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Written by Chris Floyd
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Tuesday, 09 April 2013 10:28 |
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As the unfortunate atoms that were so cruelly knitted into the malevolent form of Maggie Thatcher now enjoy their sudden liberation, the London Review of Books unearths an unlikely prophet of old who clearly foresaw the dangers of mythologizing "Thatcherism" and allowing it to establish the framework for all future politics. This insightful figure, writing boldly in the name of all "radical, progressive spirits" seeking a better world, also perceptively identified the historical and geophysical fluke -- a situation that had nothing at all to do with Thatcher's rapacious, hard-hearted and wrong-headed policies -- which temporarily sustained the illusion that it was her economic "reforms" that "restored prosperity" to Britain.
As the LRB's Thomas Jones notes in the piece, how different the world might be today if this prophet himself had become prime minister! Surely he would never have succumbed to the mythology of Thatcherism, including its cynical, murderous penchant for totally unnecessary wars, but would have worked tirelessly to reverse its foul effects, which are still with us, and growing worse, today. O for what might have been!
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Saturday, 30 March 2013 00:31 |
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As millions around the world mark the death of a god this weekend, let us add our voice to the chorus on this theme with a little number laid down back in ancient times (i.e., the last decade): End Times.
***
In other news, I am off to the frozen north of these islands for a bit, where I will be locked in tight and out of range, as the saying goes. In the interim, here is the latest column I did for Counterpunch Magazine. More later, if the fates allow.
THIS IS NOT THE AGE OF DEFEAT
This is the age of loss, not the age of defeat.
Drone strikes, kill lists, murderers and torturers approved for high office. Austerity for the poor, record profits for the rich. Truthtellers shackled, liars lauded, ignorance exalted, cruelty and callousness gilded with righteous piety. Everywhere, goodness is driven to its knees, and this brutality is not decried but celebrated.
As in that age of iron that lowered over our forbears during dark night of the Thirties, you see faces once thought kind and kindred turn suddenly feral. Fear is behind it, but not just fear: also a self-hatred for what fear has turned them into, a self-hatred that cannot be borne and so is turned outward, thrown outward, into harsh projections of hatefulness, violence and desolation.
The avid embrace of what was once denounced, or the sad but “savvy” acceptance of the “lesser evil”: this is what we see at every turn today among ourselves, among those we thought were our own, and sometimes, maybe – when the lowering is darkest, heaviest – in mirrors as we pass. When the lowering is darkest, when the soul is lost. In them. In us.
This is the age of loss – but it is not the age of defeat.
What do you think goodness is? Some commodity, a material substance that can be wasted utterly, atomized, made inert? Do you think it is a thing, that can be destroyed, organic matter that can die? Do you think it is an idea that can lose its force, its coherence, its context, can be rendered quaint or antiquated by time’s passing, or by any suppression or negation? What do you think goodness is? Goodness is like fire: it is a process not an entity, not even a mental entity: it is process, it is relation, it exists only in the moment of its enacting, in the moment of ignition, of relation, where matter and energy become one, become nothing, become all.
Goodness is like fire, but it is not fire, because the matter it feeds upon is existence itself: inexhaustible, in all of its uncountable coalescences of innumerable elements – right down to the quantum switchings in the invisible cores: rising, decaying, recombining, rising again, decaying, recombining, on and on, in every direction, at every level, until the end of whatever time is, if whatever time is has an end.
Fearful, damaged creatures rule us. It is because they are more fearful and damaged than we are that they want to rule, that they aren’t content with mere images of projected self-hatred (like so many of their sycophants and followers). No, they must have the viscera in their hands, smell the overpowering stench of death, hear the wail of suffering, see the damage, the destroyed body that is the image of their own soul. They think that in this way what is fearful and damaged inside them will be expelled. But of course, the opposite is true; the hateful damage is only increased, exponentially, the rot grows deeper and deeper inside them.
This is what our politics is, this is what power is: the maniacal attempt to overcome relation -- to blot it out, stop the endless process, put out the fire, and impose a deadened stasis on the reality that pains them so.
