Desire Creates Us, A History Boy, 16/10/2016

I'm one of those people who always reads a bunch of books at the same time. A little while ago, I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I came to the book in a very simple way, but came to the author in a bit of a roundabout path.

Not the cover of my edition, but I think it's my
favourite. The smoke is the sign of the productive
energy that unites the steamship that united the
narrator's grandparents, the city where she
lived, and the relationship that helped her
fully understand his identity and nature.

Turning From Small Worlds

Eugenides is typically lumped in with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen – sensitive white male chroniclers of the angst and narratives of the suburban American culture heading for an existential crisis through the 1990s and early 2000s. 

They were the most prominent writers in a clique of American authors that were called a coherent cohort in New York Magazine in 2011, their society and wider meaning unified by in how their culture made sense of Wallace’s suicide a few years earlier. 

Eugenides never had much meaning to me when I first discovered these writers. I bought Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest practically by impulse in a mall bookstore when I was 16. 

When I first read it, I was overwhelmed, bowled over by the massive scope of his literary creation, which was wedded to a narrow focus on his characters’ deep, personal, singular pain. I’d later think of Wallace as prefiguring the drive to sincerity. That cultural drive jacked up seriously after Sept 11, as the ironic reflexes of late 20th century popular culture* weren’t adequate to process America’s intense societal trauma.

* Key example: the cool, smirking, distance of authors like Thomas Pynchon from the interiors of his characters, the postmodern focus on technical and formal experimentation, characters as plays of tropes and pure ideas instead of personalities.

I grew tired over the last decade of both postmodern experimentation and the insular interiority of the Wallace-influenced approach. The deal on Wallace was sealed when I read D. T. Max’s biography of him last year – Wallace spent his life tortured by mental illness, frequently unable to escape his own head and most often a mess. 

His characters fell into such deep and detailed pits of interiority in their depression because that was the arc that kept repeating in Wallace’s own life. His research on settings would be comprehensive. I was especially impressed by how much he learned about tax accountancy for The Pale King, but the story was always the same. A subject's fall into their own sadness. Usually never to emerge.

Eugenides has become my favourite of that cohort of
white novelists of the midwestern suburban
American subjective interior. He breaks their
crushing sameness.

I felt the same about Franzen's work, except on a social level. Wallace and Franzen had convinced me that this crew of writers couldn’t escape their heads and their own, socially isolated worlds. The precious interiority of the middle and upper class white American male of the mid-sized town.

Writing Difference – Imagination at Last!

That article I linked earlier, describing Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as an adaptation of the sick relationship Wallace developed with Mary Karr, made me think he was little different than the others. But with a little reflection, I thought differently.

I remembered The Virgin Suicides. Not the book itself, which I still haven’t read, but the film. I often thought of it primarily as a Sofia Coppola film – her personality was all over the film. But so much of Eugenides’ narrative voice survived her adaptation. Literally, in the film's narration.

That voice expressed a mind that sought to understand difference. The Virgin Suicides could sound like a journey that never leaves a skull at first sight, because it remains the voice of the boys who followed the Lisbon girls. Boys who follow girls. Say it, and you can hear how easily it can fall into the unseemly.

Yet the voice in that film preserved the love that always disappeared from the true solipsists. Wallace’s writing never escaped the black pits, though he depicted the abyss brilliantly. Whenever I try to read Franzen, I have to stop for the choking odour of mothballs. Eugenides seemed different.

The Virgin Suicides was an attempt to narrate the radically different from the outside. That little boys’ choir narrator wanted to explore this world that was so close to their own, but diverged so radically. 

The steel oppression of social conservatism, even for such a basic, insular neighbourhood society as theirs – and the silent howls of pain as they clawed into a familial coffin – the desperation of the realization that an actual coffin is the only escape. 

A story of the relentless drive of love to uncover an alien neighbour.
The film is a masterpiece you can never watch twice, its violent
sadness overcomes your guts.

The entire narrative was an exercise in the refusal to understand what’s different from you on your own terms. The beginning of the ethical imagination that I know now is the purpose of art. If that was Eugenides’ first novel, then how far would he go afterward?

