Here Is Humanity! I: There Will Always Be Shit, A History Boy, 09/09/2016

Check the introduction to this series here: Humanity Is Gone! – Here Is Humanity!

• • •

One of the things I really enjoyed about that book of Etienne Balibar essays on nationalism is the flashback. We, the People of Europe? was published in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and many of its essays spoke to the issues that dominated politics of the time.

What dominated those politics was George W Bush and his impending invasion of Iraq. I was part of the opposition, and I made my voice heard as loud as I could. I was part of my city’s local media – I attended and covered protests, I interviewed people about their stances. 

The protests against Bush's invasion of Iraq that I covered
in Newfoundland were never quite this big, of course.
But they had a good, healthy size.

One of my courses in the same year that book was published even had a major paper project where we analyzed the Iraq invasion vote in the Security Council from the geopolitical perspective of our choice of permanent member. It became my first essay writing award as a student – declared the best undergraduate paper in all the humanities and social science disciplines of my 12,000-strong student body.*

* And I won again two years later for an essay about Michel Foucault’s concept of power. You can’t say I didn’t get a lot of encouragement to find a career in the academy.

The Iraq invasion and the Bush years were when I became politically mature. How I thought about W’s government and the unfolding disaster of that war was the starting point for a lot of my views about politics, war, activism, and ethics today. And I think that’s true for a lot of people my age.

The storm of conflicting ideas that flew around in that turbulent time** informs the philosophical standpoint of Utopias. It’s examining the paradoxes of buoyant idealism co-existing with stark pessimism.

** Like the turbulence has ever stopped. It was the time when turbulence began. It only felt turbulent at the time, because we were leaving the 1990s, when all the conflicts the Bush years brought to the forefront had a low enough intensity that we could ignore them.

In the book’s last essay, Balibar is trying to squeeze what utopian energy he can from the depressing situation of neoconservatism’s triumph. When he gave the talk that became that essay, the United States was barrelling toward the invasion of Iraq. One of the pro-war voices that Balibar singles out for critique is Robert Kagan, one of the leading neoconservative intellectuals.

Robert Kagan, today of the Brookings Institute, who
believes in the inevitability of war and the eternal
necessity of military power for peace.

Kagan offers a sobering challenge to any idealist of world peace who sees a model to be followed in the project of the European Union. In his essay “Power and Weakness,” Kagan basically calls bullshit on the idealism of international law, and pretty much any political program aimed at establishing perpetual world peace under the rule of law.

You can read the whole essay without having to look for pirated versions – it’s still available for free. And the argument is essentially that European state leaders have only focussed on international diplomacy and rule of law as the best route to peace because they can no longer bomb their enemies into submission.

The world, in Kagan’s view, will always be a violent place where everyone can potentially descend into horrifying war with everyone else. And I’m not disputing this claim – he has plenty of evidence on his side. 

The world is a place where massive military power, or a good relationship with it, will always be necessary to survive. Even while being such a massive military power invites violence on you, makes you a target.

Europe used to be a massive military power. Several, in fact. Kagan uses the term machtpolitik, foreign relations based on force and the threat of force. But centuries of state-vs-state military violence since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created the modern Western state? Eventually, it led to a point of mutually assured destruction.

And the destruction happened. It was called the first two world wars. European military force was so decimated by decades of total war that they could no longer really function as global military powers anymore. European economic power – especially as the EU – was the basis of its global power after their military implosion.

European politics has been associated with international
law for so long that we forget that a militarist philosophy
remained strong in Western European nations for a long
time after the Second World War. Kagan discusses in
"Power and Weakness" how the peaceful European
continent of the early 2000s was the product of
militarists like France's Charles de Gaulle essentially
getting neutered by the shadows of American
military might.

That's nothing to sneeze at – we’ve seen many examples of Europe’s economic power. Both for good, as in the global growth of European companies with social democratic models of worker relations and innovation like Siemens and IKEA. But also for ill, as in the European Central Bank’s punitive destruction of the Greek economy.

Yet for Kagan, none of this is enough, because it’s still possible for any truly great power to carpet-bomb all the major countries of Europe to rubble and blood without serious resistance. For Kagan, the definition of great power is solely in military terms, for this exact reason. 

So when you bring those premises to your political thinking, of course you won’t seen any alternative to the massive state violence of a military with global reach. It’s not as if those militaries can’t get a lot of stuff done. Not that you’d really want to do any of what a massive military can do when it really gets moving on a mission.