But this is impossible to do, because the flame of reality cannot be extinguished. Individual points of consciousness can be destroyed – an abysmal, irreplaceable, inconsolable loss – but not the always-changing, rising, falling, recombining process that is reality. What do you think goodness is? Goodness is reality, it is Being itself. Evil is the attempt to quell reality, to quell goodness, to stop it, arrest it, indefinitely detain it, to beat it, terrorize it into submission, to assassinate it, sequester it, to make it go away somehow and stop reflecting back to us the damaged thing we have become.
But this cannot be done. It cannot be done. Goodness can lose, but it cannot be defeated. It can be balked, but it cannot be quelled. In every single moment of existence, the choice for goodness is there. Every single moment – the choice. And you can make it at any point, you can begin the process of accepting, enacting, igniting goodness at any point, even the darkest and most degraded.
Sometimes we don’t have the strength, of course. Sometimes we don’t know what’s working on us, turning us away from reality, the process, the flame, drawing us down into hatefulness, into the dead world of projection. Sometimes we know, but can’t control these forces. As I once wrote elsewhere (nothing new under the sun), “moments will be lost, moments will be won; this is the imperishable way.” This is the endless task of consciousness, of being alive in reality.
(And “goodness” here does not mean “goodiness” or righteousness or any kind of bloodless, lifeless thing. Goodness is the impulse or action that moves in relation, the impulse or action that does not abstract, exploit, dehumanize the other, does not solidify them, but moves, flows in empathetic relation to them. You can have a hell of a good time in that kind of flow.)
In any given age, the lowering clouds can bear down more heavily than in others. Ours is indeed a very hard age, another age of iron. It is an age of loss, of grievous loss – but it is not the age of defeat. Reality remains, the process goes on, the choice for goodness is always – always – there, no matter what.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Thursday, 16 July 2009 10:26 |
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You want to climb to the top of this seething pit,
You got to walk and talk real nice.
But the secret price of power here is
Human sacrifice.
Yesterday we wrote about the sudden-onset amnesia of our media-political class concerning the officially confirmed operations of American death squads. As we noted, official Washington is in a minor flutter at the moment over reports that Dick Cheney ordered and then concealed the existence of a planned program of targeted assassinations -- a program which was supposedly never implemented and was then supposedly cancelled by Obama CIA chief Leon Panetta. We merely pointed out the well-known fact -- supported by copious reportage in mainstream journals in the past eight years, not to mention proud public admissions by top government officials, including the president -- that the CIA (and other agents of the United States government) had indeed been murdering people in "extrajudicial assassinations" throughout the Bush Administration.
I concentrated on state murder during the Bush years because that is the ostensible focus of the current, manufactured controversy over the alleged existence of one allegedly non-operational program. However, as Jeremy Scahill points out, the Bush-Cheney murder racket was not created ex nihilo, but was a continuation and refinement of murder programs initiated by Bill Clinton. Scahill also makes the pertinent observation that "extrajudicial assassination" -- known quaintly in the old days as murder most foul -- is continuing unabated under Barack Obama.
The deep-dyed complicity of Democratic leaders, executive and congressional, in official murder sprees is the main reason we will never see a genuine investigation of America's death squads, as Scahill points out. Imperial crime is thoroughly bipartisan; neither faction dares push too far in such matters, because both are smeared and caked with blood.
Scahill's piece should be read in its entirety, but here are a few choice bits:
The fact is that many of Bush’s worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping...
As [the Democrats now pretending to be scandalized by the recent Cheney allegations] well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting "high value targets." As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, "The CIA runs drones and targets al-Qaeda safe houses all the time." Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.
...It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration’s policy on assassination and ran with it — albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.
Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan "terrorist" in Bosnia, saying, "American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 ‘lethal finding’ signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists." A former senior Clinton official speaking shortly after 9/11 called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying "We have a war on drugs, too, but we don’t kill drug lords." But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, "we have proxies who do."
...The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations. ... Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other "al-Qaeda leaders." That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton’s signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W. Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president. Under Clinton, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings stating that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to "military targets" or "to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense," according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Ghost Wars.
Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration’s "war on terror" targeted assassination policy, saying on NBC News, "The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn’t apply to terrorists." That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban. Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO airstrike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister, Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN’s "Larry King Live." Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.
