An occupier does not have the right to use arms in “self-defence”.
Is the mass slaughter of civilians self-defence? Every person has the right to life and to self-defence, but Israel’s “right to self-defence” is constantly being used to obfuscate the non-defensive nature of it’s military violence in Palestinian territory. Israel’s self-defence is a lie, not just because their actions are not defensive but because Israel cannot legally use its military in self-defence against Palestinians. Let me repeat that, Israel cannot legally use its military against Palestinians in self-defence. That is the big lie at the heart of the current horrors
There are four reasons why Israel cannot cite a legal right to self defence in response to Palestinian violence. First and foremost is that the ability of a very strong military power to achieve anything defensive by the attrition of a much weaker military power is spurious and leads into the genocidal logic of attempting to deprive a people of all capacity for violence.
The second reason is that Israel is actively contravening UN Security Council resolutions and the UN Charter is very clear on the fact that the right to self-defence exists “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” A state that works to thwart UNSC measures to maintain peace and security cannot logically be extended the unimpaired right to self defence.
On the third count Israel is an occupying power and the occupied have a legal right to armed resistance. It would be nonsensical to accord a legal right to use arms to defend against another’s legal resistance. Fourthly, it would be equally paradoxical to allow each party to act in self-defence against each other’s acts of self defence. Thus one of the parties must be the aggressor. On several counts, not least its defiance of UNSC resolutions, Israel must be considered the aggressor.
Israel’s only legitimate way of defending itself begins with ending its occupation. Israelis have a right to life and they deserve peace and security as we all do, but they have no right to kill Palestinians and claim that they are pursuing those things.
Before tackling the specifics we should question the general validity of military violence as a form of self-defence. At this time hundreds of people are killed by Israel every day under the pretext of seeking to render Hamas 100% ineffective. This is a tacit claim of self-defence linked to the notion that Hamas is an ongoing source of potential violence to Israelis. However it is hard to reconcile this rationale with the actualities when one sees a parade of children’s corpses. One body after another with the increasingly familiar pall of concrete dust on their lifeless faces. Thinking of all of that pain, fear and suffering should make it impossible to somehow see killing those children as an act of self-defence. The human instinct to reject this monstrosity is not mere sentimentality. It would be impossible to make a sound detailed argument to show how the killing of any one of these children contributed materially to the increased security of Israelis. In truth it is far easier to argue that each dead Palestinian child makes Israeli people less secure.
Israel relies on broad and vague notions of “self-defence” to enact mass violence that does nothing to make any person safer and, in fact, is certain to cost the lives of many Israel personnel and any number of hostages. Military violence can only achieve so much as no amount of attrition will deprive a people of all ability to commit violence in return short of extermination. Beyond a point violence becomes waged “not merely against states and their armies but against peoples.” These were the words that Raphäel Lemkin when he first described the concept of genocide. Military violence can be used in ways that can only be called “self-defence” through the logic of genocide that situates the threat within the people and their intrinsic capacity for violence (also known as resistance). This is not legitimate self-defence, yet it is clearly part of the racist thinking of some Israelis and their apologists elsewhere.
It is actually normal that the logic of genocide presents itself as self-defence. Consider this quote by Arnon Soffer, the pre-eminent alarmist in Israel over the “demographic” threat of Palestinians:
“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today … The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day … the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.” This is the reasoning of someone who has no concern for military power, who will never accept Israel’s overwhelming military might and nuclear deterrent as a sufficient lever ensure that Israel can be secure in a time of peace. These words are shockingly Himmleresque in labelling a people animals; in stating that mass killing is neither choice nor desire, but necessity; and in the sickening concern that mass killing might cause psychological harm to Israeli personnel. Adolf Eichmann and others at the Wannsee Conference shared Himmler’s fear of the effect of killing on the murderers and it was a major consideration in their adoption of the “Final Solution” which industrialised the mass-murder of Jews.
Soffer later explained: “I didn’t recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we’ll have to kill them. I was right about mounting demographic pressures. I am also entitled to defend myself and my country.” It is difficult to imagine any Israeli getting closer to Nazi rhetoric than this, but it says something that his ideas were not immediately denounced by everyone in Israel for what they are. This is the essence of genocide. Though referencing the circumstances in Gaza, he is openly saying that Palestinians must be killed because they are Palestinians.
In contrast to genocidal notions, the theory behind using military power in self-defence draws on the idea that warfare is a contestation of belligerents using violence in a manner, as Clausewitz suggested, of wrestlers: “Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will….” This begins from the presupposition that each belligerent has diametrically opposed aims, which might have sufficed in the 19th Century, but does not suit our more complex polities today.
In reality, war is not a chess game and killing babies is not in any way the same as taking a pawn from the board, yet the use of aerial and ground artillery on populated areas implies that this brutal madness makes sense. We are tricked by the notion that the “self-defence” of nations is truly analogous to the self-defence of an individual using a weapon to counter an assailant. That analogy breaks down in an era of high-tech weaponry and in circumstances of asymmetry where the strong are killing the weak. Leaders and pundits often twist the notion of asymmetry itself to suggest that the strong are more vulnerable to the weak and are thus the real victims, but this is just one of those lies that are repeated so constantly that it becomes a commonplace.
Despite the clear disproportionate asymmetry of violence and the ever-growing numbers of people killed by Israel the media discourse enforces a framework that decontextualises Israeli violence, presenting it as a reaction to the violence of Hamas. Pro-Palestinian and pro-peace interviewees on Western media cannot speak without first making pronouncements affirming that they condemn Hamas’ “terrorist” violence and affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself”. These statements function as “thought-terminating clichés”, though in such instances they might be more aptly called “thought-terminating pieties”. Pieties go beyond mere clichés to invoke moralistic religious, patriotic, or other emotive ideological beliefs that create both a dominant sentiment as well as a constrictive framework of discourse. They close off certain avenues of speech, so that those who speak for Palestinians must begin by stating that Israel has a legal and moral right to kill Palestinians, and then take the stance of a supplicant begging for moderation, clemency, or mercy.
Of late Palestinians and others have pushed back against the pressure to commence their testimony and commentary with a condemnation of Hamas. They are trying to evade a narrative in which events commence with a condemnable act by Hamas and thus Israel’s massive surge of killing and destruction is framed as a reaction to Palestinian violence. This framework decontextualises events from the occupation and oppression including the ongoing acts of killing and destruction which Israeli personnel enact every single day in Palestine.
The “self-defence” argument is even more insidious than the attempt to frame all Israeli military violence as being in reaction to “terrorism”. It relies on a persistent but unrecognised one-sidedness. One cannot deny the right for Israelis to defend their lives, but nor can one deny the right of Palestinians to defend their lives. If Israel can kill Palestinian civilians in “self-defence” and present its own reasons to explain why such killings are necessary, then logic dictates that Hamas can do the exactly the same. Thus it may seem that if applied even-handedly “self-defence” becomes totally meaningless.
It may surprise people to know that in legal terms the problem of self-defence is not tricky nor intractable. Israel very clearly does not have the right to use military violence and claim self-defence on several grounds. Firstly, an occupied people has the right to resistance, including armed resistance, “in or outside their own territory”. Obviously it would be illogical to accord a legal right to armed resistance and then accord a legal right to collective self-defence against that legal resistance.
Thankfully the United Nations Charter has a way out of the paradoxes of allowing two belligerents the right to self-defence against each other’s self-defence and that of allowing self-defence against legal acts of resistance. Chapter VII of Article 51 states “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Clearly “peace and security” has not been established but the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has passed many resolutions on Palestine. Israel is currently violating a very large number of these resolutions ranging at least as far back as UNSCR 242 in 1967 through to UNSCR 2334 in 2016. These violations are occurring despite the fact that the US constantly vetoes UNSC resolutions that it deems detrimental to Israel. Logically cannot claim a legal right to self-defence if it violates the UNSC resolutions designed to bring “peace and security” thus its real path to legitimate self-defence lies first and foremost in complying with all relevant resolutions. In simple terms Israel must end its occupation as the very first of any acts of self-defence. Thus it does have the right to self defence but it must cease its own belligerency first.
I want to complicate this further here, but in a way that will lead to greater elegance and certainty, by explaining the onus on the aggressor. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal described waging a war of aggression as “the supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Placing the onus on the aggressor (which is the government of the state not its people) in this way does not exonerate those who commit crimes in self-defence, but it means that the aggressor is also guilty. It is only thus that we can preserve the principle that all people have the right to life. Without the aggressor being morally and legally culpable it would mean not only that the military personnel of the aggressor belligerent have no right to life, but also that civilians of that state have no right to life if they should become legitimate collateral damage in legal military operations by the defending belligerent. This emphasis on the culpability of the aggressor is very satisfying because it closes these loopholes and also satisfies our moral instinct that a sovereign that wages aggressive war, knowingly sacrificing the lives of their own people, is guilty of the murder of those killed.
We need to pause here to reflect on our habitual callousness towards death in times of conflict. Death in wartime is so inevitable that we become inured to to its nature. Deaths caused by armed conflict tend to be terrifying, agonising, lonely, and brutally untimely. The grief of needless loss over those who usually have health and life to spare is not lessened because death becomes so statistical when the machinery of killing is unleashed. War is an abomination and every person who is currently working to prevent a ceasefire in Gaza is a criminal.
As things currently stand Israel has such a grip on the framing of the Western media coverage that it can get away with claiming its murders in Gaza are all part of a campaign to eradicate Hamas and that this is a legitimate act of self-defence. Of course, anyone who goes beyond the Western media (Al Jazeera being the easiest outlet to escape the censored narrative) will know that Israel is targeting civilians, hospitals, churches, ambulances, and so forth. For those who see only the Western media they must deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing the death, destruction, and suffering and being told that it is arguably some form of self-defence. The trick with the Western media is not to state outright that Israel’s self-defence claims are true, but to avoid all facts or basic reasoning that gives lie to that claim.
Once those who support peace and humanity learn to counter Israel’s claims to the right to use violence in “self-defence” it will be another foundation of the propaganda narrative removed. Brave individuals are challenging the demand to begin all media interviews by condemning Hamas and refusing to accept timelines that always assert that cycles of violence begin with Palestinian actions. They need to add to that by rejecting Israel’s right to use arms in self-defence.
The way to counter the distortions of the Western media is to attack the borders of the narrative where they are thinnest and most strained. Some ideas are the sledgehammers that break through walls of cognitive dissonance, forcing people to unite what their eyes see and what their emotional and moral senses tell them with their intellectual framework – the story that they force facts and feelings into. When people see bombing, missiles and siege warfare against a powerless people the imagery does not naturally lend itself to a conclusion of violence waged for defensive purposes. To break the argument we need to attack the very validity of Israel’s claims.
An occupier cannot use arms in self-defence until they cease being the occupier.
The aggressor cannot be the defender.
Genocide is never justified. The violence of those who see others as a threat because of their membership in a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is the defining character of genocide. It is always framed as self-defence.
From the beginning, we knew that this election would never happen. An election of representatives for any office involves the belief that they will represent the electorate. In the past, this system has been imperfect and undemocratic, but developing tools of mass persuasion have taken voting societies further and further away from democracy. In 2016 USA things have reached the logical conclusion wherein the public acts of voting are no longer related to a real act of election by an actual electorate.
I take my title and opening line from Jean Baudrillard who claimed the 1991 “Gulf War” was a literal “non-event”. The USA has now become the Disney version of 1984 and it seems right to draw on Baudrillard’s superposition of Disneyland fakery and the all-too-real atrocities that happened in Iraq and Kuwait. However, though Baudrillard leaves room for anger and anguish at the human suffering from the non-event, he indulges the avoidance of naming the real that hides behind the “hyperreal”. The non-event is an extension of the control of language in what Orwell described as “the defence of the indefensible”. Baudrillard was in some ways determined never to look behind the façade, and the non-event of this fake election of dead politics hides a real dynamic of empire which ordinary people would never countenance if it were shown to them as it truly is. I want to go beyond performing the autopsy of US politics, and find the events that do still take place, the ones that polite people don’t like to talk about.
The time also seems right to revisit some lines in a Yeats poem that was written in 1919: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It describes people yearning for a “Second Coming”, and ends prophetically, on the dawn of Fascism and Nazism, with the lines:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
We have entered a fact-free zone. Sometimes it seems that the truth has entered a state of quantum indeterminacy where two contradictory things are simultaneously true until the waveform is collapsed by observations by political pollsters. For example, when the Clinton camp attributed their candidate’s 9/11 collapse to overheating, differing journalists and commentators simultaneously reported a that it was an unusually hot day or an unusually cold day. Another instance can be seen in these headlines from editions of the Wall St. Journal:
A lot of amazing things are happening in “journalism” these days. Here’s one that still has me floored. pic.twitter.com/1nN309ZFvp
Events wildly plot a drunken careering narrative and each potential voter is forced into more and more speculative interpretation of what those events actually signify. People want to vote for a candidate according to their interests and principles, but those who still believe with “passionate intensity” that they can do so by voting for Trump or Clinton are dangerously deluded. As everything else about the year 2016 becomes muddier and weirder with each passing day, the only thing that is becoming more clear at every moment is that the 2016 election will not take place.
The Stinking Corpse of Democracy
From January to March 1991 the post-modernist Jean Baudrillard published 3 articles: “The Gulf War will not take place”; “The Gulf War is not really taking place?” and “The Gulf War did not take place”. Baudrillard was describing the war as a hyperreal simulation of something that has no origin in reality. “Hyperreal” refers to a situation where a simulation of a possible reality is indistinguishable from reality and is thus a type of reality itself. What happened in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 was not war, however it was made into a simulation of war and it was experienced as being war by those watching it on CNN.
“This is why the Gulf War will not take place. It is neither reassuring nor comforting that it has become bogged in interminable suspense. In this sense, the gravity of the non-event in the Gulf is even greater than the event of war: it corresponds to the highly toxic period which affects a rotting corpse and which can cause nausea and powerless stupor.”
Baudrillard put the basic case most succinctly when he wrote: “Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like.”
The Baudrillard articles drew attention to something important (the fact that there was no war) but they also drew attention away from the fact that the “Gulf War” was an act of genocide; a very concrete, banal and definitely not at all “hyperreal” act of co-ordinated mass violence and destruction aimed at the nation and the people of Iraq. Baudrillard may have missed the mark on the Iraq War, but his remarks could be very fittingly adapted to 2016. To paraphrase: “…here comes the dead election and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse which nobody from Washington DC has managed to revive. Trump and Clinton are fighting over the corpse of an election.”
Let me be clear, the people of the US have not lost democracy. They never had it. No modern countries are democracies. In countries with elections undemocratic power is given to numerous people, some of whom are elected. The theory is that by vesting the highest authority in officials who are elected, this will create an electoral process of candidates who seek and receive a mandate. Thus, by acting as a mandated elected official even though the power of the office may be undemocratic, this will bring about democratic governance. This is all jolly good, except that it doesn’t work. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page made news a couple of years ago by releasing a study in 2014. While they acknowledge that having free speech is an important democratic institution, in policy terms: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
One writer called the Page and Gillens paper “the ‘Duh’ report” because anyone paying attention should have already known the truth. It roughly confirms what C. Wright Mills had diagnosed nearly 60 years earlier in his book The Power Elite, which showed the oligarchic nature of US political governance. The US has long had issues of plutocratic corruption intervening in government but the 20th century saw a change from influencing government against the wishes of the electorate to consciously shaping the electorate in order to “engineer the consent” of the governed. Democracy had always been a unrealised promise in the US, shoehorned uncomfortably into the Constitution by anti-Federalists against the wishes of Federalists (like the puzzlingly celebrated Alexander Hamilton). The promise of democracy died with the advent of the Commission on Public Information in 1917 which began an era of “guided democracy” in the US. Oligarchs and bureaucrats turned their minds towards shaping and controlling public opinion while plutocrats still tried to ensure that governance was not overly influenced against the interests of capital by this already mediated public opinion.
We take it all for granted now, but suddenly many different entities wanted to adopt the purposes that had previously been those of politicians, impressarios and snake-oil salesmen. The FBI published heroic literature about “g-men”, and black propaganda smearing Black Power and left-wing movements. The CIA, still one of the biggest publishers in the world, promoted jazz, abstract art and the right sort of academic work. They established themselves in every major news media organ in the “free” world. Hollywood established a close working relationship with different parts of the US government, becoming a willing source of propaganda, and largely integrated into the military-industrial complex (through both ownership and the close working relationship with the Pentagon and CIA). Advertising agencies, over and above the immediate purpose of selling, were slavishly loyal promoters of “free enterprise”, the “American dream”, consumerism, and the values of gendered racialised class hierarchy. For evidence you need look no further than this extraordinary (and ballsy) meta-propaganda about advertising:
Throughout the 20th century, governance in the US also became ever more technocratic and removed from public sight at the same time as the more overt part of governance (elected administrations and legislators) became subject to ever more inescapable and sophisticated perception management. It is difficult to see past the projected self-image of the US as the sort of country that has a minimal government (even to the point of neglecting the vulnerable and allowing infrastructure to crumble) but the truth is that the US has a vast state sector. Combining all levels of government it spent $6.134 trillion in 2010. This is many times higher than China which seems to be a distant second in terms of state sector expenditure.
The machinery of government in the US is enormous and has a Byzantine bureaucratic complexity of overlapping jurisdictions. The documentary above gave an image of a society of free agents with a welfare oriented government. In reality under neoliberalism government, using the pretext of shrinking itself, reallocates resources to state coercion: military, intelligence, police and incarceration. What welfare remains becomes a tool of state control under an ideology that criminalises or pathologises neediness of any form. If you have no home, for example, the state feels it can dictate behavioural and moral codes that are the absolute antithesis of the proclaimed “liberty” that is considered the norm of society.
Meanwhile, the US government at various levels has control of the greatest machinery of state violence and oppression that has ever existed. Some people refer to these capabilities as a “turnkey tyranny” (the phrase existed long before Edward Snowden’s usage) but that creates the unfortunate sense that the entire apparatus is currently turned off (and that some people are conspiring to suddenly turn it on). In reality there is a continuum of state coercion. In the US case the capability for rounding people up and putting them in FEMA camps will probably never be more than a remote, but scary, potential. On the other hand, surveillance, intrusive policing and security, militarised policing, restrictions on liberties, and fear-mongering are already familiar parts of routine and banal oppression. These shape and control people in ways that don’t involve direct physical coercion, but are not merely brainwashing people into happy consumerist zombies either. There is a carrot laced with tranquillisers, but there is also a stick. Sheldon Wolin called the resulting system “inverted totalitarianism”.
The freedom enjoyed by Usanians is the contingent freedom enjoyed by the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ anti-capitalist allegory The Time Machine. They live lives of consumerist luxury right up until the point that some are abducted and eaten. The same is true of those who fall foul of the massive private or governmental bureaucracies that run the USA, and I think that it is good to set-aside our visions of a land with 48-flavours-of-ice-cream and look at the grim, grey inhuman machinery that coexists with consumerist pseudo-liberty.
We have found in all of the former “free world” that our sneers at communist bread queues were premature. We felt superior because capitalism seemed to be designed to meet our needs and desires efficiently, but now that it faces no ideological competition we find that it just wants to sell us barely functional goods and when we call for support or service, to place us on hold for hours. I guess it is better than being hungry waiting in the cold winter, but it is hard to deny that capitalist private bureaucracy is just as entitled and unhelpful as socialist government bureaucracy. In the US it can be deadly. For example, by denying insurance cover to people with life-threatening conditions pen-pushing penny-pinchers from Aetna and other such “providers” hand out death-sentences. The US has a corporatised health sector that is measurably more inefficient, more bureaucratic, more inhumane and much more expensive than actual “socialism”, and it forces people to buy private insurance or face a fine (or, as Forbesspins it, because of exemptions “only 4 million people” are expected to be subject to fines in 2016, and we all know that any law that only affects 4 million doesn’t really count). Employers can also simply garnish wages without permission to enrol workers in the employer’s chosen insurance plan.
Moreover, in this land of private/public dual tyranny, eminent domain laws in the US are often used to forcibly alienate property for the benefit of private capital (because individual states can determine what is “public use”) in the manner that does not happen in other countries.
Meanwhile those who fall into the gears of the “justice” system may find fates that seem akin to terrible stories of mediaeval cruelty, grim totalitarianism, or dystopian science-fiction nightmare. In a Milwaukee gaol, under the jurisdiction of Trump supporter David Clarke, an imprisoned suspect had his water shut off for 6 days. Witnesses heard him beg repeatedly for water as he slowly died of “profound dehydration”.
In many countries the rights of criminal suspects are minimal despite the supposed presumption of innocence, but in the US this can reach a soul-crushing extreme such as in the case of Kalief Browder. He refused to plead guilty to stealing a backpack and because the case against him was thin to non-existent, he spent 3 years, from age 16, enduring terrible conditions and violent abuse at Rykers Island prison. He killed himself 2 years after release. A different horror was endured by Roberta Blake. Not knowing that she had an arrest warrant for returning a rental car late, she was detained in California and spent two weeks in a cage in an overheated van being taken to Alabama to face “justice” for her heinous crime: “Lacking both privacy and sanitary napkins, she had to use a cup in front of the male guards and prisoners when she began menstruating. After another prisoner ripped off her shirt, she spent the rest of the trip in a sports bra.” In most developed countries it would be illegal to treat an animal that way.
Staying on the subject of the accused, I want to remind readers that a Pennsylvania judge received millions in kickbacks for sending thousands of children into institutions. Given the level of corruption victimising so many kids, some of them from white-collar households, is it any surprise that some claim similar corruption is part of the adult incarceration system?
I mention these things to show that “guided democracy” (which is not democratic) produces a tyranny with two faces. These things happen because the accused are unpeople and that itself is a product of an elite “guided democracy” culture in the US that is authoritarian, lacking in empathy, and phobic about poor people.
All I have detailed is just passive and reflexive brutality. It is incidental and can fall on any non-rich person unlucky enough to fall foul of a capricious state, but you will notice that I haven’t even mentioned racialised police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, and mass incarceration. That is a more active aspect of tyranny that functions (like “anti-terrorism” or the “war” on any other internal or external threat) to normalise oppression and market it to a much wider demographic than that specifically targetted. I won’t waste anyone’s time by detailing the latest horrors of police violence in the US, nor the everyday obscenity of mass incarceration. Readers are probably familiar with the topic, and I just ask that they bear it in mind as being an important element of this story that I am consciously omitting.
The Stinking Corpse of Politics
When Sheldon Wolin wrote Democracy Inc. he was effectively writing the obituary of “guided democracy”. Guided democracy was beginning to give way to something new which Wolin likened to 20th century tyrannies, but characterised as “inverted”. A “new type of political system, seemingly one driven by abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on “private” media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.”
Before continuing, I must clear up a problem I have with the terminology. I cannot endorse Wolin’s (or any) use of the term “totalitarianism” because it has no potential for judicious usage. It was coined to refer to Italian Fascism to refer to the totality of the purview of the state, but both that regime and the current US regime show that defining what is and is not the state is actually subjective. The very concept of “inverted totalitarianism” or “totalitarian democracy” along with new coinages like “globalitarian” show that the word itself is useless. In fact, totalitarianism has primarily been used to create a concept which suggests that Nazism and Communism are of the same essence, but Western liberalism existentially distinct (which, by the way, is why it was one of the academic notions promoted by the CIA). Both the Soviets and the Nazis did the same thing in their time, as Slavoj Žižek explains: “Thus Stalinism in the 1930s constructed the agency of Imperialist Monopoly Capital to prove that Fascists and Social Democrats (‘Social Fascists’) are ‘twin brothers’, the ‘left and right hand of monopoly capital’. Thus Nazism itself constructed the ‘plutocratic-Bolshevik plot’ as the common agent who threatens the welfare of the German nation.”
However, Wolin also referred to inverted totalitarianism as being “a kind of fascism”. “Fascism” is a much better term to use, as I have argued at great length (in two parts). Though “fascism” is clearly too common and low-rent a concept for some people (who maintain their status with claims to exclusive multisyllabic knowledge), it is perfect in conveying an apt historical comparison. Henceforth, therefore, I will use “fascism” because it may be subjective, but even people who disagree with the usage will know exactly what I am referring to and why.
