Still blaming Muslims posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'war on terror', anti-fascism, bnp, clash of civilisations, edl, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism

Fear of a black Europe posted by Richard Seymour

It's a constant theme of the neoconservatives, as well as their less sophisticated Atlanticist cohorts this side of the water, that Europe is becoming a cesspool of moral dissipation, a place where the premium of 'tolerance' leaves formerly robust societies open to "Islamification" (a term avidly taken up by the European far right). Just as they griped that European popular opposition to American warmaking really expressed impotence, as well as a certain amount of ingratitude for the free protection provided by American military might, so they have in recent years been known to cavil about immigration and the value-pluralism it supposedly promotes. There must be some reason why Europeans aren't up for all this blood-letting after all. The latest instantiation of this trend is a long, bewildered and paranoid rant by the Weekly Standard and FT columnist, Christopher Caldwell (excerpted, rather typically, here).

Hardly an uneducated Nazi streetfighter, this aftermath of a Harvard education is certainly doing a lot of the BNP's work for it. The disconcerting lack of coherence in the argument is more than made up for the the persistence with which the author complains about white victimhood. The string of anecdotes, some of them stupid and inaccurate, others flimsy beyond belief, are almost like the sort of vaguely solemn reflections one indulges in to delay climax (which is roughly what he's doing: putting off the moment when he finally gets to the point that the white man has been had by a bunch of wiley foreigners). His observations are held together by nothing more substantial than the sense that Europe is caving in to a bunch of Kurdish, Palestinian, Algerian, black, gay, politically correct, antifascist weirdos who persecute racists, Holocaust-deniers, Christians and those obstinate nationalists who wave flags and sing sentimental songs about the fatherland. I am quite certain that Caldwell is not the kind of racist who favours ethnic purity, or anything that might stink of the sort of ideology held by America's opponents. After all, having a few black people around, provided they are 'moderate', is a matter of decorum for such people. It is just that he is as beholden to the current geopolitical logic, and its civilizational rationalisations, as most of his fellow outpatients.

Labels: 'war on terror', civilisation, clash of civilisations, fascism, immigration, islam, islamophobia, racism

Race riot posted by Richard Seymour

"Riots have broken out in the mixed city of Acre, reportedly triggered when an Israeli Arab man drove his car during the Yom Kippur religious holiday.

"Dozens of cars and shops were damaged as hundreds of people took to the streets, Haaretz newspaper reported.

"For Jews, Yom Kippur is a sombre day of fasting, during which it is considered offensive to drive in much of Israel.

"The Arab man was reportedly attacked by youths who said he was making noise intentionally, Haaretz said.

"The Arab man is reported to have said he was simply driving to a property he owned in the eastern part of the city."

The usual procedure when reporting violence of this kind is to place a special accentuation on the ethnicity and/or religion of the rioters. Think "Muslim rioters". But here they only relate the ethnicity of the offending Arab. The second step, if I recall correctly, is usually to inveigh ponderously against the blight of religious intolerance and the threat to free expression and Enlightenment ideas. Curiously absent so far. And the third step is to engage in a surreptitious essentialism in which said violent intolerance is a fact of [Muslim/Arab] culture which is strictly opposed to and excluded from [Western/Anglophone] culture. I can't see it happening this time.

Labels: clash of civilisations, enlightenment, islamophobia, Israel, racism

UnSaid posted by Richard Seymour

Speaking of West versus the rest, Decentiya (or is that 'Descentiya'?) have got an on-going series devoted to pissing on the grave of Edward Said, the latest of which is a review of two critical books by Ibn Warraq and Daniel Martin Varisco. All too predictable is the touting of the superiority of a historically curtailed and asomatous 'West', via Warraq. Predictable also is the representation of actual or alleged flaws in Said's approach as if they exhausted his output. And entirely unsurprising is the casual misrepresentation, about which more in a second. What surprised me was this:

"Varisco also lambastes Said for ignoring Europe's persecution of the Jews and argues that this omission is due to Said's wholesale opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies."

