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Open Thread 2014-17
Some meta issues:
If your comment does not appear it is usually hanging in the automatic spam filter over which I have NO influence. I manually check the spam queue at least once a day and release non-spam comments falsly caught in there. It does not help when you repeatedly try to publish the same comment over and over again filling up the spam queue. It just makes it more laborious for me to clean up the queue.
Some commentators are blocked from this blog and I will continue to aggressively block those who fall in one of these categories:
- One issue folks: Everything happening in this world must be the result of the deft work of the Zionists, the British royals, the freemasons, the Jews, Islam, the Pope or who/whatever your favorite personal demon is. Sorry, the world is not that simple. If that fact is beyond your mental capacity go elsewhere. Such simpleminded themes do not help to gain knowledge but detract from the discussion of the issues at hand.
- People who use (too many) four letter words and lack general manners.
- Those who constantly attack other commentators or the proprietor of this blog. If you have a difference in opinion use arguments, not foul speech.
- People who only comment to promote another blog.
- Folks who use many many one-liner-comments thereby disrupting the flow instead of collecting their thoughts and writing one comment that fits the purpose.
Solely depending on my mood and personal judgement I may ban folks for other reasons. It is my time and money that keeps this blog up and the blocking privilege is part of the gratification. Deal with it.
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Use as open thread …
Fascism, Imperialism, and Nationalism: Some Thoughts
@bevin #94:
I recollect more than thirty years ago proposing a nationalist and a socialist future as the alternative to Thatcher’s neo-liberalism. I was of course immediately denounced as a NAZI, as if Hitler had ever introduced anything resembling socialist policies.
You seem thick-skinned enough to take it, bevin: You have gotten virtually the same treatment here by the more boorish, sadly.
Actually, there were leftwing variants of Nazism — Goebbels, oddly enough, was initially an adherent to one of the left-wing (social democratic) factions — (not so odd if one compares his early positions with those of his contemporaneous Western liberal counterparts: Edward Bernays or Walter Lippman in the US). However, all these different tendencies were subsumed into what we now know as Nazism with the inclusion of capitalist elite support as Hitler rose to power.
What was common among all the state propagandists was the acknowledgment that the population must be mobilized around some sort of “mythic narrative structure” in order to be used for ruling class purposes. Fascism uses myths of the “internal other,” and “racial purity,” as we now see in the Ukraine. These myths are used to create a societal destabilization and an emotional hysteria — kind of a Nationalist fugue — subverting, suppressing, or putting off real human needs for more immediate engineered Nationalist needs, and so, fascism must continually move forward, shark-like, or risk dying as a mobilizing force.
Fascism as an ideology, as Umberto Eco reminds us, has many aspects or properties, appearing as demonic shapeshifter as required by the situation and material and national emotional/psychological conditions.
The ideology of fascism is useful for limited Imperialist ends: In Germany, this meant the drive for “Lebensraum” — which was not totally without justification in realpolitik terms as it was the only great power at the time without a fully developed empire (having missed the “Scramble for Africa”), and there were numerous Germanic communities who had settled throughout eastern Europe. (This is not in any way meant to condone the relentless killing and ethnic cleansing of non-Germans during the expansion as moral.) The drive for a “Greater Israel” takes a very similar form and pattern.
In the Ukraine, fascism is being mobilized by the US (and Germany) to break Ukraine away from the Eurasian sphere, to split Europe irrevocably away from Asia and link it to North America — and so the virulent hatred of Russia and internal cleansing is necessary in order to activate the process of schismogenesis, first theorized by Gregory Bateson. The “mythic narrative structure” has been funded by western NGOs for decades, and its virulent far-right nationalist character is well known. It has been described and its history traced by Per Anders Rudling in his essay, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right.”
For a global imperialist drive, the mobilizing “mythic narrative structure” must be, at least on its face, universally inclusive. That point explains US imperialist ideology, which embraces immigration from every nation in the world (in order to form loyal imperialist cadrés for further foreign destabilizations), minority rights, ethnic identity rights, gay rights, artistic rights, etc. The myths revolve around American exceptionalism, democracy, freedom, liberty, a paternalistic inclusiveness, essential goodness of motive and purpose (even if execution occasionally falls somewhat below publicly stated target), and the need to help others enjoy the fruits of our civilization — r2p, liberal imperialism, etc. Human rights, free speech and “openness” are the empire’s holiest of shibboleths.
