LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Liberal Defence of Murder paperback posted by Richard Seymour

This will be formally launched in July, but the hard copies are out there. They include a brand new Afterword approximately 16,000 words in length, which takes us up to the Middle East revolutions and the Libyan war. I have also made various corrections - including some responding to the more bilious critics, recalling the old saw about stopped clocks. And they have a swell looking new cover with lots of press recommendations. You know the deal: if you want to fight the warmongers, you need this book.

Labels: cruise missile liberals, imperial ideology, liberal imperialism, liberalism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defence of murder, the liberal defense of murder

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The late Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

My autopsy of the late Hitchens, in the form of a review of Hitch-22, is now available on the ISJ website:

The strength of Hitch-22 is that it makes a serious effort to recall how it felt to be a different kind of person, to feel otherwise about the world, without trying to repudiate it. The weakness of Hitch-22 is that where it does attempt to resolve the amassing contradictions of Hitchens’s persona, it is largely through solipsistic devices of the kind “I would have suspected myself more if…” and “I wasn’t about to be told…”. The resulting memoir is an alternately riveting and sickening tribute to the late author’s narcissism...

Labels: christopher hitchens, hypocritchens, imperial ideology, john bullshit, liberal imperialism, narcissism, petty bourgeois individualism, the liberal defence of murder

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Stop them before they kill posted by Richard Seymour

My piece at ABC Australia on the Kony 2012 humbug:

There's a shady crew roaming around Uganda which must be stopped. It is a dangerous personality cult, it openly calls for violence, and it uses children in its campaigns.

Its leaders have been seen waving guns around. We must catch them, disrupt their organisation by any means necessary, stop at nothing. We don't have long to act. The deadline expires at the end of 2012, after which it will be too late. We must stop Invisible Children before they do more harm. And I'm going to tell you how to do it.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', imperial ideology, Invisible children, liberal imperialism, missionaries, uganda

Free speech martyr posted by Richard Seymour

Azhar Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to re-define racism as "anything that could conceivably offend white people". Ahmed is being prosecuted by police over a statement he made on Facebook. The police say it is a "racially aggravated public order offence".

Look at the statement. There is not a hint of racism in it. To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white, but somehow the bearer of whiteness in its essence. Maybe they are in this day and age; maybe it is through imperialist action and its effects both domestically and internationally that whiteness is produced. But the second assumption one would have to make is that white people are the victims of racist oppression by black people, Muslims and so on. We'll come back to this.

A spokesperson for Yorkshire police said: "He didn't make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother." So, the penalty for not making a point "very well" is prosecution and potentially a sentence of up to six months in prison. The suggestion, though, is that aside from being "racially aggravated" this statement constitutes an incitement to disorder. Of course, it is considerably more even tempered than some sentiments I have expressed myself in the past, though I won't suffer arrest or prosecution for it. In addition, the internet - and Facebook in particular - contains an abundance of pages that really do exist to incite violence. Yet a Muslim sassing our brave boys is too much for the state. Either this suggests that Muslims are an excitable brown rabble, apt to start cutting white people up at the merest hint of block capitals and exclamation marks, or it implies that it is the feelings of offended white people that must be protected, lest they be the ones who are incited. Unsurprisingly the EDL and Casuals United dirt (may I say that, or is it "racially aggravated"?) are delighted. Muslims won't be allowed to sass our brave boys now that the bizzies are 'on our side'. Hurrah for the filth! (Is that okay, or...?)

What is really at stake here? Why are the police behaving like this? The blog of the Index on Censorship website suggests that suspicion of Muslims voicing opposition to the troops is rooted in fear and suspicion resulting from 7/7. To be honest, I think this is lame. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are not acting out of paranoia. But the blog also makes another suggestion which gets close to the truth in my opinion: "Unconditional support for soldiers is now expected, even as we become increasingly unsure of what they’re doing out there. From the most ardent supporter of the war to the most strident critic, everyone claims to be acting in the interest of Our Brave Boys. This is now not a matter of politics, but loyalty ... the “racially aggravated” charge doesn’t stick, unless one is willing to buy into the notion that Afghanistan is part of an ethno-religious war between “Islam” and “the West”."

This suggests that it is the state, through its action, which is racializing this issue. We know that the state is involved in more than simply the bureaucratic and repressive organization of society. Fundamentally what it does is a kind of moral regulation, ordering the symbolic world, constituting norms and social classifications. Obviously the law, and the criminal justice system which executes the law, is critical to this constitutive action. The state's re-classification of racist crime in such a way as to efface the axis of oppression, to make it such that "racism cuts both ways", was an important precondition for this sort of action. But what is at stake now is an attempt to re-organize the social body behind a resurgent militarism. We have seen the PR efforts aimed at cementing a new consensus that can support war indirectly, or at least neutralise opposition, on the basis of pro-troops sentiment. I think the pukeworthy Military Wives, whatever the producers thought they were doing, was a masterpiece in this sort of propaganda. But consent does not exist in separation from coercion. Violence and, literally, terror is central to how consent is secured. How the police act in producing consent has been dealt with here.

