LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Extradition posted by Richard Seymour

I have been meaning to write up the case of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmed for a while. This important documentary, featuring Talha's brother Hamja, lays out the facts:

Labels: 'terrorism', 'war on terror', guantanamo, human rights, rendition, torture, US imperialism

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

Monday, August 29, 2011

The war on terror and the Left posted by Richard Seymour

My article for the Australian progressive literary journal, Overland, is a retrospective piece on the impact of the 'war on terror' on the Left, focusing on the US:

The wars go on, interminably, but the ‘war on terror’ is over. Liberties lost have yet to be regained. Secret prisons, kidnapping and torture continue to operate, with the connivance of a post-Bush administration. Still, the war on terror is finished.

Now that it’s over, can we figure out what it was?

Common sense on the Left holds that the war on terror was an adventurist project for reshaping a strategically significant energy-producing region in the interests of the American ruling class. As a corollary, it enabled an authoritarian retooling of participating states in dealing with internal foes, under the rubric of ‘counter-terrorism’ – but the dominant logic was geopolitical, driven by competition between the US and potential rivals such as China and Russia, and centring on the control of energy resources. If the US controlled the oil spigot, then it could reduce the flow of oil to its rivals and impede their ability to grow. However, the wager on military force failed, the argument runs, leaving the US in a weaker position. The termination of the war on terror marks a strategy-shift signposted by the ‘realists’ in the Democratic Party, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who favour consolidating US hegemony through tighter alliances with the EU and others.

This analysis has its strengths, but I wish to make a slightly different argument. If the war on terror was a bid to advance US hegemony internationally, it could also be understood as an attempt to restructure relations of force domestically, tilting them in favour of business and a stronger coercive state. The same sequence was repeated in numerous advanced capitalist states, notably those that explicitly allied with Bush, suppressing some of the emerging crises afflicting US-led neoliberal capitalism and decisively weakening oppositional forces for a time.

The Bush administration, however, ultimately rested on a narrow and highly unstable bloc, susceptible to the instability unleashed by its own policy gambles. By 2005, the occupation of Iraq was going badly, and the war was beginning to channel multiple sources of discontent with the administration, both among elites and popular constituencies. The administration that departed in 2008 was a lame duck. Even so, some of the political forces mobilised by the war on terror have had lasting effects that continue to operate in the context of the recession and the Obama presidency.

Labels: 'war on terror', bush administration, iraq, left, neoliberalism, obama, socialism, US imperialism, us ruling class, us working class

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Still blaming Muslims posted by Richard Seymour

We understand that the media would rather be talking about Islam. They jumped on the first sign that the killer of dozens of Norwegian children might be a jihadi group, despite its lack of plausibility. They didn't even wait for that sign - the assumptions were already embedded well before then. Long after the rumours had been disproven, and the culprit emerged as a white, right-wing Christian from Norway, many papers still wanted the conversation to be about Islam and 'Al Qaeda'. We understand this, just as we understand the media's discomfort at dealing with an outrage in which the very Islamophobia which they do most to propagate is implicated.

However, if you want to understand the attitude of the punditocracy to fascist terrorism, consider the query put by BBC News to the former Norwegian Prime Minister yesterday: "Do you think not enough attention was paid to those unhappy re immigration?" Or, consider this New York Times article blaming the failure of multiculturalism. Or, look at this Atlantic article, which describes such racist terrorism as a "mutation of jihad" - that is "the spread of the 'jihad' mentality to anti-immigrant and racist groups". You begin to get the picture. The idea is to find some way in which all of this is still the fault of Muslim immigrants. The logic will be: the fascists express legitimate grievances, but go too far. Or worse, in their natural outrage, they have allowed themselves to become like them.

These memes are replicating across the right-wing blogosphere as well as the news media. By one means or another, what is being avoided here is that Anders Breivik's politics were shaped not by the fact of immigration, nor by jihadism, nor by any actually existing Muslims, but by ideas beginning in the mainstream right and radiating out to the far right. The 1500 page manifesto he has written under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick comprises, alongside a set of instructions for little would-be fascist killers, a distillation of standard right-wing Islamophobic material from Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, as well as a regurgitation of just about every poisonous attack on multiculturalism from the gutter press and politicians.

The core of it is the development of an historical narrative detailing various clashes between 'Western Europe' and 'Islam', the two key protagonists. Like much far right literature these days, it is ostentatiously 'philosemitic', or at least expends a lot of energy charging Islam with antisemitism. It has the standard references - the gates of Vienna, the Lebanon, Moorish Spain, Turkey and the Armenian genocide, etc. - with extended quotes from the aforementioned sources. It is pro-colonial and pro-Israel and is concerned to defend the nation-state against 'multiculti', 'cultural Marxists', 'traitors', Muslims and so on. Of course, the whole document is laced with the usual fascist mysticism and augury, and concludes with the proclamation: "By September 11th, 2083, the third wave of Jihad will have been repelled and the cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist hegemony in Western Europe will be shattered and lying in ruin, exactly 400 years after we won the battle of Vienna on September 11th, 1683. Europe will once again be governed by patriots."

Anders Breivik, though not a Third Reich enthusiast, is obviously a fascist of some description. His manifesto, his activism and his links to the UK far right scene, talked down by the Norwegian police, are evidence that he didn't seek to be simply a lone ranger. He has made it clear that his massacres were an attack on the political system, and he clearly intended that they should be followed by others. But the ideas that led him to fascism are not at all marginal. The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the 'war on terror', the view seriously entertained by many that Europe's Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children. No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter. And anyone who starts from the idea of blaming Islam is placing themselves in a contemptible affinity with the perpetrator.