Thousands of Stories in Each of Us

So one day, I saw Middlesex on sale for $1 at a United Way fundraiser table at my local liquor store. The story and its narrator intrigued me – a young girl grows up in 1960s and becomes a man after realizing that she’s intersex with interior testes. And it also flowed through the story of hir grandparents fleeing war in Greek Turkey to settle in Detroit.

After I bought the book, I looked through reviews. Some of the negative reviews thought that a novel was too unwieldy to contain a Greek immigrant story and an intersex awakening story at the same time. 

But that overstuffed excess of narrative was a selling point for me – real life is always intersectional. Every actual person has multiple heritages and stories within them. I look among my own old and new friends in Toronto for examples. 

A young artist leaves the “new world” for the country of his parents’ birth and sees it undergoing a renaissance, while he also works through the complex heritage of a deceased parent and another whose work sometimes exposes him to the poorest of the poor.

In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
write that they wrote the book together and each of them were several
people themselves already. It made their room very crowded. Each of
us is just as crowded as they were.

A woman climbs out of poverty while also growing distant from her earlier religious awakening thanks to hypocrisies in the community, grows alienated from family, and lives through the tension of her own trauma and the mental health issues of her partner.

A man finds financial success and builds a new multicultural family while living the precarious neighbourhoods of a gentrifying city.

A man leaves a dictatorship for a democracy, where he finds love. Only a few years later, he finds himself at the forefront of activism to democratize his old country and bring victims of war to safe shores.

All these overflow the simple narratives that a straightforward literary treatment would make of them. That’s life. It’s what art should depict – the beautiful excess and diversity of human life on its own terms. 

Desire Creates Us From Sludge and Rock

The Greek-American immigrant story of Middlesex blends with the intersex-awakening story of Middlesex even better than simply through an embrace of life’s excessive meaning. I’d actually call it a very Deleuzian book (some relative spoilers coming, though, maybe, depending on your definition).

At many times in the book, Eugenides’ narrator describes himself and his family as assemblages. Particularly, assemblages of genes, phenotypes, hormones, and proteins. We’re chemical as well as psychological and narrative. That doesn’t detract from our humanity – it's part of what constitutes humanity.

Life is physical, an assemblage of forces, imperatives, and tendencies. They all run actively under our intentions and personalities, shaping who we are. We aren’t passive before them, because we’re the actors of our own desire. But those drives and forces, channelled through the personalities they constitute, become desire.

Eugenides depicts a Detroit that becomes a vibrant centre of industry
and a hollowed-out husk within a generation. The Detroit that really
exists. This is Central Michigan Railway Station, abandoned to rot
by 1988.

That's the desire that the narrator’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty have for each other. Their desire is the vehicle for the proliferation of intersex people, in the deep physicality of their metabolisms and cell nuclei. Their intense sexual desire and deep love for each other drives them to their incestuous marriage. 

It’s kept secret from everyone around them because they’re the only survivors of their home village, destroyed by the nationalist Turkish army. That same desire appears in their son Milton, who seduces his cousin by playing clarinet against her skin. Jazz has rarely been so properly erotic. 

The narrator, faced with the prospect of genital surgery that would destroy her capacity for pleasure, flees and begins living as a man. He’s already been awakened to sexuality through falling in love with a female classmate, and understands that his nature can’t fit in the strict definitions of life in mid 20th century middle America.

That’s another beautiful line of Eugenides’ story – the tension of real human difference with the conservative determination for simplicity and conformity. That’s another way that the immigrant and intersex stories blend together. 

The grandparents flee massacre by a nationalist army – their city Smyrna is burned to the ground and rebuilt as Turkish Izmir. Lefty faces constant company propaganda to abandon his Greek culture and assimilate to WASP Americanism while working at Ford Motors. Desdemona runs an indoor silk farm for a clothing business of the early Nation of Islam.

They give birth to a son who joins the army, takes over his dad’s restaurant, becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and moves his family out to the suburbs when too many blacks settle his neighbourhood. Then that son has a precocious little daughter who grows into a young man by age 15. Every drive to conformity and conservatism is ultimately shot to hell by life itself.

Humans are constructs of desire – made from forces that are prior to our individualities, and always roil beneath our identities and everyday thoughts. That desire pushes us in singular directions, uniquenesses that can’t be tied down to a single code or conform to a unified nature. No matter how much you might believe in the morality that says you must.

That's the story of Eugenides’ Middlesex. Depicting such singular existence is the point of art.