So we could see this prosecution as aberrant, the criminal justice system over-reacting, over-playing its hand, being too fastidious with incitement laws, or whatever. No doubt some will attribute it to nanny-state authoritarianism, and the usual bores will say that the liberals who support anti-racist legislation caused this to happen. I think it would make more sense to see it as a speculative manouevre in the application of an emerging discourse of treason. For that is really the logic of this prosecution. One has to see this question of 'incitement' in connection with the repressive and racialized response to the riots last Summer, and the generalized unease of the British state about the combustibility of the social order. Those police actions extended the repertoire of repressive tactics already formed in relation to the student protests, G20, UK Uncut, the climate camp and so on. As importantly, I think, it has to be seen in the context of the new doctrine of 'total policing', which is essentially about giving the police more of a free hand to intervene in aggressive ways to solve problems of social order, coded as problems of crime prevention. A premium is being placed on preemptive action, literally - I repeat, literally - on terror. In this case, it is disloyalty that is being punished, in a racialized way. The action of the police and courts is about constituting a new field of punishable conduct. And when disloyalty is punished, there really isn't much that can't be included under its canopy.

Labels: 'reverse racism', capitalist state, imperial ideology, imperialism, islamophobia, police, racism, troops

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

American Insurgents: A brief history of American anti-imperialism posted by Richard Seymour

Coming soon:

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

Labels: abolitionism, anti-imperialism, colonialism, feminism, imperial ideology, imperialism, left, liberalism, racism, slavery, socialism, us politics

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Military Wives and the sickening sentimentality of the serial killer posted by Richard Seymour

The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and banal. It is the worst form of sentimentality. Their husbands murder Afghans for queen and country, and they murder music for the same righteous cause. Wherever you are, soldier boy, know that the love of your counterpart is so strong, so thoroughly adequate, that it is apt to suddenly materialise into a substance able to "keep you safe" from the foreigners you are busy subduing in the rough hinterlands. Yet at the very same time, this love is so elevated, so ethereal, so much above the humdrum and quotidian, that it is almost as if her heart will, as it were, "build a bridge of light across both time and space". Oh, but there is more, cherished mercenary, much more to say on this love. For its cosmic ordering is capable of reducing the distance between Nottingham and Helmand by various simple expedients. Your hearts will "beat as one", for one. This while your amour holds you in her dreams each night "until your task is done", O "prince of peace".

Comrades and friends, you will forgive me if I end the assay there. There is only so much a man can wear his spleen on his sleeve. But lest I seem to fall into a crusty disdain for the cheesier tropes of the pop-tastic, and particularly the romantic ballad, allow me just to say that I have exactly the same weaknesses in this regard as every single one of you. For example, I cried when watching some piece of shit film whose name I forget. (Fuck you, that's what it was called.) And I emoted in a similar fashion over that song that everyone bought one Christmas, and I wasn't tipsy on mulled wine when I did. These cultural technologies produce many of the same reactions in all of us because they are intended to do just that, because they operate on basically identical raw material. But this imperial doggerel is a sick, chauvinist parody of love. If you like this song, you don't have love; you don't even have taste: what you have is a military-industrial infestation.

To illustrate. Jonathan Freedland's tribute notably fails to mention except obliquely the motivating context for this song, the "task" - of bombing, strafing, torturing, disappearing, poisoning, assassinating, subjugating - that is responsible for its sole element of genuine pathos. As such, he can't acknowledge the ethnocentric bases for his appreciation of the song, the mixture of patriotic and narcissistic affect that is mobilised within its construction of a community of harmonious vocalists. He is perhaps unwitting in his cliche when he describes the solidarity achieved through common struggle without the expense of losers, or of the sadism that usually comes with television pop spectaculars. But the idea that a national community forged in war suddenly discovers its manners, its civic virtues, its solidarity and mutualism, is a shopworn antique. And were Freedland aware of the pedigree of this old cynosure of reaction, he would also be aware that the cruelty and malice whose absence he celebrates is, in such cases, merely displaced. That is, the usual (class, racial, sexual) antagonisms that suppurate resentment and cruelty in the culture - which are so expertly manipulated by Endemol, Zodiak, RTL, the BBC and the producers of all that property porn and eugenic fetishism - have simply been externalised. They are still there, in the form of an absence. Behind the woefully lyricised sentiments of the gals in the 'queen and country' t-shirts, something is occluded. That is the emotional, intellectual, religious and social life of those designated by the euphemism, 'task'. Naturally, their love, their pathos, is a matter of indifference and barely submerged contempt, which one delicately builds bridges around and over.