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

Friday, February 04, 2011

US backs Egypt's chief torturer posted by Richard Seymour

The New York Times reports that the US is negotiating with the Egyptian military to force Mubarak, preserve the regime, and put the Vice President and former chief of military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, in charge as transitional president. The US trusts him, of course, because in addition to torturing Egyptians he helped run the CIA's kidnapping and torturing ring, known as 'rendition'. The New Yorker summarises:

While he has a reputation for loyalty and effectiveness, he also carries some controversial baggage from the standpoint of those looking for a clean slate on human rights. As I described in my book “The Dark Side,” since 1993 Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.
As laid out in greater detail by Stephen Grey, in his book “Ghost Plane,” beginning in the nineteen-nineties, Suleiman negotiated directly with top Agency officials. Every rendition was greenlighted at the highest levels of both the U.S. and Egyptian intelligence agencies. Edward S. Walker, Jr., a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, described Suleiman as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way.”

So, if we can summarise. The US backed Mubarak for more than three decades after the assassination of Sadat, supplied him with billions in aid, military equipment, torture equipment, tear gas, etc. They trained the army, forging close ties with the military top brass. The IMF vended largesse, with the usual strings attached. Beginning with Sadat's 'Open Door' policies and the peace treaty with Israel, Egypt was transformed from a nationalist, corporatist, anti-imperialist polity, into a neoliberal comprador regime. A new fraction of rentiers emerged as the financial sector grew and private sector capitalists were given greater opportunities to profit from public investments. Every crisis of the system, whether it was produced by a financial crash, a slump in oil prices, the upending of BCCI, or the long-term collapse of fruit and vegetable exports, was an occasion for further austerity, cutting 'profligate' state spending. When revenues from the nationalised petroleum company and the Suez canal bolstered state revenues, the credit for growth was allocated to the IMF and its free market wizardry. The result was that wealth was perpetually transferred to an increasingly aloof ruling class, affiliated to the regime. When Mubarak slaughtered opponents, as during the anti-Islamist counterinsurgency in 1992-97, which included the famously brutal wipe-out in a working class quarter of Embada in 1992, the US sent more money, more weapons. The CIA forged ties with the security apparatus, . Mubarak's regional importance for the US was heightened during the 'war on terror', and especially when he agreed to help impose the Quad's blockade on Gaza. The flow of weapons, money and diplomatic support was not interrupted by a wave of protests arising from the Second Intifada in 2002, or from mass strike action radiating from Mahalla in 2007, both of which Mubarak's police cracked down on viciously. But then the global capitalist system went haywire, sinking into its worst crisis for decades, which struck at the heart of the fragile accumulation regimes pursued by north African states. The protests against the regime did not begin when Tunisia went up, but it was a catalyst for a drastic escalation of the revolt. And in the last couple of weeks, the accumulated grievances and agitation of decades has exploded in an astounding revolt which has withstood waves of massacres from armed police, looting and chaos by officers out of uniform, terror by mounted and armed terror gangs (again, largely populated by Mubarak's police force) . The US responds with concern, calls for protesters to make nice, and pays tribute to Mubarak's courageous work in the fictitious 'peace process'. Officials urge Mubarak to embark on political and economic reforms to placate the opposition. For well over a week, throughout all the bloodshed, Hillary Clinton insists that the US has no plans to revise aid to the regime. US officials fearmonger about the Muslim Brothers, asserting that there must be a managed, 'orderly transition', but do not call for Mubarak to step down. The Egyptian army, presumably under instructions for the US, protects the regime, and allows it to try every measure to crush the revolt. It also moves to secure the Rafah crossing, so that no one gets any ideas. Egyptians form people's committees to manage local resistance. Workers form new trade unions, and embark on a general strike. They fend off wave after wave of assault. The US begins to hint that Mubarak should step aside and appoint a transitional government to replace him. And, unsurprisingly, it emerges that they've been negotiating to impose a trusted regime hard man. And if Egyptians won't accept Suleiman, as they almost certainly won't? Watch this space...

Labels: 'war on terror', dictatorship, egypt, Israel, middle east, palestinians, revolution, torture, US imperialism

Saturday, December 18, 2010

John Pilger - The War You Don't See posted by Richard Seymour

John Pilger - The War You Don't See from The War We Don't See on Vimeo.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, imperialism, iraq, Israel, pilger, US imperialism, zionism

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Late Britannia. posted by Richard Seymour

British capitalism can't afford British imperialism any more.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, capitalism, capitalist crisis, imperialism, recession, spending cuts

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Tony Blair must die. posted by Richard Seymour

Bless the former PM for reminding us why we despise every sordid molecule of him. Few British leaders apart from Margaret Thatcher have been so completely loathed. He has left his party in a wretched, miserable state, panhandling for votes from people whom its has previously shown contempt for. He has driven the country further and faster to the right than most of his predecessors. He has participated in the international adventurism and vandalism of the most right-wing American administration since WWII, with no regrets. And he has come back with his memoirs, his shitty self-serving redacted diatribe about his kampf, to remind us just exactly what it is about him that is so emetic. To his war crimes, he adds crimes against language and taste.

It is appropriate, perhaps, that one of the monsters of our age should communicate his de profundis to us in a style befitting the morning television chat show. The matey populism, the chattiness, and the familiar cliche-riddled inarticulacy, is surely the fitting idiom for a thoroughly modern serial killer. In another age, a moralist, Whig and Gladstonian imperialist of Blair's class would have adopted a manner of expression displaying the fruits of a classical education. Literature would have supplied the dominant tropes of even his extemporary remarks. Today, advertising and public relations are the supreme genres. But there's something else - the discursive style suggests that Blair probably made use of a ghost writer who transcribed his waffling while the former premiere gurgled from the shower or expatiated from the back seat of a limo. Blair would deny this, and has complained that Robert Harris was a 'cheeky fuck' for suggesting that he was such a lightweight as to require a ghost-writer. A plausible alternative is that he used a team of monkeys with typewriters and some unfortunate editors had to piece together the smarmiest copy.