Obsolete Democracy IV: Democracy in Motion, Composing, 15/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . After a very difficult week (and in the face of what could be an even more difficult week starting in a few days), I want to get a moment of real creativity on this blog. After about three years of research on it, I’m about ready to say for sure what the outline of the third part of Utopias will be.

Yesterday, I asked a question that I’ll say, provisionally, is the central question of any democratic thinking. What kind of community is ideal for human life? In that post, I gave a list of examples of how nationalism and ideas of nationhood stand in the way of realizing that ideal.

A protestor at a Trump rally speaks a democracy that blows up
borders and nationhood.

But the ideal itself is pretty simple. An ideal human community is a place where we can all be free to live as we wish and live with dignity. 

This isn’t a tough question. Yet very rarely can any of our political leaders say that this is the goal of democracy, let alone build policies to push our communities in that direction.

Utopias is going to be a very weird book, but I hope it’ll also be fun. Fun in that model of a thought puzzle. A work of philosophy that’s also a game. And the conclusion of the game will be a justification of enlightenment, a way of thinking about society that’s both the ideal and the next step forward in our democratic tradition. Integrating the democratic tradition with a wider metaphysics and history of human becoming itself.

It’ll be some heavy shit.

So here’s basically how it looks. That last section anyway, flowing from a conclusion that nationalism and the very concepts of nation and nationhood now stand in the way of human freedom. The nation was once a vehicle of freedom, but it’s made itself obsolete today. 

Historical influences will come from the radical democratic tradition. Some of them were communists back in the day, but I'm no communist. That's another obsolete idea – an impossibility in a globalized world. 

Start with the ideals of Mikhail Bakunin – that free people must govern themselves, and live under no kings, dictators, or oligarchs, whether they achieve their power through state control or riches. And yes, one important ideal of Karl Marx – that a wage slave is still a slave, that exhaustion merely for a knife-edge escape from poverty is still a raw deal.

A lesson from Emma Goldman – that civic freedoms are useless if you're too poor or otherwise disadvantaged to have any material freedom of choice in your life. Or the words of Antonio Gramsci – that activists can’t trust the global-level conditions of the world to induce change for the better. Building a better community is a shared project.

Once a long-standing bastion of fascist nationalism in Europe, Spain
is now the home of a thriving radical democratic movement of the
left. Hope never dies as long as there's life.

That shared project needs communication, platform-building, common spaces of conversation, public relations and lobbying. All the means of marshalling and organizing social forces so powerful that they can't be ignored. 

And contemporary influences. Antonio Negri’s theories of globalization* demonstrate that the real progressive path is to finish embracing a global society, not shutting it down just because only the few wealthy have benefited so far. Jacques Rancière’s fiery critiques of those who think civic nationalism and legitimate state authority is all a democracy needs. The deceptively steely pragmatism of Etienne Balibar. And most importantly, the insight into the nature and ease of human terror that Hannah Arendt brought to us through her books on totalitarianism and democracy – the social wills to uniformity and diversity.

* And his philosophies of time will be pretty important to developing the ideas in the first half of Utopias too.

Two thinkers that I think I should still draw on from that Western liberatory tradition are Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who integrated their philosophical thinking with the progressive and idealist social movements of Europe.

Thinkers from outside the Western sphere will be needed too, though I’m only at the beginning of this research. There’s the classics like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, of course. But also Partha Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, Pheng Cheah, and indigenous thinkers like Wab Kinew and Glen Sean Coulthard.

The picture isn’t complete by far and it isn’t meant to be. But Utopias will be my own contribution to what Mouffe calls the radicalization of democracy – visions of human society that reconcile civic and material freedoms, where people can live as they wish in communities of strong bonds and vibrant, singular differences.

Where human creativity keeps driving ourselves forward – new ways of life, new thoughts, new societies. Always adapting to changing times and worlds, and changing those worlds as we act. Social becoming. Democracy in motion.

Obsolete Democracy III: Must You Be a Nation? Composing, 14/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . Here's what I've been trying to figure out for the last few days of thinking about Partha Chatterjee’s thoughts about “political society.” What kinds of words will we use to talk about communities that unify in state institutions, but maintain and grow their differences without the unity of nationhood?

