Even Stranger Things Than Netflix Managed, Jamming, 18/09/2016

A while ago, I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. A couple of days later, I finally got around to finishing Stranger Things. It’s an interesting pairing, a coincidence that actually reveals a lot of what I like about genre fiction, and how I approach writing it myself.

To start, I loved The Ocean. It’s a deft insertion of a traditional English fairy story – an ordinary child discovers an enchanting but dangerous land under the surface of his world – into a contemporary setting. The story is set as the narrator returning to his childhood home and remembering, as if he had forgotten for a long time, an adventure from his seventh year – 1974.

As evocative as the imagery of Stranger Things can be, there doesn't seem to
be much to those images than the images themselves. Their meanings and
suggestions stay at the superficial, and open no thought to anything
deeper or stranger.

It’s told with a depth of detail and forethought that’s typical of Gaiman’s world-building powers – He’s worked out a complex machinery for the physics and nature of this hidden world. But we don’t get it laid out explicitly, as such pummelling exposition would be torture to read. 

Instead, the story plays out according to its mechanics, and we see it as the seven-year-old narrator would have. There are enough allusions to the popular understanding of ideas in modern physics – the multiverse, dark matter, speculative alien ecology –  that the story is woven from science-fictional entities into a more traditional fantastic* narrative style.

* I say ‘fantastic’ instead of ‘fantasy’ because of how ‘fantasy’ as a term has been popularly co-opted by a very specific genre – dense, continuity-heavy, multiple-volume book cycles with narrowly Tolkien-esque building blocks. Frankly, it’s become a very boring genre. So much so that even a purposely subversive series like Game of Thrones has buckled into the stereotypes it once tried to explode.

Reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the propulsion of exploring this world for the first time, seeing it in only glimpses. But every detail of the narrator’s experience in this fantastic world depends on some specific aspect of this world. As readers, it takes an act of thinking, memory as we read, to figure out how that world works. 

It’s never explained to you explicitly, but it’s revealed through the acts of the story itself. I built the storyline of Under the Trees, Eaten according to the same principle. And the few people who’ve read it tell me it was quite a success. I just wish I had managed a publisher for it who actually had a marketing budget.

Gaiman suggests his parallel world in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
is genuinely alien to our own, and that there are a multitude of totally
alien ecologies and worlds in the vastness of the universe. But
Stranger Things' Upside-Down seems to be a straight-up
parasitical version of our world, making it really quite familiar.

Going through Stranger Things at the same time as I read Gaiman’s book only made the Duffer Brothers’ series feel more paltry in comparison. The world Joyce, Mike and the boys, Jonathan, Nancy, and Hopper discover underneath our own is far more menacing and openly violent than Gaiman’s.**

** Though the ecology of Gaiman’s hidden world is, if anything, more merciless in its brutal logic than anything in Netflix’s extended Stephen King riff.

But it isn’t really thought through as an ecology. At one point, the characters settle on “The Upside-Down” as their name for the parallel world where Will is trapped. It’s based on a moment where Elle turns a D&D board upside-down, and places a monster figure in the centre of its blankness.

When we go to the Upside-Down, we see everything in our own world – houses, cars, forests, and roads – but coated in grotesque webbing and with constantly flurrying toxic snowflakes in the air. How was this parallel universe created? What’s its relationship with our own? Because there’s clearly a relationship.

And why is there a horrifying monster in this world? What does it eat in its own ecology?

We don’t need to have any of this explained to us openly. That would hurt the story, just like any extended riff of exposition divorced from any character or narrative development. But reading Gaiman at the same time led me to focus on this problem. 

Gaiman’s story was of an ordinary person slowly discovering a world whose nature the author had conceived to the small cosmological details. The Duffers never developed their parallel universe beyond scary shit and the basic metaphor of ‘upside-down.’ 

In this darkness, there's vastness, multiplicity, and wonder.

Gaiman told a very simple, beautiful story. It was about one young boy, his family, his friend the immortal pan-dimensional being from the dawn of time, and his evil babysitter a shapeshifting flea-demon from parallel universe. But he really thought through the world of that story as a world. Not only did it improve the story itself, but it gave him (and maybe others) the ability to tell more stories with those worldly mechanics.

I think the next (and any future) seasons of Stranger Things will run into a problem, precisely because their science-fictional world isn’t really complete. It’s still suggestions, but I don’t think there’s any world beyond the suggestions. 