Blair's fat little compendium of pseudo-revelations, attacks on personal acquaintances and colleagues, self-justifying circumlocutions, political polemic, and narcissistic reflections, comes with its own self-destruct button. Comparing himself to the 'people's princess', he says: "We were both in our ways manipulative people, perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them." Elsewhere, he informs astonished readers that sometimes politicians must "conceal the full truth ... bend it and even distort it". This being the case, you might suspect that he is not always being honest with his readers, and that the impression he tries to give of opening up and being fully frank is as counterfeit as his 'intelligence' on Iraq. You might wonder what is the point of your parting with a portion of your spending power even for one of the thousands of half price copies that your local WH Smith will be shoving in your direction, if all that's going to happen is that Tony Blair lies to you. Again. When all he's ever done is lie to you, at taxpayers' expense. Will there come a time, you might wonder, when we will stop paying Tony Blair to lie to us?

You would also expect, from the foregoing, that Blair's testimonial should be a masterful display of button-pushing, noodzhing, heartstring-plucking and tear-jerking. At the end of which, the former Prime Minister should emerge as an heroic liberal reformer stoically facing down the forces of conservatism, triumphing against the odds, vindicated by history and the big man upstairs, though privately nurturing a wounded soul. So, roughly, it turns out. From his earliest political and legal education at the hands of Derry Irvine, the eminence grise whom he has described as a 'tyrannical genius', to the scuffles with Gordon Brown, whom he cheerfully patronises, Tony is almost always right, or on the right path. He's macho too. We hear all about COBRA sessions and 'ticking clock' scenarios in which, for example, he came close to blasting a passenger jet out of the skies. White-knuckle negotiating sessions with Ulster's natives are duly described with a certain amount of colonial panache. The tough guy, swaggering, iron-in-the-soul stuff that is de rigeur for former statesmen of his ilk, is all there. But so is the love-me-tender vulnerability. He says he hit the bottle to manage the stress of his job. Boo hoo. Millions of people do that all the time - it's called alcoholism. Like the walrus, he says he cried for his victims in Iraq, before mercilessly consuming every one. He admits to a few 'small' errors here and there, of course. He is mortal after all, like Jesus or, his other role model, Diana.

Even when confessing to errors, though, what is most eminently on display is Blair's cynicism. When he cheerfully admits to lying through his teeth, manipulating everyone around him, he is sure to let us know of the effect this had on policymaking. On the freedom of information act, he tells us that it was an 'imbecilic' mistake because of the way journalists used it to ask questions about what the government was doing. Oh well, never mind our civil rights, Tony, if it inconveniences you in any way. On the fox-hunting business, he says he deliberately sabotaged his own legislation to let some forms of hunting continue, to the ire of Labour colleagues. At the end of these triangulations, he complains that he "felt like the damn fox". Poor thing. Hunted by mad dogs and mounted forces of conservatism, chased through the thickets of political intrigue, always on the brink of capture - but miraculously...

The ex-PM's Tory instincts are also prominent, as he again attempts to whip his party, the public and the world into shape. Having given his support to the coalition's austerity programme, which even the right-wing of the Labour Party is now shying away from, he orders Labour not to 'drift to the Left', as if the big problem for Labour is that it might start representing some of the millions of working class voters that it lost under Blair's watch. And he's pleading with 'the world' not to rule out the possibility of war with Iran. He hasn't had his fill of blood crimes yet. David Cameron, who has falsely alleged that Iran has nuclear weapons, would probably agree. Blair is not only a logical ally of this sham of a government, but is on its right-wing. To Clegg's right on war, to Cameron's right on identity cards, civil liberties and even immigration, Blair has never had any business as part of this country's organised labour movement. That he was ever its leader is a shame and a disgrace. Labour's members, supporters and affiliates should look at his memoirs, look at the way he's conducting himself in the press, preening himself, spouting his ridiculously reactionary opinions as if he hasn't been comprehensively discredited, and say to themselves: "never again".

Protest at his book-signing at Waterstones Piccadilly, next Wednesday, 8th September.

Labels: 'war on terror', advertising, afghanistan, capitalism, class struggle, iraq, labour, liberal imperialism, neoliberalism, new labour, socialism, tony blair, tories, trade unions, war crimes

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Hounded until his death posted by Richard Seymour

Faraj Hassan was not a criminal. He was an asylum seeker from the Libyan dictatorship. In late 2001, he fled the country and stayed temporarily in Italy, before travelling to the United Kingdom. He applied for asylum, and was granted temporary residence by the Home Office. A month after his arrival, in May 2002, he was illegally detained. Police initially tried to say that he was an illegal immigrant. When he presented his documents, they nonetheless insisted on taking him into custody. He was kept in jail, both in London and in Leicester, while the police prepared a prosecution. They alleged that he had attempted to blow up a church while in Italy. They never presented him with any evidence for this allegation. In 2003, he was charged under the Terrorism Act 2000, which awarded the state powers that it had not used since the Irish struggle. In the context of the 'war on terror', these became part of a legal apparatus that specifically oppressed Muslims.

Hassan was also presented with an Italian extradition warrant alleging that he was the leader of an international terrorist gang. The warrant was suspended, and he was found not guilty in absentia by the court in Milan. But he was nevertheless imprisoned in - variously - Leicester, Belmarsh, Wormwood Scrubs, Brixton and Long Lartin for four years on the basis of evidence which no one, neither Hassan nor his lawyer nor a jury nor the public, was ever allowed to see. Hassan detested Belmarsh in particular, describing it as "institutionally racist" due to the victimisation of Muslim prisoners, who are mainly held in a separate, highly securitised wing of the prison.

