground is fundamentally ridiculous. He’s a bloody cartoon.

By the time the government is taking your children away to boarding school to have their culture beaten and raped out of them, you can be certain you’ve been colonized. Patton is exploring how we think of this transition from the ridiculous to the terrifying.

You can follow the transition, the small changes that make up a massive transformation. As a process, you can see it all unfolding, bit by bit over time. But what is the event of colonization?

See, this is where Deleuzian Concepts suffers from an unfortunate tendency in academia. When you specialize in writing secondary material in a particular main figure – like how Paul Patton always writes books and articles about Gilles Deleuze – there’s often a tendency to think of their work as a unified system.

So you produce articles or book chapters about, say, how to reconcile two concepts of the event in Deleuze’s work. Before he started working with Guattari, Deleuze thought of the event largely through a Stoic lens – the sudden transformation, the moment when everything changes. Afterward, he started thinking of events as processes – transformative processes whose changes are fractal pretty much to the Planck length.

Here's one way in which I've been thinking of Russian global policy
these days. Among many things I've been thinking about the Russian
government lately. We Westerners have been raised, pretty much, to
think that international relations have moved past this weird way of
fighting over territory on Earth. That's not the model of politics that
we developed international law for – it's a game of Risk, not politics.
But Russian leaders these days act like they never got the memo.
Maybe they really didn't.

Those two ideas don’t go together – if you try to call them both “the event,” the conceptions just about contradict each other. The only reason you’d try to reconcile them is because of the unfortunate tendency in philosophy scholarship to think about a figure’s works systematically instead of historically.

If you thought historically, you’d actually have to think about the concepts themselves, and the thinkers themselves as people. You’d realize that the question has a pretty simple answer. Ask why Deleuze developed these two seemingly incompatible concepts of the event?

You won’t get anything all that philosophically fascinating. You won’t get some complicated attempt to build a system of philosophy, a hermetically sealed “Deleuze Studies.” No, you’ll get the ordinary story of a writer who thinks one way for a few years, then a happy encounter convinces him that he’d been barking up the wrong tree. So he went in a better direction.

And in all this academic posturing, the events at the heart of the example are forgotten. Because you actually could use the tension between the two concepts of the event – instantaneous transition and slow process of variation on variation – to develop a complex, powerful, and illuminating conception of how colonialism works.

As a whole book, it would be an transdisciplinary blend of history, indigenous narrative, economics, ideological analysis of racism, and social ontology. But Paul Patton is not such a writer. He specialized in Deleuze Studies. So two pages is all he’s got.

I know what the better book would be. And Patton didn’t write it.

Being Is Primary Over Knowledge, Jamming, 10/04/2018

Being is primary over knowledge. That’s the fundamental principle of empiricism, that human knowledge and thinking always has something to learn from the world. The world can surprise a human thinker easily, ordinarily. Or maybe rarely. But it always can.

I’m keeping it short tonight. I’ve had a super-long day. I’m going to have a lot of super-long days moving apartments, and I’m only moving up the road.

Pictured: The logic of colonialism expressed in mass murder.

Knowledge doesn’t exist to determine being. Knowledge is a means of exploring existence. We contribute to building the world, but it’s a dynamic process of feedback – far from the determination of logic.

The refusal to be surprised is a refusal to take what’s different from you as something to learn from. It rejects the dignity of the different. The logic of colonialism is expressed ontologically.

This doesn’t reduce that complex ontology of high modernism – the kind Deleuze found in Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel – to a colonial ideology. One is the expression of the other. Neither is primary absolutely. Ontological vocab works to develop the idea in one context. Political vocab in another.

Michael Hardt’s book about Gilles Deleuze’s early years describes the older man as a young thinker. Not about his daily life, of course, which was unexciting – teaching secondary school, mostly in Lyon, raising his young family, bored out of his mind.

A man who’d lost his brother to a Gestapo prison cell might wish for an unexciting life, I suppose. Though he applied all the time for jobs back in Paris.

Deleuze saw the influence of that ontological chauvinism – that human reason determined the fundamental structure of reality – as something that desperately needed to be overcome. It had led to disaster politically, and increasingly insular navel-gazing among the philosophers of his country.

He sought to overcome it not by arguing against it, but my articulating a philosophical vision so alien to it that it didn’t even need to refer to the hubris and ego of ontological rationalism. In doing so, he set a model for the most thorough empiricism to come yet from the Western tradition.

And he argued for that empiricism by showing all the amazing things you could do with that approach to thinking that you simply couldn’t with hubristic rationalism.

That, to me, is the most interesting part of his career because it’s the most creative part, especially after he junked his Freudian influences through collaborating with Félix Guattari and wrote some explicitly political philosophy.

Having read Hardt’s book, I’m not sure that it really does Deleuze’s thinking justice to frame all of his creative later developments in this early, reactionary phase of his thinking. He’s still running away. Not yet able to stand on his own (and with his friends) to articulate a real philosophical alternative to the modernist model.

The Limits of Your Universe, Research Time, 09/11/2017

Philosophical thinking sometimes puts you in a tricky place. For example, I’m doing the research for a big book of political philosophy. That research comes mostly from Western traditions of thinking. But it’s going to discuss ideas and concepts that are universal in scope – applying to people no matter their civilization or culture.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Now put a bunch of philosophers in the room and see if any discussion of universality can make it out alive. Cultural relativism is a common foil here, especially for Westerners like me who know the Western tradition best.

Thanks to the conceptual framework of colonialism that polluted Western thinking for a good few centuries, it’s dangerous for any Western person to apply their writing on a universal scale. Let me give you an example.

Hannah Arendt focussed her energy on understand the core concepts
of Western thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Actually, I’ll just link back to the example I gave yesterday when I was writing about something different. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition examines how a set of cultural presumptions about humanity’s relationship with the world and our place in it developed over time.

She talks about it on the terms of those presumptions’ core concepts themselves. Really anal but important thing I want to call attention to – I don’t say ‘in terms of,’ but ‘on terms of.’ In the same sense that, when you ask someone for an eyewitness account, you say they described the incident on their terms.

