Echoes of Future Politics, Composing, 02/10/2017

I haven’t posted about it in a few weeks, but I’m still working on my Doctor Who project. These are the essays on the Peter Capaldi years that I’m revising into a book, which I hope will be released independently in the gap between Capaldi’s farewell this Xmas and Jodie Whittaker’s official premiere later in 2018.

Filming The Caretaker on the set of Doctor Who in those innocent
times of the year 2014.

I wrote these essays first as reviews – episode by episode as they played, I took a philosophical lens to them. Like all my writing on the blog, these posts improved over time. So when I go back to earlier posts – like this initial review of The Caretaker – I can see that they’re in serious need of revision.

Sometimes, it’s a style issue. Sometimes, it’s way more complicated. The case of Gareth Roberts, for instance. When I first ranked the stories of Capaldi’s first season, I put Roberts’ The Caretaker on top of the list.

The reasons were clear to me. For one, it was a perfectly constructed farce, which threaded complex characterization and relationship-building among the plot itself. It was a masterful fusion of the sitcom style with a Doctor Who adventure story about an alien robot.

The Caretaker also confronted a political issue that had drifted away from prominence in Doctor Who since Steven Moffat took over as creative producer – class. The central source of conflict in the story was the misunderstanding between the Doctor and Danny Pink over class.

The Doctor – keeping with the war, peace, and sacrifice theme of the season – presumed Danny to be a bit stupid when he first learned that he’d been a soldier. When Danny learned that the new school caretaker was actually a Time Lord, he presumed the Doctor was the same kind of Lord who gave him his mission in Afghanistan.

The sort of upper-class bastard who’s content to start wars and burn bridges to prop up his rightful place at the top of the social world. The Doctor didn’t yet understand that Danny was a victim of war, someone who’d killed but who wasn’t a killer. Danny didn’t yet understand that the Doctor was a Lord who’d turned against his class for the exact same reasons Danny despised the lordly caste.

Understanding all the facets of Clara Oswald is more than I think one
book can manage.

Clara was literally caught in the middle – dealing with this massive misunderstanding between the two most important men in her life – her lover and her best friend. That’s not to mention how the Doctor’s friendship with Coal Hill troublemaker Courtney or the motives of the Skovox Blitzer robot played into the same themes.

Roberts did a beautiful job weaving all these elements together. I consider it a masterclass in the craftsmanship of thematically rich comedy narrative. In the moment of that season, the story also did a wonderful job of maintaining the hopeful outlook of Doctor Who.

After a bleak season finale with Death in Heaven, Roberts offered a refreshing model for the show going forward. Writing as I was a few days after its broadcast, I also presumed that this would be Clara’s exit from Doctor Who, a terribly depressing place to leave the character.

Clara’s future – and how I’ll deal with her in this book – are subjects for another post. Probably several as I hammer out my ideas. Clara Oswald contains multitudes, as you know.

No, my biggest problem as I rethink the Caretaker essay is its author. See, when Gareth Roberts first wrote The Caretaker, her politics were kind of a non-issue. He was just an ordinary British middle-of-the-road decently-off gay liberal.

I followed him on Twitter, and quite enjoyed a lot of what he said. Roberts would fairly often post about political issues, and I could often sympathize with him at first. Given the political choices Britain was offering its people for government early in the Capaldi years, I could see how someone in his position could be frustrated.

Gareth Roberts hasn't written for Doctor Who on television since
Capaldi's first year, and I think his increasingly extreme turn in
politics have been a key reason.

Suspicious of Jeremy Corbyn and his reputation for being too far on the left for most people. Feeling a bit frozen out of the Tories, whose austerity budgets were putting too much of a squeeze on the British people. Unable to accept the perpetual damp squib of Liberal Democrat organizing and opposed to separatism, there seemed to be nowhere to stand.

Well, there was one other place. And over the next few years, I saw Roberts drift there. The key issue seems to have been anti-gay violence by extremist Islamists, particularly the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Florida. Over 2017, Roberts flew very quickly to oppose Islam, painting all Muslims as supporters of massacring and oppressing LGBTQ people.

This is a major path that alt-right activists use to turn liberals into anti-Islam bigots. All Muslims are conflated with the most violent extremism, this time on the wedge issue of gay rights. The Chechen crackdown on LGBTQ people – concentration camps included – is an important touchstone, since Chechnya is a Muslim-majority Russian republic whose president is Muslim himself.

