A regime in mortal freefall posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: democracy, dictatorship, libya, massacre, middle east, revolution, US imperialism

The liberal defence of mass murder posted by Richard Seymour

Would the liberal commentariat be happy to sacrifice Egyptians for the sake of capitalism?


Granted, this is Brendan O'Neill's version of events, so you may wish to take this with a pinch of salt.

Labels: cruise missile liberals, dictatorship, egypt, liberal imperialism, massacre, revolution, US imperialism

Israel: marionette or schlemiel posted by Richard Seymour

Don't get me wrong. I think the attack on the Gaza Freedom flotilla was an insane adventurist provocation that may turn out very badly for Israel. But there are two narratives developing in the media, and among the commentariat, in which Israel is either a bungling, Frank Spencer-style dolt, well-meaning but overly eager, or a sort of mannequin with no animus of its own, pushed into action exclusively by external forces. The former narrative is most popular. Note the ubiquity of the phrase "botched raid" in the reporting. As if Netanyahu's cabinet didn't send the notoriously violent Masada unit (whose crimes against humanity usually take place in the locus of one of Israel's political jails, or in the vicinity of a peaceful Palestinian protest) to storm the Mavi Marmara on purpose. As if the whole thing wasn't planned for weeks in advance, in detail, from inception to denouement. As if the probability of murders wasn't accounted for.

The second narrative, the marionette tale, is more specialised fare, and it is perhaps telling that two of Israel's liberal "critics" should purvey it in different versions. Example one: Turkish Islamists used humanitarians as bait to "lure Israel into a trap, precisely because it knew how Israel would react, knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did." Example two: Israel had "no choice" but to murder the aid workers because they had "issued threat after threat against the IDF in the days building up to this morning's clash" and on the day used "iron bars and other weapons to assault the troops and giving the IDF carte blanche to respond with force against them". The aid workers compelled Israeli troops to kill them, gave them no options. Their every action was pre-determined from start to finish, and even if the results are regrettable, and even if Israel initiated the aggression and pulled the trigger, it bears no responsibility.

It has a venerable history, this idea. Golda Meir expressed it most pithily when she said that she would never forgive the Arabs for making Israel kill their children. In whatever variant it takes, it is surely revealing that the best defence (or least worst criticism) of Israel that such people can muster is that Israel is not a responsible agent.

Labels: flotilla, free gaza, gaza freedom march, Israel, massacre, palestine, zionism

Sabra and Shatila posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: gaza, massacre, palestine, plo, sabra and shatila, US imperialism, west bank, zionism

Emergency Gaza Protest Outside Israeli Embassy posted by Richard Seymour

For a freezing Sunday afternoon, on the day after a huge demo in the centre of London has already taken place, today's protest was great. Hundreds of people gathered for a very militant emergency protest against Israel's invasion of Gaza. I am constantly amazed by the speed at which people have moved on this. The big one will undoubtedly be on Saturday, but in the meantime I think you could almost guarantee there will be protests all week. Here are some initial pics:






Here's some footage:

Labels: air strikes, gaza, hamas, invasion, Israel, massacre, palestine

Secret Air War Confirmed posted by Richard Seymour

A recent (typically apologetic) study by the CSIS of US bombing raids in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced figures that confirm what many of us have been arguing - that the US has drastically escalated its aerial assault on Iraq and Afghanistan, below the radar of the corporate media. You may not have realised by how much, though. These are the figures (click to enlarge):



Which statistics, fed into Excel, produce this (click to enlarge):



As you can see, both countries have taken a hammering, but Afghanistan in particular has taken the brunt of a massive series of air attacks in part due to the 'risk-transfer' conception of war, in which civilians are to bear the brunt of death and destruction rather than US combatants. The hostile terrain of Afghanistan, and the fact that few are actually covering it very extensively, makes it an ideal target for this kind of ferocious assault - with, as we saw last year, a rolling wave of massacres in the country. Inevitably, since the air war hasn't been covered much by the media, and given its insensitivity to 'enemy' casualties, those massacres reported are a tiny sample of the true total. Without a Lancet-style survey, we will remain very much in the dark about the true nature of this assault and its effects.

