Agency Is Universal, Research Time, 12/05/2014

Still working on the things that I’ve been working on for the last week or so, with no more interesting developments. I’ve also been taking advantage of the recent merger of my book collection with my girlfriend’s, which also includes some of the old books of her father, who departed just over two years ago. He had some more conservative political leanings that I don’t exactly agree with, but one of the books in his inherited collection that I’ve started to read was The Left at War by the cultural theorist Michael Bérubé. 

When she was in prison or demonstrating against Putin at
the Sochi Olympics, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was a hero.
What would those on the anti-imperialist left say now, only
a few months later, when she's lobbying the US Congress
for sanctions against Putin's Russia, even though Putin is
now supposedly the ally of free people in the fight against
European fascism and the American Empire?

This book analyzes the political phenomenon that’s been angering me in my recent posts about the growing civil war and Russian intervention in Ukraine: figures on the democratic left lionizing Vladimir Putin as a heroic ally of anti-imperialism, just because he opposes corporate American interest. There are many reasons why this is a ridiculous point of view, not least because the very same leftists who have allied with him on Ukraine called him a villainous abuser of human rights during the Olympics when Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was publicizing how the gulag system of Russian prisons had survived and thrived in the modern era. 

Written in 2009, Bérubé’s book instead focusses on the left’s lionization of Islamist terrorist and otherwise radical groups (Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Ba’ath Party) for their resistance to American imperialism in the form of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush-Cheney. He also focusses on the left’s virulent denunciation of Israel that often borders on anti-Semitic, histrionics which only serve to drown out and delegitimize the genuine issues regarding the disenfranchisement of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, and the violent politicization of the Ultra-Orthodox community. 

He calls this kind of leftism the Manichean Left, because of its stark division of the world into a simplistic Good and Evil. The United States, because of their position at the head of modern imperialist capitalism, is Evil, along with its allies, and Good is defined only in terms of opposition to the United States. This is how a democratic advocate for women’s and gay rights would assign herself common cause with Islamic fundamentalists who believe rape should be legal and that women’s literacy is an insult to God. Both oppose the American empire.*

* I, however, no longer believe that a single country can be at the genuine centre of an “empire” today, no matter how much the rhetoric of contemporary anti-capitalist activism, and even the wettest dreams of Dick Cheney, may think this the case. I don’t have the time to go into it now, but essentially, read Antonio Negri’s Empire and get back to me.

I’m just beginning my read through the book at the moment — it’s interesting, but not exactly the toughest philosophical meat in the world. So I don’t have a detailed case to present on its ideas. But I will offer one notion that perhaps speaks in its favour. Bérubé discusses how American meddling in Middle Eastern politics created the conditions for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Quite often, the focus was on the United States having helped arrange the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected president, Mohammed Mossaddegh, in 1953, to replace him with the violent rule of the Shah and his secret police, Savak. Osama bin Laden also justified his opposition to America in terms of their military presence in Saudi Arabian bases as an insult to Muslim people. But beyond this, bin Laden’s own motivations for instituting Islamic fundamentalist government in the Middle East were to restore a unified Islamic government over Arabia and North Africa — the Caliphate. This political unity was destroyed in the aftermath of the First World War, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk overthrew the Ottoman Empire and installed a secular regime in Turkey. 

This particular story complicates the typical narrative of that ever-so-mild gesture of sympathy, if not to bin Laden himself, then to the rise of Islamic fundamentalist resistance to American activity. Here is a motivation for a fundamentalist organization that has little or nothing to do with the direct actions of the United States. 

I consider the work of Edward Said a guide in understanding the meaning, history, and legacy of modern imperialism. And one of the central ideas he focussed on, as a definition of the imperialist attitude, was the notion that colonized peoples had no agency of their own, no histories. That they only held a valid existence insofar as they related to Western powers, peoples, and traditions. When you describe every political act of a formerly colonized people to assert some independence (whether that act is peaceful, violent, or oppressive in itself) as a reaction to the United States, you are essentially describing a world where the United States is the only active political partner. So the actions of a formerly or potentially colonized people would only have meaning in relation to the actions and goals of the United States. In perceiving and defending only the reactive agency of oppressed peoples, you oppress them further by engaging with them as if they had no active agency.

