A Vision of a World Better Than Humanity’s, Composing, 18/05/2015

There’s a short story contest running at the writing website Inkitt.com, where you can submit for free a single fantasy or science-fantasy story. Now that my college program is finished, my days are still hectic with my internship and applications for jobs, but I at least have more time on the weekends to write. 

I realized this weekend, as I thought about some ways that I could contribute to this writing contest, that it could be an appropriate place for the return of Alice. The short story contest wouldn’t be the best context to display the character in all that she signifies. That would simply be impossible in the condensed form of a 2-3000 word story, and I haven’t even fully thought through all the philosophical implications of Alice as a character.*

* Ethically, politically, morally, sexually, epistemically, ontologically, narratively. I think I’ve made something really interesting with this character. I hope Vaka Rangi sees this post and has something to say in the comments. He’s always very insightful with these concepts. 

The cover image I'll use for my story submission, from Flickr Creative Commons.

I’m not really sure how successful this story will even be in the contest. Its style isn’t what I’d call experimental, but it is different. My girlfriend recently finished Irvine Welsh’s novel Crime. I haven’t yet read Welsh myself, though I’ll steal this and her copy of Trainspotting soon too. 

As she explained his writing style to me, I realized that it resembles the modernist techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: long, introspective, first-person, stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered with a particular ear for the character’s cultural vernacular. Welsh innovates by drawing his plots and storylines from genre fiction, as with Crime.

While I don’t have a cultural vernacular for my narrator, interstellar space pilot Jorge Patel, the story describes his “Epic World” through digressions in his memories that spark from snippets of dialogue between he and Alice as they travel to the world-ship where most androids live in their fictional universe. The story opens with a remark Alice makes about slavery. 

As they speak, Jorge recalls lessons about Earth’s history on his own homeworld, Delta Pavonis, which vilified the planet as a society addicted to slave economies. But another remark later reminds him of his disillusionment with the economy and society of his own world, which quite resembles ours. 

I also include a dig at Ed Miliband

and the UK’s Labour Party, who

differ from the Conservatives only in

being the pro-austerity political party

that feels a little sad about endorsing

economic policies that drag almost

the entire country’s population into

inescapable poverty. And if Liz

Kendall wins, I doubt they'll even

feel sad about it anymore.

Falling wages and a bloated oligarchy are justified to the public as the cost of staying competitive in an economy that needs planet-wide austerity for the indefinite future to overcome a crisis. He spends his teenage years watching his friends drop out of school one by one, as their families can no longer afford the fees. Unlike the rest of us, he’s able to train to become an interstellar pilot, and fly to other worlds. 

I try to paint a whole world through the digressive memories of one person seeking a better life. The other stories at the Inkitt contest are pretty good, and also quite interesting. But they favour descriptions of events, followed by dialogue. For someone more accustomed to this, I admit that my style can be challenging.

The story’s politics carry an explicit left-wing message and an implicit feminist ideal. I think it’ll definitely have an appreciative audience, but most of the stories that I see at the top of its leaderboards right now are very typical fantasy plots like roguish action heroes kidnapping sarcastic princesses, or stereotypical grimdark fantasies about the horrors of war.

So I’m not sure how well my story, “Dancing in the Harshest Starlight,” will do in this context. In essence, the story is about someone who turns away from the cesspool of misery and violence that his human society has become, then discovers the paradise that superior creatures, the androids, have built. But he remains human, and the community of peace, prosperity, neighbourliness, and happiness that he sees remains forever separate from him precisely because he’s only human.

Another New Feminist Revolution III: Because She's a Great Philosopher, Composing, 15/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . Maybe now you can see why Laurie Penny’s ideas have so quickly become so important to my own projects. From my own position as a blogger with a small following, respectable pageview numbers, and a couple of books either out or on the way out, I’m trying to help change the world through my ideas. 

I’m not as successful as Penny, of course, because I spent my 20s in graduate school and she spent it hustling journalism. Also, I don’t think I would have done as well as she has, or even been able to formulate the ideas I have if I hadn’t taken the path that I did. 

I'm calling it right now: Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,
Steinem, Cixous, Penny. She goes on the list.