Of course, the alt-right’s radicalization narrative avoids the fact that anti-LGBTQ strongman Ramzan Kadyrov executes white nationalist Vladimir Putin’s own anti-LGBTQ and nationalist agendas. Kadyrov is an ally in the Eurasian imperial project motivating modern Russian global affairs.

So what am I supposed to do with a script that celebrates love, joy, and comedy, when its author has fallen into the radical racist politics that Doctor Who fundamentally stands against? I honestly don’t know. Any suggestions?

The Relentless Ruthlessness of Existential Threats, A History Boy, 31/01/2016

I was originally going to shift my running posts about my aesthetic impressions of Doctor Who production leaders over the years to Sundays. But an idea dawned on me a few days ago that I wanted to get out in the form of a post. 

Here’s what it comes down to. Modern politics are polarized, fearful, demonizing, and violent because it’s now standard to understand your opponents as existential threats.

Millions have died in the last 12 years of fighting the
wars that began with the American invasion of Iraq.
Don't forget that, for all we rightfully attack Daesh,
the leaders and founders of Islamic State were members
of Al Qaeda and other anti-occupation rebels who
met in an American prison camp.

Grounded in Collective Trauma

I'm not the first one to comment that something’s shifted in the way we think about politics in our society. And I’m talking about just straight-up electoral politics,* the political parties who jockey for public support in voting processes to control state legislatures and bureaucracies.

* In contrast to where real politics, the radical transformations of societies, happen – in social movements, uprisings, mass migrations, and cultural revolutions.

I remember the tone of things beginning to change with September 11, the slack-jawed incomprehension at the fawning, worshipful tone so much of the mainstream media took with the Bush Administration and the invasion of Iraq.

We saw a terrible mistake happening, one we knew would have horrifying results – instability across the region, massive violence, the killings of millions with horrible weaponry and the crunching terror of neighbours going house to house, murdering. 

We knew it in 2002 when the marches against the Iraq invasion began. We knew it as we watched all the most nightmarish visions of the anti-war movement come true. The Iraq invasion was a blunt instrument wielded with blatant disregard for even such ordinary tasks as contingency planning. 

Something rotten and horribly destructive took control of the American government. Even the worst interventions of the Cold War – the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Augusto Pinochet’s coup and Operation Condor, the invasion of Grenada, stoking civil wars and paramilitary terrorism across Latin America – weren’t as horrifying as the invasion of Iraq.

Even the Vietnam War had a logic underlying its justification. The “It’s all about oil!” protesters of 2003 were desperate that there be some sensible reason for Bush’s war. But the worst really was true. 

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and the rest of them all thought you could invade and occupy a country, and they’d be grateful to you for unleashing a society of unrestrained violent mercenaries and stationing a massive military presence in their communities. Then it got worse.

Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher who
first developed the concept of the existential
threat, a social conception of an enemy
whose mere existence is an act of violence
toward you.

Bush League

The reason so many people supported the Iraq war was because they were all so freaked and collectively traumatized over the theatrical terror of the September 11 attacks. The majority of Americans – maybe 200 million people – felt the burning presence of existential threat.

Bush did one respectable thing in this instance – he distinguished terror from Islam and Muslim people. Despite the anti-Muslim racism that grew prevalent in America, he didn’t encourage it. But the existential threat of nameless Islamist terrorism galvanized millions.

And we got used to it. Existential threat became an ordinary part of political thinking for most people. That made it get even worse.

The election of Barack Obama constituted an existential threat to just about everyone in America who still had enough anti-black racism in their personality to consider his Presidency illegitimate. The racial roots of the Tea Party lie in the refusal to accept that a black person legitimately gained and holds the authority of the President’s office.

But the politics of existential threats had settled into the left as well. Bush, if anything was the left’s first existential threat. Bush seemed unstoppable, a demon more than a man. He committed terrible acts that we thought would invalidate him from office, then he won re-election by a bigger margin than he got in the first place!

When Bush left office, he was at his lowest low of popularity. His policies had caused a worldwide economic recession, the Iraq war was a univocal disaster, and the response he oversaw to Hurricane Katrina was so incompetent as to leave hundreds dead and many thousands internally displaced.

I cried when Obama won his first Presidential election, because I thought the nightmare was finally over.

No, there's certainly no racism in populist American
opposition to Barack Obama. Just policy disagreements,
I'm sure.