Labels: afghanistan, air war, iraq, massacre, secret air war

Well, duh. posted by Richard Seymour

Occupiers have killed more civilians this year than the 'Taliban'. That doesn't include the civilians they killed in Pakistan. But it does include this latest massacre. Now, as usual, the occupiers say that it was the 'Taliban' what made them do it. When shall we hear solemn press-releases, solemnly recounted by newspapers, in which the 'Taliban' explain that they meant to hit only occupying troops with their latest suicide attack, but that the occupiers forced them to strike in civilian areas by hiding in humvees and helicopters and Bradley tanks, driving through densely populated areas and thus using the surrounding people as human shields like the cowards they are?

Labels: afghanistan, massacre, occupation, taliban

How to sanctify mass murder. posted by Richard Seymour

Now, look at this. When you've bombed hospitals, destroyed cities, attacked the civilian infrastructure, shot people up in their houses and cars, shot at ambulances, fried people alive with white phosphorus, killed hundreds of thousands of people, tortured and raped prisoners to death, and pounded housing estates with bullets and shells, you're probably running out of possibilities for barbarity and savagery. Time for a school run. Seven kids killed, three wounded, and the contemptible excuse offered that they were only trying to kill the bad guys, who are so wicked and evil that they hide themselves among the civilian population, even tricking good American boys into believing that they may be secreted in the clothing of small children in a school. They forced the yanqui liberators to fire on those poor kids, and so it's their fault.

Let's deal with this bullshit once and for all, because I'm sick of hearing every time American military forces blow up a wedding ceremony, or a refugee convoy, or family home, that it's all the fault of the bad guys. If you choose war, you choose its consequences. If you choose the tactic of urban warfare and sectarian death squads, you are responsible for what takes place. If you choose to pound a school with shells, even if - and I want to be absolutely clear about this - even if you are under the impression that there might be nefarious folks hanging around in the vicinity, then the deaths are your fault. It doesn't matter if you think the military are bullshitting on this or not: there is a whole ideology involved here, which is inherently exculpatory and in many of its manifestations deeply racist.

This is the ideology of the 'western way of war', in which it is claimed that western states uniquely refuse to target civilians (see Martin Shaw's The New Western Way of War for an explication and qualified apologia). Isn't this always the claim? When Bush senior explained that he had no beef with ordinary Iraqis in 1991, indeed prayed for their safety as his army was incinerating, shredding and burying alive Iraqi conscripts and civilians hiding in bomb shelters, he explicated an obnoxious and supremacist mythology. For while it is true that Western states engaged in military conquest have not on the whole sought to commit widespread massacres against civilians, the very innocence of the distinction between combatants and civilians is deeply suspect. To begin with, because it implicitly denies any legitimacy to opposing combatants, it licences a wide variety of industrialised slaughter techniques that can be used against them: even where they are not the initiators of the conflict. This has permitted not only the use of indefinite and secret imprisonment and torture against suspected combatants, but also the preference at every stage for intensified aggression with predictably high rates of death and destruction, rather than serious consideration of demands or claims made by oppositional groups. Secondly, the category of civilians appears to be suffused with racist sentimentality - the implicit claim is that any right they have to be exempted from high-tech slaughter is a sort of reward for passivity and acceptance of conquest. Even that right is imperiled if they manage to give the impression of being potential combatants, or protecting or otherwise aiding them, or even being in close proximity to them. One's rights as a civilian are so precarious that a bunch of enraged or deranged occupying troops can take them away with little prospect of discovery and a great effort at cover-up if someone does find out. This is an elemental condition of war and occupation. Indeed, it is a highly unsatisfactory right, since one is supposed to passively accept not only exposure to "collateral damage" - the inevitably widespread civilian deaths that occur from military strategies designed to wipe out the enemy ruthlessly, efficiently, and from a great cocooned distance - and not only the destruction of the infrastructure that enables life, and not only the constant disruption and fear: one is also expected to accept the political priorities of the aggressors, whatever they happen to be. Somehow, the slim chance that you will be among those given two grand by the occupiers for having had a family member certifiably killed by US troops, isn't adequate compensation.