The context makes it clear that the author agrees with Varisco, (although I sense that Varisco may be the subject of some misrepresentation himself here). Edward Said 'ignored' European antisemitism? He 'ignored' the persection of the Jews? I just mention that the reviewer is presumably someone who has read Orientalism, and has probably encountered his interviews and various articles in collected form. He certainly quotes from Orientalism quite a lot, although that is no proof of having read it. Nevertheless, if he has, he will know that the heart of Said's argument is that anti-Semitism and Orientalism are conjoined at the hip and that they share a similar origin. Anti-Semitic and Orientalist statements and actions are authorised by the same discourse. So, for example, when he discusses Schlegel on the Orient, he discusses the anti-Semitic thesis of a philological divide between a superior Indo-European (Aryan) race and an inferior Oriental (Semitic) race. When he discusses Ernest Renan, as he does at some length, he describes his invention of the 'Semite' as an inferior non-European species. Excoriating Edward William Lane on the same theme, he writes: "The Jews and Muslims, as objects of Orientalist study, were readily understandable in view of their primitive origins: this was (and to a certain extent still is) the cornerstone of modern Orientalism ... No Semite advanced in time beyond the development of a 'classical' period; no Semite could ever shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe." (Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin Books, 2003: 234). Here are a couple more relevant quotations:

"The study of the Semitic was Renan's first full-length Orientalist and scientific study (finished in 1847, published first in 1855), and was as much a part of his late major works on the origins of Christianity and the history of the Jews as it was a propadeutic for them ... Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always with remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practising) strictures on the Semites in mind." (Said, 2003, op cit: 140-1)

"One of the things that disappointed me about the reviews of Orientalism was that a lot of the reviews published by Jewish or Zionist journals missed the point that I was trying to make: the roots of European anti-Semitism and Orientalism were really the same. Ernest Renan, for example [some of whose writing are republished with enthusiastic endorsement in Ibn Warraq's The Quest for the Historical Muhammad] was a tremendous anti-Semite and anti-Muslim, and his view of both was essentially the same: that the Semites, whether Muslim or Jew, were not Christians and not Europeans, and therefore had to be excoriated and confined." (Gauri Viswanathan, ed, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, Bloomsbury, 2001: 48)

When Said writes about Palestine, he is often at pains to emphasise the persecution of the Jews. Thus, speaking of comparisons between apartheid and Zionism, he writes: "The conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is admittedly more complex than the battle against apartheid ... [because] the Jews are a people with a tragic history of persecution and genocide." (Edward Said, 'The Only Alternative', Al Hayat, 2 March 2001). Speaking of the powerlessness of the Palestinians, he reminds readers that "Sixty years ago the Jews of Europe were at the lowest point of their collective existence. Herded like cattle into trains, they were transported from the rest of Europe by Nazi soldiers into death camps, where they were systematically exterminated in gas ovens." (Edward Said, 'Low Point of Powerlessness', Al Hayat, 30 September 2002). Far from Said's anti-Zionism conspiring to silence him on the persecution of the Jews, it has made him rather vocal about it, because he regards Orientalism as a particular variety of anti-Semitism.