To state the problem as a paradox – How can you have a nation without nationhood? A nation of many nationalities?

I don’t want to keep talking in paradoxes, though. That’s what kept Derrida from being read seriously by thousands of overly-rational Anglos, and what spawned way too many genuinely obscurantist writers who thought they were being deep.

I've spent a lot of different posts on this blog thinking about the allure of nationalism – what about its nature seduces people into some of the most horrifying violence of humanity’s last few centuries. 

This was the image that contributed heavily to killing France's short-lived
ban on the burkini – modest swimwear marketed largely to Muslim
women. It's the image of state authority forcing a citizen to strip in
public because of her choice of clothing. This act was done in the name
of defending France's democratic tradition of civil secularism. Yes,
this is an extremely democratic activity.

The core of Utopias is a philosophy of community. How do we build a community that can become a true democracy? A place where people can be as free as possible to do what they want with their lives. 

When we look at nationalism today, we see horrid results. Barbed wire fences strung along the length of a country’s entire border to keep migrants and war refugees out. Migrant detention camps on isolated islands lock people in hideous conditions – even as they flee military regimes and ecological disasters. 

And on my own continent, we have Donald Trump, his ultra-nationalist followers, and the pale imitations of his white supremacist politics creeping even into Canada’s Conservative party. 

One of the most grotesque displays of nationalism I think I’ve seen this year is the militant defence of the French national concept of laïcité – enforcing secularism on a Muslim minority to the point of stripping headscarves and other modest garments from them in public. 

The real motives and actions of hijab-wearing women make no difference when national unity appears at stake. In the French case, this is why Jacques Rancière wrote in Hatred of Democracy that there's little essential difference between ultra-nationalists like Marine Le Pen and liberal internationalists like Bernard Henri-Levy. 

So what do these different nationalist expressions reveal about nationalism? Let’s take it by each example. 

When the Hungarian government builds fences along its borders to keep Syrians out, or Trump dreams of his Great Wall Paid By Mexico. This is a vision of the nation that includes its citizens by excluding others. The nation as defined by the boundary, the border. In or out.

When the Australians lock migrants in indefinite detention, in the hells of their camps on isolated islands like Nauru. The petition for citizenship, to join a community, becomes itself a crime. 

To come from one community – no matter its hardship, suffering, or disastrous existence – and ask for the brotherhood or a new community. It’s such an affront to the petitioned community’s sense of decency and right that the petitioners are dehumanized, their persecution, imprisonment, and suffering legitimized. 

When a country like France or Quebec demands cultural uniformity from its citizens – Muslim women have their hijabs stripped off, or synagogues are pelted with porkchops. Nationhood becomes a template for each member’s personality. Conformity is valued above creativity, self-expression, and difference. Nationhood assaults democracy.

If we let these ideas – borders and exclusion, criminalizing petitions for brotherhood, and cultural conformity – define our nation, then nationhood and democracy really do seem incompatible. To have a nation without nationhood truly becomes a paradox. 

Chatterjee's examples show that our countries and communities don’t have to be this way. So why do so many of us think they do? And what would this democratic nationhood look like? . . . To Be Continued

How Much Is On Me? Occupational Therapy, 13/10/2016

Well, that turned into a much longer break than I’d planned. Originally, I was planning to throw up the third post in that "Obsolete Democracy” series last Friday, take the Thanksgiving weekend off for a gathering with friends in St Catharine’s, then finish it with a fourth entry yesterday. 

Instead, those are going to come tomorrow and Friday, after a delay of nearly a week. 

I'm going to be honest on this space – it was the result of another mental health crisis. A panic attack whose repercussions I’m still dealing with. In my own person, in my relationship with my partner, and at my work. 

It’s been difficult to reorient myself, and income insecurity continues to gnaw at me whenever I think about it for too long. Which is unfortunate, because I need to think about it if I’m going to solve it.

What’s helping, is that I’m getting myself accustomed to some mild anti-anxiety medications – though finding the optimal dosage is probably going to take a while. Another thing that’s helping – if slowly – is my cognitive behavioural therapy sessions.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;

Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

And I’ve been reaching out to some old friends. Not just friends in general, but friends who’ve had experience with depression and mental health problems. And friends who’ve been more successful at the post-doctoral career transition than I’ve been so far.