I do not know what motivated BBC2 and Gareth Malone to turn The Choir into a special on 'Military Wives'. Possibly, it's an opaque satire intended to illustrate the Frankfurt school's analysis of popular culture, which in this day and age looks blithely over-optimistic. More plausibly, I suspect that the Ministry of Defence may have had a hand in this monster. Even if they did not, the aptitude of this sort of format for such appropriation and re-territorialisation is a reminder of an important aspect of our conjuncture. Ideologically, the ruling class is weak. Its legitimacy is fragile. Politically, it is disunited (though it doesn't do to underestimate what a cohering factor class struggle can be). Yet, its technologies of ideological rule are vastly more sophisticated than they have been in the past. The surprising 'visibility' of the military-industrial-entertainment complex during the 'war on terror' merely allowed us to see the tip of a cultural iceberg, one formed by the concentration and centralisation of cultural capital and its fusion with the state. The 'Military Wives' song that is presently #1 in the UK charts is a small tribute to its power, its ability to infantilise and temporarily stupefy audiences with artistic cliche and spectacle.

Far be it from me to suggest that a few more hit songs like this will have us marching cheerfully into Tehran - no such thing - but this does have long range effects, even if these aren't computable according to any simple calculus of stimulus-response. We cannot afford to be complacent about such ordure. We have to destroy it, instantly, utterly. It won't do to simply buy a few Nirvana singles to get them to the top of the charts instead of Military Wives. That won't even work at this point. We have to start confronting this military fetishism wherever it insinuates itself in daily life. The 'help for heroes' boondoggle should be noisily boycotted; anyone collecting money for military causes in a bear outfit should be mercilessly ridiculed; young air, navy and army cadets sent out to pack bags at Marks and Spencer should be told exactly how and where to get a life; the poppies should be burned - not just a few, in a symbolic Islam4UK-style action, but all of them in a mass cremation of postcolonial bunting; and any family members who actually sign up to wear a uniform of the armed forces in Afghanistan or anywhere else should be shunned, not loved. That's a map of our kulturkampf for 2012.

Labels: culture industry, imperial ideology, imperialism, military-industrial complex, Pop Culture

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Forlorn Hope: Lost Dreams of American Renewal posted by Richard Seymour

American liberals who supported the ‘war on terror’ did so on ostensibly humanitarian and democratic grounds. Yet, underlying those soothing bromides was a fantasy of American regeneration through violence. Commentators as diverse as Frank Rich, David Brooks and George Packer had contended in the wake of that an era of decadence and frivolousness had just drawn to a close.

Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times that ‘tolerance for people with dangerous ideas seems frivolous compared with the need to stop them’. Her new ‘sense of seriousness’, as she chose to call it, allowed her to understand the ‘urgent patriotism’ of Stephen Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’. The invocation of Americans in a collective struggle with fascism was not incidental: Spielberg’s focus on World War II, seen by many as a good ‘liberal’ war, had arguably been an effort to overcome the trauma of Vietnam and resuscitate liberal nationalism. Shulevitz continued: ‘Somewhere deep in my heart, I have always longed for a catastrophe like the present one’, as it would produce a ‘collective purpose’ comparable with World War II or the ‘Velvet Revolution’. It would sweep aside all triviality, such as ‘petty political squabbling’ and ‘enervating celebrity gossip’. An op-ed in the Washington Post mused that the hijackers ‘decided to attack the symbols of American empire, financial domination, military hegemony, strangely ugly buildings housing the people who rule a strangely ugly world despite our soft hearts.’ It was this softness, the failure to make this strangely ugly world beautiful, that had brought about such bloody consequences in Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon and Somalia.

On the day that the attack on Afghanistan began, former New York Times editor James Atlas told the paper’s readers that ‘[o]ur great American empire seems bound to crumble at some point’ and that ‘the end of Western civilization has become a possibility against which the need to fight terrorism is being framed, as Roosevelt and Churchill framed the need to fight Hitler’. The alarming ease with which ‘Western civilization’ was conflated with the American empire was matched only by the implication that nineteen hijackers from a small transnational network of jihadis represent a civilizational challenge, an existential threat comparable with the Third Reich. But this was precisely the argument of liberal interventionists. Thus, the polemics of Paul Berman, shorn of the language of empire, nonetheless held that both Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba’ath regime updated the ‘totalitarian’ challenge to liberalism that had been represented by Nazism and Stalinism. For Ignatieff, the ‘war on terror’ was an older contest between an empire whose ‘grace notes’ were free markets and democracy, and ‘barbarians’. And for Christopher Hitchens, nothing less was at stake than secular democracy, under threat from ‘Islamic fascism’. This challenge demanded both a censorious ‘moral clarity’ and support for extraordinary measures to abate the threat.

Anatol Lieven, in his study of American nationalism, compared the post-9/11 climate in the United States to the ‘Spirit of 1914’ that prevailed across Europe on the outbreak of World War I. It is a perceptive comparison. As Domenico Losurdo illustrates in his Heidegger and the Ideology of War, that era also generated a striking martial discourse (Kriegsideologie), which insisted on civilizational explanations for war. It was then mainly thinkers of the German right who elaborated the discourse. Max Weber, though politically liberal, argued that the war was not about profit, but about German existence, ‘destiny’ and ‘honour’. Some even saw it as ‘a religious and holy war, a Glaubenswieg’. Then, too, it was hoped that war would restore social solidarity, and authenticity to life. The existentialist philosopher Edmund Husserl explained: ‘The belief that one’s death signifies a voluntary sacrifice, bestows sublime dignity and elevates the individual’s suffering to a sphere which is beyond each individuality. We can no longer live as private people.’