One could go on, and indeed there would be much more to cite and quote if the facts of the matter were not already obvious. Those facts being that: 1) Edward Said did not ignore the persecution of the Jews; and 2) that to claim that he did is both a ludicrous misrepresentation of his entire project, actually to miss the whole point, and a disgusting political smear. Any critique of Said that doesn't grasp the fact that he was a powerful humanist critic of anti-Semitism and racism in general, that this was in fact his life's work, is poorly placed to grasp much else about his work. I should say that as far as original critique of Said goes, there isn't much to be had in the linked article, and as far as original and coherent critique goes, there is none. Aijaz Ahmad dealt with significant problems in Said's use of Foucauldian concept of 'discourse', pointed to the inconsistent way in which Said deals with the Hellenic connection (which is not exhausted by Said's treatment of Aeschylus, contrary to the linked article's claim), the methodological flitting between high humanism and anti-humanism, the abberant uses of 'representation' and 'misrepresentation' - all this more than fifteen years ago, and without the supererogatory hostility and misrepresentations (although I think some of Ahmad's criticisms are overdone). Before that, Robert Young had pointed to internal inconsistencies in Orientalism, in his 1990 book White Mythologies, again without managing to reduce Said's work to an elaborate set of schoolboy howlers. Even the reactionary carping about 'intellectual terrorism' that Warraq nurtures has been a theme of conservative criticism for years, since he was dubbed the 'professor of terror' by Edward Alexander in 1989. Once again, it would be possible to go on for some time on this theme. The urgency with which the 'decent left' seek, alongside the neoconservative right, to disinter Said and put him on trial on outdated, spent or wholly contrived charges, without any defense lawyer or witnesses if at all possible, is really an artefact of insecurity about the 'West' and its supremacy. For, after all, we live in a time in which pro-war intellectuals - let us be absolutely honest and say pro-empire intellectuals - of different shades are increasingly concerned about the question of Western ascendancy. The demand that we assert the superiority of something called 'Western values' (curiously, including secularism and human rights, but excluding racism, imperialism and Christian fundamentalism) is more forcefully uttered the more dubious that superiority seems. As armies purportedly acting as agents of those values despoil nations, terrorise civilians, rape women and torture prisoners, while using comprador Islamist parties to provide the human base for death squads, some people might be inclined to recall that this sort of thing happens rather a lot. It happens so often that it is hard to recall a time when someone, purportedly a leader of this 'West', was not invading somewhere outside the 'West', not finding some use for death squads, not bombing something somewhere. And when it does happen, it seems to come with a spiel about values that we all share, and wish to extend.

Labels: antisemitism, clash of civilisations, decentiya, edward said, islamophobia, orientalism, pro-war 'left'

A Lonely Outpost of Civilization posted by Richard Seymour

This frontiersman holds a lonely vigil. Gazing wistfully across the terrain from a desolate watchtower, he sees the barbarians gather their forces. Illiberal. Despotic. Pre-Enlightened. Irrational. And, most terrible of all, utterly incapable of appreciating the lofty ends to which he has dedicated himself. It is perfectly maddening. In a manly fashion he gathers his nerve, holds his chin aloft, and presses the button marked 'civilization'. In seconds, a cruise missile whizzes noiselessly past the reinforced windows, streaks across the barren land, and slams into the hordes of ingrates. His satisfaction at the pacific effect this has is despoiled, however, by the thought of treachery within. He thinks of those who are "ready to undermine our struggle and support our deadly enemies in all these places". He reaches for the education pamphlet and directs his attention to the 'squared circle'. How, he wonders, could anyone fail to be impressed by its pedagogic simplicity?



In its minimalist beauty it draws out a multitude of relations, distills thousands of concepts into their essentials, and throws the most obscure dimensions of global politics into sharp relief. It bears the magisterial authority of Renan, Spengler, Schmitt, Strauss and Huntington. Who could refuse it? Only cynics, naysayers and nihilists. Only the enemies of reason and Enlightenment! His reverie is interrupted by a ferocious din - some of the more restless natives are being interrogated in a chamber below his station. They can wail like banshees, call down curses, fret, weep, imprecate, invoke the authority of the Almighty - but they usually quieten down as they dangle from the strappado and the pressure gathers on their chest. The agonised howling goes on. He smiles as he hears a familiar crackle: the modern miracle of electricity!