In 2007, he was released under a control order. A control order is a comprehensive deprivation of liberty, a sanction imposed by the Home Secretary on the pretext that its subject is a terrorist threat. It restricts where you can go, what you can own, what means of transport you can use, who you may associate with, what form of employment you may have (if any). In practise for Hassan it meant that he was prevented from having much of a life. He could not work, he could not take the bus to the supermarket, he could not travel to visit his brother.

Furthermore, on the basis of his imprisonment, the European Union applied a sanction permitted under UN law, that being the freezing of a person's funds. He was not allowed access to his money, so was wholly dependent on vouchers supplied through the Home Office. Challenging this EU penalty through the European Court of Justice, he was told by the court that he must avail himself of the opportunities for judicial remedy in UK domestic law if he meant to challenge the good faith of the British authorities. He and his solicitors did so. In 2009, Hassan was released from the control order. This was because the Law Lords had at last ruled that the use of secret evidence was illegal. Secret evidence had meant that the state did not have to meet internationally recognised standards of evidence before depriving a person of his or her liberty. It meant that any old dreck could substantiate a terrorism charge and warrant detention in Her Majesty's toughest prisons. Without the veil of secrecy, the basis for the government's prosecution and control order collapsed.

Hassan fully availed himself of his freedom to start campaigning for others who were unjustly or illegally detained. He spent Sunday night lobbying with others outside the US embassy, in solidarity with Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who is believed to have spent five years in one of America's secret detention facilities, and was recently jailed in the US for allegedly shooting at US military personnel while detained by Afghan police in Ghazni, Afghanistan. She was shot in the abdomen by a US soldier, allegedly in defence, held in a medical facility in the US, tried despite obviously suffering from poor mental health, and convicted despite a lack of forensic evidence and contradictory statements from prosecution witnesses. Having spent the night with a protest at the US embassy, Hassan rode his motorcycle home yesterday morning, and was killed when a red minicab crashed into him.

He was only twenty two when he was first arrested, and he died before he reached his thirties. For most of his adult life, he was being persecuted by the British state and the international legal system on the basis of phoney charges, secret evidence, and the onerous laws that facilitate the political oppression of Muslims in the United Kingdom. He was a casualty of a perilous intersection between good old British racism, the increasing authoritarianism of the state in late capitalism, and the global system of surveillance, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings that US has promulgated under the mandate of the 'war on terror'.

Labels: 'war on terror', civil liberties, internment, islamophobia, prisons, racism, repression, torture

Monday, June 14, 2010

Europe and its intellectual property posted by Richard Seymour

“The peculiar tenor of current ideological campaigns against fanaticism derives from the smug conviction that ‘we’ are indeed enlightened, and the concomitant notion that the Enlightenment is something to be preserved rather than enacted, furthered or repeated. Especially prevalent is the idea that Enlightenment is something like a cultural patrimony (a ‘value’, precisely) which defines our civilization. It would perhaps be otiose to point out the many ways in which contemporary, rationalist visions originating in the French Lumière or German Aufklärung are systematically denied in the contemporary political panorama. If we can indeed speak of it as a project, much of the Enlightenment is not merely unfinished: it has been ignored, buried or traduced.”

—	Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: The Uses of An Idea, Verso, 2010, p. 99 (review forthcoming)

Labels: 'war on terror', alberto toscano, capitalism, enlightenment, europe, fanaticism, imperialism, native fanaticism, the liberal defence of murder

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Pakistan's ruling class circles the drain posted by Richard Seymour

A good piece by a Pakistani socialist:

The Pakistani rulers are in tatters. They are being attacked in their offices, the barricaded headquarters, that is, almost everywhere they hide. The imposing structures from where they rule stand today as prisons of a bygone power. The rulers are forced to sneak-a-peak and disappear again. They are reduced to issuing statements of sorrow and condemnation at the 'suicide attack'. They cannot appear with prior notice, their appearance has to be discrete, instantaneous and surprising, else they will be surprised by the unseen enemy.

This unseen enemy is also daily lambasted by the US and its imperialist allies. They denounce and everyone is asked to fight it, wreck it and finish it off from the face of earth. But the unseen enemy keeps on reappearing. It is also hidden, shadowy, instantaneous and surprising. But you cannot see it, you cannot find it, you cannot attack it. But the imperialist powers demand us in Pakistan to fight it. We are told as a nation, as rulers and as spymasters to muster all our energies and fight this unseen enemy. We are reminded, on a daily basis, its not USA's war, its yours, Pakistanis war and Pakistanis will have to fight the unseen enemy. And how do we know it is the unseen enemy that has attacked us?

Every time there is a bomb explosion in a city it is instantaneously claimed by the hidden ministry of interior, and the military public relations office and all sorts of sneak-a-peak rulers that the explosion was a suicide attack carried out by the Taliban or most recently India. To catch the suicide attackers every day scores are arrested in raids at Afghani, Waziristani and Swati localities all over Pakistan. This is how we are made to see the enemy. So the mountain inhabiting Pushtoons are portrayed as uncouth, greedy and rural. Pushtoons are made to look like uncivilized, hot-headed and terrorist in making. We are reminded that since we cannot see the unseen enemy but see a Pushtoon and therefore we should be watchful of their behavior. If we see them anywhere and we think they are acting suspiciously we must inform the police, spy on them and help save the nation. We are made to support the raids, search operations, arrests in the cities and killings in the rural areas only because we are made to accept the propaganda of the state. This is how Pushtoons are made to become the unseen enemy. Scapegoating the Pushtoons as the unseen enemy is aimed at creating a Pushtoon as a Taliban in our imagination.