Before, I had thought that the problem was the inevitability that the distinction between combatant and civilian would be eroded or erased once it became clear that the combatants had a community of support and a mandate to wage war with the resources of that community. I had thought, in other words, that the problem was in the degenerate tendencies of especially longer wars. This is partially the case: it is no mere accident, but systematic. And in fact, not only does war possess those inherently degenerative tendencies ranging from massacre to genocide, but the relationship between war and genocide manifests itself in other ways: curiously, it was pro-war commentator William Shawcross who outlined this some decades ago, in his book Sideshow, in which it is described how the Khmer Rouge were "born out of the inferno" of the American bombing of Cambodia. It is well within the range of possibilities that a post-occupation Iraq will succumb to similar forces. Yet, that only gets one so far - and at any rate, the Pentagon et al prefer short wars with comparatively few (and discreet, or unnoticed) casualties. No, the problem is deeper, because we're talking about an analytical frame within which war is perceived, and not simply a paradigm within which it is fought: the problem resides in the way the civilian/combatant distinction is made, and the way that it legitimises great harm to the communities under attack, always displacing the blame onto the opposing combatants (and eventually, onto the civilians too, since they have failed to live up to expectations). If they didn't fight, they would be civilians, thus protected: that is, if everyone does as they're told, no one will get hurt. This is the ethics of the bank robbery or the ransom note.

The racism of this ideology couldn't be clearer: only Americans are entitled to self-defense (and even, tacitly, a great deal of vengeful excess) if their citizens, territory or even claimed interests are attacked. Everyone else has to suck it up. And of course, the military supremacy comes with an added dimension of ideological supremacism. The very fact that military aggression is presented as, variously, emergency management, democratisation and security - all tapping into universalist claims with axiomatic appeal among the target audience (the population of the warmaking states), means that any opponent is automatically disqualified from the normal range of human consideration because by simple virtue of resisting, They're Opposed To Democracy. And if they're opposed to that, ironically enough, they are not entitled to self-determination (catch 22: if they're not opposed to it, then they aren't entitled to self-determination either, because the United States claims to be delivering democracy).

I raise all this as the White House predicts without the slightest hint of shame, that it's coming wave of attacks in Iraq will produce massive casualties. Tony Snow, the spokesperson, explains that in a bid to crush the resistance, they are going to press into the "tougher neighbourhoods". He says, as if to disarm critics, that: "We've known that, been saying it all along. We're getting into some of the grittiest security operations". It doesn't need saying, because it goes without saying, that massive organised carnage and the hacking and tearing and burning of individuals to death through long-range weaponry, is legitimate if directed principally against armed opponents of the occupation. At worst it is too risky, or bad for American troops, or making a crisis worse, perpetuating an unwinnable war, but the basic legitimacy of such choices is never challenged. Similarly, the US apologises for civilian murders in Afghanistan, after considerable reluctance to accept responsibility it has to be said, but does so in a way that clearly places the larger part of the blame on 'Taliban' while reducing their repeated (usually disavowed or concealed) massacres to a series of unfortunate accidents.

Labels: 'war on terror', iraq, iraqi resistance, massacre, US imperialism, us troops

The massacres piling up in Afghanistan. posted by Richard Seymour

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a rolling wave of US massacres of civilians, in the double figures. The latest report speaks of thirteen killed in a bombing raid. A few days ago it was fifty one civilians murdered in a village where the US was combatting 'Taliban' fighters. A couple of weeks ago, it was forty civilians, killed or wounded by troops who claimed to have come under fire, but hadn't. There are a couple of separate things going on here, then: on the one hand, the aspect of 'risk-transfer war' that involves bombing from a great height to ensure that the risk of death is transferred to civilians rather than US troops; on the other, the aspect of 'degenerative' war, in which population centres increasingly become a target if a) traditional military targets don't avail themselves, and b) the population appears to provide some support to the opposition. But there's a third aspect, which is the ideological matrix through which this violence is understood and wielded. Chris Floyd writes about it here.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, massacre, taliban, US imperialism, us troops

A Murderous Smile: Mark Ames on American shoot-ups. posted by Richard Seymour

Someone in the comments boxes recommended Mark Ames' Going Postal shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre. You can read Ames' take on the Virginia Tech Massacre here, but do pick up the book if you see it. An aphotically witty and fact-heavy investigation such as this ought to be supplied to workers and students who want a preparatory course on the sources of these massacres. The heuristic is infallibly correct, which is remarkable since he starts with a hypothesis that the killings are in some senses 'justified'. That, I assume, has a few jaws dropping - but stick with this.