His grin fades as he reflects on what a grim business it all is, and he resumes his meditations on the troubling domestic treachery. The Lord Wellington Society has published several articles of his on this very topic. The problem of active subversion is itself the most manageable problem. Essentially, they can be eliminated in much the same way as the unfortunate captives in the floor below. Even more worrisome are idle critics who, from the comfort of homes protected by he and his Rough Riders Militia, give all manner of comfort to the subversives and, in so doing, provide the best aid to an implacable foe. There will have to be a purge, he resolves. When this territory is at last settled and cultivated with the values of liberal modernity, the Riders will reconquer the homeland. A healthy society cannot long stomach these illiberal, intolerant elements. In the meantime, he spots another battalion of deceptively unarmed Islamofascists sweeping in from the slum quarters of the city, bearing portraits of their riff-raff leader. Some appear to be carrying miniature coffins. "Sorry chaps," he mutters sternly, "but this is an unauthorised manifestation of anti-liberal chauvinism." Within moments, he has called in the helicopters. The ground reddens, the sky blackens, and a depuratory fire consumes the terrorists before discharging them in splendid atramentous pulses into the atmosphere. From all directions the elegant copters converge, circle above in an elegaic dance and discharge round after round of liberal democratic values. Amid the Wagnerian glory of this Gotterdammerung, our frontiersman pauses to transcribe the lapidary thought: "There is No Left or Right; There Is Only Us and Them; If You Are Not With Us, You Are With Them. Exterminate All The Brutes!"

Labels: after the cataclysm, clash of civilisations, friend/enemy distinction, huntington, imperial ideology, leo strauss, neoconservatism, orientalism, renan, schmitt, spengler, west

Clash of civilizations, genocide, and a large island in the south Pacific posted by Richard Seymour

The reliquaries of imperialist history are being shuffled through again. Not a single myth forged in defense of colonialism is left unexamined, in the hope of its re-usability. Whether its Ferguson and his cash nexus, neocons insisting that slavery wasn't as bad as everyone makes out, or Sarkozy (the alleged Mossad operative) restoring the doctrine of the unhistorical society, the details don't matter. All that is needed is to dust off the old theses, add a few innovations, fix the evidence around them (you know that phrase don't you?), and raunch them up a bit for televisual consumption. The BBC 2 programme 'Clash of the Worlds' has so far managed to explain two savage episodes of imperialist history in terms of a clash between "the Christian West" and "Islamic fundamentalism" (the Indian Rebellion and the Mahdi rebellion) and seeks next week to explain the Nakba in similar terms (yes, really!). It is not that colonialism is blameless, but that it is construed through a thetic frame that cannot but exonerate it of most its worst crimes: it is depicted as an 'encounter', a cultural face-to-face which is characterised by misunderstanding and fear and - oh dear - fanaticism.

I think it's worth stepping back from this particular argument and considering a broader sweep. Linda Colley points out in Captives that Europeans have historically spent much more time destroying one another than destroying the rest of the world. This doesn't diminish the savagery of colonialism - on the contrary, it highlights the fact that what was unprecedented barbarism for an aboriginal of whichever continent was being stolen, was in fact part of the means by which savagely despotic and hierarchical European states had built up their strength and conducted normal interstate as well as domestic relations. Mass murder, rape, pillage, enslavement and so on was ordinary to a European coloniser in a way that it wasn't to its New World victims. What colonialism represented to some extent was the ability to externalise the extraordinary savagery of the European states-system. It was not a 'clash of civilizations' but the expansion of decivilization. The next step in this process is obviously the construction of 'race' which takes shape as contact with indigenous people becomes increasingly characterised by military combat. This alone permits decivilization to be understood as its opposite. It legitimises forms of aggression and subordination that are increasingly under attack in Europe - so that while Europe's lower classes resist impressment, enslavement or serfdom, the attempt to drive an Atlantic (and increasingly Pacific) expansion through the enslavement of Africans is represented as itself a humanitarian process. But of course when there are things such as slave rebellions and anticolonial struggles, the mood turns sour: no longer are we assisting these people, but defending ourselves against fanaticism and obscurants and mystics. It becomes a 'race war', as per the vicious struggle between the US and Japan, for example. But their struggles succeed to some extent - the colonised acquire states, challenge racist ideology and attempt to overcome their subordinate status. Yet still we try to bomb them, invade them, IMF them, keep them in line. So now it's a 'clash of civilizations'.