My current mental health issues are the product of a career transition that’s honestly been rougher than I had always planned. Soon after my teaching opportunities dried up, I realized that I had fewer resources than I originally thought for my Plan B outside the university sector. And despite my investments in retraining, a corporate or public sector career hasn’t really taken off.

Several parts of my life are going well – my research, writing and publishing, and film festival work. But none of those are actually making me any money at this point, and those financial worries have compounded over the years. That kind of constant stress doesn’t do nice things to a person’s mind.

The blog is called Adam Riggio Writes. And I do. But even though Adam Riggio Makes a Decent Salary wouldn’t be as interesting to read about, it’s something that I’ve wanted for quite some time. And for the last four years, it just hasn’t come together. 

So the years of stress, worries, missed opportunities, failed chances have all added up. The result is a powerful sense of shame, and all the feelings of worthlessness that implies. 

Shame that my first chosen career, the one that I dedicated my 20s to training for, the one to which I devoted myself to the detriment of a lot of other aspects of a well-rounded life, fell apart. Shame that I’m nearly 34 and still hustling to get a career and financial solvency together. Shame that I'm a failure. A non-starter. Shame at my own economic impotence. Shame at messing up. Shame that I’m ashamed instead of being an optimistic go-getter who gets results.

And always the worries that there is only so much time. That the more time I spend struggling, the more like a perpetual failure and a loser I'll appear to more and more hiring committees and human resources evaluators. The continual message from my therapist is that I must focus on what's in my power to change. 

But the forces and decisions that make the biggest impact on all our lives lie beyond our powers. That's the source of my fear, stress, and anxiety. Worse is that others all too often judge our character as if those forces and decisions were in our control. We're blamed for them. Attempts to name them as beyond our control are written off as 'avoiding responsibility.' And we feel ashamed.

I know it can get better, that there are plenty of opportunities that I can still take hold of, if I can find them. But I also know that life rarely feels that way anymore. 

And I worry that being honest about my mental health struggles will alienate me, and drive away possible opportunities. “Why would I want to work with someone who has to take anxiety pills? Who has these mental health problems? Who admits to feeling stress and lacking constant confidence?” Everyone who suffers from any mental health issue is afraid of that.

And I’m sick of being afraid.

Obsolete Democracy II: The Origin of Most Welfare States, Research Time, 06/10/2016

Earlier this week before our interruption to yell at people about the Syrian war, I ended on a question about the dangers democracy may face in the post-colonial world.

“So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.
"If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued”

A lot of the states in the world that used to be imperialist colonies inherited institutions that were generally geared toward two activities. One was delivering services. The other was dividing up the population into categories and classes based on what services they’d receive.

Now in the time when these institutions were run by a bunch of racist Europeans, the population was usually divided to stir up resentment and hatreds, prevent them from forming social links strong enough to overthrow the empire.

Movies are sometimes the only ways most Westerners learn anything
about another culture, especially Asian ones. You don't exactly get a
lot of detail in between the Bollywood tropes.

So colonial states were built to discourage and break apart any civic nationalist solidarity before it could even form. That’s good management from an imperialist’s sense. That way, the population will be less likely to organize themselves to kick you out of their country. 

Once all the colonial empires did get kicked out of those countries, there was a bit of a dilemma. Here we had a state institution all ready to run, but it was built to segment the population into separate groups and treat them totally differently.

Remove the divide-and-conquer motivation from the state institutions,* but keep an administration that minutely identifies different classes in a population by need and situation. What you have left after that is a quality welfare state. 

* And not all of them did, to their horrifying detriment usually.

And this kind of welfare state ends up with a curious form of politics attached to it. The politics of community lobbying. 

Think back to the example of Kolkata’s Railway Gate shantytown in Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. They're able to maintain their existence as a thriving community of poor people on the side of the tracks because they formed a leadership group.

The People’s Welfare Association organizes to lobby for government services and coordinate how they’re distributed. And they rarely meet with elected officials. They meet with the administration officials and workers who actually get work done.

The shantytown and its concerns are on such a small scale compared to the entire city of Kolkata that municipal representatives don’t have the remit to deal with it. Let alone elected officials in any higher level of the Indian government. So they deal directly with government administrative workers.

Men hoping to join India's civil service line up expectantly. According
to Chatterjee, they're important organs of Indian democracy. I think
he's on to something really interesting here.