Wolin’s annunciation of the conception of a new fascism should also have pointed to the immanence of a new “rough beast”. We have seen, in the last 14 years, that the “inverted” part of Wolin’s described fascism is unstable and contingent. Like the pluralism of Weimar Germany it could be replaced with leader worship and more conventionally oriented fascism in short order. Ann Coulter, (author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome) recently said: “I worship him like the North Koreans worship the ‘Dear Leaders’ — yes, I would die for him.” Coulter might seem to be a clown or a liar trying to flog a bad book, but we can no longer doubt that Trump does have a cult of personality and very dangerously deranged followers. For example there is this irrational rant from a Trump supporter:
Note that he is wrong in every aspect of what he accusers Shah of being: her candidate is running against Clinton; Shah is US born; and, as it happens, she is not Muslim. His passion for these lies, though, is about as real as anything gets in this time. The self-deception that is so widespread is part of this erosion of the “inverted” corporate and impersonal aspect of US fascism. Obama has very frequently evinced his Christian faith over the years, but millions think he is either Muslim or even the Antichrist. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t make a big deal out of religion and yet he is still treated as the instrument of God. My argument would be that some feminists have exactly the same faith-based irrational and ironic view of Clinton that these “Christians” have of Trump. Both are equally unlikely avatars of the spirit of each faith and the blindness of the followers is very reminiscent of a fascist cult of personality.
The ever scary nationalist fervour in the US has also entered into the realms of mass hysteria. This year’s DNC and RNC showed plenty of evidence of violent irrationality. Only ten years ago neoconservatives were mocked by the “reality-based community” for saying things like: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Now, their view of history and of the US role in it has gone mainstream. There is no escaping the conclusion politics are dead and the US is taking an extended holiday (or vacation) away from reality.
We have entered what people are calling the “age of post-truth politics”. Here in Aotearoa it happened very suddenly. We went from being very hard on politicians when they were caught lying, to having a Prime Minister who lies constantly and freely and who gets away with it because the media adopted the self-fulfilling prophecy of saying that people are not bothered by his lying and therefore there is little point in drawing their attention to it by making a big deal of it. In short, the media created a new post-truth norm overnight.
In contrast, the US journey towards this post-truth moment has been a long and well sign-posted journey. The practice of “plausible denial” over covert action that began 70 years ago almost immediately became a practice that should more truly be known as “implausible denial” and was extended to overt military action. The system is simple: an official tells a blatant and obvious lie, then reporters report the statement as having been stated. No matter how thin the lie, it is treated as weighty. It is not analysed or fact-checked, because that is reserved for domestic policies that are contended between the two major parties. It may or may not be noted that others dispute the lie, but the real Orwellian and twisted part that occurs is that the media will forever after treat the lie as unquestionably having been believed by the officials in question.
Thus when the US destroyed a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, newspapers outside of the US reported that Bill Clinton knew that beforehand that it was a civilian factory, but inside the US the cruise missile attack, even after it was found that the target was not a chemical weapons plant, reported that the strike was “an effort to curb the activities of the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden”.
Hillary Clinton and Trump are the logical outcome of a combination of mainstream media permissiveness when it comes to politicians lies, and the existence of partisan spheres or “reference groups”. These spheres have two levels. The inner level is the “partisan echo chamber” where you will never be informed that your chosen candidate lies. Apparently the inhabitants of this bubble are a minority, but the outer sphere is may be more important. In the outer sphere people aren’t like Coulter; they aren’t uncritically loyal and they don’t think of themselves as belonging to the Great Leader; they just know that the lies of the candidate they support are regrettable but not outrageous, unacceptable and dangerous like those of the rival candidate. Clinton supporters know that their candidate has a few imperfections, but Trump threatens all life as we know it and they don’t seem to find it at all remarkable that their opponents feel exactly the same way in reverse. They do not recognise their mirror images because years of something called the “culture wars” (which I won’t get into here) have made them blind to similarities outside of that culture war framework. In fact each stance can be rationally argued and we once again see a kind of political quantum superposition where these contradictory stances are simultaneously true. Both of them are the greatest threat currently facing humanity and they must both be stopped.
That is why I say that this election shows the death of politics, rather then merely democracy. There is no longer a machinery to control public opinion, but rather opinions themselves are rendered meaningless. Only the delusional are still taking the rhetoric of Clinton and Trump as being an indication of ideology and policy intent. People are trying to discern their character, but if they juxtapose each against the other trying to make a relative judgement they get into trouble. Which one is the crook? Which one is the liar? Which one is the warmonger? Which one is pro-corporate? If you think that the answers to that are easy, then you aren’t really paying attention.
Things have gotten so bad that in South Park they clearly struggled to decide which candidate should be represented as a Shit Sandwich and which candidate is really a Giant Douche. The creators are lucky that their storyline depicts their own fictional character opposing Clinton, because otherwise they would have to admit that both candidates this year are Shit Sandwich. Their 12 year-old allegory for no meaningful electoral choice is now too mild for the circumstances. We now choose between a Shit Sandwich made with puffy white bread that has a tendency to go soggy with shit juice, and one made with a stale multigrain that is pretty similar but may or may not be a little bit healthier over time.
The Desert of the Real…
… was a book by Slavoj Žižek published in the same year (2002) as Wolin’s Democracy Inc. It has its faults. Like Baudrillard on Iraq, Žižek imposes an inappropriate, if not offensive, semiotician’s interpretation of the bombing of Afghanistan. Instead of being a brutal act of imperialist aggression that can and should be compared with historical imperialism, Žižek asks if it isn’t “the ultimate case of impotent acting out?” In fact Žižek’s judgement in this ironically similar to the limitations he describes in others who cannot accept answers that fall outside of presupposed truth. As the old wisdom tells us, when you gaze long into Keanu, Keanu gazes also into you – to which I will add that Keanu knows fuck-all about geopolitics.
Another complaint, of a sort, is that reading The Desert of the Real today is somewhat like reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in that events have so overtaken and exceeded the prophetic work that I tend to react by thinking: “You call that future shock? That is not even mild astonishment compared to what we have to cope with nowadays.” Žižek refers to Alan Badiou’s notion that the 20th century was dominated by “the passion for the real” which “was fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real.” With the benefit of the last 14 years of reality television informing us we can say back to 2002 Žižek: “No shit, Einstein.”
But Žižek was quite perceptive in seeing the beginnings of the regime that we now live in. The world of 2002 was one of “politics without politics” and Žižek saw the potential for a resurgent and dangerous right-wing. One passage should particularly resonate with those who are following the 2016 US presidential race: “A decade ago, in the State of Louisiana’s governor elections, when the only alternative to the ex-KKK David Duke was a corrupt Democrat, many cars displayed a sticker: ‘Vote for a crook – it’s important!’”
The 20th century “pursuit of the Real” may have chased reality away, but clearly Žižek understood early that this would take us back to the dangerous yearning for the authenticity of a Second Coming that Yeats perceived in 1919.
The Desert of the Real ends by asking “What if the true aim of this ‘war [on terror]’ is ourselves, our own ideological mobilization against the threat of the Act?” In many ways the war on terror has made people in Western countries accept discipline, control and surveillance that they would never have accepted otherwise, but in other ways there has been resistance. In some ways the things that are most obvious are the least significant because they are resisted and ultimately rejected. After 9/11 the US rounded up and detained hundreds of Muslims and foreigners. That practice ended. What stayed was the Department of Homeland Security, the Transport Safety Authority, and a new officially promoted “if you see something say something”. The most profound changes have come in those spaces of knowledge where people assent and accept subliminally because they feel no friction of resistance and they are anaesthetised. Some changes are too subtle, but others are too big. People stop thinking about them almost immediately because they become everyday normality very quickly.
As I alluded to earlier, the path to the current US post-truth post-politics moment follows through the territory of imperialist wars justified by a skein of lies that creates a pseudo-history. It is possible to discuss and dispute aspects of the pseudo-history in that same way that people can discuss and dispute aspects of Game of Thrones. It is still fiction.
Žižek described a dearth and death of reality that, to my prosaic mind, was the culmination of post-WWII US hypocrisy and exceptionalism. What is happening in the 2016 election is due to the fact that on September 11 2001, the US stopped merely stringing together lies and launched a “global” war that is framed within one giant fairytale. For 15 years it has been as if every day the US has destroyed another Sudanese factory, but the lies have become to large and too numerous. They penetrate everywhere and inter-penetrate each other so that they cannot be refuted singly.
The real is abolished, and no one really wants it any more. Trump recently rewrote history by saying that a “stop-and-frisk” policing policy worked wonders for New York. Some challenge that, but not because it is untrue, but because they are not on Trump’s side. Yet there is little objection when John Kerry spoke to the UN General assembly:
Yes! we bombed an anti-ISIS #SAA base,killing 60+ soldiers & injuring 100+ more but we apologized now lets move on.. pic.twitter.com/UQ06bRkv8J
The gall of the man is not merely from the inappropriate dismissiveness (compare this to attitude towards the attack on the USS Cole which killed 17 sailors), but also in brushing over the very obvious questions raised by claiming that this was an “accident”. It took me all of 5 minutes after putting in the search terms “syria deir ez-zor map forces” to find out that there is a prima facie case that the act must have been deliberate. I could easily just look at news reports from the past 6 months that make it hard to avoid the conclusion that the US-led attack must have been intended to aid the forces of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”. Once you consider in addition that within minutes of the attack the self-proclaimed “IS” launched an attack that has halted or reversed 6 months of slow SAA progress towards lifting the siege of Deir ez-Zor, then the incident looks very much like air support for “IS” forces. I would defy anyone to give any other explanation as to why the US would suddenly decide to bomb in this area, where the only military forces are the Syrian Arab Army and the “IS”. At the very least every journalist should report that the circumstances suggest that until their actions are explained, US claims should not be seen as credible as they are not reconcilable with the facts as we currently understand them.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I am about to write something that may be the most controversial thing I have ever written. I realise that many people will hate me for this, and I fully expect to be hunted down and savaged by vicious sci-fi nerds. But there comes a time when destiny calls, and it is my destiny to say something heretical about The Matrix…
Here is my testament: If someone called “Morpheus” (the Greek god of dreams) offers to take you “down the rabbit hole” (an allusion to entering “Wonderland”) and you then end up perceiving a new reality in which you are the messiah, but the most fundamental fact of human existence (that people are in a virtual world being used by a machine intelligence as a way of generating electricity) makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, then accepting Morpheus’ offer is choosing delusion over reality. That means that “taking the red pill” means indulging delusions, lies and fantasy.
To recap: 1) Morpheus = god of dreams; 2) “down the rabbit hole” = journey into fantasy; 3) world of people hooked up as batteries = self-evident nonsense; 4) messianic mission = attractive delusion satisfying to ego and superego (and id once you throw in the inevitable “love interest”).
Ironically people refer to “taking the red pill” as being a path to enlightenment. Even more ironically it is linked to “9/11 truth” activism. But the people who took the red pill on 9/11 were the people in the US government, the elected officials, the military personnel, the spooks, the cops, the administrators. They, along with much of the population of the Western world, entered a phantasmagorical parallel universe, the GWOT Wonderland, where the fundamental premise of the main fact shaping the world makes no sense.
The Matrix tricks its viewers in the same way that science fiction author Philip K. Dick would often trick his readers. But where Dick’s deception was either playful or served a serious purpose (or both), the Wachowskis were either more mean-spirited or simply underestimated the human capacity for self-deception. The desire for purpose and the need for meaningfulness in one’s life drives people to perceive Neo’s journey as a revelation of truth rather than a descent into madness despite the heavy-handed hints I mentioned. The messiah figure is enticing because it satisfies narcissism and altruism simultaneously in a way that real life does not offer. As it happens, Phil Dick also explored this desire with black humour in “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” which formed the basis of the films Total Recall. The short story parallels the Total Recall film adaptations up to a point but has crucial further developments that we omitted from the films. When the protagonist’s belief that he is a secret agent becomes rationally unsustainable he “remembers” that he is actually an alien emissary sent to bring peace and enlightenment to humanity. When the alien emissary narrative is fatally challenged by its own irrational contradictions, then the protagonist “remembers” that even that was actually a cover identity for his real nature which is the actual messiah and saviour of all humankind.
There is a lot of power in the attractiveness of a sense of messianic purpose, but in The Matrix it is used to scam people. They overlook the obvious because that are deceived into doing so. I would even call it the “Neo con” (if I were cruel enough to inflict such a bad pun on readers) because it is a good model of the trickery that keeps people from seeing the obvious lies of the Global War on Terror.
The neocons themselves were and are a mix of scammers and scammed. Whether they believed the lies or not, they evinced a messianic purpose for the US. It is true that the fundamental benevolence of the enterprise did not bear much scrutiny, but then again the fundamental rationality did not bear scrutiny either. The point, like The Matrix, is not to conceal lies but to disincentivise the perception of unhidden lies. As the neocons’ direct influence seemed to fade, the fundamental parts of their worldview were left behind as mainstream political orthodoxy. The distinction between neocons and liberal interventionists (as I have repeatedly written) was never significant anyway and now we inhabit the world they created.
In The Matrix the whole purpose of the eponymous Matrix itself is explained as being a completely infeasible and physically impossible system of generating electricity. It is stated as quickly as possible, and the real trick is that those who do notice the impossibility will blame poor narrative construction and not suspect that it is key evidence of the real nature of what is happening. In the war on terror, Islamic terrorism is constantly highlighted but the connection with foreign policy is passed over very quickly, even though it is the central explanation for why the US needs to invade and bomb so widely. The US military still hands out medals for the GWOT so the basic premise is still that their far-flung interventions are a response to terrorism. The fall-back position is that even if it doesn’t make sense to attack other countries to stop terrorism, it is a real if mistaken belief on the part of officials.
Whether it is the Neocons or the Wachowskis, people never stop to consider whether it is reasonable to think that their unreasonableness is in earnest. Wolin, for example, keeps repeating that “inverted totalitarianism” came about without intention: “It has no Mein Kampf as an inspiration” he tells us in between quotes from various neocon equivalents. The ideology, the strategy, the intention and the foresight of consequences are all there to be seen, for those who will see them rather than asserting that they cannot be there. Once you figure out that the neocons and their allies must have deliberately crafted the terrorism lie, it puts quite a different spin on things.
15 years into this delusion we have seen military actions coalesce into a slow-motion World War. Without citing the threat of terrorism, the US could not have taken military action against Afghanistan or Iraq. Yet we shouldn’t forget that the threat of terrorism is still used to give people the impression that there is some natural and urgent reason for the US to be involved in Islamic countries. If we take the instances of Syria or Libya, they conflate concerns about the crimes of the dictatorial regime with concerns about terrorism. It makes no more sense than when the Nazis claimed that there was a single conspiracy of Communism and Western capitalism. Yet without being able to say the “IS” is a threat to the homeland, moves against regimes like Libya’s and Syria’s might be difficult to explain in light of, say, the ongoing support for Saudi Arabia or Egypt or any of the many brutal regimes that the US considers to be friendly and “moderate”. It makes no sense to attack regimes that oppose the alleged sources of terror, but that doesn’t really matter any more than it makes no sense to provide a massive life support and virtual reality infrastructure to billions of humans just so you can use them as energy cells. The senselessness is irrelevant.
We have gone down the rabbit hole, because even if we know that it is irrational to say that US interventions are against terror or because they oppose the oppression of dictators, we have no other coherent narrative. That is why I am constantly pushing for people to recognise that US interventions are genocides, attacks aimed at extending imperial power by committing violence and destruction against peoples and nations as such. It is that simple. It is also that banal. It is a grey world where even the most cruel of crimes are just another day at the office for some of the perpetrators. People prefer a dramatic fantasy narrative of anti-terror and humanitarian intervention to prevent the “next Rwanda”, yet most highly educated people would consider me a fantasist because suggesting a coherence in US foreign policy is a “conspiracy theory”.
Sauce for the Gander
In the end, if we have accepted irrationality and lies for so long; if we have for 15 years purged those who cannot live with cognitive dissonance from public and private areas of authority; should it surprise us that we have created the circumstances where truth is no longer relevant? Kerry, Clinton, Power and Obama are all capable at any day of the week of telling preposterous and monstrous lies. It is impossible to tell, for example, if Samantha Power is completely insane or not. Like Tony Blair she seems to be so deeply “in character” that the original human host, the once beloved daughter of Mr and Mrs Power, has been murdered by this bloodthirsty monster.
If you think Trump has gumption, think of the sheer chutzpah shown by Power when she turned the US massacre of Syrian personnel into an chance to attack Russia for daring to criticise the US: “even by Russia’s standards, tonight’s stunt – a stunt replete with moralism and grandstanding – is uniquely cynical and hypocritical.” As Gary Leupp writes, she is “condemning Russia for condemning a war crime”.
Our semiotician friends Baudrillard and Žižek like to condemn atrocious actions, but they avoid suggesting that there might be some premeditation and conscious shaping of the semantic. Žižek would probably consider me to be crude, primitive and jarring in my insistence on continually returning to a realist perspective. However Žižek has alienated many on the left with his comments on the European refugee crisis and I like to think that my more pointed view allows me to be honest about the refugee crisis without falling into disproportionate victim-blaming that amounts to xenophobia (regardless of whether it is literally true or not). On this subject Žižek is purely and smoothly in concord with the right. He is effectively like one of those second-degree racists who neatly substitute nurture for nature and justify fear and bigotry on the basis of “environment” instead of genetics. To my mind this is the logical outcome of never being brave enough to go out on a limb and say that there is a locus of power behind the events that shape our narrative perception. It may not be a literal Star Chamber of sinister conspirators, but power coalesces again and again in ways that form virtual Star Chambers and once you understand that mass transformations are often imposed from above then it makes little sense to fret about whether some refugees are rapists in the midst of a metastasising holocaust that has killed millions and threatens tens of millions.
Žižek wants to state a generality that is true and comforting (that the West is not responsible for every bad thing in the world) without testing whether it is actually applicable to the specific case he addresses. For example, Žižek says that the Rwanda genocide can’t be blamed on the West, because he is ignorant of the history. The US acted in co-ordination with Uganda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front to destabilise the country and provoke ethnic violence. Perhaps the resulting genocide was far beyond what they wished for, or perhaps not. It was not the end of US-backed ethnic violence in Rwanda and bordering areas of the DR Congo, so the provocateurs cannot have been too appalled at the violence. Nor does the US history of slaughter in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East allow us to take seriously the horror they evince at the Rwanda Genocide, nor the way they use the memory of it as a pretext for their own acts of genocide.
Likewise, Žižek says that the refugee crisis cannot be blamed entirely on the West because “ISIS” is an “active response”. The problem is that we either have to confront the fact that “IS” is a deliberate creation of the US empire, or we remain in Wonderland where magically, just when the US needs a new pretext to carry on the wars that it is already fighting, “IS” appears. Miraculously, because of “IS”, the US gets to continue the wars it was already fighting for other reasons even when the primary activity of this wars is to attack the enemies of “IS”.
We know that the US armed the “IS” forces, but we are meant to believe that they did it somehow by accident. A country suddenly appeared and found itself governing millions while simultaneously fighting a four-front war against established national armies and ethnic militias. Despite being land-locked and surrounded by putative enemies it has remained in play for 2 years. It is as if the Nazis had consolidated in Bavaria in 1945 and were still there in defiance of the Allies best effort in 1947. It simply makes no sense.
That is why a lying reality show personality and probable child rapist can make a credible run for the highest office in the US. It is because we have had 15 years of deluded and/or shameless US imperialists doubling down over and over and over again on their lies. We are trapped in Wonderland, because it hurts people to think of reality; because people want to believe Žižek’s announcement that not everything is the West’s fault; and they want to join in with his implied sneer at those who say otherwise.
The 2016 US election will not take place because reality is in abeyance. Young people might not even know what it is any more. They see all the shades of grey, but they can no longer conceptualise black or white, so it is hard to find meaning. The trivial and the profound are no longer distinguishable, not because of some general social evolution, but because managed democracy evolved as a system of political domination. This is the result of astroturfing, greenwashing, pinkwashing, native advertising, product placement, grey propaganda, and so forth. We did not just end up like this because we are spoilt and spend too much time on social media. This was done to us.
So there is Trump. He is a sick joke. His party, which he seems almost completely detached from, is like magician’s illusion: a giant edifice that seems to be levitating with no visible means of support. He has the endorsement of the patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” Phil Robertson who offered to baptise him on camera to get “God on our side”. Apparently even God no longer believes in the Real until it is on reality television. But it takes two to tango; Hillary Clinton is no more real than Trump and the polls show that ordinary people know it.
The 2016 election will be a non-event. The way the votes are counted will shape the destiny of the world, but the voting itself will be an empty ritual. That is not a reason not to vote, it is actually a reason to reject the idea that your vote was wasted. The votes are not wasted, but even if they are counted they are stolen. Stolen by fictional candidates like Trump and Clinton and stolen by the death of politics. Vote your conscience and then live according to it. Let everyone know that your vote was stolen by a system that is fraudulent. Make sure that everyone remembers that it is a lie every time they tell you that you might not like what the President does but you have to accept it because that is the way democracy works.
One day they will push the lies too far and Wonderland will shatter, releasing us from this dark sphere back into the light.
Yemen is being destroyed. A US-backed “Saudi Coalition” has been bombing and shelling Yemen for 16 months. The UN puts the civilian death toll at 3700, but (aside from the question of why combatants’ lives apparently only count if they are Western soldiers) this probably vastly under-represents the death toll by both direct violence and by the indirect effects of the war. Most of the country has no reliable access to clean water and people, particularly young children, are dying of disease and deprivation.
On August the 22nd, two eminent commentators gave interviews on Yemen. Harper’s magazine editor Andrew Cockburn (author of a book on drone assassinations called Kill Chain) was interviewed on Democracy Now! Later in the day Medea Benjamin (prominent activist co-founder of Code Pink and also author of a book on Drone Warfare) was interviewed on KPFA’s Flashpoints.
Cockburn and Benjamin were in complete agreement about two very important facts. This first is that this is a US war. As Cockburn wrote in a Harper’s piece:
Thousands of civilians – no one knows how many – have been killed or wounded. Along with the bombing, the Saudis have enforced a blockade, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine. A year and a half into the war, the health system has largely broken down, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation.
This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.)
The second important fact is that Saudi violence is is targeted against civilians and civilian infrastructure. To quote Cockburn again: “They’ve destroyed most of the health system. They destroyed schools. Human Rights Watch did an excellent report pointing out that they’ve attacked—consistently attacked economic targets having nothing to do with any kind of war effort, but like potato chip factories, water bottling factories, power plants. It’s an effort to destroy Yemen. And … we are part of that. This is our war, and it’s shameful.”
The type of warfare Cockburn is describing, systematic violence against a national group and systematic destruction of a nation-state, is exactly what was meant by Raphael Lemkin when he coined the term “genocide” (as you can read for yourself here) and it is clearly covered by the UN Convention against genocide which prohibits any intentional destruction “in whole or in part” of a national group by:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I will return to the significance of the concept of genocide in due course, but there is a third very significant thing on which Benjamin and Cockburn agree, and that is that the US motive in participating is to make money. In response to Kevin Pina’s opening question as to why the US is involved, Benjamin answered: “That’s a pretty simple one: money; greed; US weapons industries. The Saudis have become the number 1 purchaser of US weapons.” In this case, however, I must vehemently disagree with Benjamin and Cockburn (and on this subject it often feels like I’m disagreeing with the entire Western world). Blaming greed, or the power of profit, is a dangerous delusion. If opposition to permanent warfare continues to be dominated by this trope then we will never be able to end these ongoing massacres. Nor, for that matter, will we be able to halt the war on the domestic front – the intrinsically linked increase in militarisation, surveillance, and state violence (actual and potential) that is the other side of the permanent warfare coin.
There are many things that make me angry about the wide-held belief that US foreign policy is shaped by the profit motive. It is facile; it is intellectually cowardly; it is self-defeating; it is chauvinistic (or more specifically Usacentric) and thus unavoidably racist; and it is embarrassingly credulous. Nicholas J S Davies recently published an excellent article on the “normalisation of deviance” which causes US foreign policy elites to embrace a worldview of vast cognitive dissonances, in which realities of illegal and inhumane US practices are subsumed (and thus made possible) in the oceanic assumption of fundamental existential US benevolence, benevolence of US purposes, and benevolence of US intents. My contention is that Benjamin, Cockburn, and others I shall name are part of a constrained and disciplined dialectic of opposition that condemns the individual dissonant actions but actually accommodates and reinforces the US exceptionalist worldview that creates the “normalisation of deviance”.
There are two things that are very crucial to understand. One is that the US exceptionalist worldview is hegemonic throughout the West and, to a lesser extent, globally. What this means is that when judging the actions of the US government we project our own self-image onto imagined or real agents (such as the US President). We assume that the motives behind their actions are sane and rational and not malevolent in intent (unlike those of demonised enemy leaders who are often assumed to be acting out of irrational or diabolical intent). That is not to say that the claim is that US foreign policy is rational, but rather that irrationality is created by the system, while US leaders are personalised as rational beings who mean well in exactly the way that enemies of the West are personalised as irrational and/or malevolent in intent.
The second thing to understand is that without the widespread “normalisation of deviance” US military interventions would be impossible. Many US personnel would not follow the flagrantly illegal orders which they currently enact without a second thought. Other countries would not continue to cooperate with the US except when necessary and they would make war crimes prosecutions an unsurpassed priority of public and private diplomacy.