Her historical references for this analysis are entirely Western – from Polis Greece through Medieval Christian Europe to the Scientific Revolutions and their growing intensity until the Nuclear Age. But the philosophical problems that all these cultural dynamics influence and change refer to existential questions about humanity itself.

Here we have a culture speaking for all of humanity – the West. And it sounds for a second like the argument we’ve all heard before.

European navies and armies spent a few centuries ruthlessly conquering every other civilization on Earth. Our education systems and most of our cultural traditions have trained and raised* most of us Westerners to think as if we deserved to conquer them. Western ideas were universal – everyone else’s were local. Westerners were Man – everybody else were just a bunch of people.

One of the first great thinkers to see the real end
point of decolonization was Frantz Fanon. In The
Wretched of the Earth, the revolution throwing
the colonizers out is only the beginning. A society
can stay on a war footing for much too long. It
has to begin its own cultural renaissance of
creativity and freedom. Only then can they truly
be equals with the bastards who once conquered
them. Rub that freedom to develop your culture
as you want in their face. That's the real victory.

* Respectively.

The typical reaction is to declare this whole pretence to the Western way of thinking being the true universal a general crock of shit. I’m speaking, of course, about the 20th century left. This is the set of progressive attitudes that the paranoid nationalist right believes is the only left.

That old-fashioned progressive attitude is over – in the 21st century generation anyway. The attitude that appears to be shaking out from our culture right now is what I’m about to describe. Basically, it’s the endpoint of cultural decolonization.

At the end of the day, The Human Condition describes one way to think about humanity. It’s a continuous cultural development – a general trend among many different communities.

But those communities grew similar in this broad set of problems – over humanity’s place in the world – that they all developed similar responses at similar times. They shared a lot among each other. Enough to become Europe.

There are other densely integrated communities throughout the world that interacted much more intensely among each other than beyond for long periods of time. They developed their own traditions of thinking about these broad problems – over humanity’s place in the world.

The Western way of thinking is not the one way, standing apart from the many.

The Western way of thinking is one way among many.

In the 21st century, these many civilizational traditions of thought are now interacting more intensely than they ever have before. Let’s all bring our ideas to each other and see what new thinking results.

A Metaphor That Will Devour Your World, Doctor Who: Eaters of Light, Reviews, 19/06/2017

“Eaters of Light” is a very old-fashioned Doctor Who story, but it’s also perfectly in tune with the rebellious tone and message Doctor Who is expressing in 2017. Several stories this season have staked out what Doctor Who can be in the Britain of Brexit nationalism and cultural delusion. “Eaters of Light” is another one.

The Doctor’s Harsh Words for Brexit Nation

The British nationalism of Brexit is an ideology that’s trying to resurrect the spirit of the British Empire, a time when Britain as a country needed no partners, no friends. Brexit ideology is the image of Britain as the dominant power in the world.

Quite simply, the Doctor does not have time for any of your shit.

That’s why the ideology rejects the European Union – for all that its execution remains flawed, the core promise of the EU is that it’s a confederation of partners who are stronger together than they ever could be separately or at war.

Brexit nationalism remembers an alternative arrangement – when Britain was independent of all such confederations, and wanted war because Britain would conquer.

Nigel Farage’s vision has two elements: domination and racism. Reject the European Union because Britain’s true greatness lies not in becoming one partner among ostensible equals, but in dominating all rivals. Reject a multicultural society because those who aren’t ethnically and culturally traditional British are no equals, but slaves.

The victory of Brexit was a reactionary eruption of this demented vision – a demand to return to the patriotism of the empire, of conquerors.

We’ve seen several reactions Doctor Who has had to this vision of Britain – all variations on “NO!”

Doctor Who could never have embraced this kind of ideology without falling apart. It would be a bigger ethical crisis for the show than the collapse of the Doctor’s character in the metafictional suicide of 1985.

One flaw of the retro nature of Rona Munro's script was that the
supporting cast didn't get much development in their dialogue that
wasn't directly related to the theme of the story. Which was fine,
since the theme was brilliant. But I found Rebecca Benson's Kar
had the best performance in relatively thin material.

Doctor Who was designed as a take on the Victorian character trope of the travelling scientist-adventurer in a post-empire world. The Doctor explores the ethic of the imperial scientist-adventurer who rejects empire. So of course Doctor Who could only ever stand against Brexit ideology.

Thieves and Killers, Eaters of Light

Several stories this season have attacked different expressions of Brexit ideology. “Thin Ice” depicted the Victorian-era version of Nigel Farage for exactly the kind of petty, pathetic, small-minded, racist twit he is.

“Oxygen” shows how the world is perverted into a horror-show of exploitation, where people are treated as disposable machinery in the name of profit. A society whose core values are those of remorseless, pitiless, rapacious libertarian capitalism where everything can be for sale, even the air we breathe. This society is the monster whose death the Doctor sets in motion.

The flawed yet terribly ambitious Monks Trilogy carries among its many dense philosophical themes a running resistance to apparently invincible empire. Each episode features an act of resistance and hope that eventually forces that empire to crumble.

“Empress of Mars” is probably the biggest middle finger to the Faragean romanticizing of brutality and theft. It’s not a subtle story. The Victorian English soldiers that Brexit ideology considers the height of British nobility are petty thieves and chauvinist murderers.

Romans are romanticized as the ultimate warriors, ever since the
original histories of their empire. Livy was as much a propagandist
for his country as its chronicler. But when the chips are seriously
down and your enemy is a hungry killing machine from another
dimension whose very material nature is a destructive cancer on
your own universe, they're a bit in over their heads.

The only one among the major soldier characters with any honour or ethics is the deserter. I mean, naturally. This is Doctor Who – anyone who deserts from a brutal conquering army bent on looting the world is a hero.

Which brings us to “Eaters of Light,” which is simultaneously straightforward in its rejection of Brexit nationalist ideology and a little more complex.

Impotent Empires

This week’s story is straightforward, though a warning of

SPOILERS!! 

is needed. Phil Sandifer’s review already described how the structure of the story was so straightforward, it was straight out of the classic series. Rona Munro, who wrote the last story of the classic series “Survival,” turned in a very simple Doctor Who story. Its narrative wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s.