Nazism inherited Kriegsideologie, and this was reported and experienced by several of those closest to the regime as a remake of the ‘wonderful, communal experience of 1914’. In Philosophie (1932), Karl Jaspers exalted the ‘camaraderie that is created in war [and that] becomes unconditional loyalty’. ‘I would betray myself if I betrayed others, if I wasn’t determined to unconditionally accept my people, my parents, and my love, since it is to them that I owe myself.’ (Jaspers, though a nationalist and political elitist like Max Weber, was not a biological racist, and his Jewish wife would fall foul of Nazi race laws). Heidegger argued that ‘[w]ar and the camaraderie of the front seem to provide the solution to the problem of creating an organic community by starting from that which is most irreducibly individual, that is, death and courage in the face of death’. For him, the much-coveted life of bourgeois peace was ‘boring, senile, and, though contemplatable’, was ‘not possible’.

These are family resemblances, rather than linear continuities. The emergence of communism as a clear and present danger to nation-states, and the post-war conflagrations of class conflict, sharpened the anti-materialism of European rightists who were already critical of humanism, internationalism and the inauthenticity of commercial society. Their dilemma was different, and their animus was directed against socialist ideologies that barely register in today’s United States. Yet, some patterns suggest themselves. The recurring themes of Kriegsideologie were community, danger and death. The community is the nation (or civilization) in existential peril; danger enforces a rigorous moral clarity and heightens one’s appreciation of fellow citizens; death is what ‘they’ must experience so that ‘we’ do not.

The hope that a nationhood retooled for war would restore collective purpose proved to be forlorn. The fixtures of American life, from celebrity gossip to school shootings, did not evaporate. By 2003, Dissent magazine complained that ‘a larger, collective self-re-evaluation did not take place in the wake of September 11, 2001’ – not as regards foreign policy, but rather the domestic culture that had formed during the ‘orgiastic’ preceding decade. An angry New Yorker article would later mourn the dissipation of ‘simple solidarity’ alongside the squandering of international goodwill by the Bush administration. Yet, it was through that dream that the barbarian virtues of the early-twentieth-century German right infused the lingua franca of American imperialism.

Excerpt from ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’, Verso, 2008

Labels: 'war on terror', 9/11, imperial ideology, kriegsideologie, liberal imperialism, militarism, nationalism, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Mad Dogs and Englishmen posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on the subject of war propaganda:

The air strikes on Libya are, under the terms of the UN resolution, supposedly intended to protect civilians and result in a negotiated settlement between Colonel Gaddafi and the rebels. This has resulted in some controversy, as air strikes devastated Gaddafi's compound – Bab El-Azizia, the presidential palace abutting military barracks in Tripoli. The defence secretary Liam Fox has insisted, against British army opposition, that Gaddafi would be a legitimate target of air strikes. Assassination, whatever else may be said about it, would leave Gaddafi unavailable for negotiations. But a "compound" – what could be wrong with bombing such a facility?
In situations like this, the usual affective repertoire is unleashed. Gaddafi is a "Mad Dog", the Sun, the Mirror, the Star and the Daily Record inform us – an epithet first applied by Ronald Reagan when the latter bombed Gaddafi's compound, among other targets, in 1986. He is "barking mad", they say. Jon Henley in the Guardian went further – not just "barking mad", but "foaming at the mouth". "Cowardly Colonel Gaddafi," the Sun almost alliterated.
I grant that Gaddafi is a dictator whose determination to hold on initially seemed to defy reality. Yet the reality is that he has shown every sign of being a canny operator, from his rapprochement with the EU and US to his outmanoeuvring of the rebels. Besides, such language has connotations which overflow its formal significations, and does important ideological work in the context of war. It might help to look at an example of this at work...

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', dictatorship, imperial ideology, libya, middle east, qadhafi, revolution, US imperialism

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

The revival of imperialist ideology posted by Richard Seymour

Ironic, in the middle of a revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East, that an unholy alliance of security experts, politicos, EU personnel, ambassadors, and house babblers is once more bruiting the shop-soiled commodity of 'humanitarian intervention'. Forget the recent embarrassment over the loss of Tunisia, and Egypt, and the sweats over uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen. It's all about Libya. And having spent the last few years arming Qadhafi, selling him to international audiences as a former madman who has seen the light, the US and EU are now simulating mortal affront over the use to which Qadhafi is putting those weapons. Having waited and watched, and made initially very equivocal statements, they've determined that Qadhafi's regime is finished just in time to avoid any faux pas, such as Joe Biden or Tony Blair bigging up the man's courage or denying his dictatorial proclivities. More, they're ready to fight on the side of the Libyan revolution. Neocons are once more clamouring for the breach. Anne Marie Slaughter, the 'Wilsonian' former head of State Department policy planning, is also tweeting for the intervention. David Cameron is raising alarm over the prospect of chemical weapons being used as justification for imposing a 'no fly zone'.