Social Self-Determination in Ukraine, Dialogues, 18/04/2014

I’m introducing a new category to the blog today. Dialogues are short to long interviews with colleagues and friends about issues relating to what I write about — political philosophy, the related journalism, and my various fiction projects. Below is an edited version of a conversation I had with my friend M, in response to my post yesterday on the worsening political situation in Ukraine and the threats the Jewish population in Donetsk have received recently of ethnic cleansing.

Unrelated to this, I had an article published this week with Newfoundland’s newest literary and arts magazine, Landwash, which you can read here. It adapts my posts regarding the institutionalization of creative writing, the wider educational effects of University of Iowa’s seminal program in that area, and how my upcoming novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, confronts and critiques these issues. 

• • •

Vladimir Putin is a dangerous man
leading a geopolitically dangerous
country. He's even more deadly
when he takes his shirt off.

M

Hey Adam,

I'm curious as to your thoughts on this, but didn't want to lob this grenade into the thread on your Facebook wall. I feel like the current issues in Ukraine are a fascinating example of Putin's mastery of the Western love affair with the notion of the liberal subject. Crimea, for example, is being spun as a case of individual sovereignty, with the referendum understood as the free choice of the Crimean people to join Russia. Further, the Russian line interprets attempts by the West to reject this referendum’s legitimacy as nothing more than a typical unilateral decision as to what is best for any given country, regardless of the feelings of that country’s citizens.

Of course, such arguments have to ignore the past and present geopolitical history of Crimea. One could ask how the province’s Tatar population feels about its region’s political developments, because no one ever has. The party of the current president of Crimea only received 4% of the vote in Ukraine’s last national election, and he ascended to power at gunpoint. Turning to these facts, however, means suggesting that some kind of Ukrainian federalism would have to override the apparent desires of the current citizens of Crimea.

While I'm not totally sure where my ideas could go, I can't help but feel that Putin has grasped how to use the Western idolization of the liberal subject to get what he wants. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, given that you have much more knowledge in this area than I do.

Cheers!

Me

Self-determination as a political concept can get so slippery, and I think it has to do with the notion we have of treating countries and cultures as if they were unified individuals. As the concept was first developed with John Locke and his successors up north in the Scottish Enlightenment, it focussed on individuals being able to live in freedom from interference by the government or armed forces, and quite literally determine themselves. Then the Kantian moral philosophy made self-determination (which he re-conceived as self-legislation) an essential function of reason itself.

There had been a tradition in absolute monarchy of conceiving of an entire kingdom as the extension of the King's body, hence Louis XIV's habit of referring to himself as France. But I think the real kicker to blending universal self-determination with the self-determination of polities was justified with Hegelian political philosophy. Hegel and the thinkers he influenced tended to subscribe, at least for the first 100ish years, to a notion that humans could only be free insofar as they articulated the cultural values and continuities which constituted them individually as people in the first place. So the state was conceived as the engine of freedom, culture was linked to the state, and the internal consistency of a culture in a territory defined by state borders was seen as a culture's gaining internal consistency. This ended up only fuelling racism, because cultures were linked to states and territories, and a culture could only be authentic if everyone shared the same moral and religious beliefs. Cultural authenticity was possible only when all citizens of a state shared a culture. Otherwise, discord would necessarily arise to disrupt the rational order of a people. I see this underlying a lot of racism in modern Europe against Muslim immigrants: because they have a different culture, they don't belong in Holland, France, Hungary, Austria, etc. This identification of culture, country, and state has been ingrained in Europe for so long that I don't know if many Europeans can conceive of alternatives, unless they're ethnically mixed or otherwise pluralized already.