The TARDIS team gets split up and meets the two sides of a terrible conflict. Bill meets the last teenage soldiers of the Roman legion while the Doctor and Nardole meet the child and teenage survivors of the area’s Pictish people. When they reunite, they bring the two sides together to fight a greater evil. The monster receives no greater detail than its monstrousness, its concept as a light-eater.

The episode's ending, with Pict and Roman warriors and shamans
locked together in a time-out-of-joint pocket battling eternally for
the safety of our reality, reminded me a lot of the end of the classic
Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor," but much more hopeful.

The Romans of 2000 years ago are, along with the British of 150 years ago, the most legendary empires of Europe. Their armies and conquests are remembered fondly in the current age. Mussolini’s nationalism regarded imperial Rome in much the same way Farage’s remembers Victorian Britain.

But Kar herself, the young Pict shaman, describes what they were in their own times. Armies of mass murderers, thieves, looters, not warriors but despoilers. The reason the few teenagers are left in the Roman legion is because the Light Eater monster killed them all. As for the adult Picts, the Romans killed all of them.

The episode itself demonstrates the pathetic nature of this kind of imperialist killing. You wouldn’t think that we’d have to demonstrate how horrible imperialist killing is, but that’s Brexit ideology for you, and it’s a serious danger.

Peace Conquers All

Simply demonstrating the inherent wrongness of invading a country, massacring its people, and looting its wealth isn’t enough, however. The problem is one of intuitions, the kind of ethical thinking to which you’re accustomed.

I can very easily say that invading a country, massacring its people, and looting their wealth is a terrible thing, because that is what I believe. And I can argue for its rightness using appeals to historical evidence and philosophical principle. History provides my cases to analyze, and philosophy provides my principles and the means to justify them.

The last scene (whether written by Munro herself or Steven Moffat,
credit to them both anyway) is a vast improvement on Toby
Whithouse's brick-headed attempt to show the Master's ethical
transformation. "Eaters of Light" is bold and sophisticated
enough to show us the deeply erotic aspects of this season's arc
of the Master's relationship with the Doctor as the means to her
ethical change. It's territory that Doctor Who has never really
explored (officially, anyway). Like I said last time, I'm
disappointed that it turned out to be a straight pairing, as is
everyone else who wrote a little Davison Doctor / Ainley
Master slash-fic in our day. But that's especially so for this
episode, which made such a touching moment of queer
conversation when Bill got to know her Roman friends.

The problem is that a rabid imperialist nationalist can do the same. They believe that the glory of a people is in dominating, conquering, brutalizing, and looting them. They use cases from history and philosophical analysis to determine and justify their principles too. What can break the deadlock?

“Eaters of Light” provides an answer, one similar in a fashion to that of “Empress of Mars” last week. They prove that domination through violence is ultimately a fool’s game, because you can never win those contests forever. You might believe that you can, as Catchlove did last week and the most deranged Farageans do most every day.

But if the British Empire had lasted long enough (or made it to Mars), they’d have eventually discovered some alien civilization with far superior technology who would have made short work of their glory. The same goes for Rome – the all-consuming army is destroyed by a locust from another dimension.

What can actually ensure the continuity of your civilization and culture through such a challenge is peace. Last week, we saw a human who’d rejected empire making peace with Martians. This weekend, we saw the remnants of conquerors joining with the remnants of the conquered to defeat a force that threatened their whole world.

That's the message of Doctor Who for those who worship empire. Not only are our values of peace and friendship better ethically, they’re better for our very survival.
• • •
My reviews on this season of Doctor Who so far. Unranked, at least for now.
The Pilot / The Girl with The Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land
The Monks Trilogy
Empress of Mars

The Pathetic Impotence of Empire, Doctor Who: Empress of Mars, Reviews, 12/06/2017

"Empress of Mars" is Mark Gatiss’ swan song to Doctor Who, and another explicit contribution to a vision of Doctor Who for the Brexit era.

Iraxxa is one of Mark Gatiss' best characters, and I'd love to see the
show engage her again. I've seen very few clues emerging so far
about the style and priorities of the Chris Chibnall era, so I'm
interested in seeing what they'd do with the Ice Warrior
matriarch.

A Man of Tradition

Gatiss was literally the second writer whose script appeared since the revival back in the Christopher Eccleston year. “The Unquiet Dead” was one of Gatiss’ best scripts, and I’d put “Empress of Mars” in the same category.

He’ll probably leave Doctor Who television with Steven Moffat, and the two of them – lifelong friends and creative partners – have had a wonderful run on the show of a decade and a half. Gatiss, however, always had a reputation as the lesser half of that pair.

In all fairness, aesthetically that’s the case. Moffat has always been able to deliver trippy concepts, complex narratives, and detailed story arcs. Gatiss can put a solid script together, though some of them feature some unfortunate holes and problematic implications.

If Gatiss’ work has one running flaw, it’s that he’s an inescapable traditionalist. His stories are all fairly simple. There are evil aliens of some kind, and the supporting cast usually has an engaging story.

It isn’t always the existential rejuvenation of Charles Dickens, the family drama of “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Night Terrors,” or the metafictional mythmaking of “Robot of Sherwood,”* but there’s always some idea beyond the base under siege.

Mark Gatiss is often called a traditionalist Doctor Who writer. But
while his style typically sticks with the creepiness and camp that
dominated the show's styles in the 1970s, many of his stories
actually turn the traditional story forms of classical Doctor Who
on their heads. Like in "Empress of Mars," where the humans are
the invaders of a Martian base, and they're more dangers to
themselves than the Ice Warriors.

* Which wasn’t really all that successful, and is a top candidate for Gatiss’ lowest-ranking story.

Because Gatiss stories are fundamentally bases under siege – locations or worlds that are disrupted by alien invasions. The Gelth, the Wire, the Daleks, the Tenza child, the Sweetville community, the Ice Warriors, the robots, and the sleep creatures all invade Victorian London, 1950s London, the council estate, Victorian Yorkshire, a Russian submarine, the metafictional Sherwood Forest, and the Le Verrier space station.