So they win our imagination but have they won the wars? Despite the propaganda of winning the war in Swat and nearly winning the one in Waziristan we can see that attacks continue to happen on city centres and of course on the ruling class. Now we are told that it is an allout war, as if the military operation on Waziristan and Swat were not. On a daily basis it is officially claimed that 40 to 70 terrorists were killed in Swat/Waziristan operation. But we are supposed to be shocked at the 'suicide attack' only!
And hence we are told to get prepared to fight this war. Now does that ring some bells? Yes, first the US told us that it is Pakistani's war and now the ministry of interior and military's public relations tells us that the Pakistanis will have to fight it. But wasn't the Pakistani military supposed to fight Pakistan's enemies? But that is not enough now, comes the response, we need laskhars, defence committees and need to arm them.

So here we go again. Once more it is a jihad but now it is against the bad jihadists. So once again the minister of interior visits the local death squad organizers, the militias that control the cities, and asks them to join this war. Thus you see the pictures of the minister with the preferred sectarian leaders who are willing to give thousands of their madressa students and militant lower-middle-class MQM cadres to fight alongside the Pakistani military. Does that sounds familiar? Yes back in the 1980s it was the madressa students who were urged by the US and Pakistani rulers to fight the infidel Soviets in Afghanistan and the lower-middle class Jamaat e Islami came along as well. Now it is the good madressa students and the MQM which will get the arms to fight the bad madressa Taliban. Very soon we will be told that these good have also become bad and once again there will be another war of the people to be fought with the people. A war leads to another war.

So what can the people do? The ruling class has decided that it will speak from its prisons, rule from broadcasting stations and only police its own safe houses. The middle class has decided to pack its bags or for the moment allow the goons of the lower-middle class to fight the monster, the unseen enemy. The problem remains with the under-class unemployed, hungry, disempowered and the working class. It is these who are now forced to decide the side they are going to hold their sway.

The ruling and middle classes, if they had their way, they will make everyone else fight this unending and non-sensical war until they wipe out half of the population. They have already displaced record number of people in a single calendar year and are famous for shedding blood of 3 million at the least 39 years ago. They are already making the ordinary Pakistani soldier, coming from the lowest echelons of the peasantry, to give their lives to occupy the Pushtoon land. They have already bombed over 4.5 million people to punish them for siding with the unseen enemy. Now whenever they are attacked in their military or police or torture headquarters the next day a city centre is bombed. As if to ensure that if the war is between the Taliban and the military then it should appear as a war of Taliban against the Pakistani people. Hence they wish to create a false polarization.

Taliban leadership does not have an agenda for the under-priviliged, they themselves are willing to impose an order from above. Hence the false polarization is rapidly becoming a real polarization. This is between those who are against the Taliban and those who are with the Taliban. In other words those with the Pakistani rulers and those against. That means those against the US and those with the US. Hence condemnation of Taliban becomes an act of endorsing US-led aggression to occupy Afghanistan and now Pakistan. And this is a reactionary polarization. It is not a polarization of the under-priviliged against the privileged, the ruling class against the working class. It is polarization that sheds blood at every moment of its existence, it is reactionary to its core.

Therefore the underprivileged and the working class, the city dwellers and the countryside petty worker has to do is to refuse to accept that it is our war, demand the warring military to stop its military operations, force the US led imperialist occupiers out of our land and call for an all out peace.

The rulers are cornered, they have no way out. The middle class is besieged and the military bitterly divided. The imperialist power USA stands defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. They all want to spread the war, make it the war of Pakistani underclass. They want to use the military against ordinary Pushtoons, they want us to form lashkars and arm them, they want us to form defence committees. We should refuse to fight their war and refuse to accept that there exists an enemy which we or they could not see. We should refuse to scapegoat the Pushtoon and the Afghan and demand an end to extrajudicial killings and raids and arrests. It is not the unseen enemy we can fight back against, it is always the enemy we see that we have to organize against. The more the war spreads the more will be a mutated response against it. Its not our war, we should not let it be fought in our name.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, pakistan, pashtun, taliban, US imperialism

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Somalia and Africom posted by Richard Seymour

There was an understated news report on the BBC yesterday which informed viewers that Hillary Clinton was threatening Eritrea with 'action'. The US is accusing Eritrea of supporting the insurgents against what the BBC characterises as Somalia's 'unity government', and promising more weapons for its clients. Clinton claims that the 'al-Shahab' insurgents are liable to become a "threat" to the United States and "launch attacks against countries far and near". That rootless, worldwide conspiracy against freedom just will not go to bed.

It's important to clarify a couple of terms here, though. First of all, many of the 'insurgents' were once the government of Somalia, but were overthrown by CIA-funded warlords and a US-backed Ethiopian invasion. You may recall that this created a humanitarian catastrophe that the UN was moved to described as 'worse than Darfur' (some historical background here). Secondly, the 'unity government', as the BBC acknowledges, only controls a small section of Mogadishu - which means it isn't a government, and unites no one. (It seems rather odd that an entity backed by the immense power of the United States could be placed in such a difficult position by Eritrea. They've given millions of dollars and over forty tonnes of weapons to their clients, and yet are undone by the alleged illicit activities of a tiny neighbouring state?) The only thing that makes it a 'unity government' is that it incorporates 'moderate' elements of the old Islamic Courts Union. Apart from that, it evidently has no popular support whatsoever. Ironically, given the hysteria about Somali pirates, it is worth noting that this 'unity government' is far less effective at dealing with piracy than their Islamist opponents were.