Indeed, the mobilizing US imperial ideology so privileges the discourse of human rights, that it even accords the right to corporations; similarly, it so privileges the right of free speech, that it even accords it to dollar bills (among other financial instruments), which corporations and the rich have in superabundance over the poor — thus creating an implicit hierarchy of power and privilege under the guise of universal and beneficent “rights.” This hierarchical privileging of rights creates a hidden or covert Orwellian situation: “Free Trade” denies poor countries the ability to manufacture necessary drugs and medications for its people, to provide water, power, save seeds, etc. It prevents nations from denying entry to foreign corporations, indemnifies corporations from claims of pollution, and requires nations to recompense corporations for “unrealized profits.” Actual human beings face a similar quandary: their identity rights are protected at the expense of signing away their economic rights. They are as free to starve to death or die of preventable illness, or merely to live a brief brutal existence of quiet desperation, as they are to fondle the genitals of another of the same sex. The western mantra of “Openness” undergoes a similar Orwellian transformation. Under the US-led “Washington Consensus,” nations must hierarchically privilege “openness” for corporations over people: Natural wealth and resources are to be “open” to foreign corporate exploitation and profit repatriation, while people must be “open” to the cutting of essential life-support services mandated by IMF austerity packages, like welfare, healthcare and education. It’s all equally good in the postmodern imperialist American empire when Franklin Roosevelt’s essential third freedom, “Freedom from want,” has been surreptitiously replaced with the freedom to stuff frozen chickens up your vagina or nail your nutsack to the ground in the center of a pubic square.
It is no mere accident that the word “liberalism” is employed both for the protection of human rights, and the restriction of economic rights.
Nationalism, as I have hinted in previous posts over the years, is a necessary first step, and only a first step, in the world overcoming the global “Washington Consensus” octopus strangling and killing the planet. The problem, as Aristotle and others first realized, is that all political forms have a dark side as well as a light side. Polybius’ political doctrine of Anacyclosis, or the cyclical theory of political evolution, recognized three basic forms of “benign” government — monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — which he believed to be inherently weak and unstable. These forms, he felt, tend to degenerate rapidly into the three basic forms of “malignant” government — tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob rule). According to the doctrine, the “benign” governments have the interests of all at heart, whereas “malignant” governments have the interests of a select few at heart. Thus, the problem wasn’t rule by one, the few, or the many, but rather, how to prevent that rule from degenerating away from the greater common good. The trick, therefore, in designing and instituting any more just system, is in devising ways to prevent the degeneration of the political form.
Nationalism, similarly, has a dark and a light side. We are all familiar with the dark side: fascism — national purity in some guise or form: of ethnicity, language, belief, culture; domination by national oligarchy; jingoism, war mobilization, and national expansion; and over-protectionism, going beyond the basic dictates of Import Substitution Theory until a type of stultification and self-reinforcing groupthink sets in, as in North Korea.
The light side might be theorized thusly: Proper development of a nation’s natural and human resources with the interests of all at heart and without undo closure to the outside world, concomitant with peaceful relations between nations in accordance with international law.
But what should be the mobilizing “mythic narrative structures” of a light nationalism? Or must complex societies dwell in a fugue of ideological and emotional self-justification at all in order to function? What is to induce the national elite to comply and prevent a descent into Oligarchy? Can international law be revived? These are but a few of the questions to be asked, and solutions to be devised around the problem of creating a more sustainable and just nationalism in the future than in the past.
Thus, the trick remains how to devolve from liberal globalism towards a light side Nationalism, and yet defend against the dark forces taking control, while still moving towards a more just and sustainable (and decentralized) world order in the future. If anyone is curious, Sergey Glazyev’s latest position paper, “How Not to Lose the War” has some thoughts and concrete steps on this matter in regard to Russia. But all of that, my friends, is a topic far larger than this post is meant to be.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 13 2014 3:07 utc | 141
@ JSorrentine #99:
Kudos on a particularly brilliant deconstruction of the mythic structure of the modern boogieman.
Just reading what you wrote should awaken some of the brain-dead to the absurdity of the story. But when the average Hollywood shoot-em up plot is just as absurd, the level of critical thinking around stories in our culture is pretty darn low.
*Judging from your headless/topless comment, I’m sure you are familiar with the world’s most famous tabloid headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar” , a copy of which I was proud to own for many years and brandish whenever discussions of the quality of American Journalism came up.
*As far as ISIS goes: They seem to have learned from Hezbollah and other conservative networks, as well as Iraq 1.0 and 2.0 US strategy, concerning social help networks and the provisioning of public services. So the propaganda follows a dual course: We get stories of atrocities while Mosul gets kiddie days!