The TARDIS crew with their local allies defend the invaded space, or else figure out how the invaders and invaded can make peace. Gatiss doesn’t religiously follow the old base-under-siege format.

His more complex character dynamics put him above that tired format, for one. As well, the fact that some siege conflicts can be settled peacefully is another form of progress over the traditional. “Sleep No More” was probably his most ambitious work, using the camera itself as a deceptive narrative device. That story was his biggest creative leap.

Paint Mars Pink

“Empress of Mars” isn’t such a leap. It’s reactive, but in a good way. This is an explicitly anti-imperialist political story that subverts its own traditionalism. It’s a base under siege, but the base is the Martian cryogenic complex, and the invaders are Victorian English soldiers.

Catchlove is a caricature, but he's a sadly accurate one. He's exactly
the kind of person who the most blindly nationalist Brexiteer would
hope a Britain free from the constraints of the European Union's
prissy, pansy, peacenik ideology will grow among its next
generation.

The soldiers have explicitly enslaved the Ice Warrior they found shipwrecked on Earth. They even named him Man Friday, after the Pacific Islander Robinson Crusoe enslaves. The characters admit it – their own reference to Robinson Crusoe parallels Bill’s references to her contemporary television serials and movies.

It portrays the soldiers as ordinary British people, just like Bill. But their attitudes show the violence and rage that was ordinary in British society at the time. They aren’t on Mars to explore it, but to conquer it, rob it of its mineral wealth, and subjugate its inhabitants. Just like they did throughout India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

The humans are the invaders, but their invasion is incompetent. They’ve been easily manipulated by Friday’s promises of precious gems on Mars. Their apparent shipwreck was entirely intentional, since the English camp was so close to the Empress’ cryo chamber.

The most the English crew could manage for mining equipment was a repurposed laser cannon. When the fighting starts, their guns are pathetically ineffective. These are the most incompetent invaders in years of Doctor Who.

Yet they’re poster boys for British greatness. The red uniforms, aggressive courage, and will to conquer is the worshipped image of the Brexit crew’s campaign to Make Britain Great Again!.

A political persona as ridiculous as
this idiot was never supposed to win.

Blinded by Dreams

It isn’t a stretch to identify the same chauvinist nationalism in the leaders of Britain’s Brexit movement as in those pathetic soldiers. The motivating sentiment of Brexit is to return to an era when Britain on its own was powerful enough to conquer the world. And in the case of “Empress of Mars,” beyond.

Except Britain isn’t powerful enough to conquer the world beyond Earth. It never was. Even in this sci-fi scenario where they make it to Mars, they fail miserably. Their weapons are no match for the Ice Warriors’ sonic guns, and they seem incapable of conceiving of any tactic but standing in a line and firing their useless rifles.

They’re deluded into thinking that this millennia-old starfaring civilization is simply a bunch of walking crocodiles. We’re British! they say. We can conquer anything! British conquer and destroy!

The rhetoric of Brexit had more than one parallel to these toy soldiers. Boris Johnson’s boisterous strutting national pride, Michael Gove’s supremely dorky sense of self-superiority, Andrea Leadsom’s quaint social conservatism – they were all deluding themselves that Britain could be powerful enough to conquer Earth again if they just cut their ties to these pansy democratic institutions.

Nigel Farage is the worst of them all, an unreconstructed racist nationalist who’s offended by the mere presence of Muslims and Poles on pure, white English shores. “Empress of Mars” is a slap in all their faces – a story that depicts blatantly what an idiotic bumble chauvinist nationalism really is.

The only reason Britain was able to conquer the world was because of the contingent fact that they actually were, for the most part, technologically superior to many of their enemies. They never faced down Iraxxa.

The last shot of "Empress of Mars" is a brief moment of what seems to
be a slow-brewing sexual tension between the Doctor and the Master.
It's a much more nuanced way to handle the Master's ethical reform
than Toby Whithouse's pathetic Frank Miller retreads. My only
regret is that, by the time Doctor Who started making the Doctor-
Master sexual tension explicit and obvious, they were a straight
pairing.

Nothing about empire is inherently great – it’s simply delusions on top of delusions.

More Than Monsters, True Alien Worlds

“Empress of Mars” also does a lot to make the Ice Warriors a unique fictional people. He got this started a little bit with his nuanced character of Grand Marshal Skaldak. But he gets the most done here.

In their original appearances during the Troughton era, the Ice Warriors were generic evil aliens invading a series of bases as part of evil schemes to conquer to Earth. But the Pertwee years saw the creatures gain some depth and complexity.

By the Peladon stories of 1972 and 1974, their characters had motivations just as complex as the others. Some were uncertain allies with their own priorities in a complicated political backdrop, and some were manipulative villains. Hulking monsters they weren’t.

The Big Finish audios, for the most part, weren’t too kind to the Ice Warriors. They basically just made them into hissing green Klingons.

In this short story, Gatiss adds a remarkable amount of nuance to Ice Warrior culture. For one thing, matriarchal values are central to their society. Iraxxa puts special weight on Bill’s assessment of the Mars-Britain standoff when she makes her decision – as a woman, Bill’s is a calm voice amid the shouts of strutting men.

Do these guys seriously think their rifles can stand up to the sonic
weaponry of Ice Warriors? Also, "Empress of Mars" was the first
Doctor Who story that rendered the Ice Warriors' sonic weaponry
in contemporary visual effects. It looked fantastic.

The perspective of a woman is that of careful thought – sanity in a world of madness, shouting, and rage. A woman is wise and noble, well-suited for leadership and the responsibility to make high-stakes decisions.

The most important cultural development for “Empress of Mars” comes through Iraxxa’s contrast to the most violent of the British soldiers. Ice Warriors are creatures of war, battle, and honour. But they aren’t imperialists. Iraxxa’s values revolve around solidarity and courage, not conquest and theft.

The British are, for the most part, cruel egotists. Jackdaw is a petty thief, getting himself killed over stealing ornamental jewels from Iraxxa’s cryogenic chamber. Catchlove is the most obvious example of what the story holds in contempt. He embodies all the racism, arrogance, aggression, rage, and violence that makes him wretched filth.