The idea that “war is a racket” and that wars are fought to line the pockets of profiteers is part of a tradition that comes out of an ideological consensus that is so widespread as to be nearly invisible. This is a materialist consensus between Marxists, liberals, conservatives, and others which embraces economic determinism (meaning roughly that economics shape society rather than society shapes economics). Note that Marxists often reject economic determinism as merely “vulgar Marxism”, but the fact remains that the very terminology of Marxism, much of which is used by non-Marxists, ensures that they remain shackled to that basic position. Free-market liberals, conservatives, neoliberals, and libertarians are ultimately just as tied to economic determinism, not least because they embrace the notion of capitalism which (as we tend to forget) comes from Marx. The point about this materialist consensus is that creates a common language in which people can intelligibly argue about the fine details of a fundamentally nonsensical construct. Disputants on both sides find that the path of least resistance lies in affirming the underlying orthodoxy and working with that, and the prefabricated arguments that come with it. The fatal flaw is that dissent becomes limited and impotent to affect change.
People who cite the military-industrial complex and profiteering as being a cause of US foreign policy often seem to be rather smug with what seem to me to be an unjustified sense of bravery and insight. I think people find it satisfying because they have the sensation of having pierced a veil, or having clambered over the thorny hedge that surrounds the a meadow of classroom platitudes. Such people, presumably, feel good about themselves for being clever. They will generally only be challenged by people who still cling to an even less tenable analysis so they need never interrogate these beliefs.
There is also a certain calculus of dissent. If you reject the mainstream view in the most obvious and easy fashion, you can be sure that you will have a cohort of like-minded semi-dissidents. However, if you then question and reject the easy critique, you will most likely find yourself isolated and deprived of the common language and shortcuts shared between the mainstream and semi-dissenting viewpoint. Usually someone will be quite young when they reject idealistic notions of politics and embrace a sense of amoral economic determinism and human greed or self-interest as driving forces behind the exercise of power. Once they have that conviction it will be a foundation on which rests all of their political analysis that they develop through life and thus it becomes an ingrained unexamined habit of thought.
However, when it comes to war, the centrality of profit/profiteering becomes a big problem. There are some exceptional circumstances, such as the interests of US financiers in World War I, in which powerful individuals may have a strong profit-motive that leads them to agitate for war. On the whole, however, wars do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. Some interests may profit, but fighting wars will reduce overall profits (except in as much as they may allow an upward redistribution of wealth through the disbursement of tax money and government bond money (which is the tax money of future generations)).
In the US context people may mistakenly believe that they have a more robust analysis than “war is a racket” because they can cite the existence of the military-industrial complex. The problem with that is that is presumes that the military-industrial complex just created itself. On Waatea 5th Estate, for example,Henry Rollins opened an interview by explaining the whole thrust of US politics since Reagan as being caused by the needs of the military-industrial-complex and the prison-industrial-complex. In fairness, he did go on to show that he understood the prison-industrial-complex to be a dynamic mechanism (situated in history) for reproducing the racialised “caste” system that subjugates African Americans. However, he shows no such insight into the military-industrial complex, though its historical roots are, if anything, more strikingly functional than those of the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex exists to maintain a domestic social order through violent subjugation and the military-industrial complex exists to maintain imperial hegemony and an international social order through even greater violence and subjugation.
The term “military-industrial complex” was coined by Dwight Eisenhower at the end of 8 years in the White House. The forerunners of the complex can be seen in the British Empire. Thus, in trying to diagnose the British Empire at the end of the 19th century, John A. Hobson noted that the Empire was an economic drain, but that it benefited “certain sectional interests”. He specified that these interests were the finance sector plus “the shipbuilding, boiler-making, and gun and ammunition making trades”. In those days of British naval supremacy shipbuilding and boiler-making were the equivalent of the aerospace industry in the US today. Hobson, like today’s aficionados of the military-industrial complex, treated the whole thing as if it were some sort of scam – an unfair and vastly disproportionate way of fleecing the British people and the colonies. But the disproportionality itself showed that profit could not be a driving factor. Why, after all, would wealthy landowners and traders sacrifice their own wealth, as Hobson claimed, for sectional interests? If those interests had taken control of policy, why and how?
The key to understanding this “empire complex”, as I will call it, is that these “certain sectional interests” were, alongside the military and some other parts of the British state structure, the governing structures of the Empire (and the informal empire). This rose from a deliberate blurring of the lines between state and private power. For example, in Century of WarF. William Engdahl writes of 3 “pillars of the British Empire” (finance, shipping and control of natural resources) and gives this example of interpenetration between private interests, government and British intelligence:
Britain modelled its post-Waterloo empire on an extremely sophisticated marriage between top bankers and financiers of the City of London, Government cabinet ministers, heads of key industrial companies deemed strategic to the national interest, and the heads of the espionage services.
Representative of this arrangement was City of London merchant banking scion, Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro, who sat as a director of the Bank of England from 1928 until his death in 1963. During the Second World War, Hambro was Executive Chief of British secret intelligence’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Government’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, which ran war-time economic warfare against Germany, and trained the entire leadership of what was to become the postwar American Central Intelligence Agency and intelligence elite, including William Casey, Charles Kindelberger, Walt Rostow and Robert Roosa, later Kennedy Treasury Deputy Secretary and partner of Wall Street’s elite Brown Brothers, Harriman.
The US military-industrial complex took things further than its British forerunner. When Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” he was referring to something with long historical roots and antecedents, but nevertheless he was referring to something new; something only a decade old. In earlier drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address it was referred to as the “military-industrial-Congressional complex”. In retrospect it was unfortunate that the word “Congressional” was omitted, because he nature of Congressional involvement shows a level of premeditated planning. Military contracts were distributed to every possible Congressional district so that every representative would be vulnerable to losses of jobs and income in their district. Politicians were being deliberately tied to the complex, so that it would be possible to either direct or replace any who spoke out against the interests of the complex. This was all happening at the time when NSC-68 became policy, creating what we know as the Cold War.
NSC-68 was a policy document signed by President Truman in 1950. It halted the post-WWII demobilisation of the USA and put the country on a permanent wartime footing. Though top secret, the 58 page document is stuffed full of propaganda that painted a fictitious picture of the USSR as a military threat to the USA. It states: “The Kremlin regards the United States as the only major threat to the conflict between idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin … and the exclusive possession of atomic weapons by the two protagonists. The idea of freedom, moreover, is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.” NSC-68 is full of fake figures and outright lies about Soviet capabilities. The document was probably not intended to persuade lawmakers and administrators as much as it was to give them a Party-line and talking points. These were words, phrases and arguments that could sell a new brand of USA to the people living in the USA itself and the strongest dissenting voices were soon silenced by McCarthyism.
Military spending tripled in the three years after NSC-68. An armistice was signed in Korea in 1953, but the military spending remained at wartime levels, and has never significantly decreased since.
The military-industrial complex was purposefully given a lever to control Congress and this tells us something about the intentionality of its creation, but I must point out that the complex has other levers to pull. Like other big industries which rely on government contracts and/or a lucrative legislative and policy environment, the private interests in the complex spend vast amounts on lobbying and campaign donations. This alone gives them “unwarranted influence” far in excess of what Eisenhower might have envisaged (at least in the fact that that influence is ineradicable by any means short of revolution). It gets even worse, however, because elected officials in the US are heavy investors in weapons and aerospace, and House and Senate members are not prohibited from insider trading. Between 2004 and 2009 19 of 28 members of the Senate Armed Services committee held stock in companies to which they could award contracts. They are only: “precluded … from taking official actions that could boost their personal wealth if they are the sole beneficiaries.”
The circle of venality tying politicians to the military-industrial complex works through bonds of greed and self-interest, but it has nothing to do with the profit mechanisms of “capitalism” as it is usually conceived. The complex was partly the product of historical processes shaped by power relations, but more importantly it was a conscious artifice. At the same time that food companies were developing the “TV Dinner”, US political elites created a TV Dinner military hegemony which went with a new TV Dinner empire. They pulled back the foil on their instant empire by announcing the doctrine of Cold War “containment”. Modelled on the 19th century “Monroe Doctrine”, by which the US gave itself the right to intervene in any Western hemisphere country, “containment” meant that any time the US had the power and desire to intervene they would simply claim that there was a Communist threat.
The military-industrial complex was created to tie government to the project of empire, however it did not remain static once created. Because this is an empire, success within the system is not determined by market forces, as much as market forces are twisted, wrangled and beaten into a shape that feeds the semi-private arms of imperial power. They are profitable, but that is incidental.
Both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex are subsumed within a greater empire complex. This model of government corruption (campaign financing, lobbying, revolving door appointments, intellectual property legislation, no-bid contracts, cost-plus contracts, bail-outs, etc.) creates a whole class of industries that are co-dependent with government. These are not random concerns, they are tied together by a shared characteristic. Such industries include arms; aerospace; finance; agribusiness; pharmaceuticals; health; oil and energy; infrastructure; media and communications; and security/policing/prisons/mercenaries. What ties them together is that whoever controls these things controls nations and peoples.
The imperial complex creates a situation where it becomes inevitable that the business of empire is empire, and nothing else unless it is in the service of empire. The government of the USA is so integral to the empire complex that, in foreign policy, it is purely devoted to the extension and maintenance of imperial power. In fact, the model of governance imposed on the empire by the public-private branches of the empire complex, widely known as “neoliberal”, increasingly provides the model of domestic governance. The US is colonising itself. The empire complex has evolved to control, not to build, nurture or protect. Like empires of the past, it has become the tool of a narrow elite whose interests are not truly tied to the motherland any more tightly than they are to the colonies.
This brings me back to the claim that the US is behind the bombing in Yemen because it feed the profits of the military-industrial complex. The claim is 100% wrong. None of this is for profit. It was a system intentionally constructed to maintain and extend imperial hegemony. It’s subsequent evolution has not in any way made it capitalistic, but has alarmingly broadened and deepened the governance structures.
There is an underlying assumption by Cockburn, Benjamin and other such critics of US foreign policy that the money factor has perverted foreign policy from its true course. This implies that uncorrupted by money (and nefarious foreigners) US foreign policy would revert to being a largely benevolent practice directed by concern with national security, the national interest, and the prosperity of the homeland. The frustrating thing about this is that it is a complete refusal to simply attempt to analyse an empire (which many critics US foreign policy gladly admit that it is) as an empire. It is sad that trenchant critics of wars (and the bloodthirsty elites who wage them) are stuck with such a childish mentality. They evince a faith that the proper purpose of the system itself is akin to that of a parent (whether loving or stern) and that Dad just needs to sober up from the intoxication of money.
Most critics of US foreign policy assume that it is a dysfunctional branch of nation-state politics, rather than even entertaining the idea that it might be a very rational and functional arm of imperial politics. For example, they assume that provoking terrorism against US interests and people is a failure of policy, but there are no concrete reasons for believing this. In contrast, one can argue that the US provokes terrorism on purpose in order to justify foreign interventions and erosions of civil liberties. That is a reasoned position that explains US actions with a clear motive. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, but let us consider conventional assumption that provoking terrorism is a mistake. In that case the contention is that an observed repeated pattern of behaviour (the various violent provocations such as invasions, bombings, torture, kidnappings) is a continual series of errors due to systemic dysfunction. To support this you must create a complex analytical apparatus showing that some essentialist cultural characteristics (a blend of ignorance, arrogance, and the desire to do good) cause US officials and personnel to keep repeating the same mistakes and never learn their lesson. All of this, a massive offence against the principle of parsimony, rests on the assumption that there can be no intent to foment terrorism because those same officials and personnel are collectively inclined to protect Usanians and US interests. This all falls down though, in the very obvious fact that the US government only protects US citizens when forced to. In the policies environment, public health, health, economy, trade, infrastructure, civil defence and (let us not forget) foreign intervention the US government shows that it will happily sacrifice the lives of its citizens. Terrorism deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to those caused by the insufficient healthcare in the US. Moreover, if you pre-ordain that non-interventionism and demilitarisation are not allowable foreign policy options, then you will not allow a policy that keeps people safe from terrorism. In practical terms that is a conspiracy to foment and harness terrorism for foreign interventions because the results are foreseeable and unavoidable.
Accompanying the infuriating belief that the natural state of Western governance is enlightened self-interest is the more repugnant and hypocritical belief that non-Western foreigners act in ways that need no explanation other than their hatred, brutality, and irrational violence. We endless ask ourselves where the US went “wrong” over various acts of mass violence, but no one feels the need to agonise about what part of the Qatari national character causes them to keep making the “mistake” of thinking they can bomb terrorism out of existence. The only analysis you need put forward is that they hate Iran, or hate Shi’a or (if you are really sophisticated) hate republicanism, then there is not need to explain why this translates into bombing or invasions or torture or any form of violence. When non-Westerners commit such acts it is treated as no more remarkable than the sun rising.
When Saudi Arabia bombs Yemen with US weapons, few entertain the notion that the Saudi Arabia might be acting as a US proxy, even though the US must approve enough to keep supplying the bombs. Instead we have a frankly racist discourse that suggests that Saudi Arabia is by some means dragging the US into a conflict in contravention of US interests. This whole “tail-wags-dog” trope really pisses me off. The US has been using the supposed rebelliousness and truculence of its puppets as an excuse for its actions going at least as far back as Syngman Rhee, the dictator they installed in South Korea after WWII. Everywhere that they possibly can, the US installs leaders who are unpopular enough with their own people that they are dependent on the US military to stay in power. That is how you run an empire. Sometimes it is in the US interest that such people make a show of anti-imperialist defiance, but when they really are defiant they tend to find themselves exiled, dead or imprisoned in fairly short order.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, an oligarchy of royals rules in defiance of the public will and the public interest. That is the classic recipe for a client regime, and probably differs little from a standard Roman client regime 2000 years ago. Iraqi-American analyst BJ Sabri has been posting a multi-part analysis of Saudi subjugation for over some months and argues that Saudi dependency is very deep, perhaps unusually so. In Part 2 of the series Sabri wrote:
On one side, we have the Saudi deference to the United States. I view this deference as follows: (1) confluence and reciprocal opportunism of two different but oppressive ideologies —Wahhabism and imperialism; (2) oil and petrodollars, and (3) a long history of secret deals—since the day Franklin D. Roosevelt met Abdul Aziz Al Saud in 1945. On the other, we have a supremacist superpower that views Al Saud as no more than a backward tribal bunch whose primary function is providing special services to the United States. These include cheap oil, buying US weapons, investing oil money in the US capitalistic system, supporting US hegemonic quest, buying US national debt, and bankrolling its covert operations and wars.
To drive the point, I argue that the combination between lack of means, lack of resistance, and other forms of dependence (US political and public relations support, for example) has created a situation of dependency. It incrementally forced the Saudi regime into a mental subordination to the United States similar to an occupied mentality.
Of course, others will tell you that the US must be acting at the behest of Saudi Arabia because they have no motive of their own. As Cockburn reports, “no one that I talked to in Washington suggested that the war was in any way necessary to our national security. The best answer I got came from Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who has been one of the few public officials to speak out about the devastation we were enabling far away. ‘Honestly,’ he told me, ‘I think it’s because Saudi Arabia asked.’”
When people like Cockburn make reference to “our national security” as if it were a factor in US military interventions I have to check that I haven’t been whisked to a parallel dimension. When has US national security ever been a consideration in a US decision to attack another country? This is the most interventionist state in the history of humanity and from an historical perspective the only differentiation in terms of national security is whether the US government puts a lot of effort into lying about having a national security interest (e.g. Viet Nam, Cambodia, Korea, Iraq); puts on a minimal or pathetic show (e.g. Grenada, Laos, Syria, Libya); or doesn’t really bother with the pretence at all (e.g. Haiti, Somalia, Panama).
Implying that a given US military intervention is aberrant because not does not serve national security is gross intellectual cowardice. It is a way of critiquing US policy without ever suggesting that the US might itself be worthy of criticism. Notions of exceptionalism are not challenged but rather are enforced by the implication that each act of mass violence is a departure from an unspoken norm. These are criticisms that sanitise and conceal US agency and intentionality by using the equivalent of the passive voice.
Gareth Porter is a fine critic of US policy when it comes to challenging the lies of officials who are gunning for war. He has written extensively to debunk the nuclear scare tactics used by US officials to threaten war against Iran and to impose cruel sanctions. But Porter is also an exponent of this passive voice historiography. His 2005 bookPerils of Dominance documented the fact that the US had an unassailable strategic hegemony and lied to create the impression that the USSR was a threat to national security. It is a very useful book (although I would dispute his exculpation of Lyndon Johnson), but the way Porter frames facts, indeed the central “thesis” of the book, is that not having any genuinely security fears caused the US to invade Viet Nam. It is rather like framing a story of spousal abuse by focussing on the fact that the perpetrator was induced to beat the victim because of a large difference in size and strength.
The reason I bring Porter up is because in a recent interview with Lee Camp he said we need to go beyond the military-industrial complex and look at the “national-security complex” and the “permanent war state”. At first glance you might think that he and I were on the same wavelength, but despite admitting to long years of “committing the liberal error of opposing the war, but not the system”, he refuses to relinquish his central delusion. He reprises the same analytical framework that was very common after the US withdrew from Viet Nam under titles like Quagmire Theory or Stalemate Theory. The idea is that bureaucratic systems running on their own logic become the determinants of foreign policy. This allows people like Arthur Schlesinger (himself an official under Kennedy) to state that the war in Indochina was “a tragedy without victims” and talk of “the politics of inadvertence”. This apologism can be seen in book titles on US war that emphasise benign intent or lack of agency such as Nobody Wanted War, or the book by one of the US officials who help destroy Iraq whose lame excuse is We Meant Well.
Discussing Syria (though it could just as well be Yemen) Porter says US actions point to “the total inanity and irrationality of US policy”. This is the critique of someone who wants to go on record as opposing US warmongering but wants the least possible challenges and repercussions for doing so. It resonates easily with people, but it simply does not hold up to any intellectual examination. US aggressions, as Porter admits, fit a pattern of behaviour, so are they irrational? Irrational would imply self-defeating, but the US has been destroying countries, Balkanising them, destabilising them, killing and impoverishing in many places. They have created an ever-lengthening string of failed or near-failed states in actions so momentous that they have created the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Why would irrationality be so consistent and have such a strong impact?
I do not have the time and space here to detail the intrinsic links between genocide and imperialism here, but let us not be unnecessarily stupid and deny that empires profit from Balkanising, partitioning and destroying countries that are strategically inconvenient. That is well established as part of history, and there is no reason at all to think that the US should be any different. The US empire, despite its internally generated weakness and contradictions, goes from strength to strength in foreign policy. The USSR is gone and NATO is on Russia’s border. China is besieged by the “Pacific pivot” and the TPP. Independent nationalist regimes that reject the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” (which is the surrender of economic sovereignty to the US empire) have been picked off one by one. In global terms the US has never been more powerful.
How many times do we need to see the same intentional destruction of a country and its people by the US before we call it what it is – genocide. This is intentional destruction of “nations and peoples” and it is exactly what the term genocide was coined to describe.
The US empire is hollowing itself out. As it fails internally it will be ever more driven to impose control globally. As the 2016 Presidential campaign enters its crucial stage, we are entering the most dangerous period of history since the Cold War. We cannot afford to cling to delusions. We need to oppose US wars; evict US military bases; end mass surveillance and intelligence co-operation; reject neoliberalism and pro-corporate trade deals; and we need to reject the propaganda and discourse of US exceptionalism and apologism. When I say “we”, I mean every single person on the planet (including people in the US itself). The empire has to be beaten back on all fronts, because otherwise there are two horrific options: either it collapses, or worse still it doesn’t.
In a post on Aotearoa’s The Daily Blog, a supposedly “leftist” blogger, Chris Trotter, took “Bernie’s die-hard supporters” to task for being “ridiculous”. He was endorsing Sarah Silverman’s words, but after some inconsequential waffle, he took it a bit further: “That makes the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd something much more than ridiculous, Sarah, it makes them dangerous.”
Trotter is not alone in this sentiment, but it is highly arrogant to presume to criticise without showing any insight or seeming to know much about the subject at all. Not only is the disruption and protest valid, the circumstances that lead them to it have a significance even broader than this US general election. Trump v. Clinton is the Alien vs. Predator election. Those who refuse to reject the two-party system agree that they prefer Predator, but they disagree about which candidate that is. Meanwhile a growing number of people, with varying levels of politeness, are trying to get them to realise that Alien and Predator are both aliens and both predators. But this predicament facing US voters is to some extent faced everywhere that neoliberalism holds sway, it is just more scary and funny when you put it in the deranged context of US electoral politics.
In my country, as fellow Kiwi Patrick Gower explained to Democracy Now!, we have a “morbid fascination” with the political rise of Donald Trump, but our media have been much kinder to Hillary Clinton. I can only liken the phenomenon to US news media reporting on Israel which is far more obsequious and uncritical than Israel’s own media. I don’t know why our media gloss over the faults, weaknesses, scandals and crimes of Clinton, but they do. They also followed a script in which Bernie Sanders was a wannabe spoiler, threatening to hand the USA over to Trump by prolonging his primary campaign and splitting the Democrats (a narrative similar to that in which Nader is blamed for giving the 2000 election to Bush).
In reality, if you look for them even from half a world away, there are clear reasons why Clinton is so unpopular with the people of the USA. In fact, she and Trump currently have equal pegging in dislike with both having “unfavourable” responses of 58% according to Gallup. No past Democrat or Republican candidate “comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike.” In ordinary circumstances neither Clinton nor Trump would be electable with that level of public disdain. The very fact that either could become POTUS is purely because they face each other.
These are strange times. We should reflect on the fact that each party can afford to put forward such a loser of a candidate only because both parties are doing so at the same time. Polls clearly showed that Bernie Sanders would have been able to beat Trump overwhelmingly in the popular vote (despite the vagaries of the electoral college system, this is historically reliable as an indicator of who will win ). Even though they come many months before the election these polls are not just an irrelevance and they probably even understate the advantage Sanders would have had over Trump. Like Clinton, and unlike Sanders, Trump is embroiled in ongoing scandals (over taxes, business practices and child rape allegations) that would in ordinary circumstances have made a presidential campaign highly problematic. Moreover, his campaigning style is key to his base of supporters, but the same theatrics and incendiary rhetoric inevitably make most people dislike him all the more. The only thing that keeps Trump in the race is Clinton, and vice versa.
Instead of feeling entitled to lecture and scold from afar, Chris Trotter should have taken the time to engage with the substance behind the discontent of Sanders delegates (not to mention the masses of protesters on the streets of Philadelphia, far greater in number than those protesting the RNC in Cleveland). To be “ridiculous” or even “dangerous”, as Trotter claims, the dissident Democrats would have to have no grounds to contest the legitimacy of Clinton’s selection as Democratic presidential candidate, no grounds to contest the legitimacy of the dominance of the two main parties in the electoral process, and no grounds to reject Clinton as morally unacceptable and insupportable as an elected representative. On all three counts those who refuse to accept Clinton have very safe and justifiable grounds.
Clinton’s selection as candidate has been far from democratic. She did not, as Trotter claims, win “fair and square”. There is evidence of systematic fraud in the Democratic primaries (the source is not a peer-reviewed paper, but this Snopes article confirms that there is substance to the claims). Similar findings come from a more recent non-partisan report (written in collaboration with Fritz Scheuren, former President of the American Statistical Association). In addition there has been voter suppression, most significantly in the psychologically and politically important states of California and New York. Then there is the media bias against Sanders (not to mention CNN dramatically biasing the electorate on the eve of the California primary).
Moreover leaked DNC emails clearly show that the primary process was unfair. DNC officials on DNC time were conspiring against a candidate and, by extension, the democratic process itself. How could anyone in good conscience simply brush this off as unworthy of examination? How much these DNC officials biased the process may be up for debate, but the fact that they did cannot be questioned. They were acting in bad faith all along, and decisions such as when and where to debate seemed to favour the Clinton campaign throughout. Politifact fatuously claims that there is no evidence in the DNC emails that they set out to rig the debates, but it is clear that important DNC staffers were willing and able to work to get Clinton the nomination, and her weakness as an orator is well recognised. To ignore these impacts also reeks of bad faith.
Perhaps we should also consider the fact that one of the leaks from Guccifer 2.0 showed that DNC staffers were planning Clinton’s strategy against the GOP “field” of candidates in May of 2015. This means that as far as they were concerned Clinton was already the anointed presidential candidate of their party. They were right: even though Clinton is highly unpopular; had to fight off a Sanders insurgency; and has been plagued by scandals about DNC emails, her own emails, and an FBI investigation, they were right to presume that she would get the nomination. The implications of this are that democracy is not really a factor in Democratic primaries and that insiders do not expect it to be.