Little Doughboy's revenge
The title refers to the fact that these massacres began to occur in the 1980s in the US Postal Service (USPS) and expanded rapidly to various American workplaces, from Louisville to Honolulu, often destroying companies in the process. Hence, a workplace assassin has 'gone postal'. The turning point came when Joseph Wesbecker entered his workplace in September 1989, a printing press called Standard Gravura, and shot seven of his co-workers to death, causing twenty others devastating wounds. He then put a gun to his own face and pulled the trigger. Ames was able to interview one of the survivors, Michael Campbell, whose body is deformed by the impact of six bullets from Wesbecker's various munitions. Oh hell, Campbell has told Ames' contact, "everybody supported him, everybody saw where he was coming from. His only problem was that he shot the wrong people." He isn't alone. Another worker at the plant tells Ames that Wesbecker was "pressed into it" And if he'd only got "the right people", he would have "had a lot more sympathy. Still does, as it is!" Finding out what could induce workers at the plant to say that takes Ames on a scintillating journey through America's corporate landscape. The initial media reaction - indeed the stock reaction to these events - was to describe a 'flip-out'. For here was a man who had been a conscientious worker, working enormous amounts of overtime, taking on the onerous role of working a noisy and dangerous machine called 'the folder' (which, due to its fumes and emissions, is a dangerous device and can only be worked for half-hour stretches). He saves up, buys a nice car and a good house. He is ambitious, but always good-humoured. Ah, but - he has marital problems, and suspects (apparently with some reason) that his wife sleeps with his co-workers. He is mocked and derided by his co-workers. He is on anti-depressant drugs. One of his sons had been seriously ill, and another had been caught flashing. And perhaps, oweing to his nickname, 'Rocky', he was known for violent tendencies. That must explain the indiscriminate rampage, then. Except that the massacre wasn't indiscriminate at all - he specifically, despite media depictions, picked his victims off while leaving others unharmed, and there is a great deal more to the story. Firstly, 'Rocky's' first nickname was 'Little Doughboy' on account of him being overweight and soft - he acquired the sobriquet 'Rocky' after mouthing off to a woman in a bar for the benefit of his friends, who then kicked the shit out of him. Secondly, his marital difficulties and his general difficulties with women were not new, nor had they exactly stopped him from trying.

In 1978, however, after working for the firm for seven years, he started to experience a multitude of problems - this was when he divorced his wife, when he son became sick and his other son got busted. In 1980, naturally enough, the stress of the work he had devoted himself to became too much. He requested that he be taken off 'folder' duty, and claimed that it was harming his health - other workers say that the 'folder' is indeed damaging. But the company refused to do so, and continued to refuse his request for years: no other worker wanted to take over, and he - a sort of laughing stock with both management and staff - didn't have any leverage. The union's strength had been diminished by economic hard times, and a Reaganite anti-union drive was about to make it even weaker. The plants was exposed to severe job cuts and wage freezes, and the owners - the wealthy Bingham family - were secretly constructing a new plant in Tennessee to shift production. They told the union leadership, when it was discovered, that they had either to agree to austerity measures or face the plant's closure. The union caved. So, when Wesbecker is expected to continue in a role that could well be killing him for a company that doesn't appear to care about him and indeed seems intent either on getting rid of him or squeezing the last drop out of him, he looks for every means to escape. The union will do little, so a doctor writes a letter for him begging the company to take him off the 'folder', to no avail. He files a discrimination complaint against the company on the grounds that he is diagnosed as a manic depressive, a form of incapacitation, and the company has made allowances for incapacitation in the past. The company's 'Human Resources' department (how I hate those words, and those people) stonewalls, offering the county's Human Relations Commission, which supports Wesbecker's claim, an outlandish string of claims explaining why Wesbecker and only he must be available for the 'folder'. Eventually, Wesbecker has to drop the claim and take medical leave for psychological stress. When he returns, instead of compromising, they stick him on long-term disability and drastically reduce his pay. The company was planning to cut his disability pension to 60% of its previous value in October 1989 - Wesbecker got them before they got him. After his massacre, the company was destroyed and had to shut down: such was the aim. He wished to destroy both the specific agents he saw as responsible for his miserable condition and the company that encouraged the bullying and victimisation that he experienced.