The Nightmare Truly Begins

I seriously thought it would end. I thought politics would become more rational. But the Tea Party amped it up. The snowballing social collapse among the American white working class – permanent unemployment, economic stagnation, ubiquitous opiate addiction, a suicide epidemic – amped it up even more.

Hopelessness made millions feel as if their lifestyle really was under threat. Because it literally was under threat, thanks to all those social problems exploding from economic stagnation in white America crossing a threshold to become total collapse.

Yet these people didn’t realize that the threat to their culture’s existence was rooted in complex macroeconomic forces that had been unleashed decades ago and culminating in today’s mass social wreckage. Such hopeless people are the natural patrons of scapegoat politics and demagoguery. Hence the rise of Donald Trump.

Everything is an existential threat in America’s Trumpist movement. Refugees, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, gay and trans people, terrorists. All of these are threats to the American way of life for their very existence. 

More than that, even just ordinary political opponents: people who support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, or even people who support Rubio or Jeb Bush for President. To the Trumpist, all of these people are complicit in YOUR destruction. Opponents are not people to work with to someone who takes all opposition as an existential threats.

Existential threats can only be destroyed, because their existence imperils your own. That’s what an existential threat is.

In the words of one group of anti-Harper activists, he
encouraged his supporters to believe that Canadian
democracy was fragile enough that the entire state
institution could be destroyed by a mere change in
government. The heirs of this message in Canadian
culture now talk as if an anti-Trudeau coup is brewing.

Canada Is No Exception

It’s not like my own country hasn’t done this. The opposition to Stephen Harper, from its earliest days, was based in the notion that he was fundamentally un-Canadian. 

The notion that his goal was to undo all the work of social program, human rights advancement, and international peace-building. From the first days of his majority government, radical gestures of opposition followed him. We opponents of Stephen Harper saw his leadership as a fundamental threat to the social fabric of Canada itself.

The weird thing is, we were actually right. He did fundamentally change the nature of the Canadian government and state, and its relationship with its people. 

Harper’s Canada would be in thrall to the globe’s oil companies. Government science institutions would receive their marching orders from resource extraction companies, both oil and metals mining. No dissent allowed.

Canada’s government would be neutered and bankrupted through gutting its statistical data gathering powers and bleeding its public institutions through comprehensive tax cuts and inflated police, prison, and military spending. 

The F-35 boondoggle and other wasteful, misdirected military expansions, would have cost so much government money that no social program, even the health care system, would have been able to continue. 

Total privatization would have been the main theme of a second Harper majority. It may still be, since Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have no plans to restore the government revenue that Harper slashed.

Sierra Club activists plant trees in a San Francisco
neighbourhood. Stephen Harper considered these types
of people radical violent saboteurs and agitators.

Harper was an existential threat to the Canada that its progressive social movements and politicians built. And he made good on that threat. But he also based his own electoral strategy on the same hysteria that has reintroduced racist fascism to mainstream American politics.

Harper had always demonized political opponents. This was particularly true of environmentalist groups, which his government frequently lumped in with terrorist organizations. 

But leading up to the 2015 election, his communications vilified opponents as dangerous radical leftists – you know, Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair – whose policies would destroy Canada. He and others in his party also vilified observant Muslims and war refugees as radical, violent killers whose danger was so constant that they needed a special police tipline to inform on our neighbours’ barbaric cultural practices.

This Is Madness

Dealing with all your opponents as threats to the fabric of your society and your ability to live as you wish (or at all) can be very effective in stopping them. But it also causes a lot of horrifying collateral damage.

For one thing, conceiving of people as existential threats encourages actual mass slaughter. It what Hutus thought of Tutsis thanks to that class’ dominance of a colonially-structured state in Rwanda. It was what Germans thought of Jews as Hitler’s racial Darwinist dogma dominated the country’s politics. 

Will this be the face of America's future?

But it also animates politics to the intensity of constant hysteria. Political activity is the daily grind of working through issues among different people to live together peacefully. Seeing any group or type of people with which you live – an ethnic or religious minority, people with political differences – as existential threats destroys the ability to live peacefully at all.

When a person is an existential threat to you, there’s no negotiation. You sincerely and deeply believe that the existence of this person in your community is a fatal threat to you. When you believe that, the different person can’t stay in your community. They’ve got to go.

By any means necessary. We must not become our nightmares.

Genuine Freedom Is Empty Freedom, Composing, 08/10/2015

Why did I write those last two posts the way I did? I’m trying to understand the roots of modern conservative thinking. Why folks like Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul believe what they do. 