For Kagan, taken as the voice of the model neoconservative military hawk, European leaders could choose a path of diplomacy and international rule of law for their global politics because they had a patron. They had a protector. They had a country who was willing to front the military budget and the lives of its soldiers.

The USA had their back. The American military would do the dirty work so European leaders and people could afford to be peaceniks. Is that the only way peace can be possible? . . . . To Be Continued

Destroyer II: America the Dream, Research Time, 26/05/2016

Continued from previous post . . . I mean, if they had thought ahead even half-decently, they wouldn’t have fired everyone from the Iraqi Army in some half-hearted attempt at de-Ba’athization. Or even worse (and barely remarked upon in a lot of the media post-mortems of the disaster), fired everyone from the state-owned industries of Iraq.

I mean, when the first thing you do as the supposedly benevolent occupying power is fire literally tens of thousands of people and tell them that they’re now free to build their own businesses or work for the multinationals who’ll soon set up shop here? I can understand why people would be a little upset.

That dream of democracy and freedom did not end well.

The ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism each found their perfect homes in the Bush Administration. Iraq was to be an experiment for both ideologies. Neocons: American military power would expand the frontiers of democracy by force. Neolibs: Replacing an entirely state-owned economy with a multinational-driven free trade network in mere months would create a utopia of freedom.

The two ideologies ended up sabotaging each other. Maybe the better word is corrupting each other. An American state military inadequate to occupying a Texas-sized country relied on mercenary groups like Blackwater to do its hard work, and they ended up normalizing torture and massacre. The resistance movements of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mehdi Army were the inevitable result.

Mass layoffs from state enterprises created an enormous pool of pissed-off men with no income security. Meanwhile, the military and mercenaries destabilized the country enough that no foreign companies could employ Iraqis on the same scale as Saddam’s totalitarian state once did.

This was a total disaster. The fact that the horrifying violence of the Daesh was born in American prison camps just adds to the country’s misery. Could anyone believe that America was a force for good in the world after all this?

Because that’s what people used to think about America. Even the most intelligent, insightful, and ethical people of a generation held the United States up as a beacon of freedom and liberation. 

Paul Bremer was the head of the Americans' provisional
occupation government in Iraq. Every picture of him that
I found online includes some version of his tired, sad eyes.
It's as if he always knew in his heart that this was a
disaster, whether or not he ever spoke it.

Today, I'm accustomed to thought leaders among the Western left being incredibly critical of the United States government and military. Noam Chomsky is the elder statesman regarding international affairs, joined by black intellectuals like Cornel West. 

Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are leading critics of American foreign and domestic policy in journalism, and left-leaning publications like The New Republic, Salon, and VICE Media are frequent critics of the US government. Activists from anti-war and anti-racism groups devote themselves to critique and radical reform of American institutions and police practices.

So it’s jarring to an almost schizophrenic degree when I read texts from progressive intellectuals from the 1950s and even the 1960s praising the United States as a beacon for freedom. Hannah Arendt writes this way about America in the 50s, and her mentor Karl Jaspers continued to throughout his life.

While Arendt later criticized American culture for the McCarthy witch hunts and the US government for the Vietnam War, you just don’t see the raw denunciation of America as the spearhead of the new imperialism that’s at the forefront of Chomsky’s political writings or Greenwald’s critical journalism.

She was from a generation who lived through the Second World War and the Holocaust.  She saw the United States stand up to the genuine totalitarian terror state that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. Arendt literally wrote the book on totalitarianism, so she understood the dark and horrible forces that states could unleash. 

The major defence against those dark and horrible forces on the world stage during and after the Second World War was the United States of America. That counts for a lot.

A refugee loves the country that saves her from terror
and certain death. When that country turns its back on
the ideals that saved her, the betrayal hurts the refugees
worst of all.

But America reneged on that promise to be the beacon of freedom. The strain of fighting that battle caused such a paranoia that the state turned on its own citizens. Not with the horrifying intensity or scale of a Stalinist purge, of course. 

But McCarthyism and the government crackdown on the anti-war and black civil rights movements was of a piece with that kind of oppression. And the horror of the Vietnam War, fought in the name of a ridiculous theory of small countries acting like dominoes, ruined what little credibility the United States had left. In addition to all the military coups and authoritarian governments it propped up in the name of bulwarks against Soviet influence.