That this should be so amid a revolution that is actually on the verge of deposing Qadhafi, possibly not the last of recently US backed dictators to crumble in the Middle East is interesting. For anyone following the news, Qadhafi is hanging on in a few enclaves of Libya, he's lost most of the police and army and the 'tribes' that backed him, and the revolutionaries are advancing on his last strongholds even as I write. The regime can't re-take lost towns, which means it is militarily and politically finished. The massacres that Qadhafi's thugs have perpetrated in defence of the regime are very real, and very grisly, and I can't have much respect for the argument from some that Qadhafi's regime was historically progressive and thus worth defending. But these massacres aren't going to stop the regime from falling. Now, the ideology of 'humanitarian intervention' is among other things a form of racist paternalism. It maintains, through its affirmations and exclusions, that people in the Third World cannot deliver themselves from dictatorship without the assistance of imperialist Euro-American states. Even if they do, the ideology in its present permutation maintains, they won't be able to maintain a decent society by themselves. In fact, there's a palpable fear of the Arab sans-cullotes among Euro-American elites - even the express motives for 'humanitarian intervention' are not entirely altruistic. Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, those ambassadors security experts, all seem to worry about what will happen in the 'vacuum' (which, significantly, depicts Libyan people, the revolutionaries who are bravely undertaking this historic struggle, as a mere absence). Are Arabs ready for democracy? Will the 'disorder' allow 'al-Qaeda' to 'reappear'? What will happen to oil prices? And this seems to be the point. It is precisely because they know that Qadhafi will not survive, and are desperately worried about what sort of independent political forces may follow (it has nothing to do with 'al-Qaeda'), that they are anxious to 'help'.

What I think is happening here is that the US, its EU allies, and its assorted experts, intellectuals and lackeys, have been looking desperately for a way to insinuate the US directly into that revolutionary turmoil, to justify the projection of military hardware in a situation where American interests are decidedly counter-revolutionary. The attempt to envelop this complex field of social and political struggles in the dilapidated ideological frame of 'humanitarian intervention' provides just the entry point that the US and its allies have been looking for. The call for 'humanitarian intervention' has nothing to do with rescuing Libyans, who are proving quite capable of rescuing themselves. It is the tip of a counter-revolutionary wedge.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', counter-revolution, counterinsurgency, dictatorship, imperial ideology, libya, middle east, qadhafi, revolution, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Thursday, February 10, 2011

The selfish gene turns racist posted by Richard Seymour

"I think it is well arguable that Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today. Pat Condell is one of the few with the courage to say so. Before condemning his ‘extremism’, at least consider the possibility that it may be justified."

I think it is well arguable that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins has always been inter-woven with a Thatcherite project of vicious, competitive individualism, egoistic bourgeois self-interest, and authoritarian national chauvinism, and now grounds an avowedly 'secularist' agenda which is a major vector for the revival of racism among middlebrow liberals who have already swallowed the neoliberal kool aid. I think it is more than arguable, an absolute certainty in fact, that Condell represents the rage of a post-imperialist white British middle class that has never adapted to its new circumstance. You can't tell jokes about paddies and blacks any more, because they'll get 'offended'. You can't tell the truth about Islam without some uppity leftie thug leaping to his feet to denounce you, before the Muslim interlopers trail you off to be beheaded. You can't tell a woman to shut up and do as she's told any more, without Andy Gray getting the sack. "Not in my country," Condell, Dawkins and their whole terrified, stupid, solipsistic, self-pitying troupe expostulate. So, resolutely, with considerable courage given the immense wealth and resources at the disposal of their opponents, they tell the truth that has been repressed for too long, that not all cultures are equal, that immigrants are rapists, that no one invited them here and they can fuck off if they don't like it, and that the British way-of-life-dammit is worth defending against these intruders. These people are no more secularists than Richard Desmond is a feminist. Dawkins doesn't embrace this ranting, reactionary idiot because he favours the separation of Church and State, but because his politics of resentment and Anglo-chauvinism (no surprises that Condell is a UKIP voter) chime with his own long-standing beliefs. These people represent the basest elements, the ordure, of an imperialist culture whose degeneration is spiralling now that the crisis is eating away at even the perks and security of middle class employment. And there is further still to go. The adventures of the selfish gene have not ended at this nadir, I am sure.

Labels: 'british values', 'secularism', british empire, britishness, dawkins, imperial ideology, islamophobia, middle class, nationalism, racism

Sunday, August 29, 2010

You can't call peaceful Muslims a bunch of genocidal fascists any more... posted by Richard Seymour

...it's political correctness gone mad. (Hat-tip, and context. Bad news for Harry's Place).