There are more characters, and a realist tone and style pioneered by Stephen King and very popular. Its characters – sometimes for critically important reasons and sometimes inexplicably – have connected with many people. But I think it’s going to drift into aimlessness because there just isn’t enough substance to its world.

There's a moment in The Ocean when the narrator steps into an ocean that's carried to him in a bucket. Submerged, he communes with existence itself, and understands all the fundamental principles of reality's complex, ongoing assemblage. 

It's a beautiful moment, and when it's over, he steps back onto land and his knowledge disappears. But that comprehensive vision runs under the whole story, creating a stimulating enchantment of human imagination in the experience of reading. At its best, that's what science-fiction and all art can do.

Freedom Speaks With Light From a Screen, Jamming, 16/09/2016

Tonight, I’ll be busy with a fundraising event I’m organizing with the Syria Film Festival. For lack of a better name, it’s the SYFF Cultural Party, and it’s actually going to be a pretty fun night. 

When we were planning the fundraiser, we had our eye on a comprehensive menu of entertainment. We’ve arranged an art auction, and our Festival Director AtoZ’s band is playing a set of traditional and contemporary Syrian music. 

But the centrepiece of the Cultural Party is the screening of a film that one of our partners produced, My Dream My Right. Faisal Attrache is a documentary director who's made several shorts following the lives of people at the Za’atari Refugee Camp just over Syria’s border with Jordan.

Over 80,000 people live in Za’atari, making it Jordan’s fourth-largest city. It’s a city made of United Nations tents in the middle of the bloody desert. It’s existed for four years. And it’s a pretty typical refugee camp in that it’s an enormous limbo for its residents, trapped by the international laws of citizenship that keep them from seeking a better life elsewhere.

The Europeans certainly don’t want any more Syrian people coming to their country, so everyone is just sort of stuck there. That’s what refugee camps are – places where people are stuck. 80,000 people.

Some of those people are youth who’ve taken part in a set of filmmaking workshops that Attrache – and his organization, Voices of the Children – have set up. My Dream My Right is a collection of several short films that these young people made themselves. Each is only a few minutes long, and expresses an aesthetic style unique to each of these young directors.

One of the founding activists and officials in the UNHCR, Thomas Jamieson, had a saying that I discovered a while ago. “If you can close a camp, do it.” A refugee camp is a living purgatory, stuck in a place where your citizenship and your humanity isn’t even fully recognized. 

It reminds me of one core truth behind my own political ideas – We can’t rely on our states to protect us and bestow us rights. We deserve full rights and legal recognition as people, regardless of citizenship and the laws of whatever government issued us our papers. You're always in some minimal danger of a government that cares nothing for you leaving you out to dry.

Well, Za’atari doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. But these young people are sick of the limbo of life in a refugee camp.

The Cultural Party will also now be the first stage in fulfilling a promise I made to the documentary’s producers at the Voices of the Children non-profit. Figuring out how to get these people out of the god damn refugee camp. 

Because if you've been stuck in a refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert overlooking the Syrian border for four years,* you’ll want to get the hell out. It’s not a nice place to be for a month, let alone for four years.

* Four fucking years. I mean, seriously.

Four fucking years. I’d have had it. I’m not surprised that these guys have too. So I plan on introducing (virtually) some of SYFF’s donors and immigration activist partners to the young artists behind My Dream My Right. 

If they can produce such remarkable cinematic beauty in the generally shitty conditions of Za’atari, they’ll be able to weather pretty much anything in the name of art. Especially if they can get the resources of a country and society like Canada working for them.

Some of the heirs to Werner Herzog’s pragmatic existential cinematic process could be in Za’atari right now. We owe it to the world, humanity, God, to get them to make as many films as physically possible.

God would owe them. God should owe them.

Once again, here’s the Facebook event for the Cultural Party tonight. Never stop pushing and nudging the world toward freedom. Even if it’s just a $20 cover charge.

Facing Reality to Save Your Idealism, Composing, 15/09/2016

A few days ago when I was catching up on some of the recent news in radical nationalism around the West, I discovered a very enlightening Twitter thread by New Yorker reporter James Surowiecki.

There's a synergy to my own work with contemporary
issues, but I've also thought for years that I want my
non-fiction (and my fictional work) to engage with
the problems that drive my society and my world.