The 21st Century scramble for Africa is taking us to some very strange and ugly departures. The US estimates that in six years, a quarter of its oil will come from Africa, but the trouble is that - as the establishment Committee on Foreign Relations complained some years back - China is doing a good job of getting its foot in the door. So, America responded by forming Africom, initially as a subdivision of Eucom and then, by October last year, as an independent command. Just on the off chance that anyone doesn't get this, Africom is specifically charged with running military operations in 53 African states. That is it's job. It's formation consolidated a conscious drive to increase military intervention into the continent. Now the main vector for US aggression in Africa, it was initially justified by 'war on terror' conspiracy theory. The anthropologist Jeremy Keenan points out that, while Africom clearly represents a militarised drive to control strategically important, resource-rich areas of the continent, the initial rationale for its creation was a lie. Specifically, it was set up allegedly in response to a faked 'terrorist' kidnapping that was actually carried out by Algerian intelligence, and which the Bush administration used to prove that there was a 'swamp of terror' that need drained. That spurious policy justification established, the US has been able to plant its troops at strategic points on the continent the better to intimidate and terrorise anyone who gets in their way. And now little Eritrea is threatened with having its lights punched out.

Chris Floyd also has some interesting thoughts on this development.

Labels: 'war on terror', africom, eritrea, ethiopia, somalia, US imperialism

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Liberal posted by Richard Seymour

Via Angry Arab, the NYT picks an Afghan "liberal":

I will not be the one to dispute the description, but I can't help but be reminded of "Jakarta's new moderate leader, Suharto".

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', 'war on terror', afghanistan, general rashid dostum, liberalism, nyt

Friday, May 15, 2009

Malalai Joya on the Farah bombings posted by Richard Seymour

I got this statement in my inbox:

MP for Farah Province condemns NATO bombings:
’This massacre offers the world a glimpse at horrors faced by our people’

(Photo: Humayun, a resident of Bala Baluk district, who lost 20 members of his family in the U.S. air strikes on May 5, 2009, was present at the May 11 press conference in Kabul.)

By Malalai Joya

As an elected representative for Farah, Afghanistan, I add my voice to those condemning the NATO bombing that claimed over 150 civilian lives in my province earlier this month. This latest massacre offers the world a glimpse of the horrors faced by our people.

However, as I explained at a May 11 press conference in Kabul, the U.S. military authorities do not want you to see this reality. As usual, they have tried to downplay the number of civilian casualties, but I have information that as many as 164 civilians were killed in the bombings. One grief stricken man from the village of Geranai explained at the press conference that he had lost 20 members of his family in the massacre.

The Afghan government commission, furthermore, appears to have failed to list infants under the age of three who were killed. The government commission that went to the village after three days -- when all the victims had been buried in mass graves by the villagers -- is not willing to make their list public. How can the precious lives of Afghans be treated with such disrespect?

The news last week is that the U.S. has replaced their top military commander in Afghanistan, but I think this is just a trick to deceive our people and put off responsibility for their disastrous overall strategy in Afghanistan on the shoulders of one person.

The Afghan ambassador in the U.S. said in an interview with Al Jazeera that if a ‘proper apology’ is made, then ‘people will understand’ the civilian deaths. But the Afghan people do not just want to hear ‘sorry.’ We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.

The demonstrations by students and others against these latest air strikes, like last month’s protest by hundreds of Afghan women in Kabul, show the world the way forward for real democracy in Afghanistan. In the face of harassment and threats, women took to the streets to demand the scrapping of the law that would legalize rape within marriage and codify the oppression of our country’s Shia women. Just as the U.S. air strikes have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite.

This now infamous law is but the tip of the iceberg of the women’s rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism and so, in Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with impunity. Rates of abduction, gang rape, and domestic violence are as high as ever, and so is the number of women’s self-immolations and other forms of suicide. Tragically, women would rather set themselves on fire than endure the hell of life in our ‘liberated’ country.

The Afghan Constitution does include provisions for women’s rights – I was one of many female delegates to the 2003 Loya Jirga who pushed hard to include them. But this founding document of the ‘new Afghanistan’ was also scarred by the heavy influence of fundamentalists and warlords, with whom Karzai and the West have been compromising from the beginning.

In fact, I was not really surprised by this latest law against women. When the U.S. and its allies replaced the Taliban with the old notorious warlords and fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance, I could see that the only change we would see was from the frying pan to the fire.

There have been a whole series of outrageous laws and court decisions in recent years. For instance, there was the disgusting law passed on the pretext of ‘national reconciliation’ that provided immunity from prosecution to warlords and notorious war criminals, many of whom sit in the Afghan Parliament. At that time, the world media and governments turned a blind eye to it.

My opposition to this law was one of the reasons that I, as an elected MP from Farah Province, was expelled from Parliament in May 2007. More recently, there was the outrageous 20-year sentence handed down against Parvez Kambakhsh, a young man whose only crime was to allegedly distribute a dissenting article at his university.

We are told that additional U.S. and NATO troops are coming to Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But frankly the Afghan people have no hope in this election – we know that there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug trafficking mafia and occupation.

With the exception of Ramazan Bashardost, most of the other candidates are the known, discredited faces that have been part and parcel of the mafia-like, failed government of Hamid Karzai. We know that one puppet can be replaced by another puppet, and that the winner of this election will most certainly be selected behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon. I must conclude that this presidential election is merely a drama to legitimize the future U.S. puppet.

Just like in Iraq, war has not brought liberation to Afghanistan. Neither war was really about democracy or justice or uprooting terrorist groups; rather they were and are about U.S. strategic interests in the region. We Afghans have never liked being pawns in the ‘Great Game’ of empire, as the British and the Soviets learned in the past century.