The nobility of Iraxxa, Friday, Bill, and Godsacre are a contrast to that petty arrogance and cruelty. What better role models could we have?
• • •
Here are my previous reviews of Peter Capaldi's last season of Doctor Who. I won't do a formal ranking until the end of the season, after "The Doctor Falls" broadcasts and I can look into the season as a whole.

The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land (Screw you, Whithouse)
The Monks Trilogy

“Before Man Was, War Waited For Him,” Jamming, 09/06/2017

Here's an odd convergence as I thought about a passage in The Federalist Papers. I didn’t realize its implications in the moment I first read it, but thinking on it in my notebook today, it’s there. A glimpse of terror.

The Federalist Papers make a remarkably optimistic document. It would have to be. These essays were designed to sway popular opinion, so had to be appealing. And they had to sway popular opinion regarding one of the heaviest concerns ever facing the people of the United States – they had to choose what their country would be.

So you don’t throw in a stark manifestation of horror intentionally. This scream appeared by accident. At the time, they probably wouldn’t even have seen it as a scream. It would have been a call to adventure.

The quote from the title is from Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian. It was written as a dark and bloody
myth of America's creation in the late stages of its
western conquest. A story of the best time for an
otherworldly evil to manifest on Earth was during
the American genocide of its indigenous people.
When the scalp was a form of currency.

Americans don’t like to think of themselves as an empire. I feel pretty safe saying this. Even with their military bases flung all over the world supporting countless international alliances,* American corporations and business leaders still some of the most powerful in the world, and having written the very rules of global financial institutions, no American would say their country is an empire.

* So many that even the President can’t even keep track of who’s a friend or an enemy.

By some technical definitions, they’re right. Americans didn’t conquer every country where they stuck a military base. But I’m not thinking about the empire around the world.

See, in Federalist #7, Alexander Hamilton talks about another reason why the United States will be better off unified under a federal government. Now, he talks about the fascinating philosophical ideas in other essays.

His conception of patriotism as the fundamental virtue for a peaceful society is fascinating. It puts Hamilton squarely in the tradition of Machiavellian republicans – the materialist democrats. But there are also a lot of frank practical discussions about the coming challenges Americans faced at that moment in history.**

** No, of course it wouldn’t be slavery. Hamilton may have been enlightened in many ways, but he still had no problem with slavery.

This challenge was looking west. It was the challenge of building an American empire. Hamilton also foresaw several separate American nations and confederacies sparking into constant war on each other. John Jay spoke in broad historical strokes about how all peoples slip into war with each other eventually.

Hamilton had a very specific war in mind. If the USA split into four or five different countries and peoples, they’d face a massive war of competition over each other’s imperialist expansion. Not war directly on each other, but war for control of the territory of the American west and north.

Canada has its malformed romantic memory of the War of 1812, but for Americans at the time, it was just one part of a massive, decades-long program of empire building. From 1783 to the 1840s, the United States government led a massive push of military forces and armed settlers west of the 1763 Proclamation Line all the way to the Pacific.

America, land of those brave enough to force thousands of people on
brutal death marches across 400 miles.

The United States failed to conquer England’s northern colony of Upper Canada, but they did a much better job with the chunks of New France that still existed south of the Great Lakes, and with New Spain.

Of course, the worst would happen to the Indigenous peoples. US policy during its westward expansion was the open genocide of Indigenous peoples – constant raids and massacres, disease inflicted on them to decimate their population, forced starvation on reserve land.

Probably the most intense single event of America’s Indigenous Holocaust was the Trail of Tears. It’s a lilting, poetic name for a brutal death march of hundreds of thousands of people from the Carolinas halfway across the fucking continent to what’s now Oklahoma.

Hamilton urged unity for the 13 American states because otherwise, violence might break out during this continental conquest. The only violence that was a problem for him was the violence among countries and peoples who could have come together as the United States.

What about the rest – British, French, Spanish, black slaves, indigenous sub-humans? Violence against them would bring triumph, the triumph of American empire.

Alexander Hamilton knew a few things about how to topple empires. He knew what kept an empire strong, and what made it vulnerable. Most importantly, he new that the only empire that could ever last was a monopoly.

We Will Never Not Know War, Advocate, 07/04/2017

I’m pretty isolated from war and international brinksmanship in Canada – though I still remind people that we share a border with Russia. We just never think of it because it’s the top of the map.

Bashar Assad is immensely grateful for all the support he gets from
Western progressives, as he continues to bomb his citizens to support
obedience to his police state, while they defend him as Syria's
rightful ruler and government. You know what happens when you
ignore actual Syrian people's voices? You forget that the Arab
Spring was a democratic revolution, not some false flag.

But I watched the news Thursday night of the American missile strikes on the Syrian government air base which launched this week’s sarin gas attack with dread. But it isn’t the dread that’s becoming sadly typical of the Western left.

I’m morosely accustomed to a sad equation in left-wing political debates – opposition to one leads to apologies for another. I've seen it, for example, in so many of my fellow progressives’ uncritical embrace of even the most extreme BDS propaganda.

Such fiery BDS propaganda silences and sidelines the real voices of opposition to settlement policy inside Israel itself. Worse, it lets a principled opposition to Israeli state policy in the West Bank become a vile and twisted anti-Semitism.

In the left-wing approach to United States foreign policy, a principled opposition to American military intervention and global economic policy becomes a blind enemy-of-my-enemy support of anti-American authoritarian and nationalist leaders.

I’ve seen prominent writers and some of my own friends parrot Russian propaganda on Crimea, Ukraine, and NATO, and uncritically fawn over Rodrigo Duterte’s legalization of murder in the Philippines.

Do you know what precedent President Duterte has for his drug war by legalized murder? Hafez al-Assad’s crackdown on anyone suspected of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood after their uprising against him in 1982. Plus his near-complete destruction of the city of Hama, centre of the 1982 Islamist revolution against his regime.

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone is one of the most prominent
current examples of the hypocritical progressive, a Western
politician whose support for Palestinian autonomy and sovereignty
has tipped into an oblivious hatred of Jewish people.