One aspect of the current installation of that 'clash' drama is that (as per Sarkozy), genocide is something that happens on the other side, perpetrated by commies or 'Serbofascists' (Yugoslavia) or 'Islamofascists' (Sudan) and so on, and for which the imperial powers bear no responsibility. It is, of course, reasonably well known among those who know that modern genocide originates to a large extent in colonialism (although in fact comparatively little research is done in this vein). It includes systematic extermination not only of Native Americans (often in the form of a holy war, or 'clash of civilisations' as it might also be known), but of course also of the aboriginal population of Tasmania and the Maori of New Zealand.. And, as Colin Tatz argues, there is the matter of genocide against Australian aboriginals, fuelled by the old colonial bromides. This is what the British High Commissioner wrote to Gladstone in 1883:

The habit of regarding the natives as vermin, to be cleared off the face of the earth, has given the average Queenslander a tone of brutality and cruelty in dealing with 'blacks' which it is very difficult to anyone who does not know it, as I do, to realise. I have heard men of culture and refinement, of the greatest humanity and kindness to their fellow whites, and who when you meet them here at home you would pronounce incapable of such deeds, talk, not only of the wholesale butchery of (for the iniquity of that may sometimes be disguised from themselves) but of the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day's sport, or having to kill some troublesome animal.

And indeed, the occupation of towns and cities seemed to follow massacres, often referred to as 'dispersals'. It was widely believed that 'the white race' could not absorbe the aboriginals and so would have to exterminate them. When the Australian colonies formed a union in 1901, it was a commonplace supposition that multiracial democracy was simply impossible - a conviction drawn from the American experience. The United States had attempted during the Civil War to expel every last African American slave, a plan that had substantial bipartisan support, but which failed because they couldn't persuade the British or any other colonial power to buy them. One of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to successfully deport bonded black labourers (many of whom had come from the United States) en masse. Actually, much of the capital and political leadership that went into the future 'White Only' Australia had come from the United States, and the colonising as well as pacifying of the country was in part an American effort, so the kinship was redoubled in various ways early on. Meanwhile, the development of the country's agriculture, whether in cotton production or sugar cane, was led by overseers and colonisers from the Carribean and parts of Africa. Those who wanted to profit from 'blackbirding' (the enslavement of Pacific Islanders and African Americans) did not agree with the 'White Australia' doctrine from its foundation, but as in the foundation of the United States, seditious republicanism in Australia was bound up with ideas of white supremacy. And there were substantial sectors of capital which feared that continuing the institution of slavery in an Australian commonwealth would produce endless social strife and eventually something like the American Civil War, which cost millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And so, on the basis of colonial racism, fears about social antagonism and class struggle and Britain's worry that it would lose possession of Australia unless it granted quasi-independence, the commonwealth was launched and white Australians continued a genocidal process that had begun as a multinational enterprise.

In fact, some of the Australian government's worst segregationist policies in this regard were seen as efforts to protect aboriginals from white settler violence, in much the same way that American politicians considered the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII a humanitarian process, and Woodrow Wilson considered Jim Crow policies a positive benefit to African Americans. Aboriginals were made 'wards' of white men who regulated their labour, travel, consumption, sexual activity, wages (held down way below the 'basic wage') and so on. The Protectors were frequently the agents of attempted extermination. For example, O A Neville, Chief Protector of the West (1915-1940) imposed a system of managing 'full-blood' aboriginals (who would die out), 'half-castes' (who would be removed from their aboriginal parents) and 'quadroons' or 'quarter-bloods' (who could apply for citizenship) - with a mixture of policies based on race theory and eugenics, Australia would be made 'white'. Of course, even those who acquired citizenship could revert to subordinate status if a white person made a complaint that impugned their conduct as unbecoming a civilised Australian. Of course, this genocide, which took place over a prolonged period, and involved violent extermination as well as bureaucratic efforts with intent to destroy a population, is the topic of denial. Mainstream Australian politicians do not admit to such a process, and compare the 'forced transfer' of children to the sending of whites to boarding school. Restitution is as unthinkable to white politicians in Australia as it is to American senators. The structures created by the genocide are being firmly kept intact.