But the result of this was that instead of identifying a kingdom with its king, a people are identified with the state. It's become a justification of racism because any cultural diversity in a state is seen as introducing discord. I've heard quite reasonable people suggest that Canada isn't really a country because of its incredible internal cultural diversity. On Hegelian (and Heideggerian, but let's not go there because I have a busy day) grounds, that's actually true.

And so we still use the segregation of diverse peoples to solve problems of racism that arise in ethnically plural societies. This is a justification for the creation of Kosovo, just as it is for Crimea, Donetsk, and Transnistria. It only works when racism has become so terrible and violent anyway that culturally plural regions have practically been ethnically cleansed anyway. Kosovars or Timorese just wouldn't feel safe still living with Serbian or Indonesian controlled police. 

But I'm Canadian. So I don't see this as a necessary result of cultural pluralism. You can just as easily get the racism parodies of Russell Peters arising out of a culturally diverse society as you do ethnic cleansing. And even though he's not my favourite comedian, I prefer the Canadian path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hopeless and Stupid World, Jamming, 21/02/2014

I was originally planning to write another post about the political philosophy research I’m doing for the Utopias project, perhaps about the Badiou essay that my friend B sent me a copy of the other day. Then I learned that Kyiv exploded.

As of my writing this draft (on the evening of 20 February, which will be posted on the morning of 21 February), there were over twenty confirmed dead in Independence Square. I have my own perspective on the subject, which is very simple. I’ve been watching periodic news on Ukrainian politics throughout my adulthood, not for any personal reason, but just as part of my taste for international news. I remember watching reports of Viktor Yuschchenko’s near-fatal poisoning and the public protests that resulted in his presidency. I remember Yuschchenko’s mediocre tenure as Ukrainian president until his own coalition kicked him out. I remember the most recent election, when Yulia Tymoshenko, another Orange Revolution protest leader, was defeated in her run for president by Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-backed politician whose 2004 election fraud began this mad decade-long cycle. Yanukovych himself, since he returned to the presidency, has been following as best he can the post-Soviet script for leaders: jailing his opponents, such as Tymoshenko, on amorphous charges of “corruption,” and using the powers of his office to enrich his extended family to oligarchical levels.

Today is not a good day in Ukraine.

Now Kyiv is consumed with rioting and police and protestors are shooting each other. When this kind of violence last happened in the old Soviet sphere of influence, a coalition of NATO countries and UN peacekeepers rolled in to bring some semblance of order, or at least make a gesture towards it. But this isn’t Bosnia, and we live in a very different world than the early 1990s. It isn’t just that Russia is a much stronger country actually able to flex its muscles in what used to be its exclusive territory (indeed, in this case, its national territory). But this is the case. And it isn’t just that the United States is a much weaker power than it has been, having lost its taste and stomach for foreign intervention after imploding the material and mental capacity of its own armed forces in two protracted, practically unending Asian wars. But this is the case.

A significant part of why our world has changed, aside from the policies, economics, and military powers of states, lies in the internet. When the siege of Sarajevo began, we had only the conventional television, radio, and newsprint media to follow the situation and inform us of what was happening. Now, we can follow all the action of the Kyiv protests and police violence all over the internet, particularly on twitter. We can even trace the story and life of an individual medical volunteer wounded by gunfire during the last few days. 

Smartphone technology is an indispensable tool for anti-Putin/Yanukovych activists to organize themselves. But smartphone technology was also an indispensable tool for the Ukrainian police to track and intimidate protestors, as in the incident of police sending texts to Kyiv citizens within the region of the protests, “Dear subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” 

Viktor Yanukovych is not a democrat. Democrats don't
throw their political opponents in prison.

Even beyond the powers and vulnerabilities that contemporary technology grants to people, the internet enables access to a plethora of knowledge and conversation. But this isn’t knowledge that informs people; it’s the chatter of conspiracy theory that plays into the hands of politicians (Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin, to avoid any ambiguity on my part) who use police state tactics and a Stalinist gulag system to oppress and silence anyone who would critique their regime or act against it.