Civil servants. They have their welfare budgets and can largely direct it as their offices see fit. So if you’re a small-scale self-organized group like the Railway Gate shantytown, you can get the most effective results from your lobbying efforts. The officials give out the money and the services.

This is the kind of democracy that exists in a lot of post-colonial countries, where people are still beholden to multiple identities and solidarities, and no one national identity need take precedence. This is the democracy of community organization itself.

It preserves the desires, identities, and lifestyles of each peculiar group. And it creates solidarity within all these groups because of the social organization needed to thrive. The flow of money and goods from the general population to different communities within it helps build a social solidarity across the country that has nothing to do with the drive to conformity that comes with nationalism.

This is the ideal of what the lobbying democracy of the administrative welfare state can do. It can revive civic organization on a local, micro level to demand entitlements – the satisfaction of needs. 

Ideals are rarely achieved, of course. One obvious way this kind of democracy can corrupt itself is with literal corruption. 

The formerly democratic lobbying organization ossifies into a static office. The loyal leader of his people becomes a stodgy lifetime-appointed official himself. Lobbying for public resources for your community becomes bribery for government lucre. 

But the potential is incredible. A democratic culture of organization from the micro-level to lobby large and larger scale state institutions – there is nothing more democratic than the demand. The demand for a better life and the assistance to build one.

What happens when nationalism collides with this new kind of democracy? . . . To Be Continued

Iraq & Syria: A Spark that Lit an All-Consuming Fire, Advocate, 05/10/2016

One of my arts & advocacy projects is my work with the Syria Film Festival. This is an organization that gave me my first communications gig after I finished my business program, an internship for their public relations work.

Though Blumenthal doubts their legitimacy because of it, the White
Helmets are simultaneously humanitarians and publicists for
democratic activism. But advocacy and humanitarianism have
never been separate.

The friendships and professional relationships I’ve built in my work with SYFF have been ethically and professionally rewarding. And aside from my personal fulfillment, I’m proud to be part of an artistic and advocacy network that strives for a peaceful and free Syria – an end to the world’s most brutal ongoing war and an end to the culture and institutions of dictatorship that laid the conditions for that war.

So it burned me pretty hard to see Max Blumenthal’s recent articles floating around my social media networks. These amount to hit pieces on The Syria Campaign, a public relations firm whose focus is building support for humanitarian work in Syria – in particular, advocating on behalf of the White Helmets – and for an end to the Assad regime. 

None of these are objectively bad things. In a war – especially one as horrifying as Syria’s – humanitarian workers are needed. And the Assad regime from Hafez to Bashar has been a Stalinist totalitarian police state, organizing its institutional power along ethnic-religious sectarian lines. 

Ending that dynasty’s decades-long reign would be a chance for a new beginning. And with a population inside and outside Syria of highly educated, democratically-inclined people, that country would have a good chance of growing into an Arab democracy.

The problem is that we in the West have heard all this sort of stuff before.

Substance: Lobbying & Image-Making

Blumenthal does a fine job of tracing the links between the White Helmets, the Syria Campaign, and a variety of activist individuals and organizations who’ve worked with and drawn funds from the American government’s democracy promotion agencies like USAID, the Office of Transition Initiatives, and affiliated contractor companies like Chemonics. 

He’s found examples of individual members of White Helmet brigades who – when out of their humanitarian uniforms – have carried out terrible acts of violence. Who have tortured people who’ve been claimed to work for the Assad regime. Who have apparently picked up a gun with Al Qaeda affiliated organizations like Jabhat Al Nusra.

Seriously. You should go.

He concludes, after combing through the history of all these links, that the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are not non-partisan humanitarians but are open agitators in the Syrian war. For him, that implies that their humanitarian work is a sham, a mere “public relations” move. 

The move that leads Blumenthal to condemn the Syria Campaign, though, is their new campaign to lobby for a no-fly zone over Syria. This would require a massive military intervention to enforce. Given the current state of Assad’s alliances, this would essentially require a shooting war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation.

That’s a situation that could easily escalate into a true nuclear war. That is something we should all be afraid of. I’d dare say it’s one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t intervened in Syria. Given Putin’s aggressive stance, a more nuanced strategy is needed to stop him without provoking him into authorizing nuclear weapons use.