Playing these esoteric and over-complicated ideas in Fukuyama's writing against my thoughts on the Arab Spring helped me wrap my head around a problem. It goes a little something like this.

We will be greeted as liberators, they said. Let's see if
this all works out, then.

Start from this premise. 

Premise 1

Think back to the first years of this century, if you can bear it. It’s not much worse than the state of the world today, honestly. George W Bush and his administration genuinely believed that all people universally yearned to live in a capitalist liberal democracy. 

This was especially true of those who had worked for the think tank Project for a New American Century in the 1990s. This think tank developed the democratic domino effect theory of Middle East politics: if one Arab country overthrew its dictators and democratized, then they would all quickly follow suit.

Fukuyama’s End of History was the key source for this idea, that capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s universal aspiration. I explored why this is so strange and self-contradictory (or at least hypocritical) yesterday.

Fukuyama and the neoconservatives of PNAC were also impressed by the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. All their lives, they’d grown up with the idea that there wouldn't be an end to the Cold War but nuclear annihilation. 

Everyone thought that everyone in communist countries loved their regimes. Then the citizens overthrew their communist governments and embraced capitalist life and democracy. 

At least it seemed the case in 1992. Russia and Serbia threw us all for a bit of a loop since then. And no one noticed the exception of Belarus, which remains a strange military dictatorship. 

And they didn't count the central Asian former Soviet Republics that remained totalitarian monarchies, like Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Niyazov – Turkmenbashi.

American marines at the Battle of Fallujah. This
"liberators" thing isn't working out well by now.

Test Premise 1

The problem with this theory of the universal democratic dream is that when it was tested – overthrowing Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq in 2003 – liberal, culturally pluralist democracy didn’t replace him. Instead, the population of Iraq split on sectarian grounds. Shia factions took over the government and armed Sunni resistance grew.

So Shia and Sunni nationalism tore Iraq to pieces, and inflamed tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Since then, the Middle East has been engulfed in proxy wars as they jockey for dominance. 

The incompetence and violence of the US occupation only made things worse. The US had an army with no real training in peacemaking or guerrilla warfare, was grossly underfunded, relied on desperate volunteers for their numbers, and still relied on unreliable and psychotic teams of mercenaries to do most of the real offensive work of the occupation.

Let's not forget that ISIS formed in America's Camp Bucca. It’s the product of the most dangerous and radical members of Al Qaeda in Iraq growing even more deranged under day after day of torture.

Conclusion

So looking at this, you’d say that capitalist liberal democracy isn’t a universal aspiration. If it was, Iraq would be a peaceful democracy and not a country on fire.

And this is Tahrir Square, Cairo, in June 2011. The
revolution was televised, and I watched it on TV.

Hey, Wait a Minute . . . 

But the Arab Spring happened, even though its revolutions were cruelly suppressed. Only Tunisia's was successful. Yet those revolutions were driven by the real desires of the populations of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf Emirates for freedom.

Maybe This Conclusion?

So maybe the desire for freedom from autocratic, totalitarian, and military governments really is universal. But precisely what that freedom is may not always take the form of Fukuyama’s ideal society: Western capitalist liberal democracy.

What I’ve figured out so far is that freedom is the ability to change your society. Putting that power in the hands of the people. What solutions you come up with will depend on the problems you have to solve. 

The last ten years of financial crisis and economic recession gave us plenty of problems. Now, we need to figure out how to solve them. Freedom is when the people drive that change.

Finding a Productive Western Left in the Fight Against ISIS, Advocate, 21/02/2015

Ordinary Western people are in a weird position today. Most middle and lower class people today struggle for success. Most of us aim for a relatively dignified life, stuck in an economic system that makes growing demands on us, which leads so many of us to live our lives on credit. 

Our governments’ economic policies tend increasingly to let working people’s salaries stagnate in the face of overall growth in productivity. The rich grow richer, and the rest struggle to maintain the same standards of the previous generation. This is the central political issue of my generation of Western people, the rallying cry of the Occupy movement whose political reverberations are still being felt, and will continue for decades.

But these problems are nothing compared to the horrors people face in the definitive wars of our generation. These include violent conflicts in Sudan, Mali, the Congo, and Kenya over political power and oil and mineral wealth. I refer to Vladimir Putin’s Great Game style imperial games in Ukraine and other bordering countries. I also think of the Islamist uprisings in Nigeria and Pakistan. 

From an RT report of ISIS mass murders in Tikrit.