And then there is the role of money in US politics. In simple terms, Clinton was given a lot more money than Sanders. According to the BBC in March, Sanders had received large numbers of small donations, but Clinton’s money was mostly from large donations with the finance industry being a crucial source. I would call that undemocratic whichever way you cut it, and while money is so crucial to the US electoral process, it can never ever be called “fair and square”.
Even if the #NeverHillary people did not have every right to reject the Democratic primary process in itself, they would still have grounds to reject it as part of a greater undemocratic system that maintains a duopoly of political power. Third parties are systematically excluded from publicly visible politics by the corporate news media. Social media has allowed third parties make a small amount of headway, just as soapboxes and pamphlets once did for Populists and Socialists, but now, as then, it is far from a level playing field. There is a media “blackout” of third parties. This became an issue in 2012, and it will be an even bigger issue this time. Not only are they quantitatively biased, but there is a qualitative bias in the news media with mentions of third parties being dismissive, mocking or negative. If Trump wins, for example, you can be certain that they will use the spoiler argument about Jill Stein, even though the most clear and direct cause will be the alienation of voters by the DNC’s decision to put forward a right-wing corporate-linked hawkish Clinton-Kaine ticket. And then there is the money thing, because the big corporate interests and billionaire donors have a huge sway in US elections (because of “Citizens United”) and they don’t like independent parties.
Yet the two-party system has never looked more undemocratic, more ridiculous, nor more fragile. The Republican primaries have become some sort of freak show and the party itself seems to teeter on the edge of a descent into a comical mash-up where crass aspirational consumer capitalism collides with Fascism and Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition. The Democrats, meanwhile, continue a process that dates back to 1968 (though it has changed somewhat) of carefully canvassing their support base to find who would best represent everything that epitomises Democrat ideals, and then trying their best to paint their pro-corporate elitist neoliberal candidate as being something like that person.
The chaos in both parties shows that the chronic malaise of democratic deficit that has been eating away at the US for decades, has entered a terminal phase. Chris Hedges, prophet of doom and hope par excellence, has changed his metaphorical placardbycrossing out “The End is Nigh!” and replacing it with “Told You So!”.
People have every right to reject Clinton’s selection and to disrupt this burlesque parody of a democratic process because it is demonstrably undemocratic and because their rights are being violated, but they also have a clear moral claim to reject and disrupt as a matter of conscience. Make no mistake that among other things Clinton is a grade A war criminal with the blood of thousands on her hands. Even as First Lady she took a key role in Operation Desert Fox (an air war, justified with blatant lies, which killed thousands of Iraqis). She was a key exponent of the Libya intervention which, after securing UNSC approval, immediately (and with clear premeditation) exceeded its legal mandate and became a regime change operation. That is the crime of waging aggressive war, the greatest war crime that there is. Libya has been turned into a nightmare that quite literally makes Ghadafi’s period of rule seem like a Golden Age of freedom and prosperity. As Eric Draitser reports, we can now confirm that accusations of atrocities against the Ghadafi regime were lies; that the US intent was always regime change; and that Libya is now a festering sore of instability, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, militia violence, political repression and economic disintegration.
Libya has also been used to ship arms and fighters to Syria, fuelling a civil war which has caused 250,000 deaths. Not only do these arms go to some very brutal people in their own right (from the FSA leader who bit into a dead enemy’s heart or lung in 2013 to the US-backed Islamists who posted video of themselves beheading a 12 year-old boy last week) but, predictably, they have also been a major source of arms for the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”. As for Clinton’s part, Jeffrey Sachs writes that “In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence – Clinton’s intransigence – that led to the failure of Annan’s peace efforts in the spring of 2012….” She supports current US airstrikes in Syria, such as that killed at least 28 civilians just this Thursday (only a week after a nearby strike killed at least 74 civilians). Because the Syrian government has not given permission, these airstrikes are themselves war crimes. Not only are acts such as this crimes, threatening such acts is itself a war crime. Therefore Clinton, who advocates imposing a no-fly zone on Syria, is both advocating and arguably committing a war crime as a central plank of her campaign. Given that military and diplomatic officials reject the plan as unworkable and irrational this is Clinton’s equivalent of Trumps’ wall except that it is also a war crime. She even has a bizarre “Mexico will pay” twist in that she has proposed “sharing” the no-fly zone with Russia. She should be pilloried, but she gets a free pass because people don’t understand what a no-fly zone is. This, in turn, is because they have intentionally been left in the dark in order that they think of a no-fly zone as a passive act, rather than what it is: a violent form of aggressive warfare that requires the destruction of all air defences on the ground as well as the destruction of aircraft.
Another country that owes much suffering and loss of life to Clinton is Honduras. After a coup there, as Adam Johnson of FAIR writes: “Fifteen House Democrats joined in, sending a letter to the Obama White House insisting that the State Department ‘fully acknowledge that a military coup has taken place and…follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian aid, as required by law.’ But Clinton’s State Department staunchly refused to do so, bucking the international community and implicitly recognizing the military takeover. Emails revealed last year by the State Department show that Clinton knew very well there was a military coup, but rejected cries by the international community to condemn it.”
Post-coup Honduras has seen the return of right-wing death squads and political murders such as that of Berta Caceres, an activist who, before her death, had herself singled out Clinton as responsible for the coup. Ironically, Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine frequently refers to his time in Honduras in 1980, decrying the dictatorship without ever acknowledging that it was installed and supported by the US, and showing no shame over sharing a podium with someone who helped destroy democracy and unleash violence there 3 decades later.
But if there is a people that has suffered most at the hands of Hillary Rodham Clinton, it may actually be the people of Haiti. In January of 2011 Hillary Clinton flew into Port-au-Prince to resolve an electoral dispute in this manner: the person who came third in the first round of Presidential elections should be bumped up to 2nd place because the US thinks he should and he should then compete in the run-off election. That is how Michel Martelly came to be President of Haiti. After 3 years the terms of the parliament’s deputies all ended, with Martelly refusing to hold elections. He ruled for a year by decree (without the international news media seeming to care in the slightest) before holding elections that were so fraudulent that they were scrapped after 8 months (in June). New elections are set for October of this year.
All of this was happening in a country tortured by an earthquake in 2010 that killed 220,000; a UN “stabilisation” mission, MINUSTAH, that acts more like a hostile violent occupying force; a cholera epidemic brought by MINUSTAH that has killed thousands; rampant corruption; and brutal political violence against the poor and the left. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was put in charge of a much of the overseas construction funds and Hillary announced that they would test “new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.”
Instead of rebuilding Haiti it was decided to “rebrand” Haiti. After 5 years $13.5 billion of aid had been spent with little or no assistance being given to those affected. The money is systematically disbursed in ways that make the poor poorer and the rich richer. It goes to line the pockets of US contractors. It maintains a privileged class of NGO executives who wield regnal rights (those usually reserved for the sovereign) as if they were feudal lords. It goes on constructing enterprises that destroy farms and small enterprises to return only a pittance in slave wages (incidentally, during Clinton’s time heading the State Department, US embassy staff opposed a minimum wage rise and cables released by Wikileaks in 2011 showthat they helped block a law passed unanimously in Haiti’s parliament raising minimum wage from $US0.24 to $US0.61).
“Reconstruction” money also gets spent on luxury facilities for the rich on the theory (or rather the pretext) that poor homeless people will be able to get jobs. The US Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti and only built 6 permanent houses, (note: this is not the International Red Cross, but rather the US organisation which also gained notoriety and condemnation for their response to Hurricane Sandy).
Meanwhile connected people from the US have found that Haiti is “open for business” (the actual slogan promoted by Clinton), with natural wealth to plunder and cheap labour to exploit. Among them is Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham, whose company scored a “sweetheart” concession to mine gold that had not been given for 50 years. The mining threatens to inflict severe environmental and humanitarian consequences. So when Clinton castigates Trump for ripping-off small businesses and workers, as she did in her acceptance speech, just bear in mind that her corruption hits people who are even more vulnerable. Like the no-fly zone issue she gets away with it because nobody knows about Haiti.
These are just some of the moral grounds on which people can legitimately refuse to support Hillary Clinton. Others have been highlighted by Black Lives Matter, often dating back to Bill Clinton’s terms as President. She was supportive of welfare reform, the drug war, and justice reform which all led to the current neoliberal security state. Complementing this are her ties to Wall Street, her immense wealth, her obscene speaking fees, and her clear political expediency and flexibility on issues that should be matters of conscience. Any real leftist should loathe Clinton in the same way that they would loathe Tony Blair and George Bush. They are a new aristocracy that have proven that they will steal and kill. These are all warmongering neoliberal neoconservative neofeudalist neofascists and it is time we finally understood that none of those labels is in conflict with any other of those labels. People like Trotter have an authoritarian streak that makes him far more offended by those who try to make themselves heard by disruption from below, then he does by a stinkingly corrupt decadent system that is far more offensive. His tone suggests that he views himself as being well above the ill-behaved rabble as if, despite his evidently ignorant and vulgar apprehension of the issues, he has some paternal wisdom. It is not a good look, but he is hardly the only example of his species abroad. He also has prior form: in 2007 when armed police terrorised an entire rural community with “anti-terror” raids on Māori and anarchist activists, he wrote “it wasn’t the actions of the police that provoked my fury, but of those who’d forced their hand.”
And yet, Hillary Clinton and the undemocratic behaviour of the “Democratic” party are not the only things that make disobedience and disruption a legitimate response. The Democratic National Convention showed extremely disturbing signs of militarist nationalism and fanatical fervour. Eddie Glaude described it as “retooling Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, the shining city on the hill”. That day a 4-star General marched out to a military drum-roll proclaiming Clinton’s credentials as a war leader. He scowled and yelled, probably trying to look like Churchill, but actually ending up looking more authentically Mussoliniesque than Trump: “To our enemies; we will pursue you as only America can. You will fear us!”.
And then there was the unforgettable end of Joe Biden’s speech. Long considered a non-entity only distinguished by his blinding teeth, Biden became a man possessed: a fist-pumping spittle-flecked vessel for the spirit of GI Joe and John Wayne: “We are America! Second to none. And we own the finish line. Don’t forget it! God bless you all, and may god protect our troops. Come on. We’re America! Thank you.”
Most significant of allwasthe moment that many considered the highlight of the entire conference. The crowd erupted when Khizr Khan,the father of a GI who died in the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, rhetorically asked Trump: “Have you even read the US constitution?” And then proffered his own copy from the left-hand shirt pocket (next to the heart).
Judging from the response on twitter Khan’s act was adored by nearly everyone, and that itself should be frightening because the moment carried many implications, and not one of them is good. Firstly we need to recognise that this is a ritual gesture popularised by the nationalistic right-wing Tea Party movement and linked in the public mind to that ideology. Secondly, as the US-Iraqi activist and writer Dahlia Wasfi commented: “the message that a ‘good Muslim’ is one who kills for US empire, oil, and Israel is no less offensive to me than whatever Trump has to say about Muslims or Islam.” Thirdly this is a type of disingenuous appropriation of Islam equivalent to greenwashing, pinkwashing or femiwashing. Even Piers Morgan tweeted: “Something very distasteful about Hillary using Khans as political pawns vs Trump given she’s partly responsible for their son’s death”. Fourthly it signifies that in the space of just 8 years, the Democratic Party has gone from viewing the Iraq War as a “war of choice” (which has connotations, if noticeably inexplicit ones, of immorality and illegality) to viewing the Iraq War as a fight to protect US freedoms.
The entire DNC was so nationalistic and militaristic that the actor and activist Margot Kidder was evidently driven to publish a cri de coeur in Counterpunch: she begins “the words are gagging my throat and my stomach is twisted and sick and I have to vomit this out”, and ends: “And there you all are tonight, glued to your TVs and your computers, your hearts swelled with pride because you belong to the strongest country on Earth, cheering on your Murderer President. Ignorant of the entire world’s repulsion. You kill and you kill and you kill, and still you remain proud.” My question is this: if Margot Kidder can see this clearly from within the belly of the beast (well, Montana), how can Chris Trotter, an Aotearoan and putative leftist, be such a blithe apologist for a mass-murderer like Hillary Clinton.
In all I have written I have focussed on morals and reasons of principle. They alone should make it clear that only thing that is “ridiculous” is the conceit of loftily condemning those who refuse to be drawn by fear into supporting the insupportable. I am aware, however, that there are many practical issues I have not dealt with. I am aware that some people will think that US voters, facing the possibility of Trump, do not have the luxury of rejecting Clinton. These are very important issues, because time and again even those who refuse to be chained to the “lesser-of-two-evils” cede the realist high-ground to intellectually and morally compromised dullards; dullards who insist, like broken records stuck in the era of vinyl, that we must play the game and change it from the inside. I do not intend to leave such claims unchallenged, so check back here for Part 2 of this article in which, amongst other things, I will test how strong “chains of rhetorical steel” are (hint: about as strong as chains of rhetorical butter).
In Aotearoa (New Zealand) and in Australia we observe Anzac day, commemorating the first landings at Gallipoli in 1915 on April 25. The Dardanelles campaign that followed this landing was 8 months of futile slaughter that ended in complete withdrawal. In the century since the sense of loss and the rightful condemnation of the vicious military folly were always muted and buried under tales of honour and national pride, but now we are forgetting altogether. In our fatuous nationalistic self-love we are telling our children that the war was a noble endeavour. History is being rewritten in the most offensive and disgusting manner and we need to finally confront the fact that Anzac Day should be a day of shame, not of pride.
After the Armistice in 1918 people began in many ways to commemorate the war. The event and monuments are solemn. Tombs or tomb-like memorials and plaques listing the fallen became commonplace. Events were also solemn. The Anzac Day service that we observe here in Aotearoa is based on funeral rites. Much of the memorialisation implicitly or explicitly promised to struggle against further war and bloodshed. For many this had been the war to end war, and that was the only meaning and consolation they could find in the futility of the carnage that had occurred. At the same time nationalism and the need to find positive meaning to soften grief shifted people from mourning the loss of lives to honouring the sacrifice of lives. But sacrifice implies that something was gained. Increasingly our commemoration of events that should fill us with deep shame has become an occasion for mistaken pride. We have forgotten the ugly truths of the Great War. Even though wars are happening now in which we have moral, if not material entanglement, we are as foolish as the people of 1914 who thought the War was a romantic adventure and would be “over by Christmas”.
We need to remember the forgotten truths, some of which were buried right from the start. To begin with, there is the fact that large numbers of British people actually opposed the war. On August the 2nd 1914 there was a massive antiwar rally in Trafalgar Square, London. The Manchester Guardian reported that it was “far larger, for example, than the most important of the suffragist rallies”. On that very day the British government decided to go to war. 4 cabinet ministers and one junior minister resigned and the government seemed in danger of falling, but on the 4th of August Germany invaded Belgium and Britain officially declared war. They now had the pretext of protecting Belgian neutrality, though they later violated Greek neutrality in the same manner. In truth, for Britain and for us, this was a war for Empire.
Less than 4 hours after Britain declared war Lord Liverpool, the Governor General of New Zealand, stood on Parliament steps in Wellington are read a proclamation from the Emperor King George. We were ordered to war. Many New Zealanders were wildly enthusiastic but the voices of those opposed to war were never heard. There was no debate and, as a country, we had no voice in this matter.
Young men who had no idea what they would face clamoured to volunteer. 2 years later conscription was introduced and about one third of the men sent overseas from Aotearoa were conscripts. Whether conscript or volunteer, though, the lives of military personnel during wartime are a form of regulated slavery. When ordered to die, they must die. New Zealanders died in numbers that can be hard for us to grasp. It was not lawful to act in the interests of self-preservation regardless of what you thought of the futile slaughter and stalemate that lasted for years on the Western Front. 23 New Zealanders were killed by firing squad for desertion.
April 25 is Anzac day. For both Australia and Aotearoa the formation of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was an occasion of national maturation, but we have always been too polite to admit that our national spirit developed in a very ignoble disdain for the weakness of ordinary Britons. For ordinary soldiers the Anzac spirit came from embarking thinking of themselves as somewhat inferior Britons, but on arrival discovering not only a commonality of culture between the two countries, but also a new sense of self for each. Far from being inferior, the Anzac troops soon developed the belief that they were superior to British soldiers and developed a degree of contempt for them and their murderous officers. British soldiers were physically and mentally weak for the simple reason that the British working class was the most malnourished in Europe. 50% of British military aged men were not even considered fit for military service. The Anzacs thought that they lacked strength, endurance, morale and initiative. That contempt for the less fortunate is how they overcame their sense of colonial inferiority.
As a result of the relative individual weakness of the British troops, British commanders used Canadian and Anzac troops as shock troops throughout the war. Because of this personnel from Aotearoa were over 50% more likely to be killed in the war than their British counterparts.
After three years of often horrific fighting – including the Battle of the Somme which left 2111 New Zealanders dead and 5848 wounded – New Zealand’s military effort culminated in the Third Battle of the Ypres, better known to us as Passchendaele. On the 12th of October 1917 New Zealand forces were ordered to advance in muddy conditions into machine gun fire. On that day alone 800 Kiwis died. Over all, the 3rd Ypres cost New Zealand 1796 lives. In a letter home Private Leonard Hart wrote:
“Dozens got hung up in the wire and shot down before their surviving comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost. We accordingly lay down in shell holes or any cover we could get and waited. Any man who showed his head was immediately shot. They were marvellous shots those Huns. We had lost nearly eighty per cent of our strength and gained about 300 yards of ground in the attempt. This 300 yards was useless to us for the Germans still held and dominated the ridge.”
He also wrote about seeing British wounded who were abandoned by their commanders:
“These chaps, wounded in the defence of their country, had been callously left to die the most awful of deaths in the half frozen mud while tens of thousands of able bodied men were camped within five miles of them behind the lines.”
After Passchendaele the New Zealand Division, worn down by horrible misuse and deprivation, was as broken and lacklustre as their British comrades.
Indeed, the conditions faced by all frontline troops of all nations in the War were enough to break any normal human being. On arrival at the front they were confronted with overwhelming noise and disorientation in time and space. They had to contend with stench, filth, mud, vermin and cold. They were constantly fatigued from hard labour at or behind the front line. They suffered chronic sleep deprivation exacerbated by the reversal of day/night patterns of activity in the front trenches. They were malnourished and extremely prone to physical disease, but were often treated punitively, cruelly or callously on falling ill. They were starved of any, even basic, strategic information and and were frequently blind and helpless as death and danger stalked them or exploded all around them. Their lives were thrown away by others as if they had no value. In these circumstances the front line soldier inevitably came to see some actions of military superiors and politicians (and by association the “home”) as either gratuitously idiotic or insane, or even as intentionally murderous. This was not entirely irrational as many of the commanding officers of Britain and Europe were known to loathe the men they sent into battle. However, along with hatred of those in the rear echelons, frontline soldiers often developed a hatred for women and older men. Some even imagined that women were rejoicing in the slaughter of their own sons.
Deaths in the Great War were often lingering, agonising and horrific. That is the norm for the violence of death in war, yet the technology and the conditions of the fields of battle made this even more so in World War One. Only a lucky few died clean deaths, and many who died slowly would have died unattended, alone with their grief, fear, pain and loneliness. Others might have been dragged away by brave stretcher bearers, only to end up living with horrifying incurable mutilations. These men with lost limbs, crushed joints or incinerated flesh would live in chronic pain, often as beggars.
The sense of helplessness common to soldiers seems to have been a major factor in causing acute psychiatric casualties. Men would break down completely in various ways and there was considerable risk that such people would be tried in a court martial and even shot. Others were sent for treatment and for the first time, but not the last, military psychiatrists struggled with the fact that their job was not to make people better, but to make them effective again and send them back into the situation that was destroying them. We now know that those acute psychiatric cases were the tip of the iceberg. Post-traumatic stress disorder generally develops over many years or even decades. The war created an epidemic of family violence and alcoholism that wreaked havoc on the homefront, but did so behind closed doors.
Some of the men brutalised in the War became violent official or unofficial paramilitary squadrists. The notorious “Black and Tans” sent by Britain to Ireland were largely veterans of the Great War.
Similarly the Fascist and Nazi militias that became active throughout Europe were originally veterans. The violence of fascism was born in the trenches. Like the Spanish Flu that killed up to 50 million people, no mutation of ideology could have been so virulent and so deadly had it not been cultivated in the brutality of the Great War. This is what led to another 60 million dead in the bombed cities, on the battlefields, and in the gas chambers of World War II. As Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer tells us: “The killing, mutilation and gas poisoning of millions of soldiers on both sides had broken taboos and decisively blunted moral sensitivities. Auschwitz cannot be explained without reference to World War I.”
The violence that sprang from the Great War did not end when the next war ended in the nuclear incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British Empire had devoted fully 25% of its troops to fighting in the Middle East, and in doing so it directly set in motion events that are still causing death and destruction through war as I speak to you now. Men and women are fighting and dying right now, be they volunteers or conscripts. Bombs are dropping on civilians whose homelands may not have known real peace for 2, 3 or even as much as 5 decades.
The British effort in the Middle East was a war for oil. While France pleaded for help and saw one half of her young men die in battle (one half of all French men between the ages of 20 and 32 were killed in the war), but Britain ignored the desperation of her closest ally and invaded first Turkey and then Iraq. They treated their allies very badly. They betrayed their Arab allies by signing the Sykes/Picot agreement that carved up all of the Arab Middle East for Britain and France. They then betrayed the French by redrawing the boundaries of that agreement to put further distance between French territories and the oilfields that were the British goal. Then two days after an armistice that was supposed to end hostilities between Turkey and Britain, a British force invaded Mosul vilayet in what is now northern Iraq. After nearly two weeks of fighting they secured the area and now they had established control over every known source of petroleum in the Middle East. They created the countries of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and more. In a year or so the British were dropping poison gas on rebellious Iraqi villages.
That is the empire that New Zealand soldiers died for. That is the future that their sacrifice brought us: burning cities, mass graves and wars that now seem destined to simply continue in perpetuity, as if the very idea of peace is lost to us. If we want to honour their memory, we cannot lie to ourselves about the crime perpetrated on them – on all of us. This country sent 10% of its population overseas. We lost less than countries like France, Serbia or Austria (where many civilians starved to death) but look at an atlas. Those countries had little choice. What madness made us do this to our young men? In economic terms alone we crippled ourselves, wasting years of development, not for a worthwhile cause, not even for empty gains, but to help make a world that was much much worse for our efforts and our loss. It is a hard pill to swallow, but it is worse than if they had died for nothing. That is the truth, and if we want to honour their memories we have to work to end the suffering that still follows in the wake of their deaths. Those people who are dying right now in the Middle East are most often dying from arms made by our allies in the US while US and UK based oil companies reap record profits on a new tide of blood. We were craven and wilfully blind to the immorality of the British Empire, but we still provide intelligence, diplomatic and military support to their equally immoral successors. Is that too political? Well war is political and if you don’t talk about politics you cannot talk sensibly about war.
When the Great War was first commemorated it was in the spirit that we must never let this happen again. Antiwar sentiment was the norm, not least in the RSA. In 1922 if you bought one of the first red poppies sold here, you were donating to an organisation that was committed to peace. Now, I fear, we have forgotten the lessons of two world wars and Anzac Day is increasingly nationalistic and militaristic. This is not a day for pride. Pride is the greatest offence against the memories of the fallen.
In George Orwell’s book 1984 the mainstream media language of “Newspeak” was replacing English one word at a time. Complexities were abolished and replaced with simplistic notions where a word with a defined meaning like “democracy” was unnecessary and was replaced with “double-plus good”. This is interchangeable with other “double-plus good” things like “freedom”, “opportunity”, “our troops”, “human rights” and so forth. The point is that when one discusses “double-plus good” one does not have to get bogged down in details such as whether it is used accurately or not, nor what it actually means.
“Terrorism” means “double-plus bad”. When people use the term “terrorism” it almost never comes from a critical judgement that characterises certain acts as terroristic because they employ terror. It is just as telling when the word “terrorism” is not allowable. US military violence is almost never called “terrorism”. This is not because people have weighed the characteristics of that violence and ruled our terror as an intended outcome – it is because terrorism is “double-plus bad”, and the US military can never be “double-plus bad”.
What Orwell did not envisage was the growth of another category of words. These represent concepts with two “meanings” in Newspeak – concepts which are “double-plus bad” to 50% of the population, but “double-plus good” to the other 50%. In the US a polarisation of issues that began with the artificial “culture war” created a double-Orwellian political discourse over issues like reproductive rights, guns, gender and sexuality, religion and tradition. In no issue has reason prevailed, instead fatuous unreason and tribal smugness are taking over those who formerly stood for progress. We are left with a bunch of chest-thumping troglodytes on two different sides yelling at each other while their brains shrink with each passing second. The issues they yell about may be important, but they only ever deepen the divisions and strengthen the status quo.