Labels: 'fascism', 'genocide', bad faith, imperial ideology, islam, islamophobia, pro-war 'left', reactionaries, the liberal defence of murder

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Discourse on religion and politics posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: ayatollah khomenei, comics, culture industry, imperial ideology, iran, shah, superman

Friday, August 13, 2010

Capitalism's ground zero posted by Richard Seymour

This furore about the 'ground zero mosque' - actually a mosque being built in a former business site four blocks away from 'ground zero' - reflects the fact that the Republican right's kulturkampf against 'socialism' has run out of steam as a mobilising tool, and they're now turning back to a trusted technique of whipping up hysteria about Islam. This was the other side of the race-baiting that McCain and Palin engaged in during the 2008 election. As you'll recall, the story had it that Obama was a Muslim terrorist from Kenya, and he was going to give people with brown skin the run of things. Across America, local bigots are organising against mosques, just as they are in the UK and much of Europe (other parts of Europe are prioritising a murderous purge against Roma). The GOP doesn't really give a shit about this, but knows how to throw red meat to its base. Hence, as Jamie points out, Republicans are going all out to capitalise on this, with Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas fulminating about terrorist babies - a dehumanising trope which, he also points out, has its origins in Department of Defense-Hollywood propaganda:

Not that this is a purely 'red state' phenomenon. A correspondent points out that naked anti-Muslim racism is emerging in liberal redoubts such as Seattle, where local sex columnist Dan Savage has engaged in vitriolic attacks on 'Muslim culture'. Here, traditional American nativism, imperial ideology, and pro-Israel doctrine are fusing into a vicious racist brew that, incubated by the 'war on terror', is now being used to buttress the prospects of the most reactionary class warriors for the rich, as a new recession looms. For this racist hysteria about the 1 or 2% of Americans who are Muslim is, while it has a lot to do with bolstering support for a flagging empire, certainly also a weapon of class struggle. As always when capitalism experiences a crisis, it regurgitates all existing barbarisms into a toxic new formula for bludgeoning the working class. In Arizona, the victim is immigrant labour, elsewhere it's the Muslims.

The big struggle today is no longer over healthcare - that's dead, killed for the second time by the Democrats and their allies in big capital, not least the pharmaceutical and insurance giants. The struggle now is over social security, which the Obama administration is going after: more of that accumulation-by-dispossession. Bush was soundly defeated when he tried this, but Obama is the 'progressive' president. Liberals will defend him to the bitter end. If the Republicans win big in the mid-terms, as they are expected to, they will provide a stronger bulwark of support for cuts to social security than even the most right-wing Democrats would. It will provide him with the alibi he needs - the country is right-wing, we can't risk running liberal programmes any more, we just have to save what we can, etc. So much for hope. So much for the small change you could believe in.

Labels: accumulation, barack obama, capitalism, capitalist crisis, imperial ideology, islamophobia, recession, social security, US imperialism, zionism

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Witch Trial posted by Richard Seymour

In which our motherly white angel of mercy exposes the wicked black witch's fornication with evil African dictators for the bling bling. That's how the Great Lakes region was set on fire. Naomi Campbell and Charles Taylor did it, and anything else is a filthy communist lie.

Labels: africom, british empire, capitalism, colonialism, congo, democratic republic of congo, imperial ideology, liberia, racism, rwanda, sierra leone, US imperialism

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Racism in Britain Today posted by Richard Seymour

Via:

Richard Seymour - Racism in Britain Today from swpUkTv on Vimeo.

Labels: british empire, imperial ideology, islamophobia, new racism, racism, swp, white supremacy

Monday, January 25, 2010

Haiti: "The humanitarian myth" posted by Richard Seymour

Yours truly in Socialist Worker (US) on the myth of humanitarian intervention in Haiti:

The paternalistic assumptions behind the calls for 'humanitarian intervention' have sometimes been starkly expressed. Thus, the conservative columnist Eric Margolis lauds the history of American colonial rule in Haiti: "[T]he U.S. occupation is looked back on by many Haitians as their "golden age." The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder. This era was the only time when things worked in Haiti."

Purporting to oppose imperialism, Margolis insists that "genuine humanitarian intervention" is "different," and calls for Haiti to be "temporarily administered by a great power like the U.S. or France." He writes: "U.S. administration of Haiti may be necessary and the only recourse for this benighted nation that cannot seem to govern itself."

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', haiti, imperial ideology, racism, the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Gaming war posted by Richard Seymour

This is an MoD demo programme showing soldiers how to handle roadblocks in Iraq:

And this is a video game showing people why they should join the army in the first place (cuz shooting people up is way cool):

Labels: british troops, imperial ideology, iraq, ministry of defence, video games

Monday, November 09, 2009

Benediction for the natives posted by Richard Seymour

Auntie's thumbnail sketch of the Mahometan character:

"Despite their fierce reputation, Afghans are mostly gentle, thoughtful people - deeply courteous, with warm humanity that radiates from luminous eyes.
"They are also tolerant and very patient..."

I am only disappointed to note the absence of that imperishable observation, "and from a nearby minaret, the high-pitched wailing of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer...".

