Rolling Stone eh! takes me back to stories of anti vietnam resistance, of draftees being beaten to death at boot camp and a sense that the momentum was going our way.
The Rendon story pretty neatly encapsulates what happened. This lowlife started his career working for George McGovern and later on Jimmy Carter. He quotes HST when addressing a a gathering of militarist mainchancers!
I don’t want to put MoA back on a downward spiral but sometimes it really feels like we screwed the pooch (us old farts that is).
Still the killing in Iraq is probably going to end sooner rather than later.
Interestingly there was a lobbyist on TV here the other day who had just completed a survey of of the make up of the post-election NZ house of reps.
He confirmed it was far more diverse than the pre proportional representation days ie many more women, Maori, people of races other than middle aged middle class male, but he also pointed out that in the four years since the last survey the median age of the politicians had increased by over 3 years.
IE they are all getting older. And this is a good thing because if those of us that can cast their minds back to the 60’s and 70’s we will remember that the world appeared to be run by braindead world war 2 veterans (please don’t get up in arms about the braindead bit cause not all of that generation were braindead by any means just the bulk of those with their hands on the levers). Then a change occured and the decision makers became exponentially younger overnight.
No they didn’t do everything that should have been done by any means but they did bring a new perspective to some very old problems.
This will happen again very soon and people who care about who these new faces are going to be are much more likely to be able to assist positive change if they remember the lessons of the last major generational change.
In some ways I’m lucky to have had my children considerably later than my peers because I had witnessed in others that some young people will always react against the status quo and raising them with strict liberal views (no that isn’t oxymoronic. I suspect many know what I mean) can have a drastically bad effect when young people assert their individuality.
Witness the current anti political correctness backlash much of which is well founded but the baby is going out with the bathwater.
I remember being out on the town in London in the mid to late 70’s and a soon to be famous musician/poseur was there extremely drunk and angry. He had been raised on some british commune by parents who had spent more time being intoxicated than parenting. His reaction? Take different intoxicants and ‘kill hippies’
Some of the latter were also out on the town and with a warcry of “Where were you in the summer of 67! he swung a chair over one of the rotund peaceniks head and then kicked the other one in the groin.
Extreme yes and pretty uncommon but the underlying emotions are extant in many of the generation that followed behind the baby boomers.
I suspect that one of the triggers for the needless slaughter of Iraqis, central americans, africans and all their fellow oppressed is that feeling of powerlessness that the takeover by baby boomers engendered in the smaller generation which followed.
So with a bit of luck the next bulge which will be representative of the people who were meant to be ‘liberated by globalism’, marketed at by the selfish will have a lot more media savvy than the ‘sheeple’. Being a much less racially homogenous grouping, they should be able to see things from more perspectives.
Hannah I like the concept of compiling a ‘register’ of the complicit as long as we remember that nomination doesn’t mean conviction and sentence.
In other words it IS important to keep track of these assholes because we already know that when the ordure hits the ventilator they will be scrambling for cover. Despite the lies and prevarications those mainchancers will offer then, it is vital that their purported crimes be scrutinised objectively and that the prime objective is prevention of a recurrence rather than revenge or ‘rightness’.
We all know why especially when you consider that those who “but for the grace of god should be with them” are likely to be the most vituperative in their ‘lust for justice’.
What would be the best method? Some sort of formal tactic such as a blog with a forum where nominations and basic evidence can be presented perhaps or should we hold the nominees close to the chest and only offer them up when the time is right.
There are positives with both techniques but as I consider the mechanics I do have the concerns that many other MoA barflies will also share. Sitting in judgement on others is corrupting of the self and dangerous for the innocent.
Has anyone studied the workings and outcome of Tutu’s truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa?
We should definitely consider that even the suggestion that a particular person may find themselves in more poop than a shithouse rat could get them to pull their horns in and result in some calamities not happening.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 18 2005 22:07 utc | 103

More casuistic are the arguments made in defense of the belief a few indictments will humble power. I’m arguing against casuistry, in the most literal way.
To have a sense of the scope of the problem, see how the interests of the chinese communist party are bound up w/ the interests of “washington.” 800 billion dollar “current accounts deficit” financed by chinese capital, and paid for by the sweat of chinese labor. It works well for capitalists, all around. I’m no longer convinced, as are leftists like David Harvey, the Iraq War disaccommodates Russian or even Chinese capitalists. They’re all accomplices in accumulation. They’re not about to start shooting each other. In this sense, the analog of German nationalism and assent to war in the interest of preserving regional concentrations of accumulation is less appropriate.
But, I’m not completely sure about this thesis, though I think it has merit. Globalization is concentrating capital in different ways, and the older “competition among many capitals” invoking the ambition of “empire” seems out of step w/ what is happening now.