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Also JSorrentine:
Glad to see you have finally come off your high horse and are not insulting everyone on the block: It really is the best way to get your message out.
I myself tend to fall somewhere between your position and bevin/guest77 over the past year. Those two encapsulate my worldview better, but most of your posts — those that have no worldview and are just information — are right on. Yes, those about the evil Zionists.
But, I do think you see things as too monocausal and simplistic. It’s good of you to make readers aware of Israeli plans, but those are just plans. Don’t you think that Hezbollah and Iran, for instance, also have plans, and that they just might conflict with Israeli ones? And that China and Russia have plans? And that Hamas has plans? And all other countries, corporations, and powerful groups? And that they all might be striving to implement their particular visions? In other words, if one believes in a single “conspiracy theory,” as they are pejoratively called, one must, ipso facto, believe in many competing “conspiracy theories.” It is good of you to enlighten us as to Israeli plans. And we all get a deeper understanding of events by cataloging ALL of the competing interests, and exposing ALL of their plans and actions to the light of day.
The flow of history is the dialectic of just that conflict of many competing interests. After all, if Israeli plans were fait accompli, then Gaza and Palestine would have been cleared by the 1970‘s and Israel would have had control of the water of the Litani by 1982. the Rockefellers developed their plans for Eugenics in the 1930s and… we’re still here! (At least lots of us.)
So, the world is not just run by 100 rich Joos. Yes, they have a ton of power these days. But, there are many competing interests. Believe it or not, the world is a pretty big place.
You remind me of when I lived and worked in the Carribean for seven years in black West Indian working class society, with no whites. Every discussion — and there were thousands along these lines — rapidly devolved into black vs. white, slaveowner vs. plantation. Once, I had the temerity to mention that there were one billion Indians and one billion Chinese. “Exactly!,” I was told, “The Indians are black, and the Chinese are white.” You would have fit in perfectly, except they would have kept reminding you that what you thought were Jews were really whites, and they would have considered you pretty slow on the uptake.
I ended up doing a reverse Michael Jackson: It took five years, but in the eyes of my co-workers and union buddies, I turned from white to black. And being a shop steward, I was definitely black in management’s eyes. It was strange moving back to the states and being treated as white.
By the way, did I mention that I was raised Jewish and my best friends on the island were Palestinians — who were the first people to educate me (well over 25 years ago) about their history. They changed my entire worldview over the course of a few years. And they did it without ever hectoring me, but by always calling me “Brother” and “Cousin” and inviting me over to their houses to eat and drink and share their lives and hear their stories. I hope someone shows the same compassion to you one day. If I can learn, slow as I am, I’m sure you can too.
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elsewhere:
“You think Arabs/Muslims are too stupid to do stuff like 9/11.”
This line has been coming up a lot lately. The airspace around Washington DC, and the Pentagon in specific, is the most protected airspace on the planet, bar none. From the time the Pentagon was built until 9-11, the US spent $15 trillion (real, not adjusted) on “defense.” What they choose to reveal publicly about the US defensive capabilities is not the half of it. Not only couldn’t Osama have done it, it is dubious that any single nation on the planet could have done it, with the exception of Russia — and nobody has accused them of 9-11. And even they could not have done it without a massive attack — not with a single civilian airliner. This point is glaringly obvious. It is embarrassing to have to even state it.
Remember when a small private plane hit the Clinton White House? What did that mean? You try it and you won’t get within one mile of the White House. There are g-to-a weapons on the roof of the White House. Who let that plane through? What was the message from the deep state to Clinton? What was the relationship between that event and 9-11?
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In Memoriam
It was around midnight on a muggy and rainy summer night, in the mid to late 1980s. My great uncle was in town and he invited me up to visit. In his day, he had been a top Hollywood insider. Born a few years after 1900, he was still a very powerful and handsome man. He still skied the black diamond slopes every winter. And that night he had an attractive girl, about the same age as I was, young twenties, staying with him — no questions asked. Anyway, he blew my mind that evening with inside stories about Hollywood, and then even more so with inside stories about my own family, including my father.
I was in a deep reverie as I left the apartment where he was staying — about ten blocks south of New York’s Columbia University on West End Avenue — and waited to hail a cab back home to the Village. I waited for about fifteen minutes until I was completely soaked when I finally spotted a free cab barreling down the avenue. Just as I was hailing the cab, a man exited an apartment building on the far side of the street and quickly hailed the same cab. The cabdriver, who was veering towards me, a drowned sewer rat, saw the other man, dry, well dressed and respectable looking — and confused about what to do, just screeched to a stop in center of the street. We both raced to claim the cab first and jumped in opposite doors at the same time. Being an aggressive New Yorker, I was about to shout the guy down, when I looked and saw it was Robin Williams.