Labels: afghanistan, bbc, imperial ideology, orientalism, racism

Monday, October 12, 2009

The pitfalls of tolerance posted by Richard Seymour

Every now and again, I read something like this and have to stop and consider why it is inherently ridiculous and offensive. The Tories are lauded for adopting a new attitude of 'tolerance' toward homosexuals, and one feels an immediate pressure to partake of this cosiness, this idea that something uncomplicatedly benign is happening. Increasingly, moreover, one is apt to hear 'tolerance' name-dropped in respect of racial problems in the UK, in which the absence of 'tolerance' is either a euphemism for racism, or an attitude ascribed to supposedly self-segregating minorities. And in its function as part of a martial ideology, 'tolerance' is what NATO troops defend against 'native fanaticism'. The word and its various significations do a lot of ideological work, obscuring and inverting crucial social relations, and smuggling in a patronising attitude to the subjects of said 'tolerance'. Given this problem, I just wanted to clarify my thoughts by arranging them into a number of simple arguments, as follows:

I. There is a crucial distinction between the narrow terms of religious toleration, a doctrine elaborated in an attempt to manage Protestant schisms in early modern Europe (though the Ottoman Empire's 'millet' system could also be cited as an instance of toleration), and the broader terms of 'tolerance'. The toleration of religious belief is not on the same ontological plane as tolerance for ascriptive attributes. In its ultimate Lockean variant, the former asserted not merely the separation of church and state, but the privatization of ethical belief as such, the decoupling of religious or moral statements from social context. Alasdair Macintyre has useful commentary on this, but it is separate from the contemporary issue of 'tolerance'. The latter implies a model of political communities in which different groups and individuals experience one another as a burden that they have to put up with. It implies a fundamentally competitive model of human behaviour, whose excesses are avoided through tolerance. In this respect, it is deeply misanthropic.

II. Tolerance is an alternative to equality rather than an expression of it. Toleration in its old sense was compatible with bourgeois ideas of equality but, although 'tolerance' has a soft and generous texture to it, it bears a political freight of inequality, subordination and hierarchy. Thus, when American rightists are asked about gay marriage, their answer is that they are prepared to tolerate homosexuals but not dilute the 'sanctity of marriage' by allowing same-sex partners to wed. Even Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which banned known gays from serving in the military, would serve as a 'tolerant' alternative to legal equality, since it says that homosexuality can be tolerated as a private, or rather secret, affair of the individual.

III. Tolerance displaces social justice, and as such depoliticises intensely political questions. It became a dominant discursive tool in the 1990s precisely in such a way as to displace questions of power, discrimination and social justice. This was a novelty - in previous periods, anti-racist liberals and leftists were fully aware of the basically reactionary nature of racial 'tolerance', especially in US politics where northern elites would contrast their supposed tolerance with southern bigotry. That has to do with the success of the right in parlaying such questions into 'culture wars', in which - say - segregationist schools could assert their right to practise discrimination not by defending principles of white supremacy, but by defending local or indigenous cultural practises against an intrusively egalitarian state. They demanded tolerance for down to earth Christian folk, and railed against what they called 'reverse discrimination'.

IV. Tolerance is an expression of resentment. Historically it has been an attitude that dominative majorities adopt toward oppressed minoritiesm, and so it remains. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must have already been designated a worthy object of aversion by the majority, at best to be indulged on account of the magnanimity of those with power. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must already have been deemed normatively aberrant. That means that some sort of idea of what organically belongs and does not belong to a given political imaginary (community, nation, etc.) has already been stipulated: thus white rule, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. are often asserted in the very gesture of 'tolerance'. The subject of tolerance does not really belong, is foreign, and might easily be rejected by a much less tolerant host. As such, should the basis for this maganimity be undermined or threatened, tolerance can easily lapse into its opposite: "zero tolerance".

V. Tolerance has long had an imperial and colonial dimension which is greatly in evidence today. The Dutch empire has been lauded for its supposed tolerant attitude toward colonial subjects, in contrast to Spanish and Portugese rivals. Of course, said 'tolerance' was a pragmatic decision that made more commercial and colonial sense for the Dutch than trying to convert local Islamic sultanates to Calvinism. Puritan settlers in the New World practised 'tolerance' toward heathen Native Americans when they weren't busy wiping them out. Similarly, the British Empire tended to express its own cultural domination over the natives in terms of what may or may not be tolerated under British rule. Thus, William Bentinck, governor-general of the East India Company, wrote in 1829 on the practise of sati that the sole basis upon which it may be tolerated would be if such an attitude were necessary to conserve the many improving influences of the British empire as a whole. The discourse of Anglophone rule in South Africa was also framed in terms of tolerance: Cape Town, the centre of British commercial dominance, was lauded for the 'racial tolerance' practised there, in the context of racist imperial rule. Even when the labour practises of British capital began to stratify workers by race, from the Glen Grey Act onward, the dominant tone of colonial discourse remained that of 'tolerance' of the natives. And it was in stark contrast to the incoherent 'native fanaticism' that contrived false grievances against the empire, and persisted with intolerant cultural practises despite the attempts at education and racial uplift. In the contemporary Huntington/Lewis/Ignatieff school of imperial thought, tolerance is once more a peculiar attribute of Euro-American states, noticeable for its absence in the Orient. 'We' are tolerant because we have mastered our cultural biases, our instinctive narcissism and hostility toward others. We have assayed them and submitted them to the rule of reason. Instead of romantic nationalism and religious devotion, we have civic nationalism and belief constrained by inquiry. 'They' are intolerant because their cultural biases dominate them. Their alleged hostility and self-involvement, their desire to speak their own language and wear their own religous garb, is a sign of their fanatical rejection of tolerance.