So, here is a process of extermination, in which are implicated not various fanaticisms, but cold egotistical calculation, exploitation, slavery, theft, and finally the construction of a modern state. It is not only one that exemplifies various trends in Euro-American world dominance, but also was decisive in consolidating it. It is not only denied by its measures are given legitimacy by mainstream politicians. Indeed, genocidal processes seem to be inbuilt into colonial wars, past and present. From Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam to Central America and Iraq, the tendency of ordinary American conquest to tip over into annihilation, fuelled by racism, is hardly disputable. And of course, of all the currently regnant capitalist states, most have a record of involvement in genocide at some level, colonial or otherwise. It's odd, the ease with which one of the most common forms of Western violence is externalised.

Labels: 'white australia', clash of civilisations, empire, racism

Perpetual Peace and the End of History posted by Richard Seymour

Have a look at the following charts, the first from a study by the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management entitled, 'Peace and Conflict 2003' (click to enlarge):





From these, you would gather that there has been a rapid drop in warfare of all kinds since 1992, and that wars are a risk principally in poor countries without liberal institutions. On that basis, you might concur with the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit that, while the risks of war will resurge in context-specific settings, 'globalisation' is slowly guiding us toward a more stable (and less impoverished) future. In this view, the role of stable liberal capitalist states is to manage the occasional crises as societies graduate toward fuller integration into the global economy with liberal institutions and guaranteed property rights. The 'old battles' of left and right thus dispatched, it will be a relatively simple matter to maintain perpetual peace and remove the means of coercion to the background of human societies. This is the kind of doctrine that the former diplomat Robert Cooper promulgates: "there are pre-modern states - often former colonies - whose failures have led to a Hobbesian war of all against all: countries such as Somalia and, until recently, Afghanistan. Second, there are post-imperial, postmodern states which no longer think of security primarily in terms of conquest. A third kind are the traditional 'modern' states such as India, Pakistan or China which behave as states always have, following interest, power and raison d'état." It goes without saying, which is why he doesn't say it, that liberal European and North American capitalist states are the 'postmodern' ones who never think about things such as conquest (but should, in his view).

It is not quite so simple, according to Christopher Cramer's book Civil War Is Not A Stupid Thing. For instance, consider another set of figures devised through a different lens. The Uppsala Conflict Database provides an invaluable amount of free data on the level, range and types of global conflict. Here are couple of charts from their site (click to enlarge):





The trend in the rate of conflicts is the same for both high and low-intensity warfare. While it is clear that the rates of warfare did decline after 1992, the drop is nowhere near as sharp, and it remains at roughly the level it was before the highest point of conflict during the 1980s. The number of interstate wars declines, while the number of 'internal' wars increases. As Cramer observes, these analytical frames are not merely descriptive: to describe a war as 'internal' is to direct the focus to a particular aspect of conflict and away from others. If a war is largely fought within a given terrain, largely by actors indigenous to it or nearby, this does not mean that international forces are not powerfully involved: consider the 'civil war' in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, or indeed any number of conflicts in which the US, UK and France in particular have intervened in or stimulated, or orchestrated. Their armies may not be involved, and increasingly we rely on private mercenaries (as per Sandline International or Blackwater USA). Yet they are directly involved. There are also wars waged by states against non-state movements, and in the past these would have been classified as 'extra-systemic' (anti-colonial wars in particular). This category has disappeared largely as imperial territories acquired the character of nation-states. Yet what if Chechnya were to win its war for independence? What is now considered a civil war within Russia would be an extra-systemic one. When did war begin, and when did it end, in Iraq? The US had been rapidly escalating a campaign of systematic bombing coupled with sanctions throughout the 1990s, arguably a state of de facto low-level, highly asymmetrical war, with Iraq's luckless inhabitants as hostages. There are forms of mass state-led orchestrations of violence, such as Gujarat in 1992 and 2002, which are not classified as civil war because they are directed against civilians and pose no threat to the state at any stage. Additionally, some wars that originate as civil wars progress into genocide rapidly, as in Rwanda. A further observation is that the extraordinary peak of conflict during the 1980s and at the end of the Cold War doesn't represent a sharp increase in the outbreak of wars so much as an accumulation of them over fifty years, which suggests that these wars have been extremely difficult to end once initiated. In other words, the two perceptions that war is becoming less frequent and less intense, and that war is limited to areas with weak states and 'underdeveloped' economies, are fundamentally unsound. Cramer adds there are too few observable trends to make many useful generalisations about what we might expect in the future. The variety of wars characterised as civil wars is far too broad in terms of origins, casualties, battle intensity, social actors involved, causes etc to produce secure categories.