The most terrifying political violence on Earth to me is the genocidal wave of Islamic State, a Millenarian movement whose goal is to immolate the Middle East, kill hundreds of millions of people, and bring about Allah’s Earth-destroying fire.

I read with rapt attention Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic exploring the theological foundations of Islamic State as a social enterprise. It seems to have been the most read piece of journalism on this movement, and captures much of what mainstream discourse has so far ignored. The movement is, in Wood’s words, a cult with an army of hundreds of thousands, and a military arsenal raided (or given) from the region’s most brutal dictators, forged in the shameful moral wasteland of Camp Bucca, where the United States army brutally tortured captured anti-occupation militants in Iraq. Wood's analogy is that it as if Jim Jones or David Koresh actually had the firepower and global support to raze a continent to the ground.

Westerners have thought about Al Qaeda as the paradigm of Islamic fundamentalist terror movements for so long (and the social trauma of Sept 11 was so scarring) that it’s hard for us to see how a similarly inspired movement could act differently. Their eye isn’t on the West primarily, but on building a doctrinaire, prophetic Islam on Earth, a society that strictly enforces a comprehensive social morality on the model of Mohammad’s era, as well as providing for all the physical and spiritual needs of its people. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s caliphate is supposed to become a society of perfect spiritual and social conformity in which there is no poverty, homelessness, or suffering that is not a punishment for crime or apostasy.

Islamic State is of a piece with the Edenic dreams of fundamentalist Christians who work to enforce total conformity to their religious and social beliefs, while hastening the End of Days and Christ’s Earthly dominion. Al-Baghdadi and his followers simply admit that their apocalypse is built on the slaughter of millions.

It is, to anyone used to thinking from anything resembling a secular viewpoint, really fucking weird.

One thoughtful critic of Wood’s piece forcefully points out his central conceptual error in understanding Islamic State. Wood talks to a single scholarly expert on Islamic prophetic extremism, and most of his reporting speaks with dedicated adherents to Al-Baghdadi’s goal to build an ideal totalitarian Islamic state on the genocide or enslavement of all those not similarly devoted.

Journalist Murtaza Hussain.

Murtaza Hussain is right to describe Al-Baghdadi’s movement as heresy. All the institutional scholarly institutes of Islam agree that Baghdadi’s movement is a perversion of Islam. His interest in writing his scathing critique of Wood’s piece is clear: in representing the Islamic State movement as a distilled, hyper-extreme essence of Islam more pure than the religion’s actual practice has ever actually been, he lends al-Baghdadi and his followers a legitimacy to represent Islam to non-Muslims that they don’t deserve.

Here’s where I feel awkward as a Western person who is struggling to work out how best to strive against the political and social injustices of my own country. I’m descended from a wide culture that has been responsible for terrifying injustices and violence on the rest of the world through centuries of colonial enterprise. Nearly everyone in the West* has benefited from colonial military-economic exploitation of others, through our having such a higher average standard of living.

* The exceptions are truly destitute people like the homeless of Toronto who have frozen to death on the street this winter, abandoned by everyone to die in worse conditions than we permit to animals and sometimes even treated with the contempt too many of us give to the poor.

But Western people are still fighting struggles of their own against the growth of oligarchy in our power structures. And too many dissident Westerners let this struggle against oligarchy misdirect our energies. It’s how earnest people of the Western left defend Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin, because they fight the West, and these useful idiot leftists associate the West with an immutable colonialism. 

The Caliph speaks for no one.

The Western Idiot Leftists are just as essentialist in their political thinking as any bigot. I want to figure out how to oppose the injustices happening in other cultures without having to absolutely vilify my own culture. Doing so targets my culture, Western culture, with the same essentialism that Wood’s Atlantic article applies to Muslim cultures when he situates Islamic State as the purest Islam. 

Muslim culture is as diverse, fragmented, and filled with as many singularities as its people. Actually more, because further articulations of Islam emerge from the relations of Muslims living their cultures together. Wood wrote in a way that left his article vulnerable to Hussain’s valid objection. Islam, like any human cultural phenomenon, has no essence. Those who already hate Islam and Muslims (people like Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, and countless other bigots around the world) will read Wood’s article and take Al-Baghdadi’s Islam as the essence of Muslim culture. And they will use that belief as further bedrock for their bigotry and hatred.

What constitutes the drive to terror of Islamic State is that its adherents themselves also believe that their genocidal movement is the essence of Islam, just like the bigots of the West.