And this will be how I explore these ideas in Utopias, at least in a broad outline. The neoconservatism that destroyed Iraq and global multilateralism was a self-blinding idealism. America’s elites remained in denial that all of America’s military and authoritarian terror was a bad thing. They remained convinced in the virtuousness of America’s actions in the world. 

The neoconservatives were of the same mind-set as Hannah Arendt, but they were Arendts who let themselves stay blinded to the hypocrisy of their hero, America. . . . To be continued

Destroyer I: He Calls It a Coup and It Sort of Was, Composing, 24/05/2016

When I write Utopias, it’s not going to be an ordinary book of philosophy, in the academic style. There’ll be philosophical interpretation and thinking, of course, and it will draw explicitly on many different texts in and out of the tradition. 

But there’ll be more going on in the book than the straight-ahead arguments of a work of philosophy. Metaphors, imagery, and personal reflections on how the world has unfolded over the last two decades will be a major part of the book’s argument too. 

At this point, I think I can safely say that, on the scale of
our whole society, he's become more metaphor than man.

It’ll be a way of understanding the world – what the legacy works of philosophy themselves are. Philosophy hits its highest intensity and its greatest value for current and future readers and writers in the tradition when a work has that level of ambition. When it’s just as much art as argument.

One of the most important of those metaphors will unfold from exploring the meanings in the years of the Bush Administration in its destruction of Iraq, the wrecking of new liberal economics, and embracing the destruction of New Orleans. 

Those events didn’t cause the political situations that have flowed from them in a direct sense – the rise of ISIS, the Trump movement, the Occupy and Sanders movement, the foundation of outrage in the cry that Black Lives Matter.

But the Bush years formed a nexus of endings and beginnings. Any attempt at a comprehensive account of the political and social currents of the West in the 21st century has to reckon with their meaning. 

Utopias will do that. Through these exploratory posts on the blog, it’s doing that pretty regularly. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt did that in Commonwealth, though to a lesser extent. Negri and I have rather different goals in writing, after all. But the meaning of those years is important to us both.

I love how he calls the Bush years a coup. It’s a simple choice of word that clearly and directly communicates what a radical act of violence the American government unleashed on the world at the direction of Dick Cheney and George W Bush and all the rest of their administrators and advisors.

A clip from Threads, the BBC film that depicted nuclear
war and winter realistically, and will scar you for life.
The United Nations was a major part of why we never
actually experienced any of this hell.

But what was it a coup against? Not the United States government, as Bush was elected (and re-elected) fairly according to the ridiculous yet legitimate rules of their institutions. It was a coup against multilateralism, against the legitimacy of the United Nations. 

This is a long, sad journey, so I’ll spell it out over several posts this week. 

The dream of the United Nations was to overcome the the basic human tendency to want to kill each other. The UN emerged from the Second World War into an era when nuclear standoff dominated global politics. Ensuring world peace between superpowers was important not only to avoid general slaughter like the wars in Europe, China, and the Pacific. It was necessary to ensure the survival of humanity.

Genuine progress toward global peace and a more equitable human society occurred thanks to the United Nations. Generally, the UN provided a high profile diplomatic forum for conflict settlement between states, and later to pressure member countries about internal civil conflicts. 

It provides humane services for refugees around the world, and peacekeeping forces in terribly dangerous wars. It brought an end to the formal imperialist era, providing an institutional framework to negotiate national independence of more than a billion people throughout Africa and Asia from colonial oppression in European empires. 

It’s easy to focus on the failures of the United Nations from the Second World War to the Iraq Occupation, and it’s certainly easy to focus on its structural flaws. 

Any organization whose procedures allow a horrifying violator of human rights domestically and in foreign wars like Saudi Arabia on an official human rights committee has some issues they need to work through. And the Security Council needlessly entrenched the contingent arrangement of the Second World War’s victors' being leaders of a global peace organization.

I recently bought a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello,
the career UN diplomat who led the official United
Nations mission in Baghdad after the US occupation in
2003. He only led it for a few weeks before being
blown to bits by a truck bomb along with the UN
building and more than 80 other staff. De Mello
may will become another key metaphor in Utopias.

But the UN was still a massive improvement over the violent chaos of the 50 years before its creation and the brutal global imperialism of the 100 years before that.

Then came 2003 and the United Nations was destroyed. It was one last effort to establish a unilateral, militaristic world order directed by a single world power. The goal of Bush, Cheney, and the politicians and intellectuals in their administration’s ranks, was literally making the 21st century America’s.