Slave rebellions and the capitalist road to serfdom
Wesbecker was not to be a one-off, and the circumstances tended to be similar: it was not a social type that could be identified so much as a set of conditions. The infamous postal massacres had always involved an element of workplace bullying and victimisation by management. The USPS, regarded somewhat benignly by most, was an arena of cruelty and suspicion between management and workers. And since the Nixon administration had forced the postal service for the first time in 140 years to subsist on its own profits, with competitors like Federal Express introduced later on, the workers were being squeezed to the last pip to get those profits in, with weekly workloads extending to 70 or 80 hours, and an increasing of terror and intimidation on the shop floor. It was Wesbecker who introduced the office massacre to the corporate mainstream, and in short order 'white collar' workplaces were being shot up all over America. Repeatedly, the killer is perceived as mild-mannered, pleasant, the last person to flip out. Repeatedly, it is discovered that the killer is experiencing either direct victimisation or serious distress as the corporate culture undermines basic conviviality. Repeatedly, the victims were picked off and others deliberately left to survive, with the supervisor being a primary target (often lucky enough to be out of the office, however). This is not random mayhem: it is insurgent rage.

Ames compares the office shoot-ups to the antebellum slave revolts, often involving doom-laden, violent outbursts, inspired by 'visions' or a sense of religious purpose. These modern Nat Turners are seen as incomprehensible lunatics, ingrates, precisely as the slave rebels were. To be clear, since some people have a knack for misunderstanding, Ames isn't saying that the condition of 'postindustrial' American workers is equivalent to that of slaves. But he notes that there were few such revolts, and suggests that the slaves adapted to their fate for a number of reasons: it was routinised, and became over the long-term a 'normal' state of affairs, such that resistance was often incomprehensible; another is the endless multidimensional PR efforts to get slaves to accept their position, usually led by the Church; another is the overwhelming militarisation of America before and after the Revolution, and the ability and willingness of the local ruling class to viciously suppress any manifestation of revolt; most important, in his view, is the willingness and ability of human beings to adapt to a great variety of oppressive or difficult situations. While we now regard the abolitionist position to be obvious and its challengers absurd and despicable, the situation in the early 1800s was quite the reverse. Even when abolitionism came to be an acceptable political platform, the 'moderate' or 'realistic' abolitionism was preferred to the 'radical' version. And so, we might discover with a shift of perspective that these massacres are comprehensible as a revolt against intolerable, desperate conditions, a result of a sustained blitz on workers' security and income.

Well, there is plenty of evidence for the latter, and you wouldn't have to read Ames' book to find that out. The statistics on wage growth, inequality and workplace safety tell their own tale, as does the almost psychopathic denial that is issued by corporate spokespeople every time a similar 'tragegy' occurs. But Ames discusses the full range of the attacks on workers since 1980. This includes not only the atrocious ways in which wealth has been transferred to the rich, while ever-expanding numbers of American workers have to put up with no health insurance, lousy wages, diminishing benefits, eroding pension schemes, and longer hours, but also the much-celebrated drives by people like Al 'Chainsaw' Dunlap and General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who insisted that workers have 'unlimited juice to squeeze', and that fear in the workplace was an invaluable tool of business. Indeed, the assumption of the right of capitalist firms to terrorise their staff is so ingrained that Ames has no difficulty turning up editorials and statements from successful CEOs on the topic, as well as some detail on the practise. One document, an internal memo from the CEO of the Cernel Corporation, is sickening and vile in its attempt to bully the middle managers into bullying the staff more effectively. The car parks aren't full at 8am, the boss whines, people are being allowed to come in late, and leave early. The managers are told that if they don't make sure that everyone is at work, arriving half an hour early and leaving half an hour late, they will be fired: and this is to be achieved by out-of-hours emergency meetings with staff in which they are threatened with the boot. Staff numbers are cut, facilities are cut, benefits are frozen, etc etc. There ought, says the boss, to be pizza men arriving at 7.30pm to feed starving workers. And there is no shortage of official corporate ideology legitimising this. Welch explains, for instance, that fear is "healthy, like pain is healthy" because it "gets you out of that comfortable equilibrium". It destroys "comfortable equilibrium" alright - sanity, marriages, families, livelihoods, communities...