So when I see Trump reverse his long-held pro-Assad leanings and start bombing regime military installations, I increasingly fear that the Western left will start praising the dictator openly. Clueless TV pundits praise Trump for his “Presidential” stand protecting human rights with missiles? You’ll see much more disgusting love of police state dictators coming from the left soon.

And I say this as a leftist! As a card carrying* member of Canada’s social democratic NDP. I want the opinion leaders in the Western left to develop a complex understanding of our profoundly fucked up world. I have growing doubts that this will happen.

* If we still had cards. The New Democrats don’t have cards anymore.

An American Congressional Representative with a growing following, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, secretly visited the Syrian government and met personally with Bashar Assad. She returned to the United States witlessly parroting his propaganda that the entire democratic revolution of 2011-2 was orchestrated by al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other militant Islamist groups.

A pro-Assad left is growing in Western progressive politics, where anti-Americanism becomes the excuse to vomit his regime’s messaging without a critical thought. Now that Trump has become solidly anti-Assad, I expect this love of savage dictators to grow among his opposition.

Donald Trump may have been moved enough by children suffering
under Syrian government chemical attacks to bomb their military
installations, but he's not about to let them into the United States
as refugees. Refugees are all terrorists, don't you know?

Opposition to Donald Trump will fuel progressives’ abandoning their ideals to support a man who sits at the head of a state whose major civil service branch is a network of integrated secret police agencies. A man who arranged for horrifying Russian attacks on hospitals and bomb shelters as he pounded Aleppo to rubble. A man who authorized brutal chemical attacks this week in Idlib and four years ago in Ghouta to demonstrate the ruthlessness of his power over his population.

Gassing war refugees with sarin isn’t a military operation – it’s a policy of governance. It delivers the message to the whole population of Syria – You are mine, and I will do what I wish with you, and you are powerless to stop me; you are powerless entirely.

There are voices on the left saying the Ghouta chemical attacks never even took place. I doubt it will be long before there are apologists and conspiracists about Idlib.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Opposition to one authoritarian President and the destructive military and economic policies of one state doesn’t mean the others get a pass.

I don’t care how much someone may justify it in terms of ‘realpolitik.’ To hear anyone who calls herself a progressive spewing Henry Kissinger’s language disgusts me, and it should disgust anyone of conscience.

Staying true to your ideals means you don’t give anyone a pass. If you oppose Donald Trump, then you oppose Bashar al-Assad, Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi, King Salman, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Prayut Chanocha, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Isaias Afwerki, Yoweri Museveni, Reçep Erdogan, Nicolas Maduro, and anyone else who falls short of supporting universal democracy, freedom, and dignity.

It shouldn’t be that hard.

Original Inequality I: A Taste of Swiss Beats, Research Time, 01/03/2017

So I picked up my old book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau essays. Still diving through some classics, reading the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam.

Even aside from the larger scope of what I’m planning for Utopias the book, as I read him, I’m thinking about our own political situation today. Inequality has become one of the definitive political issues of the 21st century West – fighting inequality is the mission statement of today’s progressive left from Athens to Vancouver.

I'm one of the Bernie-Would-Have-Won folks. Not because of any love
of Sanders himself – I have a lot of problems with how he ran his
campaign for the nomination and the current focus of his public image.
But he and Donald Trump both ran on a platform of dismantling the
freewheeling new liberal economic model that's been dragging
humanity down. I wish his social democratic approach to that
project could have gone toe-to-toe with Trump's nationalism.

From Miami to Seattle, there’s the more pressing issue of resisting and surviving President Agent Orange. But there’s still an underlying idea that growing and catastrophic social and economic inequality laid the conditions of that reactionary wave.

So I picked up one of the classical texts in the Western tradition to think through the problem of social inequality. Rousseau was a rebel against the popular themes of his time – that European civilization was maturing, coming into its own as people learned to live as free citizens of enlightened, open governments guided by knowledge and wisdom of the new sciences and revival of ancient learning.

Absolutely fucking not, he said. The first of not enough punks and rebels in the history of Switzerland.

Instead, he offered an image of 1700s society as inherently corrupt, built on oppression. As a left-wing person taking part in left-wing political conversations in the 21st century, we’d today tend to think of that oppression through the era’s colonial empires. Not Rousseau, though.

Imperialism was at the heart of European culture – when The Origin of Inequality dropped in 1755, the Seven Years War between France and England was about to begin. England, France, Spain, Holland, and Portugal all held colonial territories and outposts throughout the globe. Europe was wealthy from colonial industry.

Rousseau peppers his essay with a few images of savages to illustrate his image of the truly free person. But he uses the same foul language of imperialist, racist thinking. These are almost figures of speech to him, but thankfully not the actual basis of his thinking.

The philosophy scholar Peter Gay wrote an introduction to my edition
of Rousseau's political essays. It struck me, looking at it now, how
important he described Rousseau's own origin and life in Geneva
was to his thought. However abstract and universal your thinking,
there will always be ways that your own history and the problems of
your own society and time shape you.

The Origin of Inequality keeps to an abstract plane. There are moments all over where he talks about how ludicrously difficult it would be for these tribes of 20 or so primitive people to achieve the basics of technology. As if you could just stumble into building the first iron smelter while foraging for apples.

He describes the state of pure human equality as individuals alone. We wander around a world where we’re relatively under-populated, with abundant resources. We only come into contact with others occasionally, hang out for a while, satisfy whatever sexual or social needs we might have, and move on again.

General isolation and no scarcity. These are the conditions in which humanity is at its most equal – the only state where no one has any debts to each other, no one serves another, and everyone is free.

When we meet each other, we aren’t rivals, because everyone has everything they need in such a condition. With life no more complicated than that of a naked wanderer with no worries, all our natural feelings of sympathy and love are never interrupted. Everyone is wonderful to each other because there is no material need for resentment or conflict.

Such a world never existed. But it’s a conceptual exploration. Rousseau is asking: What is the simplest state of human existence in which we could still be human?

But if society gets much more complex than the simplest possible, which it always is, inequalities begin to form. When society is complex enough that no one can provide for all their needs on their own – which is pretty much any population size and any level of relative scarcity – we rely on each other, fall into each other’s debts, exercise power over each other.