While the two sides compete in drooling primeval aggression, they have no time or energy to question the increasingly threadbare excuses given for the greatest crimes: mass killing; mass destruction (including environmental destruction); and the wholesale appropriation of the wealth of humanity and the resources of the planet.
When split in this way the sort of monolithic orthodoxy alluded to by Orwell is actually strengthened because it is subjected to much less critical scrutiny. It means that left-wing progressives who might be inclined to work for radical change can be distracted by greenwashing or pinkwashing. Equally, reactionaries are actually bolstered by the reforms they loathe but which fuel their apocalyptic rhetoric and fill their ranks with the discontented.
Kakistocracy, Mediocracy, Idiocracy, Ponerocracy, Pathocracy, and other words my spellcheck doesn’t like.
George Orwell’s 1984 was the Idiocracy of its time. Both works are satires about contemporary idiocy which use a science fiction gloss and a futuristic setting in order to mock, but also analyse, the stupidity of the authors’ peers. If each seems to be somewhat prophetic it is not because they were real attempts to predict the future, but rather because they were extremely accurate when exaggerating the trends of their own times.
1984 was more focussed on political stupidity and elite fools, but ultimately Idiocracy is the same – its depiction of mass popular stupidity becomes less important to the narrative than the fact that the people who make the decisions are the pre-eminent morons.
Both works use a disposable and transparent science fiction conceit in the same manner that Jonathan Swift used a fantasy genre in Gulliver’s Travels as a vehicle for criticising the politics and immorality of his own time and place. In Idiocracy there is a plainly whimsical and silly notion of increasing stupidity caused by a form of sexual selection that happens because stupid people choose to have more children. This is nothing more than a pretext for exploring the way marketing-driven ideology makes people into mindless drones. The reason that Idiocracy had predictive power is that the marketing model of deliberately dumbed-down consumers has diffused throughout more and more of society. This is the process which the film was critiquing.
In 1984 the science fiction conceit is more bitter than whimsical. Orwell is satirising the notion of totalitarianism (a notion which he helped into existence) by parodying his own Animal Farm and his former mentor Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. His setting of near omnipresent surveillance cameras and (just as importantly) near omnipresent televisions and loudspeakers is the vehicle for showing that internalised orthodox ideology is a panoptical disciplinary mechanism stronger than any feasible secret police and surveillance regime. He was anticipating the slogan of 1968: “There is a policeman inside all our heads”, suggesting that we internalise the orthodox ideology of the state and it monitors us from within, making us do our exercises and punishing our disloyal thoughts. He was also well ahead of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman because the allegory implies that greater thought control exists in those regimes with less physical repression.
I know what some of you are thinking – how can I be writing of Orwell’s Oceania having “less physical repression” when the protagonist is thrown in a dungeon and tortured in a real physical manner? That is the whole point, though. All of that is meant to be an allegory of the treatment meted out to those who don’t toe the line within any circles of intellectual, artistic or political communications in late-1940s Britain. When Winston Smith finds a little corner in which he thinks (mistakenly) that he is beyond the view of surveillance cameras and can write freely, it is a clear reference to Orwell’s own comment after a few months working at the BBC: “I consider I have kept our little corner of it fairly clean.” He quit the BBC about a year later in even greater disillusionment. He made reference to the BBC by calling the nebulous leader figure of Oceania “Big Brother”, and by painting journalism as “The Ministry of Truth”. He made an even clearer reference by naming the ultimate torture chamber “Room 101” after a conference room in Broadcasting House in which he attended editorial meetings.
Orwell’s critique of the BBC and other mainstream media is not at all subtle. The fact that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence over the obvious allegorical meaning completely vindicates his accusations of brainwashed obtuseness among the intelligentsia. Historically people have been very insistent that Orwell was critiquing totalitarianism and warning us about how horrible life will be if we let it happen here. That is what people are primed to expect and that is what they find, especially because they are not necessarily familiar with the subjects of satirical references. For those who have only read 1984 under the impression that it is a warning about the potential for future nastiness, I would suggest re-reading the entire work with this different understanding. Apart from anything else it is surprisingly funny in parts (although the humour does tend to leave the bitter after-taste that you get when things are a little too true).
Twice the Bang for your Buck
1984 tackled many mind-destroying facets of orthodox ideology, but I am going to stick simply to the one I mentioned above – the simplistic aspect to Newspeak which replaced complex realities with sterile predetermined moralistic judgements. This is a way of ensuring that people react in a kneejerk fashion and are not subject to the undesirably democractic results of thought, critical engagement and reasoned discourse. (It also parallels the type of stupidity derived from advertising that is seen in Idiocracy. In that film people water their crops with sports drink in the belief that electrolytes will help the plants because electrolytes are a selling point in ads. In other words, electrolytes are double-plus good.)
As I mentioned, though, things are structured a little differently and there are now two exclusive dialects of Newspeak. Imagine if most of the “two minutes hate” that people in Oceania devoted to screaming and yelling spittle-flecked abuse at a screen was redirected so that people on each side of the theatre aisle were pouring forth that very bile and loathing across at each other. If that is hard to imagine, you only need to look around online a little and eventually you will find a comment thread that fits the description.
In our stupid world irony is piled on irony. Ironically, people always misrepresent 1984 because they are being Orwellian in their obtuseness. In short, every time someone mindlessly misses the point entirely by going on about mass surveillance (usually mentioning prefab hero Edward McSnowden, the world’s first 100% synthetic whistle-blowing sheepdog), they are confirming that they are just as cowardly and moronic as the “Outer Party” dweebs of Orwell’s satire.
Idiocracy was also about the spread of stupidity created by the reproduction of ideology. It uses a genetic analogy to create an absurdly exaggerated illustration. There is, in fact, a well-known concept in which ideology is transferred through as an analogue of a gene. This analogue of a gene is a single encapsulated discrete unit of cultural production which can be replicated. The name given to this was “meme”.
The irony in this instance becomes apparent when we examine the history of the meme of the concept of the meme itself. To live, memes must be retained transmitted and propagated, just like genes. The term was created in 1976. It abided and slowly grew. By the 1990s it was becoming important in cultural activism and people started to enter self-consciously into a “meme war”. The hope was that the truth would give memes a greater attraction for retention and transmission. This would even out the unlevel playing field where elite cultural production dominates and propagandises. Hopes rose as the internet made it possible for any smartarse dissident to reach across the world and with a few well-chosen words and maybe a picture that would burst the bubble of stale orthodoxies and self-serving elite ideology. It looked as if the elite ideological hegemony that enslaves the minds of its victims might finally be overthrown.
In reality, of course, the internet actually provided a space of information overload – an environment where the fittest memes were the most facile, simplistic and self-satisfied snippets. Faced with a barrage of things and stuff, people are attracted to sensationalism and that which makes them feel good about themselves. Thus, in a dramatic twist, the very concept of the meme itself has been vastly overshadowed by its mutant offspring, the meme that a “meme” is a picture with a slogan added (the ironic iconic image being that of Gene [sic] Wilder radiating smug condescension). 99% of people who use the term “meme” use it exclusively in this latter sense, happily oblivious to the complex concept they are stomping all over.
These picture “memes” are emblematic of a social media driven paradigm of communication that is also seen in tweets and status updates. These are communications of speed and brevity. They lack complexity and the lack of critical foresight applied to communicating actually makes them deeply conservative. Everyone is a self-promoter and a crowd-pleaser, rigidly self-censoring so as to never challenge the orthodoxies of their own little reference group of followers.
By this mechanism many “progressives” and pseudo-dissidents have been transformed into the mirror image of the hegemonic class and their right-wing brownshirt thugs. They are sucked in to the “left wing” of a meta-orthodoxy embodied most clearly in institutions such as the Guardian or Huffington Post. These are left-wing enough to attract and retain left-wing readers but act almost purely to create boundaries to legitimate discourse and even to move their readers into a conservative outlook.
My Piety is Bigger than Your Piety
Regardless of any media affiliation, the online world tends to bring everyone down to the level of a spoiled bourgeois 18-year old Trotskyist, full of puerile arrogance and derision for those who don’t “get it”. In that sense, although people are getting ever more orthodox and rigid and unthinking, they are also taking on more to the outside appearance of fervent radicals.
The results are threefold. One result is that extremism and tribalism deepen. The second is that those who were once taking a stance based on knowledge and critical engagement are being crowded out by those who hollow out such causes to create mindless pieties. The third is that those same people are easily manipulated into becoming bulwarks of orthdoxy, cheerleaders of elite privilege, humanitarian warmongers, and liberal lovers of imperialist tyranny.
Everyone reading this is likely to recognise a key symptom of the malaise – lazy lies spread on social media and alternative media in support of left-wing causes. Not a day goes by when I do not find something that uses stupidity, ignorance or lies in a supposedly good cause. One that annoyed me recently was an article saying that “abortion is as old as pregnancy” and “abortion has always existed”. The article was making a worthy point, but doing so with idiocy. Because of that it can only ever preach to the choir and it encourages supporters of reproductive rights to become slack and stupid in their argumentation. It leaves them vulnerable to making idiots of themselves. Another example was a “meme” saying that 100 million “Native Americans” were killed by the “US Government”. The intent was arguably good, but the claim made is actually the result of racist chauvinistic parochialism. This is not the antithesis of mindless right-wing patriotic idiocy, it is its complement. Dissent is co-opted into the greater myth of US omnipotence and centrality. Yet everyone clicks “like” because if you don’t use your brain it seems worthy.
A big part of the support given to imperialist Western regimes like the US, and individual leaders like Obama or Sanders, is the use of this tribalism to create an unthinking loyalty. For example, virulent, if not unhinged, right-wing attacks on Bernie Sanders make people rush into his camp and react with fury against any real criticism. As with Obama, they become conditioned to think that criticism of the leader is itself a transgressive act of violence. At the same time they lose any shame about evincing proud support for mass murderers. They become zombie zealots who look normal at first but act exactly like Trump supporters when you criticise their chosen leader.
Similarly, the emotive and uncritical human rights discourse which most “progressives” are immersed in becomes a way to get them into supporting imperialist wars. The demonisation of Third World baddies like Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad or Muammer Gaddafi allows these “liberals” to get in direct touch with their inner patriot, their inner warmonger, and their inner racist. They are then indistinguishable from the right-wing “hawks” except in being somewhat more insane in their eye-rolling enthusiasm for mass death.
Fans of 1984 might wonder why I haven’t acknowledged that Orwell already suggested a fundamental equivalence between opponents and supporters of Big Brother, symbolised by the fact that the canonical revolutionary text was hidden between the pages of the Newspeak dictionary. The reason is that I think that Orwell indicates a moral equivalence, but I am suggesting that more and more people who might think that they are dissidents are actually loyal party members in a new bifurcated Inner Party divided into two antagonistic wings under the same monolithic and unquestionable orthodoxy.
“Liberal” and “conservative” do not have definitions any more. They both mean double-plus good to some people and double-plus bad to others. Similarly certain issues are no longer really debated on their merits: taxes, guns, abortions, government, civil rights and many other topics are to greater or lesser extents no longer actual issues. They are key indicators of tribal affiliation that are either double-plus good or double-plus bad. It is like a binary code, and most people’s politics can be summarised in just 1 bit. People reading this article are likely to have a more nuanced view than that, but let us face it, if you read things like this you are in a very small minority.
Our job, in this tiny minority, is to crack the system. If you cannot drag someone away from supporting Bernie Sanders or the “humanitarian” bombing of ISIS, then alienate them from yourself and your cause. If you don’t do that, then every single individual issue will continue to be co-opted and subverted. If real activists stop tolerating Party loyalists then more will leave the Party and the short-term losses suffered by activist causes will be more than compensating by not having the cause taken out of the hands of real dissidents, subverted, and then used as a tool of oppression.
Moreover, if you don’t want to be sucked in to the Party, do not give into the temptation to be stupid just because it is easy and gratifying and gives you respite from the unrelenting “pessimism of the intellect”. For example, I have already mentioned Edward Snowden in disparaging terms, which will probably anger some of you. Snowden has done and said some good things, but he has also stated that letting the public know what their government is doing is a danger to democracy. Deep down you must all know on some level that he is an elite concoction, even if his elite faction is a dissenting one. Watch the trailer to Citizen 4 and tell me that his words are not made for Hollywood. You should not trust him – he is a former CIA officer. You should not like him – he is a US patriot who joined the Army after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And you definitely should not idolise and lionise him as a being hero and the moral equivalent of Chelsea Manning. It is an insult to Manning’s sacrifice and suffering to even mention Snowden in the same breath.
We all want the easy way out and the easy answer. We must have hope, but do not hope for a saviour. Do not hope for the perfect revolution or the perfect movement. Hope for the strength to continue the struggle. Hope to keep hope alive.
Orwell ended 1984 with a vision of history as a boot stomping on a face for all eternity. We need to embrace that in the same way that Buddhists embrace the universality of suffering, and yet may nonetheless devote themselves to fighting suffering. The boot will always be with us and pretending otherwise is the road to delusion, or to despair and surrender. On the other hand, the boot isn’t going to spare you if you stop struggling so you might as well fight. Nor will the boot let you be on its side if you stomp on other people’s faces. It doesn’t have a side. It is a pure avatar of oppression.
Yet the boot is not uniform in the pain it dishes out. In simple terms, our choice is either to protect ourselves from the boot at the expense of others or protect others from the boot at our own expense. If we protect others instead of ourselves we reduce suffering more than if we protect ourselves. If everybody devoted themselves to that then the boot would be like a feather. But that is the trick isn’t it? The most important struggle is to get others to stand in solidarity when they are so prone to division, to fear, and to selfishness.
On the other side of the ledger, part of putting yourself first is also getting others to do the same. Selfishness loves company, resents and loathes altruism, and seeks to sabotage or subvert principled activism. In that sense it is like a conflict of us and them, but we don’t win be scoring points and being superior.
In conclusion: everyone should stop being so wilfully stupid, then things will get much better.
A sort of companion piece to the article “The Refugee Crisis and the New Holocaust” which explores the political misuse of Holocaust exceptionalism and Judeocide exceptionalism to mask the genocidal nature of empires past and present.
Zionists like to lay special claim to the term genocide on behalf of all Jews, but now anti-Zionists have taken to supporting this. Some anti-Zionists and supposed anti-imperialists have repeated the false claim that the term was invented to denote the killing of Jews. The only reason that I can see for this is to maintain a false image of genocide as an act of exceptional villains. In fact genocide is a normal behaviour of imperial and colonial powers. Despite many attempts to rehabilitate empires as being on some level noble – all imperial and colonial projects are inescapably genocidal.
However, a number of Jewish nationalist ideologues claim that the only true genocide was that carried out by the Germans against Jews. These people are called “Holocaust exceptionalists”, and their claims are broadly understood by genocide scholars as being nonsense supported by falsehoods. It is fair to surmise that Holocaust exceptionalists are generally ardent Zionists. That is why I have been alarmed to see their most central and fundamental lie being spread by anti-Zionists, anti-imperialists, and antiwar writers. That lie is the idea that the word genocide was ever in any way meant to be a way of describing Judeocide in particular.
One writer went so far as posting that the word genocide “was invented… in order to stress the difference between murdering Jews and killing lesser breeds.” This lie is so easy to disprove that it is laughable. Anyone can spend 30 minutes reading Chapter 9 of Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe(which can be found here) and they will know that there is no way that Lemkin meant the “genocide” term to be exclusively applied to Jews or to the Judeocide that was happening even as he wrote.
When people refuse to accept or even to re-examine a demonstrably false claim it is because it is an essential foundation of a much larger lie. For Zionists the obvious need is to make Israel morally immaculate and incapable of doing wrong. Holocaust exceptionalists have to perform serious mental contortions to avoid confronting the fact that genocide was not intrinsically related to Judeocide, but apparently the Zionists are not alone in this. When I have tried to correct others on this issue I am met with resounding silence and even censorship. The question is why don’t these antiwar and anti-Zionist people want to face up to a very simple truth? What do they have to hide? Or what are they hiding from?
Genocide is an incredibly important word. That is the reason that the meaning of the word is suppressed. It is a term, like “terrorism”, that is thrown around with great passion by people who would never in a million years be able to explain what they actually mean when they use the term.
Many people bandy the term genocide about with great emotion and no thought. However, there are also people who scorn others for inappropriately using the term when they too would be completely incapable of giving a real definition. The whole discourse between these two sides is even more idiotic than the sum of its parts because it is like a debate without any reasoning. The conflict is invariably between a party who believes that it is a badge of passion, courage and moral engagement to claim that something is genocide, and another that believes labelling something as genocide is premature, rash, irrational, partisan or lacking in scholarly standards.
Unacceptable Ideas
You might wonder how this widespread idiocy came to pass. It is very simple. At the end of World War II a traumatised world wanted to know how the events they had lived through had come to pass. They wanted to criminalise the German and Japanese leaders and they wanted to understand what had led these societies to cause such violence. People wanted to understand this as criminality and pathology. But there were two areas into which inquiring minds might wander which were metaphorically signposted with skull-and-crossbones and the legend “STAY OUT!”
The first area relates to the war that had just been. The victors in this “Good War” were in reality drenched in the blood of the innocent and that was a very delicate matter. We have just passed the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there is still a suppression of the fact that those bombings were not military in intent. They were not aimed at winning the war against Japan. Nor was the even more deadly campaign of firebombing that preceded the atom bombs. In fact most of the “strategic” bombing carried out by the US and UK in World War II was simply mass murder of civilian populations, and it was militarily counterproductive – a misuse of resources that hindered military progress. I could illustrate this in detail, but let me try to save time and effort by using a comparison. The Soviet Union produced more armaments than anyone else in the war. They did not build bomber fleets to bomb German cities. To do so would have been an unthinkable, nigh suicidal, waste of resources. The Western Allies had the luxury of wasting their most valuable materiel and personnel on a project of mass murder, but the underlying strategic calculus is the same – it was militarily counterproductive.
With the deaths of millions of civilians weighing on the consciences of leaders and on the collective conscience of the people’s who had fought against the greater evil of Axis, the last thing anyone would want would be the suggestion that the actions of the Allied leaders in killing civilians were in some intrinsic and essential way linked to the atrocities committed by Japan and Germany. Both collectively and individually, both consciously and unconsciously, people knew not to explore any notion that would suggest that mass killings of civilians by Allies had any fundamental and immutable connection to the mass killings of civilians by Axis powers.
This is best summed up by Justice Robert Jackson’s opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials, “…the record on which we judge these defendants today isthe record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” Please note that he is not talking about a future trial of a future regime, but the way “history” will judge “us” – meaning Jackson and his contemporaries. The discourse of aggressive war that was created at Nuremberg was closely and precisely shaped to construct a crime of which the Germans were guilty but of which the Allies were not. That is why Hermann Göring at times shouted out “What about Hamburg?” and “What about Hiroshima?” Göring knew that wasn’t a legal defence in and of itself, he was trying to fracture the narrative framework with which his prosecutors and judges legitimated themselves.
And then there is another no-go area – another place from which the collective consciousness (and most individual consciousnesses) shied away in fear. In addition to avoiding any suggestion that Axis atrocities might bear any resemblance to the Allied habit of incinerating innocent human beings by the tens of thousands, it was also imperative that there be no suggestion whatsoever that Japanese and German conquest and occupation might in any way resemble the colonial and imperial policies of Britain, France and the US.
The Frightening Truth
To be very clear: the Allies killed millions in World War II, but the Axis powers killed tens of millions. Within reason, aggression can justly be called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Thus, to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between Axis and Allied crime is not really acceptable. (It is equally unacceptable to claim a moral equivalence between Nazi crimes and those of Communist regimes in the USSR or China).
That said, however, the atrocities that the Germans and Japanese committed against the peoples of Europe and Asia inevitably resemble the crimes of other colonising and imperially hegemonic powers. Both of these Axis powers, along with Italy, consciously wanted to repeat the imperialist and colonialist conquests of the British and French. The difference is that with changes of technology the intensity and speed were unprecedented. What would have been 50 years of killing for the British Empire was squeezed into 5 years. Yet the principle was the same, and I cannot help but think that the main reason that people saw a moral distinction between German imperial expansion in Europe and, say, British expansion in Africa was that most of the victims of the Germans were White.
Meanwhile policies of deliberately and systematically killing civilians came to dominate the so-called “strategic bombing” of the UK and US during the war. They too bore chilling similarities to the policies of mass killing pursued by the Germans and Japanese. Eric Markusen and David Kopf published a book called The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing which documents parallels in the way the Germans and the Western Allies were justifying ever greater mass killings with pretensions of clinical detachment and inevitability, along with eerily similar euphemisms – such as the German “evacuation” and the British “dehousing”.
The fact is that there is an essential and fundamental connection between the actual extermination of peoples, such as the Aboriginals of Tasmania, the “hyperexploitation” such as lead to millions of deaths at Potosí and 10 million in King Leopold’s Congo, and the social and cultural destruction accompanying the economic and political subjugation of imperial or neocolonial domination. Within that framework there are also practices of ethnic cleansing and of any systematic attempt to reduce a non-military population through killing, preventing births, or reducing material wellbeing to lower lifespans.
The Germans did, or attempted to do, all of the above to various peoples under the Nazi leadership of the “Third Reich”. In many ways this project was inchoate and even contradictory, and yet viewed from enough distance it had a distinct singular form. One man, Raphael Lemkin, saw it and recognised in it “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” He called that “genocide”.
Disney Genocide
Lemkin had a profound insight which had three things in common with other fundamental changes in paradigmatic thinking. The first is that it had a long gestation. Lemkin didn’t just base his idea on German policies under Hitler, he had been researching and thinking about these issues since he was a teenager nearly three decades earlier. He was horrified by the Armenian genocide and spent his early adulthood trying to understand and encapsulate that violence, with the particular aim of making it an “international crime”.
The second is that its significance was much greater than the originator himself understood at the time. Later, Lemkin himself, much to the detriment of his career and political standing, made a clear link between genocide and settler-colonialism. He spent a great deal of his time writing about the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In my opinion he did this despite wishing to think the best of his new home in the United States. Had he lived longer he would have been forced to confront the fact that imperialism is inherently genocidal even when it is not engaged in settler colonial expansion. Rather than seeking to impose the “national pattern” of the imperial centre it seeks to impose an “imperial pattern” which is equally alien to the victim group but which also cements their subjugation in an ethnoracial imperialist hierarchy. This is achieved with exactly the same social, political, cultural and economic destruction and the same forced displacement, concentration and mass killing that characterises settler-colonial genocides. This is true regardless of whether the empire is predominantly formal, informal, or neocolonial.
The third thing that happens when new revolutionary ideas arrive is that people try to cling on to outmoded beliefs and ways of thinking. They are resistant, and in the case of genocide this resistance has been nourished by political interests and given a fertile discursive medium by the historical experiences of the internal and external relations of Germany’s Third Reich. The nature of genocide was obscured from the very genesis of the term by a strident and loud imagery of Nazi exceptionalism.
An exceptionalist emphasis was one of two opposing reactions to the unprecedented suffering inflicted on the world by the Nazi regime. The other emphasis was to try to understand what conditions had led to members of our species doing or allowing things that seem to be unvarnished evil from the outside. A lot of good and bad things came out of line of thought, but I would argue that it greatly profited societies to think of the German experience as one to be studied and avoided. It is from this tradition, which is always at least partly relativistic, that sprung concepts like Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and our understanding of the psychology of authoritarians. I think that a very frightening aspect of contemporary life is that our understanding of these Nazi traits fades, and as the understanding fades the traits themselves become more and more manifest in ever more shamelessly inhuman official discourse. Two recent examples being the US “Law of Warfare” field manual which authorises the killing of journalists and the West Point professor who wants the military to kill lawyers and scholars who oppose US military actions to the list of targets – not to mention attacking mosques and various other enemies of US military freedom.
In contrast to those who sought deeper understanding of Nazism, all forms of exceptionalism involve taking supposedly unique aspects of something and presenting them as essential and defining characteristics. This vastly overstates the substance of those aspects that are claimed as being exceptional and, if accepted, makes comparisons impossible. This exceptionalist approach can be seen in the famous Disney wartime propaganda film “Education for Death”. It is understandable that there was a desire to dramatise the oppressive and invasive nature of the Nazi regime, but it encapsulates a fetishistic approach that is literally a cartoon version of reality. As propaganda this is to be expected, but after the war it is not as if people said to themselves: “Now that that is over I need to take a more nuanced view of the National Socialist government in Germany if I am to truly grasp the nature of that regime and its atrocities.”
The danger of exceptionalist narratives is that they deny context and refuse to allow comparisons. The upshot of this is that people emphasise the wrong things in the fetishistic and cartoon manner which I mentioned. Thus US exceptionalists create a fetish out of surface aspects of their constitution that they are formally and informally indoctrinated at a young age to view as essential parts of “democracy”. In reality, the excessive focus and attention then given to the “democratic” nature of US governance actually makes it far easier for undemocratic power relations to develop and entrench themselves.