“Hey you’re…”
“Where are you goin’ to, my lad,” He said in his best Irish brogue character voice.
“Well, the West Village.”
“Good, I’m going to SoHo. What d’you say we don’t share the ride down, then?”
“OK.”
It was one of those rainy New York nights where one would have been very content to just ease back into the cushioning, and silently watch the shimmering glow of the passing shoplights through the rivulets of water running down the windows, while lost in deep contemplation.
But that was not to be.
Instead, he launched into a non-stop staccato attack, his voice as quick as I could hear the words, moving from character to character, language to language, skit to skit, back and forth seamlessly, without missing a beat, or seeming to need to breathe. He kept an ever-growing set of dialogues going, adding, weaving, moving back and forth in space and time, subject and object, deftly painting a shimmering curtain of sound and meaning, like some sort of possessed jazz solo. I thought of myself as pretty quick, but I was aware that I was lucky to be catching perhaps half the meaning of what was being slung my way. He had me laughing until it hurt, and the cabbie barely able to stay in his lane. When either the cabbie or I managed to get a word out, he picked up from what we were saying, including it in his riff and kept right on going.
The whole experience — the tight backseat of the cab, his face a foot or two from mine so close I could smell his cologne, our bodies bouncing up and down, our breath steaming and the windows fogging, his magically wise and playful blue elfin eyes glinting back at me in the reflected light of neon signs passing by, the cab violently careering over potholes on its way down the dark avenue — felt dreamlike and other-worldly. We both had some sort of a buzz going before we entered the cab, but for me, this was just taking it to another level: like some sort of Star Trek mind-meld with the Charlie Parker of words at 77 RPM.
Eventually, the cab slowed to a low rumble over the cobblestones of Greenwich Village, and when we reached my place, at the corner of West 12th and West 4th streets (Yes, they meet at right angles, go figure!) he was still going strong. I imagine he could have kept going like that for hours, perhaps. I pushed a crumbled ten dollar bill in his hand and bid him goodnight and godspeed. He, of course, answered back in character.
As I walked to my doorway, I thought, “What a talent!”
And then, “How sad… Doesn’t he know how to relax and just be himself?”
We are each trapped deep in our own private hells. It can be inescapable and overwhelming.
We forget that every one else, high and low, faces that same pain.
We forget that every second of that pain, empty and unbearable as it is, is also a miracle — a precious gift seeping through our fingers, never, ever, to return.
Godspeed, Robin Williams!
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juannie:
Don’t know commands in German, but surely you are familiar with clicker training? I have had many excellent experiences with training/retraining old and abused animals with their methodology. The clicker method allows the animal to be very interactive, and if you do it right, once they catch on, allows them to feel that they are training you! Really. Also, Karen Pryor, the developer of the technique, is one of my absolute heroes in this world. And her book, “Lads Before the Wind,” is great reading for any animal lover. Using the technique, I had my cats trained in over twenty five commands, agility training, kayaking, swimming, and able to play three card monte.
Let us know how you progress. Sadly, I just lost my last beloved after twenty years. A cat, he hiked with me like a dog, 14 hours — 6 miles a day, no problem, the rest in his bag over my shoulder watching every inch of the path. He knew over 500 miles of trails, and would remember trails from 5 or more years ago. When this mad, human world became too painful for us, after Fukushima, we left the hopelessness of civilization and escaped to the real world of nature together to rest our souls. My buddy. There is nothing like the true pure love of an animal. Good Luck!
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And finally….
Since many here are talking about moderation policies, I will gently chime in.
Sadly, if you give many good people enough rope to hang themselves, they will. And then all you are left with is the memory of a voice you have lost from the conversation at, what is arguably, the best bar in the universe.
Some moderation is definitely preferable to what seems to amount to a policy of letting too much leash out and then jerking it back violently.
Some couldn’t take the endless vitriolic personal invective, and left, like Don Bacon.
Some, without moderation or a clear roadmap of social expectations, get like over-heated kids, and when you ask them to simmer down, they simply can’t, like Rowan Berkeley, Bot Tak, Mr. Pragma. If you don’t housetrain this type early, they forget they are guests, believing it to be their own house.