So inequality is the condition of the corruption of the happy, caring attitude we’d all have toward each other if we had no troubles in life. Corruption of our better nature constitutes itself in the first exercise of power over another.

The first moment where we push someone, lean on them, coerce them. The moment where we take even just a little bit of someone’s freedom away. . . . To be continued

Obsolete Democracy II: The Origin of Most Welfare States, Research Time, 06/10/2016

Earlier this week before our interruption to yell at people about the Syrian war, I ended on a question about the dangers democracy may face in the post-colonial world.

“So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.
"If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued”

A lot of the states in the world that used to be imperialist colonies inherited institutions that were generally geared toward two activities. One was delivering services. The other was dividing up the population into categories and classes based on what services they’d receive.

Now in the time when these institutions were run by a bunch of racist Europeans, the population was usually divided to stir up resentment and hatreds, prevent them from forming social links strong enough to overthrow the empire.

Movies are sometimes the only ways most Westerners learn anything
about another culture, especially Asian ones. You don't exactly get a
lot of detail in between the Bollywood tropes.

So colonial states were built to discourage and break apart any civic nationalist solidarity before it could even form. That’s good management from an imperialist’s sense. That way, the population will be less likely to organize themselves to kick you out of their country. 

Once all the colonial empires did get kicked out of those countries, there was a bit of a dilemma. Here we had a state institution all ready to run, but it was built to segment the population into separate groups and treat them totally differently.

Remove the divide-and-conquer motivation from the state institutions,* but keep an administration that minutely identifies different classes in a population by need and situation. What you have left after that is a quality welfare state. 

* And not all of them did, to their horrifying detriment usually.

And this kind of welfare state ends up with a curious form of politics attached to it. The politics of community lobbying. 

Think back to the example of Kolkata’s Railway Gate shantytown in Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. They're able to maintain their existence as a thriving community of poor people on the side of the tracks because they formed a leadership group.

The People’s Welfare Association organizes to lobby for government services and coordinate how they’re distributed. And they rarely meet with elected officials. They meet with the administration officials and workers who actually get work done.

The shantytown and its concerns are on such a small scale compared to the entire city of Kolkata that municipal representatives don’t have the remit to deal with it. Let alone elected officials in any higher level of the Indian government. So they deal directly with government administrative workers.

Men hoping to join India's civil service line up expectantly. According
to Chatterjee, they're important organs of Indian democracy. I think
he's on to something really interesting here.

Civil servants. They have their welfare budgets and can largely direct it as their offices see fit. So if you’re a small-scale self-organized group like the Railway Gate shantytown, you can get the most effective results from your lobbying efforts. The officials give out the money and the services.

This is the kind of democracy that exists in a lot of post-colonial countries, where people are still beholden to multiple identities and solidarities, and no one national identity need take precedence. This is the democracy of community organization itself.

It preserves the desires, identities, and lifestyles of each peculiar group. And it creates solidarity within all these groups because of the social organization needed to thrive. The flow of money and goods from the general population to different communities within it helps build a social solidarity across the country that has nothing to do with the drive to conformity that comes with nationalism.

This is the ideal of what the lobbying democracy of the administrative welfare state can do. It can revive civic organization on a local, micro level to demand entitlements – the satisfaction of needs. 

Ideals are rarely achieved, of course. One obvious way this kind of democracy can corrupt itself is with literal corruption. 

The formerly democratic lobbying organization ossifies into a static office. The loyal leader of his people becomes a stodgy lifetime-appointed official himself. Lobbying for public resources for your community becomes bribery for government lucre. 

But the potential is incredible. A democratic culture of organization from the micro-level to lobby large and larger scale state institutions – there is nothing more democratic than the demand. The demand for a better life and the assistance to build one.

What happens when nationalism collides with this new kind of democracy? . . . To Be Continued

Iraq & Syria: A Spark that Lit an All-Consuming Fire, Advocate, 05/10/2016

One of my arts & advocacy projects is my work with the Syria Film Festival. This is an organization that gave me my first communications gig after I finished my business program, an internship for their public relations work.

Though Blumenthal doubts their legitimacy because of it, the White
Helmets are simultaneously humanitarians and publicists for
democratic activism. But advocacy and humanitarianism have
never been separate.

The friendships and professional relationships I’ve built in my work with SYFF have been ethically and professionally rewarding. And aside from my personal fulfillment, I’m proud to be part of an artistic and advocacy network that strives for a peaceful and free Syria – an end to the world’s most brutal ongoing war and an end to the culture and institutions of dictatorship that laid the conditions for that war.

So it burned me pretty hard to see Max Blumenthal’s recent articles floating around my social media networks. These amount to hit pieces on The Syria Campaign, a public relations firm whose focus is building support for humanitarian work in Syria – in particular, advocating on behalf of the White Helmets – and for an end to the Assad regime. 

None of these are objectively bad things. In a war – especially one as horrifying as Syria’s – humanitarian workers are needed. And the Assad regime from Hafez to Bashar has been a Stalinist totalitarian police state, organizing its institutional power along ethnic-religious sectarian lines. 

Ending that dynasty’s decades-long reign would be a chance for a new beginning. And with a population inside and outside Syria of highly educated, democratically-inclined people, that country would have a good chance of growing into an Arab democracy.

The problem is that we in the West have heard all this sort of stuff before.

Substance: Lobbying & Image-Making

Blumenthal does a fine job of tracing the links between the White Helmets, the Syria Campaign, and a variety of activist individuals and organizations who’ve worked with and drawn funds from the American government’s democracy promotion agencies like USAID, the Office of Transition Initiatives, and affiliated contractor companies like Chemonics. 

He’s found examples of individual members of White Helmet brigades who – when out of their humanitarian uniforms – have carried out terrible acts of violence. Who have tortured people who’ve been claimed to work for the Assad regime. Who have apparently picked up a gun with Al Qaeda affiliated organizations like Jabhat Al Nusra.

Seriously. You should go.

He concludes, after combing through the history of all these links, that the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are not non-partisan humanitarians but are open agitators in the Syrian war. For him, that implies that their humanitarian work is a sham, a mere “public relations” move. 