Posted by: slothrop | Nov 18 2005 23:33 utc | 105

@ Debs
As usual, you’ve said it much better than I and brought
up important points about “sitting in judgment”, although of course that’s what we do here day in and day out. We agree (with Outrage and RGiap) that some things need to be said again and again. As both Orwell and Rendon understand very well the choice of language, i.e. lexicon, and the appropriate forum is an essential aspect of “delivering the message”. Simple words like “lie”, “treason”, “theft” and “torture” are to be preferred to their equivalents in a more aulic register.
As to the appropriate forum I am not at all sure, but I would like to see this “meme” (flagrant media whores as potentially subject to war crime tribunals) enter the koiné
of the antiwar community, and from there enter into the consciousness of a broader public. It’s really not such an outlandish notion.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 19 2005 7:04 utc | 107

Thanks dan, ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ has some eurdite
posts. Often, I forget to check it…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 19 2005 9:22 utc | 109

slothrop,
Are you thinking that capital (& accumulation) can be seen as independent or a-priori to any specific cultural / political grounding? That the current Chinese communist government is, in effect, using communism not unlike the current US government might be using “the spread of democracy” or religion to further the demands of capital. Might capital(accumulation) then have to take refuge as an innate human character as opposed to a function ( and a devient one) of other innate characteristics? Sounds like some kind of universal fascism would be the realization of such a notion. If so, why do people have to be deluded into such an enterprise when survility would seem to be the natural resultant (state) — unless, of course the deluding is so good that it seems like fun — and we are all living in living Los Vegas, but don’t know it.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 19 2005 10:09 utc | 111

@anna missed
…– and we are all living in living Los Vegas, but don’t know it.
Perhaps, your words are more true than you realize:
BushFellas: Casino Jack & the Republican Thuggees

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 19 2005 14:06 utc | 113

Are you thinking that capital (& accumulation) can be seen as independent or a-priori to any specific cultural / political grounding?

This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.–German Ideology.

Debord:

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

As I understand it, in this early Marx, there is a presumed opposition of idea/matter, realm of necessity/realm of freedom, and: production determines consciousness. By the time we arrive at the door of the situationists, really via Marx’s ingenious elaboration of the relation of consciousness and commodities in “the fetish of the commodity,” the notion of material determinism is no longer opposed by something else–the mystification of “choice,” of self-determination, continuously reproduces and legitimates the dominant mode of production. This is Debord’s “Spectacle.” Example: one doesn’t really “demand” an SUV. Preferences are created from which one “chooses.” I don’t have to say what everyone knows: these preferences become our only resource of “freedom.”
Given this thorough reification, what Horkheimer & Adorno called “the administered life,” it is possible to answer your question about a priori determinations of even the souls of communist aparatchiks. Late Capitalism, among other things, is characterized by the increasing mobility of capital to find cheap labor and extract surplus value. Labor mobility is confined to those parts of the world in which the cost of labor requires “competitive adjustment.” This globalization of the mode of production has created, determined, a capitalist class decreasingly limited in action by strictly nationalist ambition, but guided as ever by the relentless accumulation of capital made possible by the swift exploitation of cheap labor anywhere, anytime. One might say the “spectacle,” as the totalizing experience of globalized capitalist social relations, determines the behavior of bespeckled postmodern chinese communist mandarins in exactly the same way it determines the “needs” of fat men who watch those stupid poker shows on espn.
I’m not, btw, down w/ the totalizing views of some of these western marxists. Kant isn’t dispatched. And, in another sense, the ways in which globalization deligitimates “the National” is good for the world’s workers who can now confront all capitalists without the shame of lacking patriotism.

Posted by: slothrop | Nov 19 2005 16:36 utc | 115

i would suggest two films which tell us a great deal about humanity & the nature of forgettin inherent in capital & its highest stage imperialism :
salo – pier paolo pasolini
fox a his friends – r w fassbinder
it tells you all you need to know about how we end up with abu ghraib & napalm

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 19 2005 18:48 utc | 117