Yet, one such category has proven to be rather popular with a certain kind of post-Cold War liberal - people like Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw and Hans Magnus Enzenburger, who had been Leftists while there remained a Soviet Union - and that is the 'new war'. In this view, wars are unpolitical, usually organised around 'identity' rather than a clear programme of social change, brutal beyond any limit that might be imposed by international law or political norms - essentially a form of extended criminal activity, leeching off global financial and commodity networks in what is ominously described as 'black globalisation'. The theorists of 'new wars' also look to a post-military age, even if they are slightly less willing to accept overt empire than people like Robert Cooper. However, the empirical basis of their claims has been comprehensively undermined, as discussed here. The rate of civil wars was certainly not increasing during the period of the 'new wars'; their barbarity was on the whole a little bit less intense than Cold War ventures; the prominence of 'identity' politics wasn't absent in the Cold War period and was then, as it is now, intermingled with other political programmes (the Anglo-French axis in African politics has long outlived the colonial era and the Cold War, while the secessionism of Croatian leaders was not more important than the secessionism of Moise Tshombe in the Congo); and transnational financial and commodity flows were at least as important if not more so than during the Cold War ('conflict diamonds' being an analogue of 'conflict heroin').

Cramer has an interesting approach, which is to regard these wars on a continuum of violence that extends right into liberal democratic polities, from outright civil war in Mozambique, in which the establishment of property rights was every bit as conflictual as it was in Cromwell's Ireland, to sustained low-level class violence in Brazil, with perpetual clashes with the MST and favelas for instance, to sporadic clashes between strikers and the army in South Africa and ongoing forms of social violence in Europe and the United States. Social peace is maintained in advanced capitalist societies by organised violence that is usually extruded from the explicit theatre of politics. Yet there are examples of extreme domestic state violence, usually where population groups are seen to disrespect the fundamental (until then, apparently harmless) boundaries of property-based societies. The attacks on Waco or on the MOVE organisation in the US are two such instances. But the most violent periods in the history of modern liberal polities has been in the prolonged transition to capitalism: the enclosures, the revolts, the enslavement and colonisation, the class warfare, the mass hangings, the genocides and so on. Contempory conflict in 'developing' nations can thus be understood as part of the process of the "primitive accumulation" of capital. The 1975-1992 Mozambican civil war, mentioned before, is thus seen as being driven by a conflict over the accumulation of land and the establishment of conditions for successful capitalist agriculture. Aside from the specific business of acquiring and converting property into capital, the overal process of transition produces turmoil. Karl Polanyi observed that without the intervention of Tudor and Stuart states, the conversion to a market society, the enclosures, the transformation of humanity and land into capital, would have been a disaster sufficient to wipe out most of Europe's human beings.