The move that leads Blumenthal to condemn the Syria Campaign, though, is their new campaign to lobby for a no-fly zone over Syria. This would require a massive military intervention to enforce. Given the current state of Assad’s alliances, this would essentially require a shooting war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation.

That’s a situation that could easily escalate into a true nuclear war. That is something we should all be afraid of. I’d dare say it’s one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t intervened in Syria. Given Putin’s aggressive stance, a more nuanced strategy is needed to stop him without provoking him into authorizing nuclear weapons use.

Between a Quagmire and a World in Flames

Leave aside all the pragmatic arguments, though I can easily make them. Most of them are obvious – the necessity to play power politics when trying to unseat a brutal totalitarian regime like Bashar al Assad’s. 

Yes, you have to lobby with powerful states that have military capabilities to cripple and destroy the regime you oppose. Public relations, building alliances, building popular support in the countries whose governments you want to enlist to your goals. 

The power of the UN is that its neutrality lets them mediate between
even the most horrible actors. I remember stories in his biography
of Sergio Vieira de Mello of how he negotiated with the Khmer
Rouge. But that neutrality is precisely why the Syria Campaign
can't get on the UN bandwagon in the war. Revolutionaries can't
be neutral in their own fight.

Public relations – done right and with an ethical conscience – is the organization of democracy. It’s mobilizing people, taking part in the marketplace of persuasion, ideas, and competing social goals. 

Yes, it’s manipulative – but even the least amount of media literacy, which is near-universal today, gives the public power over advocates. A critical eye can still defend yourself against being a patsy, and hold tight to your freedom when others want to seduce you.

Frankly, it’s easier to act entirely on your conscience when you live far from a war zone. When you do, you have to make what alliances you can to raise your chances of surviving just a little longer. It’s sanctimonious of a Western journalist like Max Blumenthal to demand total virtuousness to the point of saintliness of humanitarians who have to work in horrifying conditions.

This is at the heart of why the Syria Campaign critiques the United Nations and UNHCR for working so closely with the Assad regime. The UN has a mandate to maintain neutrality in all conflicts – it has to be a non-partisan actor because its primary role is as the mediating forum for global politics.

So UN organizations have to work with even the most distasteful regimes. They have to recognize their legitimacy, despite their violence and terror. Even when a brutal government is under siege, the UN has to work with them. And they work with the groups uprising against that government too.

All too often, that need to work with the government of the day impedes the UN’s humanitarian mission. Because the UN and the UNHCR become dependent for access to populations in need upon the very leaders who are intent on slaughtering those populations. 

That is why the Syria Campaign, along with more than 70 Syrian human rights and democracy organizations, denounced the UN’s complicity with the Assad regime. Blumenthal describes their opposition to UN strategy and operations as a sign of their corruption, their being stooges of American military interests.

The Syria Campaign makes no illusion of neutrality in the war. They’re democrats. They want Syria at peace and Assad gone. They want a democratic Syria.

Seeing Shadows

That’s at the heart of Blumenthal’s accusation toward the Syria Campaign and White Helmets: You want regime change. 

Pictured above: Not Bashar or Hafez Assad. Remember that.

For the Western left, that’s a charged phrase. A phrase with a lot of deep and terrible meanings and implications. Regime change.

Since the late 20th century, the Western left has opposed the broad ideology of the American government and the circles of think tanks and lobbying organizations that surround that institution. It kicked into gear with protests against the World Trade Organization, opposing the imposition of global economic rules and institutions running according to what we now call neoliberal austerity.

That opposition gained a military dimension in the Bush years, with the massive protest movement against the American invasion of Iraq. That time made many in the left lose our faith in the global spread of democracy.

It seems to make no sense at first. Why would the progressive left give up on democracy? 

Because we saw it delivered at the barrel of a gun, with a plan designed by a set of neoconservative think tank dorks that was barely up to the task. Within months of the American occupation of Iraq, an Al Qaeda terror campaign began in Baghdad and Anbar, while a sectarian army arose in Shia territory.

No matter how sincere Bush, Cheney, and their crew were about the power of the American army to secure a democratic Iraq – and I have no doubt that they were truly sincere – all they achieved was six years of barely organized violence by the national army and rapacious piracy from leagues of mercenaries.

Through it all ran the not-very-secret word: regime change. The original American plan for Iraq was to install the exiled liberal party of Ahmed Chalabi as the democratically elected ruler of Iraq. Much of the faulty and false intelligence that the Bush Administration used to justify their invasion was supplied by Chalabi’s group and their affiliate lobbying organizations.

When Max Blumenthal looks at Syria, he sees Iraq.

In Syria, the revolution is televised. And ongoing.

It Began With Revolution

That’s why he denounces the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets as stooges for American military expansion and a new invasion of the Middle East. He sees public relations and media lobbying – its methods updated for the online media universe – as more of the same manipulation from liberal autocrats like Chalabi.

He sees the Syria Campaign and other activists calling out the United Nations for their complicity with the Assad regime as a new version of Bush’s railroading of the UN in 2002. A repetition of the old dismissal of the legitimacy of the grounding institution of all international law.

He paints Bashar Assad as the legal and tolerable – if horrid and distasteful – rightful leader of Syria, under siege from a superpower desperate to prevent its military decline. Just as Saddam Hussein was, the totalitarian bugbear of American neoconservatism.

But Syria in 2016 isn’t Iraq in 2002. Syria has already been embroiled in a civil war for years that began in a revolution against Assad’s regime. Blumenthal erases the will of millions of Syria’s people, seeing only public relations firms and shadowy manipulations of empire-minded deep organs of American government.

If you’re going to criticize American military intervention, there are plenty of ways to do it. Mostly because their efforts tend to self-destruct and fall apart through mismanagement. Or they’ll be out-maneuvered by a more ruthless Vladimir Putin, who isn’t squeamish about dropping bunker buster bombs on schools and hospitals.

Don’t forget that the unfolding violence of Syria’s war began – and continues – a revolution against a totalitarian tyrant. In a way, that’s quite an American story. It’s certainly a democratic one.