Here are two links from Paul Graham that I have found helpful — one, I believe from this blog — which could be posted along the sidepanel as guidelines to staying within social bounds, and more importantly, to raising the level of argumentation a notch or two.
How To Disagree
Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement
The two lowest levels, name-calling and ad hominem, should be grounds for at least temporary suspension after two warnings. Other levels, once posters are familiar with the schema, can be gently pointed out.
Well, that’s my tip to the bartender tonight.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 13 2014 7:43 utc | 153
Malooga @141
There’s nothing much in your post that I can disagree with.
The point that I am trying to make is that fascism has now become, as it always promised to do when it was the way that colonies were ruled, the ruling ideology. And all that stuff designed to appeal to the white working class- developed from social imperialism in Europe and segregation/racism in the US- is no longer important to it. There is still plenty of that social darwinism about, no end to theories combining cod genetics with snobbery into a bell curved science, but there is nothing new about it. Nor was there is Erasmus Darwin’s day, it’s just “Here’s tae us! None like us.”
And, of course, it is the belief/fear which underlies the view that one group or another is so much smarter than we, or the rest of humanity, are that, unless we are eternally vigilant they will enslave us-if they haven’t already done so…
But that has no enduring importance, nor do coloured shirts or logos taken from sanskrit. The fascism of the thirties was a form of imperialism envy, found particularly in European states with few or no colonies, grafted on to the fears of the bourgeoisie, which was more than happy to promote the idea (a variant of the Methodists’ Pie in the Sky) that 20 hectare farms in Libya, or Ukraine or Palestine awaited workers ready to desert socialism and throw in their lot with, their racial brothers, the exploiters. After all, before Libya there had been Kansas, Manitoba, the purple plains behind the River Plate and much much more, in the southern hemisphere.
The basis of modern socialist movements was the revulsion of a dispossessed peasantry, in England against the loss of autonomy that losing land and commons rights and being thrown naked into the Labour Market meant. Hence the Chartists’ Land Scheme and, later on in the C19th the plan, sponsored by those social imperialists from Birmingham (not Ala) led by Chamberlain and Jesse Collings, for smallholdings-two acres and a cow. A variant on the 40 acres and a mule, others thrown onto the labour market yearned after.
So I see fascism as being just an exotic episode in a history of the evolution of the Empire into a global capitalist system which has reached the limits of expansion and can only continue to grow by turning inwards and devouring humanity. Any reading of John Stuart Mill shows that liberalism is merely a precursor to fascism and that neither (and not Mill, himself, either) could exist without imperialism.
And not even the most depraved neo-nazis in Ukraine could exceed the brutality of the NSA directed, US financed Death Squads which have been wandering around the world since the late 1940s. If you come to think about it Svoboda deserves recognition for its frankness in calling its think Tank “The Joseph Goebbels Institute..” I’m sure its work fits right into the mainstream.
If you take the view that fascism is a variant of imperialism you see that there is good reason to examine the early opposition to imperialism and to both urbanisation and industrialism which was one of the foundations of the socialist tradition, one US form of which was Populism. One which is often forgotten by those who see little besides Marx, the Fabians and variations of those schools.
They were right about one, very important, thing which is that there is no cure for any of those three scourges on its own and that to overthrow capitalism must also involve taking both industrialism and urbanisation in hand, because if we do not it is them which will finish off the planet.
And it is one of the curious but significant features (which goes some way to explain the political history of Greens) of fascism that, among its appeal to conservatives was its affection for organic agriculture, traditional non industrial techniques and suspicion of labour saving devices, including pesticides and petroleum fueled machinery.
Of course the most important characteristic of fascism is its utter dishonesty and lack of principles, its demagogy and opportunism, which arise because, in the final analysis, it is concerned only with the power of a ruling class and regards any more ideology as little more than window dressing for the hoi poloi’s delectation. But that doesn’t matter in the sense that much of the appeal of fascism to the masses it needs, if not to win over at least to divide, lies in such conservative policies as organic agriculture, agrarianism, returning to the land, combating pollution and the rest of a long laundry list, much of which few here would take exception to.
And those who would, the positivists, progressives with their faith in industrialisation and acceptance of proletarianisation, those who relish Marx’s sneer at the “idiocy of rural life” are as much the heralds of dystopias as the capitalists themselves.
Nice story about Robin Williams, incidentally. I had been wondering what all the fuss was about, nobody cared that much about Tony Hancock.
Posted by: bevin | Aug 13 2014 17:46 utc | 181
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