It is a shame that so much of Afghanistan’s reality has been kept veiled by a western media consensus in support of the ‘good war.’ Perhaps if the citizens of North America had been better informed about my country, President Obama would not have dared to send more troops and spend taxpayers’ money on a war that is only adding to the suffering of our people and pushing the region into deeper conflicts.

A troop ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, and continued air strikes, will do nothing to help the liberation of Afghan women. The only thing it will do is increase the number of civilian casualties and increase the resistance to occupation.

To really help Afghan women, citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere must tell their government to stop propping up and covering for a regime of warlords and extremists. If these thugs were finally brought to justice, Afghan women and men would prove quite capable of helping ourselves.

Malalai Joya was the youngest member of the Afghan Parliament, elected in 2005 to represent Farah Province. In May 2007 she was unjustly suspended from Parliament. Her memoir, Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, is forthcoming later this year from Rider.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, air strikes, farah, pakistan, US imperialism

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

NATO: Taliban 'fiddling their expenses' posted by Richard Seymour

Mullah Omar, the peek-a-boo playing head of the Taliban, has been claiming expenses for a subscription to an online pornography website off of the internet, 'T-Girls Aloud', NATO chiefs said yesterday. A press release issued by Omar's stationery office confirmed that Omar had entered the claim after he experienced difficulty downloading his favourite clips from a free website. "The quality was rubbish, anyway," Omar said. "I've been making shaky videos for years and these amateur hacks make me look like Stephen fucking Spielberg." An internal inquiry is pending.

And if you think that's a piss-take, read this.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, NATO, piddling bullshit about mps expenses claims, war crimes, white phosphorus

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Rhetorical question posted by Richard Seymour

"How much moral moxie does it really take to come out, guns blazing, against torture? I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or anything to enlist in a campaign to ban pulling off the fingernails of defenseless prisoners, you just have to be halfway normal."

Labels: 'war on terror', liberals, torture

Monday, May 04, 2009

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

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Obama: wise potentate? posted by Richard Seymour

Glenn Greenwald points out that Obama's position on state secrecy and torture not only adopts the most authoritarian and extreme positions of the Bush administration, but goes farther by claiming a radical kind of 'sovereign immunity' to ensure that torture victims get no redress and no one ever finds out about it. He also notes that the Department of Justice under Eric Holder now wants total immunity from wiretapping prosecutions. (Greenwald is, though, unduly pleased by the criticisms of Obama that are coming from his 'progressive' supporters. Leave it to Dennis Perrin to notice the cravenness of liberal opinion when it comes to his Highness.) In a typical irony, as Bruce Fein points out, Obama's quest for "czarlike powers" in the 'war on terror' is being resisted legally by a judicial appointee of the Bush administration. So, the Obama doctrine is coming into full focus: no one would want such powers if they didn't intend perpetual war. The administration has taken some constructive positions on Cuba, pledged to close Guantanamo (not Bagram or the secret prisons, obviously), and been slightly less eager to bait Iran than the Bush administration. Reports of differences with Israel are probably exaggerated, but among Obama's advisors are realpolitikers who think it high time the nutty little client-state had its wings clipped, so I wouldn't rule out some change there. However, the administration is doing all this because it is intent on freeing up its hand for a more aggressive policy in southern and central Asia.

For some liberals, social democrats and Greens, Afghanistan was always the 'good war'. It was the good war because it overthrew a hated dictatorship, because it deposed sectarian religious rule, because it liberated women from misogynistic terror, and because it was the proper war of revenge against 'Al Qaeda'. Of course, these excuses for imperial violence are outrageous and ignorant, hedged by simplistic notions about the sociological potency of overwhelming violence, and rooted in uninterrogated assumptions about America as a force for good in the world. Alongside the ersatz emancipationism is an eliminationist approach to designated foes: 'Al Qaeda' are 'evil' and thus must be physically destroyed, (along with tens of thousands of people who are either bombed, shot, starved to death, tortured to a pain-wracked end, or poisoned by Dyncorps). This is mindless of the way in which enemies are created when you start bombing from 20,000 feet. After all, it isn't as if this war has escalated because the Taliban has a huge standing army, or even much social weight. What is called the Taliban is a loose network of groups that are galvanising substantial sectors of the population and, as a result, making military gains. Nonetheless, this perpetual war machine has been mantled in doctrines of 'civilization' (and clashes thereof), which have experienced renewed intellectual glamour in the aughties. Even the most violent exterminationist actions are deemed plausible if what is at stake is nothing less than the future of a 'civilization'.

Today, many pro-Obama liberals are still up for it, despite the fact that the previously low-level battle for control of Afghanistan has morphed into a regional war that could take the US into direct conflict with Pakistan. Obama is dropping the handsome puppet Karzai like so much worthless stock and preparing opinion for a security-state in Afghanistan, the better to deepen the war in the south and east of the country (more US troops are being sent to these regions) and intensify the onslaught in Pakistan. Already, Obama's drones are outkilling Bush's drones, with a reported ratio of fifty dead civilians for every one dead 'Al Qaeda' target. The idea that this is just a war against some small bands of Islamist fighters is nonsense. The main social forces in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan’s provincial capital, Quetta, are hostile to the quasi-colonial rule of the Punjab elite, and to its supplications on America's behalf. The NWFP and FATA are ethnic Pashtun, largely, like much of the population across the barely existing border, in southern Afghanistan. The vast majority of those who suffered from Pakistan's own 'war on terror' were non-combatants. Still, Pakistan's elected crime families show no sign of being able to deliver what Obama wants. They cut a deal with its foes a long time ago for fear of losing much of the country, and the government is now embroiled in a bitter row that has seen Nawaz Sharif expelled from the goverment and try to place himself as a figurehead of the lawyers' movement - Sharif, of all people, who has no reason to support a genuinely independent judiciary. Now, since the US military leadership is raising hellfire about some kind of 'Al Qaeda'-led nuclear-tipped state of supreme evil emerging if things continue as they are (a complete fantasy), one expects a US-backed military coup any month now.