All of which is to say that when we hear about tolerance, and it comes with a certain amount of self-congratulation (think of Blair and Major blissfully eulogising about a modern, tolerant England, relaxed and at ease with itself), its more sinister dimensions should come to mind and caution us against luxuriating in that sense of warmth and humanity that the term exudes.

Labels: colonialism, homophobia, imperial ideology, liberalism, racism, religion, tolerance

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Better off on the dole posted by Richard Seymour

You might remember Gordon Brown's batty idea to introduce weapons training into schools. There has, of course, been a sustained effort to get the kids interested in military careers, the better to make up for the shortfall as recruitment nosedived during the 'war on terror' (it's been recovering of late, though I don't know how significant this recovery is). The focus on young people makes strategic sense. In 2006, 14,000 people left the British armed forces, but only 12,000 signed up - and most of the new recruits were teenagers. Last night at a Stop the War Coalition meeting, I learned a bit more about what this effort to draft the kids now entails. For it seems that the British Army is now placing stalls at further education colleges on enrolment day. And what they do when there is offer students a £5,000 bursary to sign up for the army there and then. They do not immediately join, for they are only sixteen, but rather complete their two years of study at college, and are then committed to four years of military service. This makes Britain the only country in Europe that targets sixteen year olds for military recruitment. And they don't even necessarily stick to their own rules in this process, as it was revealed back in 2007 that the British government had sent soldiers under the age of eighteen into southern Iraq.

Now, this is not an open and accountable situation in which those kids have reasonable access to the materials they would need to make such a decision. The Joseph Rowntree Trust reported last year, following a study of what young people are exposed to by army recruiters, that potential recruits are subject to a barrage of propaganda extolling possible career opportunities, training, travelling the world, etc. Young people are just not informed of the risks of a spell in the army. These would include, but are not restricted to: 1) death or injury, since one in ten members of the British armed forces in Afghanistan end up either dead or seriously injured, while suicide levels in the army have peaked in the period of the 'war on terror'; 2) homelessness, as all the promise of a career and training results in two thirds of people under the care of Shelter being ex-service personnel, while the MoD itself estimates that a quarter of all homeless people in the UK are ex-military; 3) prison, as one in ten inmates are ex-service personnel, and more British soldiers are in prison or on probation than presently service in Afghanistan; and 4) mental illness, in which the development of PTSD among other maladies is likely to be poorly treated if at all. Somehow, being indoctrinated into a machinery of death has a propensity for damaging people, physically and mentally, ruining their lives. Who would have thought it? No one, obviously, who relied upon British Army propaganda or, at one remove, the inspiring homilies of Andy McNab and his epigones.

We have a situation in which youth unemployment is sky-rocketing. Unemployment among the under-25s was reaching a million in August, and has probably surpassed it by now, giving an unemployment rate of almost 20%. Kids who know they've got that to look forward to are being shown images of the army that tell them they can be engineers, cooks, senior office workers. Today's Metro had an advert for the British army that visualised these seductive career opportunities by depicting a series of medals shaped as a blackberry, a mobile phone, a notebook, etc. No doubt every other newspaper in Britain had similar advertisements. No doubt we'll be seeing these on the tube, and on buses. No doubt the stalls in educational establishments, freshers fayres and so on, will carry the same material. If people are desperate enough to believe this, then they immediately ratchet up their chances of dying young, being permanently injured, ending up in jail or on the streets - not to mention the fact that they will also become, quite against any better instincts they may have, accessories to murder as the reserve army of labour becomes the reserve army of conquest.

The other side of this is resistance. The NUT has been running a campaign to oppose military recruitment in schools, on the grounds that it is the job of educators to look after children, not manipulate them into joining the army. The UCU has, I hear, joined them in this. School students have themselves been campaigning on this issue. This now becomes a particularly urgent matter since, as General McChrystal has testified, the only way this war could be won for NATO would be if another 40,000 troops were poured in. The Senlis Council has recently reported that the Taliban now has a serious, permanent and active presence in 80% of Afghanistan, in addition to whatever base it has in the North-West Frontier Province. That means that the war, if it is allowed to continue, will become bloodier, and will consume more and more able bodies. Those bodies definitely look pretty in their little boxes, and the ceremonies they have for them are obviously quite moving in a certain light. But what's the point of it? To impose a client regime that even the war powers have stopped pretending is anything but a corrupt and brutal confederation of drug-dealing pro-American warlords? As miserable as life is on Job Seekers Allowance or on minimum wage, and as much as the yearning for adventure militates against such a bleak prospect, these kids would still be much better off on the dole.

Labels: afghanistan, british army, british troops, imperial ideology, NATO, US imperialism