Multilateralism could never allow the true growth of democracy and freedom around the world, said the thinkers of Project for a New American Century. It allowed too much compromise with people Bush would simply have called “evil.” Only a massive military led by the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy could fight evil around the world.

That army of justice would land its first victory in Iraq, invading in 2003 to be greeted as liberators. The people would be set free from dictators to embrace electoral democracy. The economy would be set free from state control and immediately welcomed into the international system of free trade.

I think we all know now that they didn’t really think this through. . . . To be continued

The Fastest Possible Revolution, Composing, 30/11/2015

I picked up some Leo Strauss again, after having put the book down during some hectic weeks. But I think his ideas, particularly as they’re expressed in Natural Right and History, are undeniably insightful about the utopian, revolutionary drive in humanity.

Strauss is supposed to be the philosophical inspiration of the neoconservatives! you shout. And you do. Because it’s true, at least as far as popular discourse – the flows of punditry and political analysis throughout television and the internet – is concerned. 

Is this man a Straussian? No, he's Bill Kristol.

If I involve Strauss’ ideas in the Utopias manuscript, and it looks like I will, it’ll be as a demonstration. The idea that the intellectual leaders of the neoconservative movement that took the American military to Iraq are dedicated Straussians is an intellectual conspiracy.

I literally mean a conspiracy. This article traces the first appearances of the modern consensus Strauss-influenced-the-neocons meme to have begun with an article published by Lyndon Larouche. Larouche apparently claims in this essay that several figures in the Reagan Administration and their associates were followers of Strauss’ political philosophy.

Then Larouche makes an absurd claim that Strauss’ political philosophy is profoundly opposed to his Promethean nature as an engine of progress for humanity in the ever-progressing power of our technology to conquer nature. 

Larouche, in his heyday, was an American communist revolutionary who attempted to build his new society on the recruitment model of a cult. Right down to allegedly brainwashing citizens to have a completely different set of moral presumptions, premises for a morality of Marxist utopia.

From this man and organization came this conspiracy that many in popular discourse believe. I took it for granted so much that I started reading the book as research for my Utopias project. Yet if its source really is a fellow-traveller of Jim Jones, the notion must be absurd.

As I read in Strauss this weekend when I was relaxing with Natural Right and History, you find the truth of a phenomenon by examining its origin.

Yes, Lyndon Larouche is still around and doing things.

In material history, the connection between Strauss and Team Wolfowitz is the product of a philosophical Marxist L. Ron Hubbard. But the myth is widely enough believed that examining conservative thinking AS IF it were true can now teach us a lot about what contemporary conservative ideals are philosophically.

We can find the noble concept that sits in horror at how much violence and war has happened around it. No one ever thought of this concept until after the fact. But it’s the unspoken attractor in the phase space of society. It never even existed until after enough events, actions, and thoughts expressed it. A tendency that manifests without governing.

The conspiracy that the neocons are Straussians is so widely believed by now as to make Strauss part of the intellectual atmosphere of the real conservative movement. Some young Republican is probably reading him now, because he’s heard the same conspiracy theory that the liberal press believes. He just likes what he hears.

What would he hear? I think there’d be two principles.

1) Democracy is the best form of human government we’ve come up with, and people shouldn’t have to live in constant fear of their government. 

2) The world will be at peace when all people are free and treat each other as brothers – this is the natural right of all people for justice, arrived by reason.

I don't think Strauss would be amused to hear
how I talk about him, but he's dead. So he
can become a retroactive inspiration
without making a big deal about it.

That second principle makes Strauss sound more like an anarchist than a contemporary conservative. He describes how democracy leads to a peaceful society where everyone helps each other. But becoming such a society requires everyone to follow their powers of reasoning well enough to uncover the truth for themselves.

This is still revolutionary. Even if the universal truth reason discovers is pretty much what you already believed, if you’re really using your reason, then you’ll have turned against your society anyway. You’ll reject your starting moral beliefs because they’ re products of authority, not reason.

That’s a tough transformation, as if the only way to build a democracy is to be their Socrates, only actually effective. Person by person, you inspire and nudge them to be more mindful of freedom, and to care for others. That makes a society full of people who wouldn’t kill or hurt another.

But that’s a really slow process. The Bill Kristol that lives in our collective head, the magazine editor of neocon doctrine, believes that this will be when every government in the world is democratic. And we can just bomb and invade our way to global democracy.

“As fast as you can!” is not the same as, “As fast as is possible.”