And why not? The US has depended on the Pakistani army for fifty years and isn't about to stop now. Ironically, it is the army and its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) that has historically built up the jihadi networks that it has recently been battling, and which remains the main source of institutional support for these outfits. It was the army that protected its Taliban clients by facilitating the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, while allowing the Talibs to retreat to its north-western territories. It is also alleged that the army has maintained and protected groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) long after their legal sell-by date in 2002. True, the Pakistani ruling class has been in a bind since 2001. Prior to that eventful year, the traditional backing for reactionary Islamist groups was highly congruent with its status as a US ally. It has been a dilemma ever since, in which billions of US dollars are at stake. The army has twice struck against the Islamists, once with the Musharraf-ordered attack on the Red Mosque, and again under US pressure with the failed 'Operation Lion Heart'. Each time it has done so, it has damaged its relationship with those jihadi groups and stimulated the insurgency. So, the army's usefulness to the US is severely compromised by its need to retain good relations with America's erstwhile foes. On the other hand, who else could the US turn to? The army remains the most powerful social force in Pakistan. It is not just a powerful security and intelligence apparatus but, as Justin Podur points out in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, a potent capitalist in its own right with control over corn flakes, real estate, cement, mineral mining, etc. The corrupt political class is no match for the military, and the civil society has only periodically been able to challenge its dominance. Short of an invasion, the Pakistani army are the only game in town.

An invasion of Pakistan, though, is not out of the question. While Obama has discounted such an approach for now, he did indicate his willingness to countenance an invasion in 2007, and he has already embraced the Bush strategy of 'preemptive warfare'. All dynamics in the present war would tend to indicate US boots on Pakistani soil and, according to the Pakistani government, unofficial incursions have already taken place. Given intense competition with Russia over those central Asian energy supplies, given the possible break-up of the NATO alliance if this war fails, and given the need for the US ruling class to shore up its global dominance as its financial system collapses and economic competitiveness takes a dive, the further militarisation of American power seems inevitable. The accumulation of executive power could be a prelude to a more ambitious phase of American expansionism than we have yet seen.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, barack obama, executive power, liberals, pakistan, torture, us economy, US imperialism

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Brief note on the function of 'political religion' posted by Richard Seymour

Following up on this 'Satanism' business...

'Political religion' is a weird thesis that, like its twin 'totalitarianism' theory, was long descredited before experiencing a revival during the 'war on terror'. (On 'totalitarianism' it is worth pointing out, as Corey Robin does, that Hannah Arendt has not been served well by her epigones. They take the more strange and least incisive of her arguments from the last third of The Origins of Totalitarianism to subsume difficult contemporary phenomena in a peasoup of pseudo-psychoanalysis.) Since the second half of 2001, there has been an academic journal devoted to disinterring this discourse. Its founder, the conservative historian Michael Burleigh, has produced several relatively popular books reheating the arguments of Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron. Burleigh, being an ideologue of the counter-revolution, has taken the opportunity to recast Jacobinism, anarchism, Marxism and Nazism as movements reconstituting Christian metaphysics and eschatology.

The basic argument is that the secularization of church and state produced a sacralization of politics resulting in the Nazism and Stalinism of the twentieth century. The 'totalitarian' movements were political religions to the extent that their total claim over the lives of subjects enjoined them to fully determine the meaning and ultimate aim of those lives. They developed belief systems, myths and rituals equivalent to those of the overthrown church. Their fetish-object was not the cross but the state. As Eric Voegelin put it: "the divine head is cut off, and the state takes the place of the world-transcendent God". For Voegelin, a Christian theologian who hated all forms of collectivism, Nazism was a "satanical" force (he literally believed that evil was a "real substance", a "force that is effective in the world"). It was, moreover, a force made possible by the "secularization of life" that accompanied the "dissolution of Western imperial unity", the emergence modern states, and of doctrines such as humanitarianism. In short, while most critics of 'totalitarianism' hold it to be an anti-modern reflux, Voegelin holds modernity itself responsible. Human experience since the Diet of Worms has been characterized by spiritual cannibalism.

Burleigh draws extensively on this argument and shares its sympathies. As a result, he covers for the behaviour of the Catholic church during WWII, and casually expedites the whole history of Christian authoritarianism, persecution, antisemitism, racism, pogroms, etc from the narrative. As the historian Neil Gregor points out, the Nazis were not exactly reinventing the wheel when they progenerated their antisemitic texts: they drew on a history of pungent Christian slanders against the Jews. But the game is really given away by his deployment of the very apocalyptic gesture that he identifies as the hallmark of 'totalitarianism'. He indulges the rather commonplace idea that a tiny band of transnational jihadis represent a threat to "western civilization". Such doom-laden nonsense was given a free ride in the months following 9/11, and I deal with some of it in Liberal Defence (buy it already!). Essentially, it is a moral and political sanction for a wide-ranging and open-ended war in defence of said "civilization" which, if it is serious about defending itself, is adjured to restore its Christian roots.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', 'war on terror', hannah arendt, nazism, political religion, stalinism

Thursday, February 26, 2009

In the gulag for reading satire posted by Richard Seymour

Binyam Mohamed was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and locked up in Kabul, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay for almost seven years because he read a satirical article on the internet.

Labels: 'war on terror', bagram, cia, guantanamo, rendition, torture