This absolutely awful viral video, to which I will only link, because I don’t want this crap on my page, was the product of filmmakers funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and US-government-funded pro-democracy groups. Its makers intended it to mobilize global support for the protests. And it’s certainly encouraging a lot of slacktivism. But after it's debunked over this weekend, many people of otherwise good conscience will turn against Ukraine’s protestors and side with 'the true people of Ukraine' in their culturally organic association with Russia and resistance to the corruption of the European Union and dominance by the capitalist empire of Washington and American corporations.

It sickens me.

The “I Am Ukrainian” video clearly echoes Kony 2012, which means Yanukovych and Putin are probably immensely happy to see it. That idiotic scam, trying to mobilize popular support for a US invasion of central Africa to arrest a warlord in the name of international peace and justice was the last nail in the coffin of the international civil society that was once the dream of people like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt. Because politically-minded people today see conspiracy and manipulation behind every attempt to encourage the end of a war in a foreign country. Even worse, they see imperialism and racism.

The right wing is the traditional opponent of
billionaire democracy activists like George
Soros. Post Kony 2012, the left are calling
him a sneaky villain of corporate capitalism.

The 2003 Iraq War permanently turned all socially progressive civil society against any American intervention for the sake of peace in a foreign country. Now, we all take it for granted that when a rich democracy speaks out against some human rights abuse or foreign police state, it’s the pretext for a 21st century empire. 

The Ukrainian protestors have become violent, and they have killed policemen. And both police and protestors have probably killed some innocent civilians by now. But if your state police force is mobilized to use unrestrained deadly force against your protests, damn right you’ll pick up a gun and defend yourself. Or a molotov cocktail. Meanwhile, Soros and the United States are vilified as meddlers and imperialists. We used to consider them the beacons of democracy and freedom. The truth is, we live in a world where no one trusts anyone anymore, where every political agitation in the name of democracy is a conspiracy to install and enforce the terror of global capitalism.

As far as the best story on the internet is concerned, all these protests are “part of Washington’s goal to control the entire world.” The protests aren't about an established police state (Russia) aiding the evolution of Ukraine into an allied police state, they're how Ukraine is conquered by "Western corporate predators." 

A few weeks ago, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was on The
Colbert Report. In a few months, she might be in an
unmarked grave in central Russia. Her possible death in
prison would be the fault of the anti-empire left's and the
isolationist right's heroic resister of Western corporate
capitalism, Vladimir Putin.

And idiotic leftists who take a few courses in post-structuralist philosophy and valorize the Paris protests of May 1968 will become fervent supporters of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovych as allies against Washington’s domination of the world, and the growth of Western capitalism. They’re no worse than the Communists during the Great Depression who spied on the United States and the European democracies for Stalin’s Soviet Union. The grassroots left in North America, who perhaps used to be intelligent, will forget Russian democracy activists being whipped in the street and sent back to gulags to die because the evil Western corporate empire is oppressing those poor police state elites of Ukraine. It was only the day before "I am a Ukrainian" dropped that Russian police were beating members of Pussy Riot in the streets like a sadist would beat a starving dog. But because he stands against the expansion of Washington's power, a lot of morons of the contemporary left will soon claim Vladimir Putin as a champion of the downtrodden.

Modern corporate capitalism is objectively awful in many ways. It’s created an elite of international oligarchs and a worldwide system of industrial production that rests on an impoverished underclass of billions and is causing catastrophic ecological change to our planet. Modern capitalism is our name for a culture whose solution to food shortages is to pollute our farms with layer after layer of pesticides, whose solution to flailing manufacturing industries is to dismember unions to force people to work for barely above subsistence wages and take on tens of thousands in debt. 

But we will never overcome these injustices by allying ourselves with police states!