Similarly, an exceptionalist narrative about Nazi Germany emphasises surface appearances and destroys any ability to learn and to avoid repetition. To use a reductio ab Hitlerum analogy, it is like saying that everything will always be okay as long as the highest political office is not occupied by a man with a funny moustache.
Holocaust Exceptionalism
Here is a multi-choice question:
The US has just won a war against the forces of darkness embodied by Germany and Japan. There is a new word around called “genocide”. Are you inclined to think that this word means a) what Hitler did to the Jews, b) what Hitler did to the Jews and what was done to the indigenous people of North America in order to create the US – illustrate your answer with reference to the screen appearances of John Wayne.
Clearly no ordinary citizen of the victor states would want to think that the crime of genocide, which saw millions of Jews systematically murdered, was a very prominent part of their own proud national heritage. Canada, Aotearoa, the US, and Australia didn’t want to see their origins as stained by comparison to the roving mass-murders of the Einsatzgruppen. The USSR didn’t want to see the Terror Famine in Ukraine or Stalin’s ethnic cleansing transmigrations as bearing any resemblance to the Camps in which so many of their own died. And the old imperial powers, France and Britain, didn’t want to see their bejewelled traditions of civilising hegemony equated in any way to gassing children.
In the fertile ground of Nazi exceptionalism that was already established it was inevitable that Holocaust exceptionalism take root, not just as the explicit belief of hardliners, but also as the default starting point for general layperson’s discourse. The base belief is that the Holocaust is the defining archetype of what genocide is and that other events are “genocidal” to the extent that they can be compared to the Holocaust.
What is this Holocaust that they are talking about? Part of the problem is that this is an extremely slippery concept. The real problem is that people don’t want a robust definition of the Holocaust. They want to be able to know what it is without having to cogently delineate that knowledge. For most people the Holocaust is emotive but vague. It is misunderstood not in the manner that one might misunderstand historic events like the War of the Roses or the reign of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, but rather the impressionistic imagery is so powerful as to drown out actual detail. This is understandable, but still regrettable.
The Holocaust is so overwhelming that a film like Schindler’s List had to be made in monochrome because even the sombre and washed-out cinematic tones that are conventionally used for Eastern Europe in World War II are insufficient for an actual concentration camp. Genocide is literally made to be black-and-white. Our sensitivities to the issue are so high that misters used to cool visitors to Auschwitz today caused an international outcry because they were reminiscent “the Holocaust showers” (as one news bulletin called them). There were, of course, no actual “Holocaust showers”. The realities are not any less horrifying than the nightmare images, but they are more complicated. In fact, the realities are more horrifying than the symbolic beliefs, and once you know them you can’t unlearn them. That is why people create a totemic imagery of the Holocaust. They can feel all of the horror, grief and outrage without the crippling depression. Most of all, they don’t feel the burden of obligation to end suffering. Instead, steeped in the dark cartoon visions of “Holocaust showers”, they are more able and more likely to inflict suffering because they are artificially separating the suffering of certain human beings from other members of the same species.
The symbolic or cartoonish approach to conceptualising the Holocaust has the advantage that you do not have to be categorical about something to make it a defining character. It is possible to retain the notion that the Holocaust is encapsulated in the conspiracy of the Final Solution, in the Judeocide, and in the gas chambers of death camps. Everything that is not part of that vision is either forcibly incorporated or essentially ignored.
To clarify my point, let me draw your attention to the role of a) gas chambers and b) the Final Solution. These things are synonymous with genocide in most people’s minds, but Lemkin never included them in his description of genocide for the very simple reason that he didn’t know about them. Moreover, if these things had not existed it might have meant that many more Jews would have survived in relative terms, but most European Jews would still have been killed by the genocide policies that Lemkin described. Those Jews who died were joined by many millions of others who died as a result of genocide. The Final Solution and the gas chambers are clearly linked to genocide in that they are a way of enacting genocide that is entirely consistent with the logic of genocide take to its greatest extreme – that of extermination. These things are linked to genocide, but they do not typify let alone embody genocide.
The end result is that the paradigmatic exemplar of genocide, the Holocaust, is a misrepresentation of itself, let alone genocide as a whole. For some that means that the Holocaust was the only genocide. For most, however, it means that when one decides to use the “g-word”, one constructs the newly acknowledged genocide as being a reflected image of that mythologised Holocaust. By maintaining that exceptionalist purity one never needs to accept something as genocide if one does not want to. In fact, people can get very angry when someone labels something genocide on the basis that to do so is to accuse the perpetrator of being as bad as the worst atrocities of German mass murder. Conversely you can appropriate the imagery of the Holocaust for anything you don’t like, particularly if you can label it anti-Semitic. In an extreme example a man was filmed at a rally opposing the “Iran nuclear deal” recently where he yelled that Obama was releasing money to “the terrorist Nazi regime which is building nuclear gas chambers!”
Kelly’s Law
If you are attempting establish the moral validity of acts by refuting any comparison to Hitler’s acts, you are defending the indefensible.
Most readers will probably be familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches”. The most common corollary is that the party that makes the analogy has lost the argument. It is dated now, and perhaps it was always more inclined to be used against critical thought than to promote it. I propose instead that what we need now is a “law” that states that if you are attempting establish the moral validity of acts by refuting any comparison to Hitler, you are defending the indefensible. This is true whether the reaction is the gut reaction of an Israeli who spits and yells with genuinely distraught anger at the suggestion that Israel is committing genocide; or whether it is the snide put-downs of a pundit, politician, bureaucrat or academic who sneers at those who claim that the US or UK or France has committed genocide.
The corollary of Kelly’s Law is that not only must the person refuting the Hitler comparison be defending the indefensible, but they are almost certain to be demolishing a straw man in doing so. To say that someone has committed genocide is not the same as saying that they are morally equivalent to Hitler in the same way that saying the we evolved through processes of natural selection is not the same as calling someone a monkey. For example, in his book Empire Niall Ferguson first himself compares the actions of British forces during the Indian Mutiny to those of the SS against Jews, but then concludes that the British weren’t actually as bad as the SS as if that somehow makes things better.
Nazi exceptionalism and Holocaust exceptionalism are the gift that keep on giving. As long as you avoid building death camps with giant gas chambers and crematoria then you can incinerate and starve hundreds of thousands. It is like teflon coating for genocide perpetrators. It shields them from all serious accusations of intentional wrongdoing because any attempt to suggest a systematic purpose behind Western mass violence is delegitimised as being an invalid attempt to equate our leaders with the Nazis. I fear that this will continue until the point where it Western governments, particularly the US, actually do become the moral equivalent of the Nazis – and that moment does get closer over time.
A New Holocaust
People don’t want to face up to the reality of genocide, because they will then have to admit that Western states are committing massive acts of genocide right now. The Western interventions most apparent in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia have created mass destruction and mass death.
The tempo of violence that exists now does not even match that of the bombing during the Korean War, let alone the enormous scale of violence of World War II. However, this violence never ends. It seems destined to continue for eternity and the scale of death continues to creep upwards. Western interventions of many types have sowed conflict and instability and they keep tearing at these open wounds, often blaming the victims. I cannot shake the feeling that if Germany had not been at war, Nazi genocide policies would have been enacted at the same slowly accumulating pace.
The destruction and the violence are often meted out by enemies of the United States, but I think people are beginning to grasp that to greater or lesser extents the US is often the creator and sponsor of these enemies. Moreover these enemies are often materially dependent on the US either directly or through allied regimes. That is the new reality, or at least one of the new realities. Lemkin’s understanding of genocide was of disparate acts that could only be related to each other when you grasped the underlying strategic reasoning,
That is why anti-Zionists are embracing Holocaust exceptionalism. Israel provides such easy cartoon villains, Netanyahu and a cabinet of political colleagues that seems unable to go two months without a minister openly calling for the extermination or ethnic-cleansing of non-Jews. They might as well have a leader with a funny moustache. It is facile and comforting, but it is stupid. Israel does not have the power to effectuate all this destruction, nor does it control the US. Everything the US has done has followed a trajectory it has clearly been on since 1945. Trying to explain it current genocidal actions is like trying to explain the trajectory of a cannonball by a stiff gust that arose during its flight without any suggestion that there might have been a cannon involved at any point.
The misuse of words is a key way to ensure that the ideological hegemony of the powerful is not disrupted when they commit acts that ordinary people find abhorrent. In 1946 George Orwell wrote “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.” A couple of years later he famously satirised this as “Newspeak” – a language of journalists and intelligentsia which systematically stripped the language of all meaningful terms, replacing them with good, bad, plus-good, plus-bad, double-plus-good, and double-plus-bad. A key aspect of using a concept of double-plus-bad or double-plus-good is that it cannot be argued against because it doesn’t have a concrete definition. We do this in a low-grade level as human beings because we are lazy and proud. We like to impress and to win arguments by using buzzwords in the place of thought. But at the higher levels of discourse (at the double-plus-bad and double-plus-good level) the use of language becomes systematically controlled in a way that shows clear purpose.
The higher one’s social ranking, the more constricted and controlled one’s vocabulary and hence thought. In part this is due to conscious propaganda manipulation coming from government and corporate interests which have long targeted “opinion leaders” with propaganda and left the messaging to “trickle down” (in the words of the US Government’s “Vietnam Information Group”). Orwell satirised this as being a “Party Line”, portraying it as a centrally coordinated effort, but what he was really suggesting is that the system functions the same whether there is a “Politburo” giving orders or not. The point is, that the ideology is internalised and the elites become their own and each other’s thought police. That was what Orwell analogised as being constant surveillance and inescapable broadcasting. The constant unstoppable nagging of the television and the inescapable omnipresent surveillance in 1984 were allegories for the internalised orthodox ideology.
The actual centralised dissemination of ideology is relatively crude, as the comparative failure of the Vietnam Information Group illustrates. The decentralised co-optation of elites is more subtle, more profound and more robust. It harnesses people’s imaginations, but more importantly it harnesses their ability to avoid imagination and thought. In real life what this may mean is that a word that does have a definition, has that definition suppressed and people use the word as if there was no actual definition at all. An obvious example is the word “terrorism”.
The word “terrorism” is used in a manner that has little to do with any actual stable definition. Originally terrorism referred to advocating the use of terror during the French Revolution. It was actually put forward as a way of minimising state violence because the emphasis on generating terror would maximise the disciplinary effects of violence. In other words, if you scare the shit out of people you don’t need to kill as many to make them all behave the way you want them to. It’s an old idea, of course, just named and given a post-enlightenment rationalisation. That form of terrorism is still very current everywhere that there is a military occupation. More broadly, though, terrorism came to denote a warfare technique where violence is used to terrorise the general population as a way of exerting pressure on a state power without having to inflict military defeats. As a technique of asymmetric warfare it has an obvious appeal, but it is usually counterproductive and a gift to your enemies. Indiscriminate attacks, like the terror-bombing campaign waged by Britain against Germany, tend to consolidate public support behind government and military leaders.
In real terrorism, the regime that rules the target population generally benefits. Moreover, ever since there has been the asymmetric use of terror, state regimes have labelled all asymmetric warfare as terrorism. In fact they have lumped in as many actions of their enemies under the category of terrorism as possible and, without exception, this is done as a way of garnering support for their own acts of terrorism, which they call “policing”, “security operations”, “counterinsurgency” or “counterterror”. The use of the term “counterterror” is quite interesting because it allows states to overtly signal to their personnel that they are to use terror tactics, but it has enough linguistic slippage to provide deniability.
In propaganda discourse terrorism is never something that stands alone, you tie it to other things like ethnicity and religion. The Germans of the Third Reich were not induced simply to hate distinct groups of people. Their propaganda system, just like ours, conflated various plus-bads and double-plus-bads to make them all seem like a great interlocked multifaceted double-plus-badness. Criminals were bad and perhaps deviants, sexual deviants who were decadent, devolved creatures, Jews or Jew-like, who are all lefties, socialists, Communists, and they want to destroy Germany. So the enemy was the criminal-queer-Jew-decadent-racial-deviant-Commie. If someone was shown to be one, they were tainted with all others. And if they were demonstrably not homosexual, for example, it didn’t matter because there was a more profound way in which they actually were – they embodied the real essence of the category rather than the mere outward form. And even though the Nazis related all of this to racial and cultural hygiene, the fact is that the most common immediate excuse for using violence against these Chimerical enemies was terrorism.
Germans used the concept of terrorism for exactly the same reasons as it is used now:
1) Because regimes like to pretend that terrorism threatens the stability of the entire society, notwithstanding that actual terrorism does not generally destabilise regimes, even if it disrupts society.
2) Because each individual will feel that they could be a victim. Terrorists are not going to stop to ask your political opinion before they kill you. This makes people feel as if they are on the side of the government because they share a common enemy.
3) Because calling people terrorists provides the all important sense of reciprocity that makes state violence against the “terrorists” seem justified. Britain, France, Israel and the US have all, just like Germany, used the label of “terrorism” to denominate entire populations as being terroristic in some essentialised way. This is used to make genocidal violence and terrorism against those populations seem justified.
In one of the most striking examples of late, Israel has just passed a law giving themselves permission to force feed hunger strikers in the manner practiced by the US and recognised elsewhere as torture. Telesurreports that security minister Gilad Erdan explained: “Prisoners are interested in turning a hunger strike into a new type of suicide terrorist attack through which they will threaten the state of Israel.”
Once upon a time, academics would have at least kept in the backs of their minds the notion that terrorism was a politically misused term. However, instead of that translating into publicly railing against the hypocritical misuse of the term by Western terrorist governments, their public contribution would tend to be along the lines of reminding people that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. Like most fatuous clichés, this has the advantage of seeming thought-provoking whilst, in fact, being thought-killing. That was the typical liberal educated view – not to actually attempt to put things into a robust linguistic framework that could facilitate real analysis, but to imply that it is all a matter of opinion anyway.
As bad as that sounds, it all changed for the worse after 2001. Suddenly there was a boost for academic “security” specialists. People who had perhaps been more marginal in terrorism studies and security studies found that their way of defining terrorism (by taking the people they wanted to call “terrorists” and working backwards) were suddenly more prominent. The response from more level-headed academics was, of course, to immediately concede the middle ground to them and allow them to set the agenda. This meant that state terrorism, which was never incorporated into “terrorism studies” anyway, was now unmentionable. The idea that no definition of terrorism should prejudicially exclude a certain type of perpetrator is apparently alien to respectable scholars. Dissenting academics turned to “critical security studies” and the new “critical terrorism studies”. But these are self-marginalising positions which by their very names tell us that practitioners do not study a thing, but rather study the way that thing is discussed. The existence of something like “critical terrorism studies” necessarily embeds an orthodox “terrorism studies”. In practice, this provides a dual academic track wherein those who question what they are told voluntarily concede the greatest authority to those who are more inclined to parrot what they are told.
To force those who use words like “democracy” and “terrorism” to only do so in accordance with robust fully contextualised definitional criteria would be to deprive potential aggressors of a potent tool against thought. This is just as true of the term “genocide”, but there is an additional significance to the term. A true understanding of genocide will do more prevent its misuse as a way of eliciting a desired uncritical emotional response. This is because genocide differs as a concept in that understanding genocide will also strip away ability for perpetrators, especially repeated perpetrators such as the United States of America, to conceal the immorality of their intents as well as their actions. The meaning and applicability of the term genocide not only belies the rhetoric of moral righteousness, wherein the US strikes for freedom and to protect the innocent from evil-doers, but also the equally repulsive rhetoric of blunders, of inadvertence, and of self-driven systemic dysfunction. Applying the concept of genocide to US foreign policy reveals a conscious systematic intentionality in a project that very few people would consider morally acceptable. But to apply the term genocide, we need to recover the original meaning, which is to say a stable meaning that does not contradict itself and can be reconciled with historical usage.
To understand what genocide means it is best to trace the thinking of Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term. Lemkin was a Polish Jew who was passionate about history. When he was a teenager the Armenian holocaust had a huge impact on him. This was understandably emotional but was also a profound intellectual impact. He saw in these horrible events something related to the history of the persecution of Jews and the violence of pogroms. He became a lawyer and in the 1933 he advocated that new international laws be passed banning acts which would be considered crimes against the law of nations. He proposed two new international crimes which were, in brief terms, killing people on the basis of their ethnic, religious or national identity (“barbarity”) and the destruction of items of culture, places of worship and so forth (“vandalism”). Amusingly, his collective term for the crimes of “barbarity” and “vandalism” was “terrorism”.
Lemkin’s genius was not, despite his intents, in naming a crime but rather in naming a strategic behaviour. It would be better if genocide had never been thought of as a crime. Genocide is something that the powerful do to the weak and, despite the mythology, legal remedies do not work between parties of highly disparate power. Whilst people like to claim that laws are an equaliser that provides the weak with a tool to fight the powerful, that is not the historical experience of criminal law nor of international law. Power includes the power to police and enforce law and the power to defy law, thus the law must always be obeisant to power. Admittedly, one can theorise a society wherein a social contract made all people equal before the law, such as posited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but in practice that would have to be a society with no significant hierarchical differentiation. The hegemonic group in any society has always used different forms of law, including criminal law, against lower classes and ethnic minorities or, when desirable, women, the LGBT community, religious groups, or people who hold undesirable political opinions. Law, in short, is inescapably predisposed to be a tool of the powerful against the weak. That is not to say that people cannot use the law for the benefit of the weak, but that is a function of individuals working against the general inclination of the system.
The limits of laws can be be demonstrated by a counter-factual thought experiment. Imagine that Lemkin had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in 1933 and that the current UN Genocide Convention had been signed and ratified by all countries including Germany in 1933. Would that have impacted the passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935? Well it didn’t stop South Africa instituting draconian “Pass Laws” in 1952, so one would have to say no. In fact there is no way in which our historical experience of the UNCG seems to suggest it would have constrained Germany in any way at all. By the time people in Allied countries were reacting to German genocides with demands for action, their governments were already at war with Germany. Moreover, their excuse for not acting against the infrastructure of extermination was the over-riding need to win the war, and argument that would not have been altered by the existence of a genocide convention. On the other hand, in 1938 the existence of a genocide convention might have strengthened Germany’s claims that ethnic Germans were being persecuted in the Sudetenland and given more legitimacy to the Munich Agreement which gave Germany the Sudetenland and left Czechoslovakia nearly defenceless against future German aggression.
That is why it is actually a pity that Lemkin was a crusading lawyer, because his great insight was in inventing a theoretically rich term which was the crystallisation of considerable historical knowledge. The breakthrough he made was to realise that the violence he had called “barbarity” and the destruction he had called “vandalism” could be reconceptualised as a single practice called “genocide”. This is absolutely fundamental to understanding what genocide means.
Here is how Lemkin introduced the subject:
“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
“The following illustration will suffice. The confiscation of property of nationals of an occupied area on the ground that they have left the country may be considered simply as a deprivation of their individual property rights. However, if the confiscations are ordered against individuals solely because they are Poles, Jews, or Czechs, then the same confiscations tend in effect to weaken the national entities of which those persons are members.”
So Lemkin’s first example of an act of genocide is the confiscation of property from “Poles, Jews or Czechs….” This is a concept in which mass violence against people’s physical bodies is only one facet of a larger practice. In other words, when the Canadian government admitted recently to committing “cultural genocide” they were not truly apologising, but using slimy evasive apologetics. There is no such thing as “cultural genocide”, there is only genocide. Pamela Palmater introduced her reactionthus: “What happened in residential schools was not ‘cultural genocide’. It wasn’t ‘language genocide’. And it wasn’t ‘almost genocide’. What happened in residential schools was genocide. Canadian officials targeted Indians for assimilation and elimination purely for economic and political reasons.”
When Palmater wrote that she was merely introducing an extended argument, but she made a much more revealing comment about the nature of genocide when speaking on Democracy Now!:
“I know there was a focus on culture and that people were abused and beaten for speaking their language and culture, and they were clearly denied their identity. But for many of these children, upwards of 40 percent, they were denied their right to live. And that goes far beyond culture. Think about at the same time the forced sterilizations that were happening against indigenous women and little girls all across the country. Sterilization has nothing to do with one’s culture, but, in essence, the one’s right to continue on in their cultural group or nation-based group. The objective was to get rid of Indians in whatever way possible. Culture was one aspect of it, but also denying them the right to live or to procreate was an essential part of this.”
The key sentence is: “The objective was to get rid of Indians in whatever way possible”. Palmater knows that that does not mean the literal extermination of every single person that is even nominally Indian. What it means is erasing Indians from the places that they are not wanted at that historical moment. As Lemkin wrote, “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals.” This can be achieved through killing, assimilation, immiseration or dispossession. This can be achieved through transmigration – the ancient Assyrians, the Atlantic slavers, and the Soviet Union all uprooted populations to weaken them by taking them from their native soil. Equally, mass settler migration to the US, to Aotearoa, to West Papua, to Tibet or to Palestine imposes a new “national pattern” on the land.
The connection to native soil has profound personal aspects that might be considered spiritual, cultural or psychological, but let us not ignore the more immediately physical and concrete factors. Uprooting people utterly destroys their economic independence and can seriously degrade social interconnections that help provide the essentials of life. Thus, the famous susceptibility that colonised people have to Old World diseases has often struck when they are forced away from the land on which they rely for sustenance. People use the excuse of a purely biological fact (namely, the lower efficacy of immune response in populations that have not had generations of exposure to certain pathogens) to conceal the degree to which those who die of disease are often outright murder victims. When those who survive are relocated it may be to camps, ghettos, or reservations that provide little for independent existence. In fact the genocide perpetrator will place them in a subordinate and precarious position, exerting as much control over them as possible whilst creating the greatest degree of appearance that the victim population are separate and autonomous. Once again we are referring to the position of included exclusion, but with the pretence that the situation is the inverse – that the victims are autonomous and choose their own situation. All of this makes victim blaming much easier and allows further genocidal depredations to take place should the perpetrators discover the need for further dispossession.
This is what is facing a number of Western Australian Aboriginal communities currently. These communities are dependent on government supplying services, as are we all, but the cost of supplying services to Aboriginal communities will no longer be subsidised by the federal government, and the WA state government is refusing to make up the shortfall. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said: “What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have.” That could be said about any rural community because they all cost more to provide services to. In fact, mathematically there must always be places that cost more to provides services to than the average, and this same Western Australian government has just announcedthat it will be spending $32 million to upgrade rural water facilities that happen to be in the electorate of the Minister for Water.
Abbott’s words are particularly incendiary, though, because even if these are the traditional lands of the people living in these communities, when you look at the whole picture of colonisation in Australia the most heavily populated and resource rich lands are now all full of the descendants of settlers. The places that Aboriginal people can most easily maintain cultural autonomy and cohesion are those that were economically marginal to the early settlers, and those places were generally more marginal and sparsely by the indigenous people for the same reasons. Moreover, there is the fact that continued occupation of traditional lands might lead to the granting of native title. (You might think that 40,000 years is long enough to justify any such claim, but in legal terms let us not forget that until 1967 Aboriginal people were counted as wildlife not humans.) Some of these communities might be economically underdeveloped, but they do happen to be adjacent to large amounts of mineral wealth. Many put this latest attack against Aboriginal communities in the context of the 7 year old “intervention” in rural Northern Territories communities. As John Pilger has documented in the film Utopiathe intervention was based on lies and seems more to do with exerting control over lands that are a potential source of strategic mineral wealth.
If official Australia is trying to dispossess Aboriginal people as suchfrom land over which they want to exert control it is genocide. However, I do not want to overemphasise the significance of “ethnic cleansing” in a way that replicates the over-emphasis on mass murder that is more common. As scholar John Docker puts it, Lemkin “took great care to define genocide as composite and manifold”. Acts of genocide are interrelated and interlocking events that create a network though space and time. Genocide against Aboriginal peoples has at various times and in various places meant extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, theft, fraud and impoverishment. Famously the genocide of Aboriginal peoples also involved the “stolen generation” of abducted children taken from Aboriginal parents and raised by “white” Australians.
The UN Genocide Convention specifically references the “forcible transfer” of children. This came from Lemkin’s observations of the Germanisation of other Caucasians. Lemkin and all those who contributed to the wording of the Genocide Convention would have had this sort of “denationalisation” in mind. Even though the abduction of Aboriginal children was occurring at the time that the Convention was written, I don’t think the people of the time really thought that it would apply to different “racial” groups, or at least those with generally distinct appearance. Regardless of the rhetorical equivocations on the subject, nobody thought that Aboriginal children would become white because they were raised by white parents or in white institutions. It was not a transfer into the hegemonic group, it was a transfer out of connection with others of the victim group. In fact, taking children was and is a way of trying to create that which all wielders of political power are innately inclined to want. They want to create human husks, cyphers who act only according to the stimuli given to them. Taking children functions in the same way that transmigration or concentration functions. It strips agency and magnifies the power of the perpetrator over the bodily existence of the victims. It is intended to also provide control over the mental existence of the victims, usurping their decision-making and imposing the “rationality” of the perpetrator.