I started my life as a pretty blinkered guy who thought that status quo was generally alright, and I’m becoming increasingly radical in my political beliefs as I get older. It’s supposed to run in the opposite direction, with youthful, naive radicalism calming down into an oppressive conservatism. The voice that asks contemptuously why you weren’t able to buy a house when you were 25 because I did in 1974.

But if we think that’s the voice of everyone in the previous generation, then we’re just playing into the hands of people who want to profit from the destruction of welfare state institutions. If a young person struggling with debt and wages they can barely live on sees a senior in poverty and spits in their face, “Now you know what it feels like, old man!” . . . Well, I don’t want to become that person.

I don’t want to become that person for the same reason I couldn’t let myself become a man who hates women and thinks that feminists want to torture men. Not just because it’s based on a lie, but because giving in to spite, anger, and revenge is the expression of weakness. 

It’s easy to deal with difficulties by hating the ones who had it easier than you did. The most difficult path of understanding and empathy is the more noble one, and it says a lot about humanity that we’re so hateful and resentful a species. It’s in this sense that I think Penny is very Nietzschean:* she understands that attitudes of resentment and hatred hold us back from progress as societies and as souls. 

* Do ignore Nietzsche’s intense sexism. I do. Nietzsche himself tells you to ignore his sexism, as he sets off those passages in Beyond Good and Evil with an introduction that essentially says that his sexist beliefs are the most contemptible, resentful parts of his own personality, part of what makes him less than the ethical nobility he aspired to be. Would that we could all be so honest with and about ourselves.

A dress that's making a new
activist in New Brunswick
every day. So some very
beneficial outrage for us all.

And as I’ve said, Penny understands the limits of anger. So much of the horrors in the everyday moments of modern life, especially the modern lives of women, find their genesis in systematic causes. When a harm is born from an intention, and the intention was itself the spontaneous genesis of the harm, then we have a reason for anger, revenge, and punishment. 

But patriarchy is a concept which distills a massive system of gendered oppression of both women and men. Women are oppressed in all the ways that we now know are obvious: they are objectified into things whose only value is in how they please others, particularly men. Men are oppressed in being twisted into hateful, raging, abusive, violent beasts, taught to blame women for the violence of their own desires, which only makes them even more violent toward women. 

A morality of retribution, of punishment for wrongs committed, is not appropriate to deal with patriarchy in this sense. We are all complicit in the socialization of gendered oppression, and we can’t punish everyone in society. Fighting systematic injustice requires healing, not punishment and revenge. When you have to heal the entire world, only restorative and reparative models of justice will work.

Advocating for the reality of systemic causation is the ontological and epistemological aspect of the current fight against new liberal ideology. My own government in Canada, the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, is the most pure embodiment of new liberal thinking I’ve ever seen, and that I think the world has ever seen.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs recently said in Parliament, completely believing his own words, that when an Aboriginal woman is murdered, it is simply an isolated crime, and that when an Aboriginal teenager commits suicide, it is simply an isolated failure of a single family. This is an example of the refusal to see systemic causation. 

The politics of restoration, healing, and love as community organizing within flexible social networks is the endpoint of my giant work of political philosophy in progress, the Utopias project. It’s the set of principles that we have to pick up going forward if we’re going to fight and defeat the injustices of our own era. 

And I’m not delivering this from some lofty position. Then I’d just be one more cis-gendered straight white man with an awesome beard authoritatively telling people how to fight authority. 

I really would like to see some future Doctor Who lead
actress influenced by Penny's style for her costume. It
would be perfect for the aesthetic Doctor Who will
likely try to go for in the 2020s and 30s, when the
current largely female fanbase starts working in
television production, just as Davies' and Moffat's
generation of fandom did.

Laurie Penny has arrived at the same organized anarchism of healing in love through the mess of her own experiences as a journalist and activist, wandering like a vagabond Doctor through the marginalized places of our society and describing them to the safely housed masses. 

That she and I have come to such similar ideas through our very different paths and methods is a sign that my own thinking and writing can, in some small way, help articulate a revolutionary idea that is already in the popular consciousness. Maybe I can wake a few people up, or at least nudge them a little bit more, into changing how they conceive themselves and their lives, and changing how they live and treat people accordingly. 

That is what philosophy is for. I find it a little awkward writing about my contemporary as a research source. My education was in philosophy, a tradition of old white dudes stretching back centuries. But philosophy at its best has this uncanny power to change the world through thinking and writing, the influence of ideas to enlighten. In speaking with this highest power, Laurie Penny has shown herself to be a great philosopher.

Another New Feminist Revolution II: Overcoming Anger, A History Boy, 14/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . It took me a while to understand all the implications of systematic causation’s reality. I’m saying this as a person who wrote, and will release through a major non-fiction publisher, a book of ecological philosophy.* Systematic causation is simply difficult to understand.

* Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, available from an online bookseller with a major global forest’s name sometime this August. 

We’re accustomed to actions being generated from intentions, from personalities and acts of will. This is the conception of action that descended from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. When I was working on my doctorate, I encountered the field of action theory, which centred on a very human model of what it was ‘to act.’ How could such a profoundly human thing like a framework to marginalize and oppress the already vulnerable not be intentional?

Anger is powerful and cleansing when you let just enough
of it through you. But it can easily cross its point of
soul-toxicity.

This failure to understand how the genesis of actions could be anything other than the individual’s will is the dynamic of thinking that provokes hatred in regard to feminism. Feminist hatred, done correctly as Laurie Penny does, is a rage toward particular men who embody the sexist norms that permeate so much of our society, and the forces and concepts that twist us all into patriarchal shapes. 

A man who harms women deserves anger from two justifications. 1) He harms women through his aggression in violence. 2) He harms women through his idiocy as he acts uncritically, with no attempt to develop real empathy or knowledge of how uncomfortable or frightened women become around him. 

Such a man – the idiot – can become violent towards women if he becomes convinced that the reason women turn from him is not his own way of carrying himself, but in the corruption of women themselves as a species. Because this is their essential and definitive message, this is why I hate Men’s Rights Activist groups. They interpret their mistakes as her evil.

I’ve been such an idiot before, so self-absorbed and unable to conceive that he might make a mistake with someone, that he leaves only a wasteland where there were once happy memories of old friends. 

Yeah, this sure turned into that kind of post. 

If a Men’s Rights Activist group found me at one of my most vulnerable moments, I don’t know what I might have become. I won’t say they definitely would have ensnared me, but I can’t say for sure they wouldn’t have. But instead, at a time when I felt lowest, I actually found love. 

That’s why I almost cried when I read Penny’s second chapter of Unspeakable Things, “Lost Boys.” It’s the chapter that showed me how deeply and perfectly Penny understood systemic causation, the processes that shape human action and society that are beyond all our conscious intentions. This is a feminist perspective that not only understands when to be angry, but also when not to be angry, when a woman must be compassionate.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. 

You know what they say about small minds . . . 

Once, I put my foot in my mouth on Facebook talking about trans activism before I really knew much of anything about trans activism. I was subject to an enormous pile-on from friends of mine who did know slightly more about trans activism,** but who spent all night yelling at me on that thread, treating my every attempted apology as a fresh provocation.

** I’ve since learned from another friend who knows a whole lot more about trans activism than anyone else I know that my question actually hit on a subtle ideological schism in the trans activist community about advocacy methods. I still sounded pretty douchey when I first asked the question, though.

When one of my now-former right-wing friends read through this exchange, he used it as an opportunity to show me the true colours of feminism, the left in general. They were only interested in taking my dignity from me, forcing me to live subject to constant abuse or fear of violence. The left would take my freedom away, he said.

Of course, that’s just what a privileged person would say at the prospect of losing their privilege: they’re going to throw on me the oppression and violence I’ve been throwing on them for centuries. He didn’t say this explicitly, obviously, but his basic message was that feminism’s goal was women treating men as men have historically treated women. It was a movement to punish, a vengeful attitude.

Until you read Penny talk about how boys and men are twisted by patriarchal social norms and frameworks of thinking until violence dominates their souls. Either we give in completely and embody all the worst possible sexist traits a man can have, or at least most of them. Or we resist, simply because violence isn’t in that individual’s soul to the same intensity as a proud date rapist, and are tortured by social pressure to dominate despite our individual nature. 

This is how you understand systemic causation, the power of a presumption into which you’re socialized from birth. If the teenage girl driven to anorexia and suicide by constant sexual violence and bullying is a victim of patriarchy, then so is a Men’s Rights Activist or the most aggressive #Gamergater. 

Perpetrators of violence whose roots are in systemic causation are victims too, twisted by forces more powerful than they are into demons. And they don’t even know enough of this force to perceive it as it mutates them. Punishment and revenge miss the true cause of destruction. Only healing and educating can fight a systemic cause. . . To be Continued.

Another New Feminist Revolution I: Ethics Adequate to Systematic Harm, Research Time, 13/05/2015

I never thought I’d like Laurie Penny’s writing quite as much as I do. Actually, I’m rather a latecomer to her work. I only discovered her after Phil Sandifer complained about a snarky comment she made about Clara’s storyline in Last Christmas.

A while after that, I found some older articles of hers, and eventually decided to order her book Unspeakable Things because I had read some glowing reviews of it, I felt like reading a good modern political polemic that had some heft to it, and it was only $13. What was truly the dealbreaker that made it inevitable that I would read it is that it contained her personal, and very powerful anorexia narrative.

Some women who have been very important to me have struggled with eating disorders, and when I remember the most severe and intense moments that I’ve shared, I still wish I could have been more than a mute awkward witness unable to think of anything to do other than shudder or run away.

Yeah, it’ll be one of those blog entries. It might turn into a long series too.

I don’t want to discuss the details of how Penny’s first chapter affected me, its philosophical analysis of the identity and self-conception of the anorexic, where the central case study was herself. That will always be a little too personal, though her words did open some old scars on my soul. 

No, what impressed me most as a philosopher about Penny is that she has so easily expressed the fundamental principles of the only possible virtuous response to systemic cruelty into her action, her writing.

A few days ago, I discussed how the struggles of the contemporary era are not shaped by the intentional planning of a set of influential people in the leadership of institutions like states. States themselves are subject to impersonal forces of a global economic machine – enormous and incredibly fast flows of material, energy, information, currency, and concepts. 

We are caught in forces that determine more of what we think and do than our intentions do because those fluxes constrain what we can even conceive of. The constraining concept that Penny attacks with philosophical analysis is what’s usually called patriarchy.

This is patriarchy as a concept, a framework of thinking that shapes what a person believes is possible for one to be. Such frameworks perpetuate themselves because a community with a shared framework of possibilities for life will socialize successive generations into that structure of thinking.

It is pretty clear that a message from this sequence of
Last Christmas is that an older female companion is
not suited for the TARDIS. But I wouldn't call this an
intentional message, any more than I'd say the same
about the nigh-indefensible abortion theme in Kill
the Moon. But as you'll see tomorrow, anger and
blame is not the proper response to non-intentional
actions.

It is a living philosophical concept.* Patriarchy is not the only such concept that exists or could exist. It’s just one framework concept, one theme that a personality could live out. Most of us have many such themes, but most of us share the patriarchy theme.

* Richard Dawkins would call it a meme, but that idea gives no sense of the genuine material power of thoughts. Dawkins always has been a bit small-minded for my liking. 

Patriarchy isn’t a set of beliefs that people hold and act on, which cruelly treats women as inferior creatures to be controlled in some way. No one prefaces every comment that maybe you should grow your hair out like a proper girl with the thought “Now I will take control of you, enslave you, put you in chains to my desires!” And not everyone who says such a comment is a man. Sexism – sexist attitudes and behaviour expressed intentionally – is blameworthy, is worth punishing. Patriarchy is not.

And if people act like everyone who perpetuates patriarchy in human society is worth punishing for it, they just don’t understand what patriarchy is. They don’t understand systematic causation, and think the only kind of causation is the direct and indirect. In the human context, direct causation would be intentional, planned activity. Likewise, indirect causation would be accidents, bad luck, plans going awry.

Patriarchy is neither. It, like all philosophical concepts when people start living them out, is a presumption of the range of possibilities in a feedback loop with whatever particular morality and life expresses and perpetuates it. Patriarchy may be perpetuated in human behaviour, but only because the concept itself structures your actions. It’s a philosophical concept – a thought with the power to think you.

Laurie Penny understands systemic causation. I know it because she describes exactly, and expresses through her daily public conversations that we can all read, how to fight a concept. 

That’s why I categorized this post as Research Time, even though I never picked up Unspeakable Things as a possible Utopias source. Now that we have the public knowledge to understand the systematic dynamisms of material, informational, and conceptual flows, and how those flows determine human intentions as the possibility ranges of our self-conceptions, we can use our power to think of new ways to live to actually overcome framework concepts. 

Free your mind, and your ass will follow. Conceive, as comprehensively as possible, an alternative way to live, and you will start to live it. Expressing that new philosophical concept in your daily life will make you a role model to others. I conclude Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity with an explanation of just such a model of activism. Penny’s approach is just such a model of ethics. To be Continued . . . 

Digressions for the Sake of My Sanity, Research Time, 12/05/2015

Reading Ernst Jünger’s biography of the First World War, Storm of Steel, is oddly bracing. His language is very straightforward and ordinary, but its precisely his ordinariness that makes what happens to him all the more terrifying. This is a book that chronicles the day to day life of a man who’s constantly surrounded by violent death on a casual basis.

Artillery warped the land into the surface of an alien
world on which humanity as it was could not survive.
It didn't.

I mean, this is the First World War we’re talking about here. But like I’ve said before, the First World War seems very distant to us today. We learn the most in school, and even just in popular culture, about the Second World War, and depending on how much time the curriculum allots you, discussion of the First World War is pretty cursory. The prelude to the Second, if anything.

Because Jünger seriously impresses me. I’ve been watching the Netflix years of Trailer Park Boys lately, so I’ll say it like this. Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. 

He writes Storm of Steel without a genuine narrative or argument. It’s a series of incidents, events that punctuate his memory when he thinks back to the war. Each event takes place over a period of time, but that’s what the book is: an assemblage of durations. You let them stack one on top of the other, and see what affects they produce.*

* Pretentiousness break. One other piece of writing that this aspect of Jünger’s work reminded me of: Gilles Deleuze’s description of the style of the Marquis de Sade. He describes how Sade’s work impacts you through a constant barrage of repetition, slamming into you again and again until you’re pulverized. Almost like artillery shells.

So here are a few impressions for now, arranged in the order I remember them. 

I love Jünger’s phrase “strenuous monotony.” This is how he describes life in the trenches in the first year or so of the war, before the mass offensives start. Ammunition is casually lobbed back and forth across trenches as people notice an opportunity. There is the occasional skirmish or battle. 

The ground is slowly worn away to mud. The mud walls of your trench erode away after the winter to reveal the remains of a soldier from your regiment, who had sunk deep underground through the churning of the land itself under artillery shells. 

Trauma makes people mechanistic. Maybe I should say instead that we should think of trauma as making people mechanistic, so that we can get some insight about how we should treat each other. A helpful metaphor to illustrate a moral and ethical point. That would be philosophy.

The trenches have been worn down into hills, tourist
attractions as ordinary as a field of grass. We forget
our collective trauma, even though we are all scarred.

But consider the phrase as poetry for a minute. A one line poem whose meaning I have only the barest idea of. Wonder if this is a brief little methodical breakdown that makes an author admirable in his fearless experimentation, or if he’s just being needlessly weird. If I wrote a poetry blog, where I just composed little poems and put them up for people to see, would I be considered weird? 

Some of the greatest poets were working professionals who wrote in their spare time. Wallace Stevens composed verse in his head during his walk to work. It makes me wonder why no commuter has dictated an epic the length of Paradise Lost into her phone in a traffic jam on the way home to Burlington from her office near Warden Station in Scarborough.

I’m getting self-consciously Torontonian. It’s obnoxious; I should stop. Forgive me.

This is what I do when I find myself unable to express the kind of weird horror that Jünger describes with such ordinary language. He speaks with a tone as workaday as you would describing running into a friend at the grocery store. This is what happens to a person when the daily horrors of the First World War are your daily life for nearly four years. 

Ernst Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. I don’t know how anyone to whom that kind of horror became ordinary could let himself live another year after it was over. He died in 1998 of being 102 years old. I was 15 that year. That’s how close the First World War is, although it gets farther away ever day.

That’s part of what the Utopias project will address. The First World War as an event in history, those four terrible years, and the shadow it still casts over our civilizations.

Who’s Your Enemy II: A New and Tougher Empire, Composing, 11/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . I’ve been talking about George Galloway because he seems so much a relic of another time. Living proof that the old ways of doing dissident politics have just petered out. The orthodoxy is to support organizations that liberate people from colonial imperialism by any means. That’s how people can demonstrate for world peace and for Hamas in the same breath.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound

Just like the noose wound, over new ground

Western powers used to physically occupy foreign territory around the world all the time, treating those annexed powers as if they were legitimate parts of themselves. It was the convention, after all, to take over and administer (economically and culturally) the territory that was conquered in war. This is how territory transferred from France to Germany or Italy to Austria in wars between European states. It didn’t matter who started the fight. The land transfer from one sovereign power to another through war was determined only by the outcome of war. No other legitimation process was needed. 

And when the armies were ridiculously mismatched in their technological powers, like industrially advanced legions marching into largely agrarian societies all over Africa, well too bad for the Africans not being lucky enough to have developed large-scale industry. Then the slave trades and the attendant racialization kicked into seriously high gear.

It’s a very simplified version of the actual complex history of global colonization as the expansion of state military conquest to feed massively expanding industrial economies. But the point is simple: Imperialism was, in essence, the state military seizure of territory all over the globe. 

That’s why Antonio Negri distinguished imperialism from empire. Imperialism was a specific kind of domination where institutions of centralized military authority took administrative control of territory and populations by armed conquest. Empire is about economic domination without the need to be bogged down in control of territory as sovereign administrators. 

Disconnected from the state, the main vehicle of domination is now economic controls that move much more insidiously into people’s everyday lives everywhere. Authoritarianism is no longer concentrated in a single kind of institution which has direct control over its agents. Authoritarianism is no longer only intentional, but systematic.

An image of Imperialism, Charles Edwin Fripp's painting
of the Battle of Isandhlwana during the Anglo-Zulu Wars.

Now, I don’t mean to say that state military services have no power anymore. Any protester who has faced police violence in Ferguson, or who suffers under the cultural oppression of the Chinese government in Tibet, or who lives under military or monarchist dictators in the Middle East for just a few examples, knows that. 

But the centreless structures of systematic oppression that constitute Empire, those are harder to fight. You can’t just blame a single set of governments for all of the activities that oppress people. We’re now dealing, fundamentally, with systems that require a different kind of radicalism to change. 

This radicalism requires carving new communities and new kinds of relationships out of the spaces that are otherwise warped by economic and corporate interests. Such spaces can still be fraught and violent, as in indigenous resistance to foreign-owned mining interests in the Amazon. State militaries may well be involved as well, as in the suppression of protest movements in Ferguson and Baltimore. 

But overthrowing that military will not be enough, because the globe-spanning relationships that encourage whatever military oppression happens in a given place remain. The dynamic systems of empire are processes bigger than and distinct from the organizations that enact oppression. This is why the new boss always becomes the same as the old boss.

Galloway’s thinking embodies this fundamental mistake, taking Empire for Imperialism. Imperialism was a phenomenon driven by the intentional activities of a few state governments, their leaders, elite classes, and the mass populations who were manipulated into joining colonial armies through patriotic and racializing ideologies. Galloway, and all the other useful idiots of the contemporary left think that these processes are still the only engines of oppression that exist. 

I sometimes wonder if Galloway resembles François, the
protagonist of Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission,
who thrives under the socially conservative, anti-
feminist rule of a Muslim Family Values government
in 2020s France.

They do still exist, but they are no longer the master processes of global oppression. Imperialism is now one articulation of Empire.

Presuming that the Imperialist era never ended, then the West is still the only malevolent force in the world, making all enemies of the West virtuous allies in the fight against Imperialism. 

This is why Galloway sees nothing oppressive about running the political machine of the Bradford West Respect Party as a system of patronage among the elite Kashmiri and Pakistani extended families who largely control the major local businesses there. The obvious corruption of such politics and the social illiberalism of their anti-Semitic politics aren’t evaluated for their material affects on the people of their community. They’re anti-Western, so they are good.

So it goes with loudmouths of the contemporary left, the useful idiots, the reactionary left. And I say this as a man of the left myself. I’ve been encouraged before to leave aside my support for liberation from unfair economic systems, to renounce environmentalism as a grab for state power, to believe that what’s good for Bay Street and Big Oil is what’s good for the people. I've been encouraged to do this because useful idiots of the right-wing have pointed to the useful idiots of the left and said that the left is essentially state authoritarianism, bureaucratic oppression, the suppression of women, and hatred of Jews.

But I won’t. Because I know who the real enemy is.

Am I the only one?

Who’s Your Enemy I: I Remember the Good George, Jamming, 10/05/2015

Among the generally terrible news for Britain that comes with a Cameron majority, a Tory government unrestrained even by the nominal resistance that the Liberal Democrat coalition brought to the most sickly and contemptuous of their policies, there was one good piece of news.

George Galloway finally lost his seat. He’s no longer George Galloway, MP, but George Galloway, just another angry screaming racist bastard. When Galloway represented a district in Glasgow, he was actually the MP for a friend of mine from the Doctor Who community. 

I doubt we've seen the last of him.

I the Scientist informs me that Galloway “was always a cunt.” As well, he earned the greasily ironic nickname Gorgeous George when he represented Glasgow because of his hilarious personal vanity and his taste for women.

But I remember George Galloway for having done one decent thing: opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I had never heard of Galloway before this moment, when he seemed to be the only MP – hell, the only person in the UK with any kind of public profile and something to lose – clearly opposing George W. Bush’s plan to invade the country into democracy. I admired the advocacy against the invasion that he did with the Stop the War Coalition. 

At the time, I thought George Galloway was an admirable man speaking truth to power at personal risk to his career. Being kicked out of the Labour Party and nationally shamed by a warmongering, boot-licking media establishment (esp. the significant parts of the British media that Rupert Murdoch controls) would be an intense hit to someone’s career. All for speaking truth to power against the determination of his Prime Minister to join Bush's ridiculous, disastrous war. I remember how impressive he was as one of the few politicians who refused to be bought by fear. 

This is how, in the contexts and conflicts of those terrible times, Galloway seemed heroic and admirable.

Times have changed.

I had an easy ride when it came to the Iraq War in a certain context. I definitely had it a lot easier than the Iraqis did, and they continue to suffer the most from the dunderheaded military thinking of North American and European individual leaders and party-political classes.

I’m Canadian, and my Prime Minister at the time always opposed the invasion of Iraq. Jean Chrétien knew from the start that the Iraq invasion and occupation was going to be a shit show in which the Canadian military simply didn’t have the physical capacity to take part. 

If my current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party had been in charge then, he would have embroiled the country in a purposeless war where hundreds of billions would be spent fruitlessly bombing and killing a civilian population, and where our involvement would only make a horrifying political situation even worse. And he would have justified it through facile statements of unconditional loyalty to the United States and a public relations campaign continually encouraging a nation-wide climate of fear and paranoia.

Oh, wait a second.

The material history of Galloway’s involvement with Iraq seems to betray absolutely horrible reasons for his opposition. Tom Dalyell, a fellow Labour MP, spoke admirably of Galloway’s speeches in the 1980s about Iraq. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and Britain was a major arms supplier to Hussein’s regime during Iraq’s conflict with Iran. Galloway frequently was the lone voice denouncing the horrifying human rights abuses of the Iraqi army and state.

Yet in 1994, he was welcomed on a visit to Iraq, and made a public speech praising Saddam Hussein. He backpedaled his words, but they betray the real reason for his opposition to the 2003 invasion. Galloway was no devoted friend of Hussein himself or his violent, authoritarian regime. Galloway is and always was a devoted enemy of the West’s imperialism. At all costs.

This is the solution to the Galloway paradox, that he’s simply one of the most individually prominent useful idiots among the Western dissident left. But there’s more going on with Galloway than this simple explanation. He doesn’t express it himself, but he makes a wonderful symbol, a signification of all in left-wing politics that the Utopias project will critique. . . . To be continued.