Middle managers are therefore expected to humiliate and abuse, because it creates the necessary atmosphere for the efficient accumulation of capital. And surprise - the massacres often attempt to target victimising supervisors, screaming middle-managers, puffed up little tyrants who like to spy on the staff or threaten them with disciplinary action on the slightest grounds. In the absence of collective action, Ames suggests, more and more workers are internalising these corporate norms, making their diminishing office space into their personal sitting room, unlearning the average forms of communication that one needs to get on with the family on the odd occassion one sees them, losing touch with leisure time which they are increasingly unable to enjoy. Indeed, such is their fear of the sack that a new phenomenon started to emerge in the 1980s known as 'presenteeism' - people coming to work even though they were too sick to do their duties properly. Without a general critique, a frame in which to perceive these issues correctly, people tend to internalise the torment. They see themselves as at fault for not being perfectly happy. They put about that bonhomie that puts others at ease and protects them from the suspicion that they are losers. They conceal their stress, their difficulties, their depression. They're often noted for precisely their mild-mannered and commodious disposition. But sometimes, especially if their long hours and commitment have been rewarded with singling out, bullying, degenerating conditions - well, then they might stalk from office to office, single-mindedly tearing up selected victims with a stash of guns in a gym sack. These slave revolts are therefore the isolated acts of those finally and permanently deranged by corporate culture. They take out their perceived enemies, often shouting some vengeful last words as they do, and then (usually) destroy themselves while still on top of matters.

But, why the schools?
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are heroes to some. It wasn't long after their massacre before notes appeared on message boards or lists explaining that they did what many young people want to do. Tribute sites appeared, some offering advice on how you might complete your "mission" even more successfully than "St Eric" and "St Dylan". Subsequently, as we know, a bunch of 'copycats' were stopped in their tracks. Intelligent student misfits from two-parent loving families in 'Middle America' probably aren't the usual candidates for deification, but the act of mass murder has propelled them into many young hearts. They were not, as is usually claimed, Nazis, goths, gay, druggies or Marilyn Manson fans. Even so, as Ames points out, you don't go expressing sympathy for these people in public, otherwise you're off to boot camp, where you stand a chance of dying from wounds incurred there. You go online and chatter away to other assassinophiles, with a reasonable prospect of anonymity.

Well, before you get to the reason for this covert sympathy, you need to try and understand the nature of the crime. As has been repeatedly pointed out, no successful profile of a typical school shooter has yet been devised. Good students, bad students, wealthy ones, poor ones, ones from stable familes, others from broken homes... there's no archetype. This is because, as Ames puts it, "It isn't the office or schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled - they can't be. It is the workplaces and schools that need to be profiled". Now, this bit is rather crucial. I quote verbatim from his list of characteristics to watch for:

complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;

antiseptic corridors and overhead fluourescent lights reminiscent of a mid-sized airports;

rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and

maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

The second point, to avoid misunderstanding, is serious. The dispiriting, uglified surroundings provide an important experiential backdrop for the bullying and hypocrisy and stress. But of course, the main points here are the competitive social structure and the parents' eagerness to ensure children succeed within it. The school is a training ground for the workplace, inculcating the kind of discipline and habits that one will be constant throughout one's life. Most waking hours, at least five days a week, will be spent in competition with one's peers, and the assholes will always rise to the top if they weren't there to begin with. Bullying will be overlooked or tacitly condoned by people who sympathise with the bullies and find it difficult to manage their subordinates without them. They call it 'hazing', apparently, and its often meted out in a formal fashion along socioeconomic lines, sometimes by sororities and fraternities. It's defended as a bit of fun, or as a means to inculcate respect: on the contrary, it is often quite serious and generates fear and mistrust. Aside from the formal 'hazing', there are asshole teachers who will emotionally humiliate students in the name of discipline, and the usual ritual drudgery and idiocy that goes on the minutiae. Many of the most miserable, demeaning things that can happen at work can happen at school, and anyone who remembers their school years knows that it seems to matter a great deal more at that age, and it seems to last forever, even if its only a few years.

That this is an experience with at least some widespread purchase is evident in the subterranean sympathy for the mass murderers. The support of some young people wasn't restricted to Klebold and Karris. When Andy Williams, a lower middle class student attending an upper class college in the fading Republican town of Santee, decided to wipe out many of his classmates, within weeks there were attempted and actual 'copycat' massacres. So far from the Pump Up the Volume fantasy, these kids don't solve all their problems by learning to express themselves through pirate radio stations, and sincerely talking through all of their problems. They implode or explode. The implication of the phrase 'copycat' is that people really want to be like the hick serial killers and destroy their own lives in the process, so that someone who doesn't matter will say they were cool. That's a cheap and lazy excuse for analysis. But, precisely as the slave revolts in the workplace often involve explicit or implicit reference to previous revolts, the example of others provides an interpretive framework, and a 'way forward'. And it might be added, as with those other slave revolts, the kids who do it are often (not always) the ones you'd least expect. So quiet, so diligent, and so pleasant.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The murderous smile in question is the quality of 'niceness' that one is supposed to evince in a company setting, the ability to smile and put others at ease. The killers so often have been among those who have taken the corporate 'Don't Worry Be Happy' bullshit as the normal response to wage-cuts, hateful competition, slashed benefits, longer hours and management terrorism, and have done their best to comport themselves in a fitting fashion. I suppose, in light of the Zombie Labour theme, you could call this 'playing dead'. So be wary of niceness. It's the last step before someone goes postal.