He argued that, even though the word ‘racist’ is usually (and rightly) used as a pejorative, we must also be open to using it as an objective description of an actual political ideology. Right now, the Trump campaign is leading a mainstream movement of openly racist politics in America.

His most dedicated supporters and activists – especially those in the alt-right who’ve been raised in the brutal message boards of Reddit and 4Chan* – openly identify as white supremacists. Or at least they sincerely believe that listening to the concerns of minorities and women expresses hatred of white men.

* And I’m sure quite a lot of them know their Moldbug. 

I've been thinking a lot this week about the conflicts of our hopes and ideals with our often cynical need to be realist in our lives. So I want to think about this very insightful series of ideas from Surowiecki through that lens. 

That the term ‘racism’ is today a straightforward insult is a sign of progress – It’s an ideal that’s become reality. Even the most enthusiastic evangelicals of race’s reality and racism’s rightness have to soak their expressions in irony to permit a sympathetic reading. 

That means writing philosophical texts that engage just as much with
ideas in daily media as in traditional academic sources.
Maybe more so.

You can't just openly say, “This is why racism is correct!” the way you could decades ago. That’s even too pleasant a sheen on how Western society was back then – only a few decades (and definitely a century) ago, you didn’t even need to try to prove it. You started an argument from racism’s truth as a basic fact. You could take for granted that everyone was a racist, and that this was an ordinary and true worldview.

In that sense, an ideal has overcome a concession to realism. And political realism is very much a concession. You take as a given that the world can’t fundamentally change, that we must accept its nature, and that all attempts to change the world for the better are fool’s errands.

Being realistic doesn’t necessarily mean you capitulate your dreams to a shitty universe. When you’re talking international relations theory, the attitude of ‘realism’ typically implies a kind of cynical quietism – there will always be war, conflict, power games, imperialism in different forms, and so on.

Here is a journalist thinking very radically, saying what needs to be
said in our current political environment: We have to take racism
seriously as politics, and he walks through its profound implications.

That attitude of blunt acceptance is a backbone of Surowiecki’s argument. There’s always been a significant stream of American culture that defines itself in racist terms. And racism is more than just an insult – it’s still, and inherently is, a fundamental political stance. We can’t just cast racism out of the realm of politics as such because it’s horrible. 

Political thinking is about the principles and concepts that form the framework of how we understand our societal and institutional relations and structures, and how we think of new relations and structures. 

You can build moral norms and principles around racism. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate it – Jim Crow and American plantation slavery, the race theories and political movements popular in Europe from the late 19th century to the Second World War, and the racial business and citizenship hierarchies of contemporary Persian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Few things have thicker political significance than the structure and
makeup of your community. Your community is the field of politics
itself. So if you don't want blacks in your community, it means
that you don't want to share your fields of political activity – let
alone your highest political institutions – with black people.

Now, all of these moralities are pretty horrible. But they’re still moral and institutional systems. 

If you don't engage with that viewpoint – that someone can consider racist norms and principles legitimate moral and political frameworks – as a real political principle, you aren’t going to grapple with racist ideologies and all they can do. You’ll think of them as cartoon Nazis from some old Biggles book.

To achieve your ideal of a world free of racism, you have to deal with racism as it really is – the sincere ideology and moral/political beliefs of real people. That’s the uncomfortable tension between realism and idealism.

If you don’t engage with racists and racism as authentic political actors and ideology, they’ll run circles around you. You’ll engage only with phantoms, and your enemies will still be real people.

Real flesh hurts when it hits you.

Here Is Humanity! III: What's a Cosmopolitan? Research Time, 14/09/2016

Probably the last post in this series. 

- Here’s the beginning, about the idealism that underpins any dedication to politics.

- And the first proper part, about the challenge idealism faces from cynical, realistic (and accurate) conceptions of violent human nature.

- And the previous part, where I defend the dream of the European Union as humanity’s largest ever experiment to change human nature.

• • •

A book like We, The People of Europe? is profoundly optimistic. Etienne Balibar believes in the power of humanity to change its morals and ethics – our entire character. He argues that our political institutions can be important tools in this process. 

Because our institutions can facilitate human action on a massive scale, they can train us in new habits. New kinds of socializing, which produce new kinds of society and new frameworks of human nature. 

The symbology works so well. The dream is dying.

These huge-scale institutional experiments are incredibly expensive. Their problems and failures can cause disaster. In the EU’s case, there are two failings bringing this utopian institution down. 

One got all the press last year, as the European Central Bank forced the Greek government and people to accept an austerity plan that plunged many thousands into poverty. All the maintain the monetary integrity of the Euro currency and other financial securities of the EU. 

The other problem I wrote about yesterday. The migrant crisis from the Syrian civil war has fuelled a resurgence of violent nationalism that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. 

Racist politics, even the national socialist model promoted by Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, are coming to dominate Europe along the vectors of many different member countries – France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Holland, and Poland.* Even the famously liberal Sweden faces the rise of a radical nationalist party.

* Respectively: The National Front, UKIP and Brexit, Pegida, Jobbik and the ruling Fidesz party, the Party for Freedom, and the Law and Justice party.

The European Union was supposed to have inspired a cosmopolitan sensibility in Europe, where national divisions were forgotten in favour of a common diverse humanity. That’s the idealism behind freedom of movement – making it just as easy for a Pole to get a job in Britain or Italy as in Poland. 

Everyone would interact with everyone else so regularly that national origin would become just as unimportant as in Canada’s multicultural cities. What were once cruel stereotypes become jokes and gags, while we welcome everyone for the variety their heritage brings to our lives. 

But it calcified into a dull bureaucracy before that vision had an opportunity to settle in to the cultures of all Europe. And the shock of the migrant crisis ruined that dream’s last chances. 

I have quite a few friends in Britain who I connect with regularly on Twitter. They’re all humanities researchers and Doctor Who fans, so we have a pretty progressive bent. I remember when the Brexit vote went down, many lamented the result. One shattered reaction was partly a joke, but also profound moment – a little death of a romantic dream.

Balibar's book We, the People of Europe offered an
insightful critique of the problems that would tear the EU
apart within only a couple of decades. He left it up to us
to figure out the solutions in detail. But his work was
still important and necessary to fight nationalism.
Know your enemy.

She could never go find work in France and meet some boy who’d be the love of her life. Lands that had been at war for centuries had become, for one young woman, a place to dream of love. Yes, it was romantic and naive, but it was also a beautiful vision. It spoke to the real possibility of a cosmopolitan community.

But – if I can get back to my own ongoing research for this book of philosophy – Balibar’s own essays don’t offer much vision as to what this cosmopolitan new European would be. Only that the everyday cosmopolitan is the cultural counter-force to the nationalism he could see when it was a small spark instead of the convulsive danger it’s become.

One part of understanding what a cosmopolitan person could be led me to choose Cosmopolitanism as the next book in my research. It’s been on my shelf for literally years, so I finally decided to get around to it. 

Since one of my former colleagues at McMaster used to work with Appiah at Princeton, my professional connection gives the book a curious atmosphere to me. Also the fact that this former colleague told me that Appiah prefers being called Anthony to Kwame.

When I read through that book, I’m also thinking about how Appiah’s ideas appear in comparison to my last two years of life in such a genuinely cosmopolitan city as Toronto. Daily life here offers a fertile ground for philosophical thinking about what a post-national identity would be. 

Thinking never stops.

Here Is Humanity! II: To Blur Is and Should in Reality, Composing, 13/09/2016

The core concept of my Utopias book is the relationship between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. That relationship is always one of becoming, whether it’s a real process or it never gets out of our imaginations.

Thinking about Robert Kagan’s essay last week, I realized that it made a very stark contrast with my own stance (and Etienne Balibar’s, and Antonio Negri’s, and many others) on what politics and activism is for.

Done well, or done badly, an activist for any cause is trying to change the world. I think a proper utopia will be centred around a particular range of values. I’m not about to grant that a radical white supremacist is a utopian in the sense I’m exploring, for example. That ideology is fundamentally cruel and destructive – it frees no one.

From an anniversary ceremony marking the 70th year
of the United Nations' existence. This was another
institution whose fundamental philosophical goal was
forging a new, more peaceful, self-conception for
humanity. The ceremony was held in San Francisco,
an important site, given its status as the capitol of a
fictional Federation with a similar nature.

So in that sense, Utopias explores how we figure out how to free the world.

Contrast Kagan and Balibar now. Balibar – even though he’s radical in many ways – ultimately keeps his faith in the European Union, for example.* It’s a space that allows us to create a new concept of power, a new social identity.

* Faith in the European Union was much easier to hold in 2003, when Balibar was compiling this book of his essays, We, the People of Europe?.

The EU’s core goal was to move European people away from defining themselves as members of a nation. Do you understand how radical and crazy that idea is? European politics and institutions literally invented the modern concept of nation. They exported this idea as the organizing principle of our entire international institutional and legal structure.

The concept of the nation even pervades the basic language of politics. Down to the word ‘international.’ A little exaggerated, but this is a truth. It’s the United Nations, after all – not the United Cultures, United Lands, United Societies, United Humanity, or even United Peoples.

That’s how radical it is to build a massive bureaucratic institution whose long-term cultural goal is pressing European societies to stop thinking of themselves as nations. 

Pursuing that kind of change is an enormous risk. You’re developing whole new political and legal institutions that have never really been tried before. The comprehensiveness and physical scale of European Union institutions and reach had no precedent in human history. 

Something that risky is always in danger of collapsing for some unforeseen reason or some terrible crisis. I feel like the European Union had become such a huge and powerful economic force that, popularly, we didn’t really believe it could fail. But it’s only a few decades old, and the Brexit vote just happened a few months ago.

It may take several tries to get an institution like the EU to work. And from a perspective like Robert Kagan’s, it’s ridiculous to try. 

Geert Wilders, one of the most ridiculous-looking
examples of the sneering face of European nationalism's
last primal horrifying scream. I like to mock them as
much as I can, to remind me that Nazis are human.

Kagan made a fundamental challenge to the viability of the European Union and the standard European approach to global politics as institutional and legal. Europeans can only pursue their experiments in international institutions and build their foreign policy around international law, because they were weak. Most importantly, they were weak and had a protector.

Kagan saw a world where, in international relations, states and militaries were the ultimate power. Your city may be a global economic hub, but it won’t be for much longer after our army pounds it to rubble and kills millions of your people. 

Accepting that brutality makes the foreign policy school of realism deserve its name. It’s a political philosophy that’s literally throwing up your hands and damning the world to hell. It accepts that there is nothing anyone can do to make the world more peaceful or just. 

If you want to build peaceful institutions in your own corner of the world, you need an ally with a massive army to protect you from the other massive armies that will inevitably destroy you. And at least temporarily, that may be necessary.

Because the experiments don’t always work. If anything has broken the EU, for example, it’s that the migrant crisis came too soon. Europe was in the middle of dealing with a reactionary nationalist insurrection – the last screams of the old national order. Leaders like Jorg Haider, Pim Fortuyn, Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban, Geert Wilders, and Beata Szydlo. 

Too many people still believed in the nation to forget about defending its ethnic and territorial integrity from a wave of suffering people. 

Maybe if European society had managed to weather one more generation without disruption, they’d have helped enough people think without nationhood. 

Experiments are fragile, and they need to be protected. The most valuable experiments are the ones that are hardest to protect, political experiments. But if the experiment is successful, they won’t need protection anymore. No one would.

Memories of an Anniversary, A History Boy, 12/09/2016

This one is about September 11 and its strange mythology. The event doesn’t even really seem to exist in the American collective social memory, as far as I can tell. Yes, we talk about it. The ceremonies are there. But a real reckoning with that horrifying day and its meaning remain absent from our society. At least on the aggregate level.

September 11 is an erased presence, constantly hovering in the American cultural psyche, but never directly confronted. 

I don't know that any one day’s events have been so traumatizing to American (and wider Western) society in generations. Pearl Harbour is, I think, comparable, but it doesn’t have the same international resonance as the social-psychological horror-blast of the World Trade Center’s destruction.

When Pearl Harbour was bombed, most of the world was already at war – continental Europe under Nazi German occupation, China and southeast Asia under the boots of the Japanese Empire. The rest of the world’s trauma was ongoing.

September 11’s trauma was not just through the shock and surreality of the event itself – the crumbling towers and dust overcoming ordinary peaceful Manhattan – but the immediately visibility of the event around the world through our media. Hundreds of millions of people saw the towers fall as it happened.

But the American people were traumatized most of all – it was an attack on their country. I remember the shock and horror of the event, but I remained a little separate from it. The attacks happened to my neighbour. However close America and Canada may be in many ways, I am not an American.