There is a lot to unpack here. Genocide is actually the expression of a desire for complete power, a fantasy which is not unique to genocide at all. People become pure objects to be moved and used at will. Their own independent existence and agency is nullified even to the point where if it is determined that they are to die it is achieved with the mere flick of a switch. This sort of power cannot be achieved without exerting destructive violence. For individuals torture might be used to produce “learned helplessness” in order to exert this sort of power over them. Genocide aims to exert this power over defined groups who are connected by familial relations. As with torture, the power relation that it creates and the violence in which it is expressed, become the ends as well as the means.
I will relate this all back to mass murder and systematic annihilation in Part 4, but first let me mention race. Race and racism are social constructs but the important thing to realise is that racial discourse does not generate genocide. It may provide fertile ground, but the seed itself is from elsewhere.
Genocide has a dynamic relationship with racism or other forms of group hatred. A significant part of that is the systematic inculcation of hatred in a perpetrator population. This is a very old part of warfare and genocide, generally signalled by leaders who promulgate atrocity propaganda. This propaganda might be a story about soldiers killing babies, or it could be about how the enemy leader’s great-great-grandfather murdered an honoured ancestor. The idea is that the intended perpetrators will view any of the intended victims as somehow linked to the crime in some essential way. The violence of warfare and/or genocide naturally fuels the sense that membership in a group makes one guilty of the crimes of any of that group. In the former Yugoslavia it has been found that ethnic animosities were generated by acts of genocide, not the other way around. This is true whether the animosity is towards perpetrators or victims. If you are part of a group that is perpetrating genocide you will have a driving need to hate the victims. This is because we are socialised in such a way that to see some from our group as the “bad guys” in relation to the Other is like an act of painful self-mutilation that hurts, maims, and causes social death.
The point is that genocide is not an expression of racial hatred as such and it does not conform to the logic of racial thinking. If you believe that some undesirable trait or stain is carried in the “blood” in accordance with racial theories, it makes no sense to transfer children from the victim population. Hitler appeared to be conscious of this at least in the case of Jews. In a letter to Martin Bormann he wrote: “We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race. … The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. … Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes, the Jew remains a Jew.” This is the other face of the coin revealed by Palmater in the quote above: “The objective was to get rid of Jews in whatever way possible”, not because of some special singular property of Jews but because of the entire multiplicity of everything that created the group identity of Jews.
With Native Americans in Canada and with Jews in Germany the object was to efface a group as such in order to allow the expansion of the hegemonic national identity. For Hitler this was philosophically linked with group will, but the same conclusions can be reached by your average prosaic greedy white supremacist who wants to get their hands on mineral resources, votes, or an expanded tax base. But Hitler’s genocidal activities and intents did not stop at the borders of Germany or Greater Germany. He wasn’t just attacking an internal minority he was also attacking ethnic and national groups outside of Germany’s borders for the purposes of imperial expansion and he was doing so using the same process – the process of genocide.
We have so overemphasised the concept of genocide as being an attack on an internal minority that even genocide scholars write about Jewish victims of German genocide as if they were a German minority. For Lemkin’s memory this is doubly abusive because he was a Polish Jew, as were half of the Jews killed by Germany. Lemkin’s prime exemplar of genocide, when he coined the term, was Poland. He mentioned many victim groups, including Jews, but the most commonly cited group he used to demonstrate “techniques of genocide” were the Poles, as such. He understood that Jews were slated for annihilation, but genocide had to be shown as a much broader phenomenon.
In genocide what is attacked is the sum of all of those things that make the victim group a group. We don’t have a term for this thing. At the risk of creating confusion I am just going to label the entire collection of inherent connections that provide a group identity its “demotic” and I think the unique essence that is created can be referred to as the “demotic idiom”. I do this to ground the terms by reference to the complex, but concrete, phenomenon of language. I also wish to make reference to demos because genocide is a strategic response to demographic circumstances. Genocide can be thought of as a demostrategic phenomenon.
So the demotic of the group is what is attacked in genocide. It is aimed at the victim group – the genos – as such. Thus the demotic is all of those things that make the group the group as such, and those things contribute strength and richness to the demotic idiom, which is, of course, unique. This would be individual and collective property, folklore, places of worship, sports stars, social welfare programmes, poets, statuary, language and public transport infrastructure – to name just a few random things. For convenience I am going to ignore weaknesses and say that anything that contributes in any way to the group identity as such is part of the demotic and is therefore potentially a target of genocide. You can attack an entire group by killing a single poet, for example.
Lemkin didn’t really quite understand the implications of the breadth of genocide. Instead of what I refer to as the demotic, he referred to a “biological aspect” to what had previously been called “denationalisation”. He specifically referenced the fact that Hitler viewed biology in essentialist terms: “Hitler’s conception of genocide is based not upon cultural but biological patterns. He believes that ‘Germanizationcan only be carried out with the soiland never with men.’” Therefore there is a contradiction here between the public Hitler of Mein Kampfand the private Hitler, confessing to Bormann that he doesn’t actually believe the literal truth of those words.
In fact, there is no “biological aspect”. Genocide is in that sense a misnomer. What Lemkin had mistaken for biological was actually the familial aspect of the demotic. Racial ideology and differences in phenotype notwithstanding, a genosis actually a social construct. It is a socially constructed demographic entity and it is reproduced primarily through child-rearing. The family is where language, customs, and the simple fact of self-identification are passed to the individual by their parents and other relatives. Moreover, even beyond the fundamental inscribing of group character on the individual, without which the group would not even exist, the familial interconnection carries through in later life. Connections with family form the closest social bond. Almost always individuals share group membership in the genos with those relatives with which they share the most significant social bonds. Inevitably, then, the familial interconnections correspond with biological structure and genetics and are the most significant sustenance of the demotic idiom.
Genocide scholars emphasise the fact that it is the way that perpetrators define the group that is important, not the way victims self-identify. Here is where we run into what seems to be a problem, because perpetrators tend to define victims in biological racial terms. However, it may be that someone’s life is spared on the basis that they do not display the “racial” characteristics by which the perpetrator claims to identify the victim group, but then again it might not. Ultimately the racial hygiene pretensions of some genocide perpetrators must be treated as hollow because the biological pretensions of racial discourse are hollow and unstable. No genos can actually be defined by “race”. The nature of human diversity is such that even the originating defining character of a genos is unstable. In fact, the hard defining lines that may form around a genos tend to be in reaction to racism, persecution and genocide. It is these things that prevent pluralistic integration.
I feel that I am drifting away from the central points about genocide, even though the problematics of identity are very important. Getting back to the demostrategic logic of genocide, there are several prominent motives for committing genocide, but in reality they are not as distinct as we might think. A settler-colony that wishes to cleanse the land of the indigenous is ultimately trying to achieve the same thing as an imperial power that wishes to crush and insurgent people which is much the same as a nationalist state that wants to erase a discordant minority and exert greater control through uniformity. The point is that all of these are undertaken by visiting destruction on the demotic idiom in the form of violence against the people and the destruction and degradation of those aspects of existence which collectively provide substance to the group.
[Below is a transcript which is about 95% complete and which contains links to some material that is cited in the commentary]
I ended Part 1 by castigating those who seek justice and redress from authorities like the ICC. This is not an era in which forward progress can be made through existing institutions. I am not against meaningful reform but working towards it has now become a form of rear-guard action in a war that the people are losing. Those who wield power in Western societies have become far too good at wielding power. They are not meaningfully opposed or moderated, and that means that they will continue down a path of social destruction, even at their own expense.
If it makes it easier to swallow, the point I am making is actually very closely linked to a point that Chris Hedges has been emphasising in the last few years. Actually it is more than one point, really, because Hedges is promoting revolt and he is saying that this age is one that needs rebels – true dissidents. He is fond of citing Václav Havel and sentiments he conveyed such as this: “The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin — and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.” This resonates with the earlier quote from Dr Thiranagama cited in Part 1: “Objectivity, the pursuit of truth and critical, honest positions, is crucial for the community, but is a view that could cost many of us our lives.” Neither sentiment leaves room for sugar-coating the truth or leaving out parts of the truth on the grounds that they are confrontational, or may alienate potential allies. Moreover, they do not allow one to decide that others do not have the intellectual capacity to grasp the whole truth and must be spoon-fed half-truths and white lies calculated to bring support to the cause you think is righteous.
The other key thing about real dissidents is that they don’t think that they can convince the powerful of the error of their ways. It is actually quite disturbing that the voices we hear criticising power are dominated by a privileged tone that projects shared interests and innate benevolence onto people such as Clinton, Obama or Kerry. Whether people overtly state this belief or not, it is inherent in any discussion that suggests that if the powerful could only be brought to see things from our perspective they would end their harmful practices. It is the equivalent of an Auschwitz inmate trying to persuade a guard that the Nuremburg Laws were both immoral and against the interests of Germany. The guard is unlikely to want to hear what you are saying, but if you do manage to persuade them where does that leave you? Or him? It is also a type of fallacy.
To assume that our leaders act with the best intentions is generally treated as being more conservative and intellectually credible than to suggest otherwise. In fact, to do so is to impute motive. It is a bankrupt practice and it is automatically applied selectively in such a way that enemy regimes are assumed to act with ill-intent whilst our leaders are presumed to mean well at least for their own countries if not for humanity as a whole.
The most common argument used to deny that the US has committed genocide is that there was no intention to commit genocide because US leaders have no such intent. Those who use such arguments do not look for evidence of intentionality any more than they would look for evidence of unicorns, because they already know that that evidence doesn’t exist. If you confront them with the fact that there is, say, more evidence of US intent to commit genocide in Cambodia than there is of Khmer Rouge intent to commit genocide, they will be upset because they know that the words and acts that seem to indicate US intentionality are a misrepresentation of the actual inner processes of US officials, but the words and acts that suggest Khmer Rouge intentionality are revelations of their true nature.
In the final analysis, though, whether our leaders are monstrous psychopaths or normal people trapped within a monstrous system is irrelevant. In fact, this is a false dichotomy between agential individuals and mere cogs. Whether or not one considers Western leaders to be demonically evil they must accommodate to the degree to which the regimes in which they function are diseased and criminal. For example, a President of the United States, a US Secretary of Defense and a US Secretary of State must all commit war crimes in order to function within a system that requires it of them. The same can be said of the UK Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Minister of Defence. Even should someone in that position have a change of heart, like Robert McNamara did, they could never be trusted to set things right because they cannot help but live in denial. Likewise, as Chris Hedges points out, there is no longer any point in putting faith in individuals or groups to work to reform the regime within its power structure. In a recent talk with Truthdig editor Robert Scheer, Hedges specifically references Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and says: “…we’ve got to stop placing our faith in particular individuals. That’s just not how power responds. Power responds when it feels threatened.”
Hedges points out that working within the system is not an avenue to change, and closing it may seem negative, but it is actually a source of hope. It is unfortunate that it takes severe crisis and dysfunction to bring this point about, but it is only once people stop placing faith in fantasies that they can act in their own interests. We have seen in the US that faith placed in Barack Obama was taken as unconditional, because there were no electoral alternatives for people who aren’t hateful or stupid. Depending on your viewpoint this has either freed or forced Obama into being a tool of elite vested interest while making enough rhetorical obeisance to public will to keep the shabby and translucent façade of democracy from collapsing into a pile of dust. This is why, paradoxically, our political elites would act with more humanity if we treated them as being baby-eating reptilian invaders from outer space because then they would feel constrained not to act like baby-eating reptilian invaders from outer space.
Just as we cannot elevate heroes to effect transformation it is also true that we cannot transform by debasing villains. Modern states with their Inquiries and Commissions and Committee Investigations have developed a huge amount of expertise in channelling justified outrage into ever-decreasing spirals of ever narrower objection. These processes end with the anticlimax of a drivelling pseudo-apology: “We’re sorry because we tried to bring too much freedom to the world and we messed up because we we’re too damned democratic and our vicious free press stabbed us in the back.” The model resembles the appalling Frost-Nixon interviews where David Frost went out of his way to systematically absolve Nixon of every one of his truly momentous crimes. But every porn production must have it’s cumshot, and after hours of this fellatio Nixon ejaculates: “I let the American people down”. And what a powerful confession that was! A little bit like John Wayne Gacy apologising for bringing disrepute to the amateur clown fraternity as if that was his only crime: “I let the clowns of this great land of America down”.
In this vein, when modern Western states do take actions against their own personnel they follow these rules:
Unless there is an inconvenient senior officer who could do with being taken down a peg, like Janis Karpinsky, ensure that you choose as few people as possible from as low in the hierarchy as possible.
Decontextualise and minimise the crimes. Maintain above all that they are aberrant isolated acts not linked to anything broader. Their isolation shows that they are the exception that proves the rule of our fundamentally benevolent nature.
Portray the accused as victims of the brutality generated by the savagery of their victims’ society.
Give as lenient a judgement as humanly possible.
Reverse the judgement with a pardon or reduction in sentence as soon as humanly possible.
Milk the proceedings as much as possible to provide “proof” that yours is a society of laws whilst tacitly or explicitly reiterating that the genesis of the crimes lay in the unwanted contact with the unlawful and brutal society of the victims.
But going back to the shell game of will-they won’t-they criminal proceedings, Israel has this procedure down to a fine art. And like all truly brilliant acts of public diplomacy, this practice exerts a disciplinary influence on both supporters and opponents of Israel’s foreign policy at home and abroad. Israel can keep Palestinian human rights activists running on a treadmill that they can’t justify leaving because there is always hope that a judicial process will provide some small relief from the greater tides of injustice. But it is some time since Israeli courts have done anything significant to constrain the Israeli occupation forces, which includes the courts themselves, and they barely do anything to constrain Israeli settlers either.
There is also a broader problem that is encouraged by Israel or the ICC dangling the prospect of criminal convictions in that it helps obscure the systematic criminality of the occupation. The recent news of the death of 18 month old Ali Dawabsha has highlighted what Ali Abunimah describes as a “hypocritical display… [of] crocodile tears”. By unreserved condemnation of a singular act, Israel’s leaders quite clearly intend to create a false image that acts to obscure the greater systematic violence. The problem is not just that Zionists use this technique, but that anti-Zionists end up being drawn into doing exactly the same thing in slightly different circumstances.
For example, Charlotte Silver of the Electronic Intifadahas reported that an Israeli, Lieutenant Colonel Nerya Yeshurun, was recorded ordering the shelling of a medical facility. Of course it must be reported when such evidence comes to light, but this tends to become what I would term “over-proving”. Not only did we already have eyewitness reports from Palestinians and international observers of such crimes, but Israeli personnel had already confessed such actions to Breaking the Silence.
As it stands, it is good that supporters of Palestinian human rights can point to this recording as being symptomatic because it shows that few Israelis consider it wrong to commit war crimes. On the other hand, if the focus becomes pursuing the punishment of Yeshurun on the grounds that he is a blatant war criminal and the prima facieevidence is impossible to ignore, then you get into very bad territory for the cause of Palestine.
Every erg of human energy that activists put into trying to get Yeshurun punished will be worse than a waste. Focussing on the one criminal risks entering an endless spiral of diminishing convolution. It will produce a discourse that combines screeching to the converted with a naïve belief that you can somehow shame your enemies into admitting that they are actually the bad guys. At the same time every bit of focus on Yeshurun’s blatant crime will devalue the clear testimony of Israeli whistle-blowers, of international observers and, above all, the voices of the Palestinian victims themselves. Perhaps even worse it will devalue the shared consensus experience. The media coverage of Operation Protective Edge in many countries was sufficient for most people to see that the narrative construction of a “conflict” is a farce. Despite the unusual number of Israeli casualties, what people saw and felt in their guts was a one-sided slaughter. Yet that comprehension is being eroded by a continuous miscontextualisation and the focus on individual crimes only furthers that diminishment of the greater truth.
And the odd thing is that the gut response of the uneducated layperson is a more sound legal opinion than than the mediated educated opinions of the mealy-mouthed weasels who function as international jurists. As long as Israel maintains its occupation and/or blockade of Gaza they cannot justify their actions under Article 51 of the UN Charter as being self-defence. That is true even if Gazan militants commit war crimes. That means that every single Palestinian killed by Israel outside of Israel’s borders, whether they are an armed militant or not, has been murdered. You can make a very good argument that even Palestinians who are killed inside Israel’s recognised borders are murder victims, because the Palestinians’ actions are still legitimate self-defence. This all means that by selecting certain individuals and prosecuting them you are inevitably suggesting that murder is legitimate if it is carried out in a certain manner, but not legitimate if it is committed while breaking other rules. You can see why I think that this is problematic. I am concentrating on the practical political realities here, but even in sentimental terms what does it mean to go after Yeshurun? What does it mean for the memories of those children murdered at the behest of Israeli officers and politicians who were careful enough not to be recorded ordering personnel to commit obvious war crimes? Where is their “justice”?
The mass murders committed by Israel are also part of a larger process of genocide. As with the Tamils a slow process of genocide will sometimes incline the perpetrators to commit acts of acute mass violence to weaken resistance to ongoing low-grade state violence and structural violence. Some Israelis, with a kind of schizophrenic and unnerving honesty, refer to this as “mowing the lawn”.
There are distinct genocidal similarities between Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Sri Lankan occupation policies, and US interventions in a number of countries both currently and in the past. However, the real reason that I bring up Israel here is the issue of the ICC, which bears some further attention still.
Earlier I posted a long condemnation of the ICC which was also a condemnation of those who are promoting an ICC investigation into Israel’s most recent crimes. I can’t really summarise the thousands of words I wrote on the issue of the ICC and Israel, but one key relevant point is that the “Rome Statute” states “a case is inadmissible where…[t]he case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it, unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution.” Immediately this places jurisdictional decisions in the realms of political judgement which inevitably favours the powerful over the weak. It is worth considering what that actually means in effect. It means that facts will exert one sort of influence in the form of a discourse of ideas and information, and it means that vested power will exert influence by shaping that discourse. If we view such a process as a contest between power and truth, the first thing we must take into account is the impact of “soft-power” on perception. This is used to ensure that public perception of the truth is muddled, uncertain and contested. When the powerful commit mass violence “soft-power” is used to minimise the perception of suffering caused, but the more crucial task is to conceal intentionality.
Once the manipulation of perception creates the widest possible room for debate in public, then in private the hard-power and the covert power are used to bribe, threaten, blackmail, subvert and co-opt both individual persons and institutions up to and including entire countries. Thereafter the powerful can be sure that officials will take the least action possible, which is quite likely to be no action at all. If a country like Sri Lanka or Israel wants to ensure that occurs it may choose to pursue its own prosecutions using the six rules I outlined above which will then enable the ICC to claim that the perpetrator country is rightfully exercising jurisdiction. Naturally this will be lapped up by journalists and bureaucrats alike, who so dearly love the tautological perfection of what is, to them, the best of all possible worlds. They will then convey this unto the public who will be split between the reassured and the nonplussed, whilst independent observers will rage ineffectually about the fact that we are drowning ourselves in our own smug bullshit.
I know that many people on reading this might think that this is all an extremist’s opinion on tactics, but that there are other equally valid opinions. To them, my opinion is likely to be seen as an expression of anti-authoritarian hatred or even the spiteful envy of one who is justly marginalised. But this is not a matter of opinion at all. The historical record is so clear that the only possible way one could advocate ICC involvement is through wilful ignorance to both the ICC’s record and the entire history of prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Equally, to hold that an elite international judicial body will dispense “justice” that is not desirable to US and European imperial interests is almost laughably intellectually lazy. It is not a secret that rising within the hierarchies of international bodies is a highly political process combining both elements of diplomatic horse-trading for some positions with a need for high ambition and the requirement that personnel be the discreet and disciplined insider type. No one in their right mind should think that the selective processes and the situational factors which constrain the behaviour of personnel at the court would ever allow them to become worthy of any level of our trust. In fact they are worthy of contempt and condemnation because, whatever their self-righteous pretensions, they profit in material terms, and gain very high social status, by taking a key role in a monstrous imperial project that has visited mass violence and immiseration through structural violence on hundreds of millions of people.
It is vital that national and international functionaries be forced to confront the injustices that they perpetrate. That is the most important fight in the world today. Part of that fight is the fight to expose the suffering brought about and the fight to humanise victims. The other part, however, is the fight over contextualisation. Contextualisation is the most crucial issue. It is important to a degree that simply cannot be overstated, because miscontextualised human suffering becomes the fuel for ever more massive crimes of mass violence such as aggression and genocide.
Every atrocity that happens in the world today is being interpreted according to an updated version of the ancient chauvinistic binary categorisation of civilisation and barbarity. We are civilised which means that when barbarians kill other barbarians we must kill barbarians to save barbarians from their own barbarity. When we kill barbarians our intent, if not our actions, must be civilised because we are civilised. It can be true of any self-identified group, but it is most acute and most stoutly defended amongst Westerners who have deep reserves of chauvinism – a sense of exceptionalism that is almost impenetrable.
There are so many ideological components to Western chauvinism that it is hard to portray the entire phenomenon accurately. I propose that we think of it in terms of being a complicated, schizophrenic and contradictory form of “white” racism. I am, of course, acutely aware that African Americans, for example, can expound this racism and no one should downplay the fact that Barack Obama embodies this racism. Nevertheless, the concept of an entity called the West arose at the same time as the concept that there were people who were in some manner “white”. In practical terms the two are inextricable because no matter how imprecise our concept of what white people are, and no matter how expansive our notion of the West is, it will always be that of a hegemonically “white” culture. Because Western Europe experienced a technologically and culturally driven explosion of imperialism that saw them impose domination on people who on average were generally darker, sometime pronouncedly so, an idea of whiteness came about, even though it was very arbitrary in terms of actual pigmentation.
Western chauvinism actually came to combine ideas of progress, capitalism, Christianity, atheism, liberalism, democracy, freedom, humanism and humanitarianism among others, but I choose to emphasise racism because it is so easy to see due to the fact that it is literally constructed as a matter of black-and-white. For that reason it becomes possible to see that whenever we essentialise any notion about the West, such as the idea that it has liberal democratic norms, it is actually a dog-whistle racial reference.
To put it in simple terms, Eurocentrism and US exceptionalism are expressions of white supremacy. That means that they inherently propound the inferiority of non-white people. If we claim that the West embodies values or so-called “norms” of, say, “democracy”, we are of necessity saying the inverse of the non-Western world. Not only does this require a completely distorted reading of history, but it is inevitably racist. Because the concept of the West cannot be disentangled from a concept of whiteness, the implications of making such statements are to reinforce notions that white people are civilised and non-white people are barbaric.
Moreover, because of the need to selectively overlook the atrocious violence of Western imperialism, Western chauvinism (or “Eurocentrism”) is inescapably a form of racism that fuels double standards. It fuels doublethink, it fuels cognitive dissonance, it fuels the vicious contradictory fanaticism of the white-hatted mass murderer of indigenous peoples whose only explanation for such brutality is that he must have caught it like a contagion from the unnatural contact with savage peoples. And thus Westerners construct an ideology in which they themselves are the victims of their own acts of mass murder.
The struggle that must be undertaken, therefore, is to counter this massive agglomeration of ideology with the following understanding – the savagery is in the act, not the actor. Yet at every level in every society since the invention of agriculture, the powerful have always tried to ensure that they are not judged by their deeds, but rather by the good intentions that they assure others they have. From the boss of a small business, to the ruler of an empire we are always enjoined to see things from their perspective and to accept a priori their fundamentally benevolent motives.
In Part 1 I discussed various things relating to the International Criminal Court. With all its humanitarian rhetoric, the actions of the ICC have consistently been a source of injustice and suffering. Moreover it has been the enemy of truth – perhaps the greatest crime because it can perpetuate suffering for generations to come.
Part 2 deals with, among other things, the undue deference paid to those who professionally don the mantle of humanitarian. These are not great humanitarians, quite the reverse. Just as hierarchies of “knowledge” can produce ignorance so can “humanitarian” hierarchies militate against humanitarianism. By analogy, if I want to hear a cogent perspective on US foreign policy I would almost be better off heading to the pub and looking for someone in the mood to be candid than I would be in heading to a foreign policy think-tank. Equally, once professional “humanitarians” have internalised the idea that they are inherently moral, it is pretty easy for them to neglect morality altogether.