Clinton also publicly acknowledged his own administration’s attempt to assassinate bin Laden. "I worked hard to try to kill him," Clinton said. "I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since." Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 "lethal finding," U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill bin Laden. "There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close," Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden’s life taken by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).
As Coll observed of the Clinton policy: "Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest."
Scahill has much more on the macabre history -- and the reeking hypocrisy -- behind the current "controversy.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Sunday, 12 July 2009 20:56 |
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As we noted a few days ago, Israel's creation of a "Warsaw Ghetto" in Gaza continues apace, using control of the food supply as a primary weapon against the civilian population. Haaretz takes up the case again in a new story:
Every time Gazans sit down for a meal, they face a depressing reality. The selection of foods available to them is dictated almost entirely by a harsh policy imposed by the Israeli government, which, as of late, has even refused to allow such innocuous-seeming foods as pumpkins, pasta or beans to cross the border.
The goal behind Israel's tight control of Gazans' dietary regime is definitely not improving their health. Rather, the government argues that allowing "luxury" foods into Gaza would only add to the popularity of Hamas' leaders, enabling them to better feed their constituency. But, in the eyes of many observers, Israel's policy of limiting foods that enter the Strip is almost tantamount to starvation, and comes dangerously close to collective punishment, both of which are not only illegal and immoral methods to use in pursuit of Israeli security, but also do little to improve that security.
It is in fact, in law, in truth and in reality collective punishment, not just "dangerously close" to it. It is an all-out, astonishing brazen war crime -- a clear echo of Nazi policies on provisioning the Jewish ghettos in Poland after the Germans conquered the country. But let's move on:
Indeed, what long-term Israeli interest is served by having pregnant women and children suffer anemia, which causes well-documented damage to fetal and juvenile development? Limiting their access to iron does not improve Israeli security. Rather, it constitutes a gross violation of our own basic human values and the morality of Israeli society.
Can the experts please explain: Why does the Health Ministry recommendation for the diet of Israeli infants and toddlers - "soft fruit such as bananas and avocado, cooked chicken and beef, and cheese cubes" - not apply to Palestinian children? These particular items are all strictly forbidden from entering Gaza, while rice and a limited selection of meat and produce are the only food items in fact allowed to enter.
Several months ago, ministry officials approached the United Nations to consult with them about their dietary plan for the Gaza Strip. The UN officials - as one might guess - politely told them to go to hell, refusing to have anything to do with such a policy. The Israelis then turned to a Health Ministry dietician, whose advice might have led to the present policy according to which, as Israeli officials have stated, "the minimal requirements for the sustenance of Gaza Strip residents are being observed without inflicting a humanitarian disaster."
The participation of medical experts in drawing up the menus for Palestinians in Gaza - if they knew what policy their advice would help produce - is a grave violation of medical ethics.
What the Israelis are doing in Gaza is precisely what the Americans and British did for years in Iraq: not an open genocide, with machine-gun squads and extermination camps, but the deliberate degradation of a people, seeking to cripple not only their political, military and economic power, but also the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social development of future generations. Every expert in child development will tell you how vitally important proper nutrition -- not to mention a stable, secure environment -- is to the development of a child's body and personality. And Nazi experts of yore could have told us how the social, emotional and psychological functioning of adults can also be degraded and destroyed by prolonged captivity in harsh, humiliating conditions of constant fear and incessant hunger. The Nazis could tell us this because they practiced it against the Jews of Europe.
This kind of degradation is what the Anglo-American elites inflicted on Iraqis before the 2003 invasion-- and they are still inflicting on them each and every day of the continuing occupation of the broken land, as the Washington Post reports. Israel, having less ground to cover and fewer captives to degrade, are able to act with even greater intensity and deliberation in Gaza than their Western mentors' pre-war strangulation of Iraq.
And of course the United States is very much a full partner in the ghettoization of Gaza. The deliberate, scientific calibration of cruelty being applied there by the Israelis would not be taking place without the indispensible financial and material support -- and political cover -- that the United States provides to Israel. The degradation of the people of Gaza -- and above all, the children of Gaza -- goes on because the administration of President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress of the United States do not want to stop it.
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