Labels: capitalism, massacre, postindustrial rebellion, ragenomics, school shootings, virginia tech

American troops "devalued Iraqi lives". posted by Richard Seymour

Awe, gee, say it ain't so, say it ain't so. But mom-meee, I thought they were there to help the Iraqians. According to this story, "a US general investigating the 2005 killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha" has said that US marines thought "Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as US lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes". Well, that's how they deal with hajis, General. What's more, they think it's funny as fuck. And do you know, General, I have a suspicion that the people who ordered torture, promulgated rape, refused to reconstruct, sent out death squads and refused to even count the bodies - well, they seem to believe that black life is cheap. Merely a hunch based on every policy choice and signal they send out to the world.

Labels: haditha, haji, iraq, massacre, US imperialism

A profound sense of audience. posted by Richard Seymour

A wholesome moment from the Herald Sun:

Labels: advertising, massacre, tasteless, virginia tech

Another one? posted by Richard Seymour

Why do they keep shooting up the students? Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that this can be hyped, and used to justify the transformation of educational institutions into heavily policed camps, or 'profiling' that enables violating students' privacy. What's more, the ideological structures prevalent in American society have permitted these events to be understood in extraordinary ways that enable schools to suspend students or send them to the cop shop for wearing black clothing, issuing threats (however insincere) or using allegedly inappropriate language. Sometimes when the perpetrator is far too young to be held responsible for their actions, they are either tried as adults or they find an adult to try for something. Or when they have been tried as minors, various people have complained that their punishment isn't severe enough, as in the case of the Jonesboro Massacre. Clearly, these are ways to avoid dealing with the problem. For, surely the incidence of this in the US is at the very least way above average. What is more, it is suggested that many more are planned than succeed - for instance, after Columbine, a number of 'copycats' were allegedly attempted. One guy even runs a blog devoted to the topic.

These aren't always sudden outbursts: rather, they are often planned some time in advance, and weapons are accumulated to accomplish the act. There are often social causes involved, such as the destruction of the welfare state, yet the agents are often reasonably well off. I can only too easily fashion an Amisian response: killing is fun, a real kick, and the only wonder is that the civilised facade holds so well for so much of the time. Yet, I don't fancy the idea at all. I can't bring myself to seriously contemplate the idea of killing someone with pleasure, not even Martin Amis. I suppose, aside from the usual nutters blaming it on the teaching of Darwin in schools without an accompanying prayer, we will have to hear from people who think there's a 'culture of violence' - video games, movies, heavy metal and hip hop. To be sure, there is no shortage of cultural output that valorises random killing, but I can't help noticing a few things. Firstly, these complaints are usually tinged with racism (complaining about gritty movies with Fifty Cents and not the sexy ones with Brad Pitt). Secondly, they rarely focus on the involvement of the military-industrial complex in producing such output (video games with advertising that encourage you to 'Command Respect' by wiping out towns and villages, or that envision the overthrow of the Venezuelan government; Hollywood participation in the 'war on terror'). Thirdly, the 'culture of violence' never involves the actual business of strafing communities with bullets, cluster-bombs and daisy-cutters. Finally, of course, plenty of societies are entirely plugged into violent American culture, and generate cultures of violence all on their own, without necessarily having this scale of ongoing murderous assault on the young.

And then there will be the calls for gun restrictions, which would seek to restrain the use of an easily handled and highly effective weapon of death. No bad thing in my view. Yet, as Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, there are plenty of societies where gun ownership is prevalent, and where there isn't the repeated spectacle of classroom massacre. Student alienation in a viciously competitive educational system that prepares children for life in a capitalist society that where forms of social solidarity are embattled and diminished can have its role, perhaps, but then again, many of these shootings have been perpetrated by adults outside of the school system, often exacting some kind of bizarre 'revenge' on the children before committing suicide. Perhaps, then, it is too simple to locate a single cause: rather, a combustible fusion of most of these factors in various ways could produce the necessary circumstances.

Labels: cho seung-hui, guns, massacre, school shootings, virginia tech