I feel that it is constructive to cultivate contempt and anger at those who are more-than-comfortably well off because of their role within agencies of dysfunction and harm such as the ICC. At the same time I am aware that critics of people within institutions often personalise criticism – not as insults nor ad hominem critiques, but as a presumption that a mistaken intellectual stance must be the result of bad intent. Obviously, I am not saying that we should extend the benefit of doubt to Obama or Kissinger or Power. Sometimes, even if people believe that they are doing the right thing it is not relevant. Pol Pot thought he was doing the right thing, but so what? For people with less executive power, though, it is generally counterproductive to attack their motives.
My answer is to cultivate contempt for the collective, and respect for the individual. Self-satisfaction is destroying the intellects of people who succeed in many walks of life, and none of us plebs should continue to feed that.
Preventing Peace
When an accused criminal is the demonised leader of a Third World state, there can be no compromise according to the pundits. Only prosecution to the utmost extent of the law is acceptable, even if innocent people must die to achieve this.
When official villains, certified by the US State Department, are up for prosecution we enter Oppositeland. War is peace and the rule of law means lawlessness. The pundits enter a cop-show fantasy where law is not an imperfect instrument of ethics, but a tool of righteous justice. The rule of law doesn’t mean abiding by the law even when the results are not to your liking, but it now means breaking the rules to ensure that the bad guy is always punished. For example, in How America Gets Away with Murder, Michael Mandel pointed at the “absurdities” of Western newspapers touting the triumph of the “rule of law” after Slobadan Milosevic was illegally extradited from Serbia under extremely political circumstances.
The bloodlust and the self-righteousness can lead to a lot worse than subverting sovereignty and bringing the law into disrepute. Hard lines on “the end of impunity” are a potential enemy of peace both indirectly and directly. Take the case of Charles Taylor. He ended a civil war and left the country when he was offered exile in Nigeria. The US Congress soon voted to offer a $2 million bounty on Taylor. Richard Falk criticised his later capture, prosecution and conviction on the ground that it was selective prosecution serving US political ends: “…when the application of international criminal law serves the cause of the powerful, it will be invoked, extended, celebrated, even institutionalised, but only so long as it is not turned against the powerful. One face of Janus is that of international justice and the rule of law, the other is one of a martial look that glorifies the rule of power on behalf of the war gods.”
There is hypocrisy, and the direct intervention of neutralising enemies through the courts, and the implicit threat to other Third World leaders that if they do not run their country according to US wishes they may end their lives in a prison cell far from home. But in some ways, those things are not the worst of it. The worst thing is that the next Charles Taylor will look at his future and weigh whether to concede defeat in war and flee the country. Remembering Taylor, he or she will decide instead to fight to the death and thousands of others will die as well.
That is an indirect way of promoting conflict, but ICC indictments can be used to more immediate warmongering effect. Shortly before NATO started an air war against Libya in 2011, the UNSC instructed the ICC to investigate Libya (despite the fact that the US, Russia and China refuse to be subject to the ICC themselves). The probe centred on the killing of political prisoners in a prison in 1996. As Phillippe Sands pointed out at the time the very existence of the investigation made a negotiated settlement to the civil war in Libya less likely. Indictments for Muammer Ghadaffi, his son Saif al Islam and his brother-in-law came less than two months after NATO bombs killed another of Ghadaffi’s sons and three of his grandchildren. Both flight and negotiation became impossible. The indictment ensured that fighting would continue – meaning that people would continue to be killed and maimed.
Given the timing and the political nature of the decision to indict in the midst of war there are really only three possible reasons for the indictment. One is that US and European leaders wanted to make a salient demonstration to the world of what happens to leaders who they dislike and they don’t care how many Libyans are killed in order to make that demonstration. (In retrospect the Panama invasion of 1989 can be seen as such an operation, and the best estimates of Panamanians killed in “Operation Just Cause” are in the thousands.) The second possibility is that the same powers were actually desirous of conflict in Libya as a divide-and-control strategy whereby independent development is curtailed by ongoing destabilisation and ever-renewable civil strife. This would be entirely fitting within a pattern of interventions which has sown conflict and degraded central governance in dozens of countries. The third option is that both of the previous options are true in varying degrees.
Colonisation by NGO
Palestine is one of a number of societies rife with NGOs. Mandy Turner has shown that the “liberal peacebuilding” practiced by these NGOs is a colonial practice and a contemporary “mission civilatrice”. Israel’s colonial practices are “at the expense of Palestinian self-determination”, but Western-backed “peacebuilding” is “at the expense of a development strategy for national liberation”.
The “liberal peacebuilding” prescription of “neoliberal policies of open markets, privatization and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on enhancing instruments of state coercion, ‘capacity building’ and ‘good governance’” is simply neocolonialism. These are the practices developed by the British and imposed wherever possible on colonies, former colonies and parts of the formal empire. Once upon a time it was called “liberalism” now it tends to be called “neoliberalism”, but it amounts to the same thing – colonial control that ensures both dependency and impoverishment. The main difference here, and in other neocolonies, is that the former colonial power does not have an exclusive concession and the exploitation and expropriation (which may be of donor money rather than indigenous wealth) is a multinational Western project.
In short, while Palestinians are concentrated into fragmented reservations by Israel’s settler colonial project, within those patches an additional burden of neocolonial servitude suppresses independent development. But as Turner also indicates, part of the neocolonial NGO dominance is the delegitimisation of violent resistance: “…the ability to decide whether someone is or is not a ‘partner for peace’ and thus act on this decision is unequal. This phrase, therefore, made Israel’s attempts to control Palestinian political elites seem innocuous. It also allowed donors to believe that funding and working with Palestinian elites regarded by Israel as being ‘partners for peace’ would assist their mission of supporting the peace process. In its application this paradigm has variously meant Israel justifying cutting off revenue transfers to the PA, arresting and detaining democratically elected Palestinian politicians, extrajudicial executions and military violence. It has also been used by donors to justify cutting off aid, reverting to ‘bad governance’ practices, and supporting regime change. It has been, in effect, the discursive framework that has bound the two practices of control together and has given them common purpose.”
One Person’s Terrorist is Another Person’s Legally Elected Political Representative
Building on Turner’s work another legal scholar, Vicky Sentas, gave this talk on “peacebuilding as counterinsurgency”. Her focus is on the listing of the Kurdish PKK as a terrorist organisation, but the logic applies equally to Palestinian armed resistance formations given that they all have been or could be declared terrorists on the basis of their resistance activities. The terrorist listing is even worse than politically motivated accusations of war crimes or crimes against humanity because it prejudicially criminalises people on the basis of belonging to a designated terrorist entity. If you delegitimise resistance or insurgency on the basis of acts designated as “terrorism” than all personnel become “terrorists” regardless of their own actions.
Of course the main use of the term “terrorist” in the last 100 years has been as a way of delegitimising armed violence from non-state actors. Our elites work hard to avoid any suggestion that terrorism might actually refer to the intentional use of terror per se, because that would inevitably mean that the greatest terrorists are the most powerful states. Noam Chomsky’s famous assertion that we ignore the “wholesale” terrorism of militarised states and concentrate on the “retail” terrorism of armed non-state entities doesn’t really suffice. “Terrorists” means people with weapons or destructive implements who we don’t like and who we can get away with labelling as “terrorist”. Whether they actually practice the use of terror is not relevant. Anticolonial rebels were called terrorists; the resistance to German occupation in Europe were labelled “Bolshevist terrorists”; the Viet Minh and later the National Liberation Front were labelled “Communist terrorists” from which came “Charlie Tango” and hence “Charlie”. The only difference is that now we have an international regime, subject to US hegemony, which makes this political, and inherently oppressive, act into a internationally legalistic one.
The idea of terrorism itself is a way of implying that the organised armed violence or property destruction of a group is illegitimate as being criminal and outside of the behaviour of combatancy. The old-fashioned approach was to suggest that belligerent parties such as insurgents must be treated as combatants. After the cessation of hostilities the victor could legitimately label the defeated foes as traitors and deal with them as such. This is hardly perfect and does nothing to prevent victor’s justice and judicial massacres. On those grounds some might think that it is a pointless distinction to make. But there is a certain sense that if the belligerents were criminals en masse because terrorism is a crime, then they would properly be dealt with by the normal policing and judicial processes of the state in question. If the response to an organised challenge is military violence, paramilitary violence, counterinsurgency, “counter-terror”, political violence and or political terror, then you are in a situation of armed conflict and the enemy should be treated as a combatant, at least for the duration.
Anyone who has Followed the Thread of This Article to This Point…
… deserves a medal. But they also might be asking: “Hang on, surely joining the ICC will strengthen Palestinian claims to statehood and make their resistance more, not less, legitimate.” I wish it were so, but it is unfortunately more accurate to say that those countries that are subject to the ICC may find themselves in the same situation as Palestinians if they face aggression or occupation. They may find that politically determined accusations about the manner in which armed resistance is conducted or internal conflict is dealt with are used to delegitimise all resistance either informally or formally through the enforcement of terrorist listings.
Bear in mind, too, that entities like the US and Israel have a long-standing habit of conflating armed and unarmed resistance activities. In Viet Nam the US coined the term “Viet Cong Infrastructure” (VCI) to designate people who had sympathy for the National Liberation Front and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). The term Viet Cong had already conflated combatants and non-combatants who opposed the Saigon regime, now the VCI designation worked in the same way as a “terrorist” or “VC” designation, legitimising deadly violence as if the victims were combatants yet denying the rights accorded to combatants. VCI were the prime target of the notorious Phoenix Programme. Unlike actual NLF officials or PLAF personnel those fingered as VCI, often by tortured suspects, were easy to abduct or kill at their homes.
A similar mentality is even applied now domestically in the US, with the designation of “material support for terrorism”. This sounds like it could only mean substantive support for actual terrorism such as providing money or materiel to suicide bombers. In practice the case of the Holy Land Foundation 5 shows that it is political designation intended to conflate the crime of thinking the wrong thoughts with unlawful acts of violence. The victims of that judicial persecution are serving sentences of up to 65 years for sending money to charities allegedly controlled by Hamas. They were not accused of funding terrorist activities, but of sending funds to a terrorist entity.
The HLF5 defendants are claiming that they were entrapped because they tried to get a State Dept. list of approved charities, but were denied. The point of the exercise is to create a political language in which giving charity to orphans is “terrorism”. This accompanies an ongoing exercise to “rebrand” military violence, including killing civilians, as “humanitarian”. The most important thing to remember is that this has worked. If you put “holy land foundation trial” into a search engine that does not anticipate your desires (such as duckduckgo), you will find that their conviction was a victory against Jihadi terrorism and the plot to enforce Sharia in the United States of America.
This illustrates that we are really faced with two possible ways of dealing with the overall issue of armed mass violence. We can either accept the Nürnberg precedents and the UN Charter. This would mean that war is illegal, all people have a right to life and that the aggressor is culpable for all loss of life and suffering. The UNSC would be able to authorise legitimate military action, but it could only do so in accordance with the UN Charter, which can only mean acting as a collective defence against an aggressor. This is a highly imperfect system and many bad things can happen to people that this particular system does not act to prevent or discourage. On the other hand, this system outlined does not actively facilitate atrocities, while the alternative does.
The system that is favoured by the US, and ultimately promoted by the ICC, is one in which the armed violence is legitimate if carried out by lawful combatants in a lawful manner. Unlawful actions by lawful combatants are not legitimate, but they are a side-issue of individual criminality. In contrast, unlawful acts committed by unlawful combatants are the retrospective rationale for justifying unlawful status and all resistance by unlawful combatants is unlawful. In other words, might makes right. Lawfulness or unlawfulness depend entirely on the ability to control perceptions. The powerful are allowed to commit mass violence against the weak, and the resistance of the weak will make them the perpetrator and justify the acts of the powerful.
Israel’s Persecution Complex
The ICC’s significance is inevitably that of a public relations exercise. Even the “end of impunity” enthusiast must readily admit that the Court’s function is not to provide specific deterrence but to create general deterrence (supposedly by ending impunity). In fact, there is no evidence or concrete reasoning that would support that claim, but it has a veneer of rationality. This isn’t a matter of common ignorance, this is highbrow ignorance for superior idiots only, but even on these terms the putative general deterrent effect is the result of managing perceptions. Thus even the supporters know that ICC activities are a form of display, and their trial are inevitably show trials.
Because the ICC is one big politicised PR exercise, legalistic analyses of the ICC are less important than discursive analyses. I have concentrated on the ways in which the ICC is part of the ongoing process of creating an international political discourse of “good guys” and “bad guys” in which the powerful control the language, the conversation and thus, ultimately, the perception. This is a thought control process aimed largely at the intelligentsia. But in the case of Palestine, ICC membership will further another project of thought control – that of the Great Israeli Persecution Complex.
Historically Jews have suffered a great deal of persecution. In Europe during World War II this persecution became something that truly defies words. Even at a time when unspeakable acts and unimaginable suffering were the experience of many millions throughout the world, the fate of Europe’s Jews stand out. The German concentration camp, slave labour, and extermination camp systems, and the mobile civilian mass-murder systems, exceeded all historical precedents of cruelty. I do not write that lightly and I am not forgetting Potosí, nor the Atlantic slave trade, nor the victims of Japanese occupation, nor the Ukrainian Terror Famine, nor any of the other great obscenities of humanity. Jews were not the only victims, by any means, but in some respects they were the key and exemplary victims.
If Zionism had ever been purely a response to persecution, perhaps the lesson of the Shoah might have been commit to opposing all acts of genocide. It would be an anticolonial movement. But Zionism was never purely about an enduring escape from persecution. It has always accommodated a combination of nationalism, colonialism, racism, chauvinistic religious belief, and Imperial power politics. In addition we must account for the role that greed and love of power play in all political movements that provide outlets for them. Thus, inevitably, the response to the Shoah was not an organic response that would reject all genocidal cruelty, but an exploitative one by a existing system of power hierarchies whose human components seized on the emotional and political capital provided by the murder of millions.
The historical persecution of Jews and the Shoah actually have very little to do with the realities facing Israel. I am not saying that there has never been persecution of Jews in the Arab world, nor that anti-Judaism is no longer a matter of concern in Europe or elsewhere. These are complicated issues which I cannot get into here. I will confine myself to pointing out that when the Argentine junta was detaining Jews and sending them to camps where they were sometimes tortured in front of pictures of Hitler, and many were killed, the Israel’s government sided with the neo-Nazis, not against them.
But when it comes to the occupation of Palestine, the exploitation of past persecution is the gift that keeps on giving. The ICC will provide an ongoing opportunity for the Zionist regime to harp on about how the entire world hates Jews on a regular basis. It will be like the Goldstone Report on a loop track.
To refresh your memory, the Goldstone Report was slanted against Palestinians. Richard Goldstone, the lead author, is an avowed Zionist despite his history of opposing apartheid. This was a fact finding mission, not a judicial inquiry, but it should still have addressed the question of aggression. Instead it misleadingly affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence. Noam Chomsky characterised the report as being pro-Israel on those grounds. It was also disproportionate, devoting considerable wordage to Palestinian militant activities, when if weighted by deaths caused Palestinian activities would barely get a mention.
Goldstone had watered down some aspects of the report against the wishes of his co-authors, yet on its release the Israeli government lead a chorus of Zionists, neocons, white supremacists and Islamophobes around the world that shrieked like stuck pigs. They claimed that the whole thing was part of the giant world-wide conspiracy of the Jew-hating UN. Goldstone later strengthened these cries by undermining the report with his name on it. All three of his fellow authors issued their own contrary statement, but hardly anyone heard about that.
This is another one of those inversions of reality, this time in three steps rather than two. When Operation Cast Lead was occurring the raw images tended to show the truth – a helpless besieged people were being attacked in a one-sided slaughter. But if you try searching “goldstone report bias” in duckduckgo you have to scroll down a great deal to find anything that counters the notion that the report was biased against Israel, and I don’t even know how many hits you would get before the first one that suggested a pro-Israel bias.
Even anti-Zionist outlets like Electronic Intifada devote their attention to decrying Goldstone’s later betrayal and defending the Goldstone Report against accusations of anti-Israel bias and completely neglect to show the important ways in which the report was unreasonably and unfairly biased in Israel’s favour. That, far more than the report’s actual contents, is the contribution of the report to posterity and our understanding of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Expect more of the same.
Binyamin Netanyahu has just succeeded electorally by taking a “hard line” and playing on fear and racism. The Great Israeli Persecution Complex has become part of an ever-intensifying spiral of extremism where each new crime necessitates a more insane world view. The world increasingly sees the bare injustice of the genocidal project of Zionism in Palestine. The response within Israel and for their fanatical supporters, who are increasingly confined to the US, is the paranoiac vision of a world of savage “anti-Semites” who oppose Israel out of hatred for Jews.
In reality the international community and the UN greatly favour Israel at the expense of Palestinians, including the diaspora. The UN was Israel’s midwife (the father of the child, Britain, decided that it was not desirable to be present at the birth). The UN has acted to shield Israel from the consequences of realising the human rights of Palestinians. It is a complicated story which can be found by scrolling halfway down here or you could just watch Vera Gowland-Debbas here and here. In short, what it means is that every single member of the United Nations, meaning your government, has a specific moral and legal obligation to act to secure the long absent rights of the people of Palestine. They have failed to do so for 66 years and the only reason for not doing so is the potential negative impact on Israel. No country has any such obligation to Israel nor, especially, to the “Jewish state of Israel”. Individual Israelis have the same human rights as we all have, but the state of Israel has no rights which can override the human rights of millions of Palestinians.
They Walk Among Us!
And who will stand for Palestinian human rights? Our over-privileged and well-tailored liberal apparatchiks advocate that the world’s problems will be solved by meting out white-man’s justice from on high. Self-appointed as God’s gift to human rights, in reality these individuals act to reproduce the most cruel and destructive imperialist violence. They perpetuate the most deadly circumstances of direct mass violence and of structural violence. These are the clerics of Hernán Cortés (“Cortez the Killer”) singing hymns to the righteousness of his bloodletting. They share their apparently capacious catholic faith with overtly hawkish liberal interventionists and neocons, but in reality this is a narrow orthodoxy fitting the requirements of “ostensible diversity concealing actual uniformity”.
Many people have come to realise that “neconservatives” are just a subset of “liberal interventionists”. The fact that highly prominent liberals have always been part of the neoconservative movement, and the fact that they both have identical “moral” facets of foreign policy prescription should have made more people realise this earlier. Still, even now most people are blind to the fact. This is an understandable result of the manner in which these ideologies are presented to people as contending and the manner in which the ideologues criticise each other. The political “debates” between various foreign policy factions in the US are nothing but frenetic, and ultimately unbelievable, theatre. The rhetoric clashes, but the exceptionalist interventionism matches – as do the concrete deeds.
For me it is no stretch at all to see some prominent “humanitarians” as blood-drenched imperialists. As soon as I read Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell I knew she was exactly as she now appears to us all. It doesn’t take a genius, it just takes actual thought. The neocons themselves considered her book a must read. And she is far from alone.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been described as having a “revolving door” relationship with the US State Dept. Amnesty International (AI), in addition to a long history of providing atrocity propaganda to support US interventions, has been implicated in helping a US regime change plot in Eritrea, along with HRW. The US State Dept in 2011 seems to have specifically funded a joint AI/HRW delegation to Eritrea as part of a destabilisation plan. Many of the people within these organisations are dedicated and well-meaning, but the seem oblivious to the malevolent nature of those running things. The clearest example is Save the Children, whose employees were shocked and appalled at the decision by their superiors to give Tony Blair a “global legacy award”.
What shocks me is that people are actually surprised to find that the folks who run big NGOs are power-loving elitist scumbags. I feel like I’m the guy in the movie They Live who has what Slavoj Žižekdescribes as “critique of ideology glasses”. When wearing the glasses he sees, among other things, that most rich and powerful people are hideous and foul creatures who are the enemies of humanity.
I am not suggesting here that all rich and powerful people are literally malevolent parasites from another species. What I am suggesting is that their humanity is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if they are loving parents or kind to animals. It doesn’t matter if they spend at least 20 hours each week washing the feet of lepers. In our unequal society even charities are often dizzyingly steep hierarchies; the dynamics of power, and the group dynamics of elite psychology, mean that with some exceptions these people might just as well be bloodthirsty baby-eating reptiles from outer space.
People reflexively defer to the authority of these “successful” people, because they are programmed to believe that advancement within a hierarchy comes through merit, while at the same time they project their own disinterested humanitarian values on to these people. What I see is what I saw in Susan Power, Tony Blair and Barack Obama. These people are happy to take selfies with Bill Clinton, or share a stage with Henry Kissinger. When they debate a neocon like Robert Kagan it is in an atmosphere of mutual respect, if not admiration. The only powerful Westerners who they don’t love are those who actively play the vicious villain, like Donald Rumsfeld, and even then that is entirely contingent and will change as soon as that villain is reinvented by a PR firm and a couple of journalistic puff-pieces.
People like Susanne Nossel (head of PEN, former executive director of AI USA, and warmonger) should only provoke disgust and anger in anyone who really cares about human rights. It is completely irrelevant if they don’t understand why we hate them and if their precious feelings are hurt. They have drunk so deeply from the well of Western hypocrisy that the only thing that can remain true within them is the love of power. The political powers and functionaries that control the ICC are no different. Some may be perfectly well-meaning, particularly if their involvement has simply followed logically from their area of legal expertise, but most are liable to be slime in human form.
The idea that human rights are advanced by a political process of choosing individual designated criminals and punishing them with maximum possible fanfare is likely to appeal to the worst fake humanitarians. Imprisoning people is not a humanitarian pursuit. A true humanitarian is more concerned with emptying prisons than filling them. Moreover, someone who really cared about justice would want to see a stronger International Court of Justice – able to rectify interstate injustice, not spend billions of dollars on prosecuting a handful of cherry-picked expedient pre-fab demons.
I happen to think that many of the people involved in the ICC are most likely to be horrible self-righteous bastards, but even if many of them are deeply concerned humanitarians it does not change the institution. Hans von Sponeck recently said on Democracy Now!“There is a new chief prosecutor in The Hague. And we are now—in mid-April, on the 18th of April, in fact, the War Crimes Commission will meet yet again in Kuala Lumpur to prepare for the second, and hopefully last, draft submission of this documentation to the International Criminal Court.” Obviously there is no harm in handing reports to the ICC, but why bring up the new prosecutor? In the context which he gives the implication is that there is a prospect of the ICC indicting US officials. Does he believe this? Does he identify with the ICC officials and project his own benevolent intents on to them? Is he confused about the difference between the way people act in the real world and, say, the way they might present their desires at a social occasion?
That is why I hang my head in despair when I hear someone as admirable as Dr Francis Boyle discussing the ICC as if Palestinians have nothing to lose, as if the worst of their worries is simply that the ICC will be unable to act on their behalf. In his own words, Boyle “advised President Abbas to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court….” And, because I know that Boyle an intelligent and caring man, from my very bowels comes the unstoppable question: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Conclusion
Inevitably the ICC will do everything possible to seem as if it is responding to public pressure to prosecute Israeli crimes, but it will not prosecute Israelis. It will be biased in favour of Israel, but that will be represented as being even-handed and objective by some, and as being biased against Israel by others. Many supporters of Palestine will be sucked into defending the ICC against accusations of bias.
Palestinian leaders will be threatened with ICC prosecutions both publicly and in private. This will deepen the already profound constraints and controls imposed on them by Israel and the US. This may be enough to erode the ability to resist armed mass violence by Israel, such as the resistance to “Operation Protective Edge”. That conflict was once again a one-sided act of mass-murder, but armed resistance caused enough IDF fatalities that there must have been some deterrent effect. That deterrence will be eroded if Palestinians do not feel able to use armed resistance.
Already Palestinians are beaten with the stick of the Hamas terrorist designation. On the other hand Al Jazeera‘s “Palestine Papers” illustrate that Palestinian Authority leaders are compromised in other ways. I draw the inference that Israeli actions such arresting legislators or the 2002 siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound were ways of creating threats which are levers with which to control PA leaders. The PA leaders might not be traitors as much as they are responding to the political realities of the world that they live in. The ICC will provide more ways of threatening and controlling some Palestinian leaders while turning the other into outlaws. It is all bad news for Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the goodhearted people of the world will be drawn into a narrative of atrocity calculus. The criminality of all Palestinian resistance will be arranged alongside the criminality of a few Israeli bad apples. When all eyes see mounds of Palestinian dead, we will still have our thinking obfuscated. The victims will be made to seem the criminals. The ICC will turn up the volume of the conversation which avoids, at all costs, trying to examine the deep historical issues of justice, and instead yells stridently and chest-thumpingly about the criminality of the “bad guys”.
Meanwhile Israel’s leaders will exploit the empty threat of ICC prosecutions against them to deepen the sense of the whole world is hostile to Jews. Israelis and Western Zionists will be deafened to criticism of Israel’s crimes, slipping ever deeper into the lake of Kool-Aid beneath the mirror surface of which lies Oppositeland.
Image source: dragoart.com
On Genocide 