Between a Quagmire and a World in Flames

Leave aside all the pragmatic arguments, though I can easily make them. Most of them are obvious – the necessity to play power politics when trying to unseat a brutal totalitarian regime like Bashar al Assad’s. 

Yes, you have to lobby with powerful states that have military capabilities to cripple and destroy the regime you oppose. Public relations, building alliances, building popular support in the countries whose governments you want to enlist to your goals. 

The power of the UN is that its neutrality lets them mediate between
even the most horrible actors. I remember stories in his biography
of Sergio Vieira de Mello of how he negotiated with the Khmer
Rouge. But that neutrality is precisely why the Syria Campaign
can't get on the UN bandwagon in the war. Revolutionaries can't
be neutral in their own fight.

Public relations – done right and with an ethical conscience – is the organization of democracy. It’s mobilizing people, taking part in the marketplace of persuasion, ideas, and competing social goals. 

Yes, it’s manipulative – but even the least amount of media literacy, which is near-universal today, gives the public power over advocates. A critical eye can still defend yourself against being a patsy, and hold tight to your freedom when others want to seduce you.

Frankly, it’s easier to act entirely on your conscience when you live far from a war zone. When you do, you have to make what alliances you can to raise your chances of surviving just a little longer. It’s sanctimonious of a Western journalist like Max Blumenthal to demand total virtuousness to the point of saintliness of humanitarians who have to work in horrifying conditions.

This is at the heart of why the Syria Campaign critiques the United Nations and UNHCR for working so closely with the Assad regime. The UN has a mandate to maintain neutrality in all conflicts – it has to be a non-partisan actor because its primary role is as the mediating forum for global politics.

So UN organizations have to work with even the most distasteful regimes. They have to recognize their legitimacy, despite their violence and terror. Even when a brutal government is under siege, the UN has to work with them. And they work with the groups uprising against that government too.

All too often, that need to work with the government of the day impedes the UN’s humanitarian mission. Because the UN and the UNHCR become dependent for access to populations in need upon the very leaders who are intent on slaughtering those populations. 

That is why the Syria Campaign, along with more than 70 Syrian human rights and democracy organizations, denounced the UN’s complicity with the Assad regime. Blumenthal describes their opposition to UN strategy and operations as a sign of their corruption, their being stooges of American military interests.

The Syria Campaign makes no illusion of neutrality in the war. They’re democrats. They want Syria at peace and Assad gone. They want a democratic Syria.

Seeing Shadows

That’s at the heart of Blumenthal’s accusation toward the Syria Campaign and White Helmets: You want regime change. 

Pictured above: Not Bashar or Hafez Assad. Remember that.

For the Western left, that’s a charged phrase. A phrase with a lot of deep and terrible meanings and implications. Regime change.

Since the late 20th century, the Western left has opposed the broad ideology of the American government and the circles of think tanks and lobbying organizations that surround that institution. It kicked into gear with protests against the World Trade Organization, opposing the imposition of global economic rules and institutions running according to what we now call neoliberal austerity.

That opposition gained a military dimension in the Bush years, with the massive protest movement against the American invasion of Iraq. That time made many in the left lose our faith in the global spread of democracy.

It seems to make no sense at first. Why would the progressive left give up on democracy? 

Because we saw it delivered at the barrel of a gun, with a plan designed by a set of neoconservative think tank dorks that was barely up to the task. Within months of the American occupation of Iraq, an Al Qaeda terror campaign began in Baghdad and Anbar, while a sectarian army arose in Shia territory.

No matter how sincere Bush, Cheney, and their crew were about the power of the American army to secure a democratic Iraq – and I have no doubt that they were truly sincere – all they achieved was six years of barely organized violence by the national army and rapacious piracy from leagues of mercenaries.

Through it all ran the not-very-secret word: regime change. The original American plan for Iraq was to install the exiled liberal party of Ahmed Chalabi as the democratically elected ruler of Iraq. Much of the faulty and false intelligence that the Bush Administration used to justify their invasion was supplied by Chalabi’s group and their affiliate lobbying organizations.

When Max Blumenthal looks at Syria, he sees Iraq.

In Syria, the revolution is televised. And ongoing.