Rudy Giuliani and George W Bush at Ground Zero,
overseeing rescue and recovery efforts after the
September 11 attacks.

Americans have the most to work through and confront in themselves and their own culture about what that mass trauma did to them. Yet Americans have done the least reflection on the cultural soul that was scarred so deeply 15 years ago. 

In the immediate aftermath, Americans turned to revenge – the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the war on Al Qaeda was a matter of retribution to them. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the administration then used the hunt for Al Qaeda and its allies into an excuse to pursue the invasion of Iraq.

That war in Iraq was motivated by neoconservative dreams of an American military empire, and the belief in the necessity of an American war machine to guarantee the freedom of their allies, or the perverse utopian dreams of Project for a New American Century that a mass-scale military invasion could install a thriving democratic political culture.

Yet that war was little more than an orgy of violence – prisoner abuse; the use of white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah, where thousands of civilians were burned alive and its pollution continues to ruin lives with birth defects and kill with cancer; the constant brutality of the American mercenary armies. 

Through all the Bush years, America as a wide culture turned away from reckoning with the damage September 11 caused the national psyche.

That looked to change with the prospect of the Obama Presidency. But the Republican Party quickly turned from its defeat into ignorance of their leadership’s horrifying blunders and intentions. 

They instead turned to a single-minded dedication – vilify, delegitimize, and destroy Barack Obama no matter the cost. By doubling down on the racist opposition to the Obama Presidency – the popular attitude among a vocal minority of Americans that a black President was inherently illegitimate because of his blackness – Republicans saw a route to electoral victory.

The Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, when US-
employed mercenaries at Blackwater killed 17 and
wounded 20 after starting a shootout when they saw
a woman and her son driving a car suspiciously. Just an
average day in the American occupation.

So instead of turning the collective conversation of American conservatism to grow from the mistakes and horrors of the Bush years, that whole society of conservative America turned to an aggressive campaign against Obama.

That turn in conservative America has now become an aggressive campaign of white nationalism. The Republican Party, having embraced racially motivated hatred of Obama to regain state power, facilitated the rise of Donald Trump to the Presidency. 

Ironically, it will be the staunchly America First Republican party who installs a stooge of Vladimir Putin in the White House as they embrace the white nationalism of Trump and the alt-right. 

Trump’s campaign has been run by pro-Putin political consultant Paul Manafort (still an influential foreign policy voice, though he was forced out of his campaign leadership role). His aggressive white nationalist agenda is the American equivalent of the Russian white nationalism that Putin’s foreign policy encourages to undermine democratic governments and movements in former Soviet Bloc states. 

One of their major funders is Peter Thiel, the immortality-obsessed oligarch who has worked for years – with growing success – to destroy a free press, and who declared democracy incompatible with freedom. 

Trump’s campaign is likely using former FOX News head Roger Ailes’ dossier of damaging info on many influential media figures to strongarm them into favourable coverage. Meanwhile, his campaign manager Steve Bannon runs the white nationalist news site Brietbart, which has cultivated the alt-right and its online bullying culture to explode onto mainstream America.

Trump launches his campaign to become President. The
most infamous escalator ride in history.

In all of this is a refusal. The refusal to consider what September 11 did to American culture and self-consciousness. It culminated in what I consider one of the most revealing moments of madness the Trump campaign has produced.

This August, Rudy Giuliani said in a live media interview that there had been no radical Islamist terror attacks in the United States before the Obama Presidency. Giuliani had been mayor of New York City on September 11, and worked with President George W Bush at the Ground Zero site. 

While the context of Giuliani’s interview made it clear that he was referring to the years under the Bush Presidency after the World Trade Center attacks, the message was still an erasure. 

September 11 became something to be avoided, fought against, a matter of pain and fear. All the ceremonies and anniversary solemnity can’t achieve a genuine reckoning with its meaning. What matters is that there must never be another September 11, that the event inspire fear of its repetition. 

The fear and hatred American politics has used September 11 to build has erased the event’s own meaning and significance. America is still trembling even as the culture believes itself strong and growing stronger. Americans’ refusal to face the terror of that day in its fullness has seen them embrace the politics of perpetuating terror themselves. 

As I’ve grown from age 18 to now, that descent is what I’ve seen of America. And it terrifies me.

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