Several new phases in this so-called "primitive accumulation" have been opened up in recent years: the clean sweep in Russia and Eastern Europe; the neoliberalisation in India and Latin America; the reconstitution of private capitalist class power in China; the rapid acceptance of neoliberalism by nominally leftist parties in most advanced capitalist states etc. The aggressive programmes of the happily defunct Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and similar initiatives by the World Trade Organisation, seek to extend this process. These policies don't necessarily cause wars in and of themselves any more than they cause the process of "primitive accumulation", but they have the capacity to aggravate an already existing set of conditions, or interact with other elements (such as arms and commodities markets, financial flows, 'ethnic' or identitarian tensions etc). Cramer's argument thus rebukes both the liberal view of violence as something surpassed by (post)modern states, and the liberal view of development as something that is technical, and can be achieved with a careful management of pain and consequences by very knowledgeable graduates from Oxford or MIT. Development is a deeply political process with powerful motors toward violent conflict, and capitalist development is not less so than any other kind despite the formal disavowal of political violence in capitalist ideology. The process of transition, it should be said, is not one with a determinate end. At no point is every form of commons enclosed and privatised, and nor could it be: there remain struggles over who will possess how much, what will belong to all and what will belong to a few, what conditions will apply to the labour force and how oppressed groups will be treated within the social hierarchy. And, as it is a crisis-ridden system, managed and sustained in large part by the projection of extreme force, the fantasy of perpetual peace and a post-military society is (at least this side of the socialist revolution) a dense revisionist palimpsest that papers over centuries of historical reality.

Labels: capitalism, civil war, clash of civilisations, end of history, peace, war

That Ineffable Islamic Threat to European Civilisation. posted by Richard Seymour

As threats to life and limb go, terrorists have always been pathetically low on the list compared to, say, motorists or police stations. A recent Europol report on terrorism on the continent, despite having been released a few weeks ago, has been curiously neglected by the media. One outstanding fact obtains: in 2006, of almost five hundred terrorist attacks in Europe, only one was by Islamists - and it failed. While the report mentions a cluster of other attacks in previous years and spend a lot of time discussing terrorist activity originating from Islamist groups, the cold facts indicate that there is little of it about. Much is made of the fact that half of the arrests for terrorist offenses were related to Islamist activity, but we already know that the arrests far outweigh the actual scale of activity. As the report notes, "the arrests and convictions were not necessarily related to terrorist offences that took place during the reporting period." Arrests are a reflection of policy focus, and dont' necessarily correlate to an actual threat. Thus, the report notes that only 32% of those arrested were suspected of involvement in or the preparation of a terrorist attack. Further, "the number of arrests made in relation to Islamist terrorism in the UK is among the highest in the EU". Elsewhere, the largest number of arrests is for separatist activity in France. However, there is no accounting for the perfidy of those who march under the black flag:

The frequency of video statements by members of the original al-Qaeda leadership and other Islamist terrorists shows a marked increase. The propaganda is of greater sophistication, of high quality and more professional. English is used more often, either in direct speech or in subtitles, allowing potential access to a wider audience.

Video attacks, the cunning bastards. At least the Home Secretary can no longer claim that Islamist activity is related to a refusal to speak English.

The report is so far the most systematic attempt by European police to gather together data on this matter, and can be seen as definitive. Indeed, if anything, Europol was pitching for a greater batch of funding with this report, seeking to upgrade itself from a continental crime-fighting force to a mainstay of the 'war on terror'. Every national police or intelligence force contributing data could be said to have a similar reason for wishing to amplify the threat. Yet, the most they could come up with was a single failed attack. I can find only two references to this report in mainstream media outlets, one in the Boston Herald, the other in Deutsche Welle, neither of which refers to these figures, but both of which discuss a 'growing terror threat'.

So much for 'Eurabia' and 'Londonistan'. So much for the Clash of Civilisations. The counter-climactic truth is that the incidence of Islamist activity, including that using terrorist tactics, is concentrated in parts of the world where US imperialism operates.

Labels: 'war on terror', clash of civilisations, europe, europol, islamism, terrorism