It Began With Revolution

That’s why he denounces the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets as stooges for American military expansion and a new invasion of the Middle East. He sees public relations and media lobbying – its methods updated for the online media universe – as more of the same manipulation from liberal autocrats like Chalabi.

He sees the Syria Campaign and other activists calling out the United Nations for their complicity with the Assad regime as a new version of Bush’s railroading of the UN in 2002. A repetition of the old dismissal of the legitimacy of the grounding institution of all international law.

He paints Bashar Assad as the legal and tolerable – if horrid and distasteful – rightful leader of Syria, under siege from a superpower desperate to prevent its military decline. Just as Saddam Hussein was, the totalitarian bugbear of American neoconservatism.

But Syria in 2016 isn’t Iraq in 2002. Syria has already been embroiled in a civil war for years that began in a revolution against Assad’s regime. Blumenthal erases the will of millions of Syria’s people, seeing only public relations firms and shadowy manipulations of empire-minded deep organs of American government.

If you’re going to criticize American military intervention, there are plenty of ways to do it. Mostly because their efforts tend to self-destruct and fall apart through mismanagement. Or they’ll be out-maneuvered by a more ruthless Vladimir Putin, who isn’t squeamish about dropping bunker buster bombs on schools and hospitals.

Don’t forget that the unfolding violence of Syria’s war began – and continues – a revolution against a totalitarian tyrant. In a way, that’s quite an American story. It’s certainly a democratic one.

Obsolete Democracy I: The Post-National Nation, Research Time, 04/10/2016

Here’s an idea that isn’t said nearly often enough in North America’s political discussions as it should. It comes from Partha Chatterjee’s observations about the kind of social organizing that he calls ‘political society.’

It’s an insight that cuts to the heart of several of the stark, intense divisions among political activists of the left and right in the West today. That explodes our usual ideas about legitimacy, the rights of citizens, and the responsibilities of government. 

India's Parliament building

We’ve become so democratic in the 20th century that we’ve undercut the original foundation of democracy itself.

Let me explain. The original conception of democracy was literally that all the citizens of a community would gather together in an assembly to decide on the actions for the government. All the citizens would lead the community as a team.

That was no longer possible in the democratic structures of the nation-state with its massive territory. But we could do the same kind of deliberative leadership in representative assemblies. A few hundred or so people elected to represent citizens in different regions of the country.

We could still tell ourselves that representation and transparent deliberations in parliament brought the real concerns of all the citizens to the decision-making table. 

The argument’s been made that this representation was always a sham – that’s one of Antonio Negri’s major messages. But whether representation could ever actually bring the wills of thousands to a single room, we believed it.

And democratic assemblies did carry out these functions. Political parties represented genuinely different philosophies of how the state should act, and they presented themselves to the public as standard bearers of ideologies. They were the bearers of conversations about our direction as a society.

This is still how the civil state works, but it isn’t the only function of government anymore. The government has taken on so many more responsibilities, because one of the goals of politics has become general human uplift. We can no longer let the very poor remain poor. And that demand carries over to our government.

The government is no longer only about the philosophical direction of our community as a whole. It’s about human welfare. 

India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, in session

Libertarian political thinking today is defined by their opposition to this. It’s the ideal behind any right-wing political philosophy that focusses on restoring small government. The only legitimate function of government is the civic function: the discourse, the venue that unites a diverse set of populations into a nation.

Us Westerners, we take that civic function as the essence of the nation-state, the primary purpose of state institutions. Largely, that’s a historical matter. For a long time, I’ve thought most concepts of the essential in political thinking were actually historical contingencies. 

That’s because I think of pretty much all human existence as historical contingency. Even facts that are universal to humanity are historical contingencies – you just have to expand your view of history to periods of millions of years instead of a few hundred or thousand.

But reading Chatterjee calls to mind another reason for the historical contingency of our institutions’ primary responsibilities. That’s the real historical foundation and creation of many modern states. 

The institutions and purposes of forging civic national union were grafted on to existing frameworks that were entirely administrative. The people who ruled India for the 200 years before its emergence as a contemporary nation-state* had no interest in encouraging a common feeling and concept of civic nationalism across the country.

* In the post-colonial world, the term now has to have a very loose application.

Those rulers were the British. You don’t want your dependent colony to have a common sense of civic nationalism – that causes revolution. 

So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.

If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued