George Monbiot takes up a theme we dealt with here the other day: the centrality of the Pentagon war machine -- and its attendant corporate war profiteers -- in American policy and politics today.
Monbiot's specific subject is the U.S. "missile defense system" -- the greatest boondoggle in human history, and an endless fount of corruption for decades. But he also provides an excellent general description of America's degraded, dysfunctional state, which is never on more naked display than during the quadrennial freak show of a presidential campaign:
If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.
I'm afraid this will be the chief question of interest to the next administration as well. As for "missile defense" -- which is now playing a starring role in the new Cold War being avidly fomented by America's bipartisan political elite - Monbiot is worth quoting at length:
The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing....All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn't have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.
This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile's susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.
Monbiot then gets to the corroded heart of the matter: scratch, geetus, moolah, long green. As he notes, the Pentagon and its willing enablers on both sides of the political aisle have come up with a truly artistic budgetary innovation to keep golden goose a-laying: "spiral development." From Monbiot:
The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government's usual accounting standards. It's called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.
Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that "the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation". Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars' worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.
So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn't work.
US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.
Monbiot also points out the obvious: the nation must be kept in a constant welter of fear and indignation in order to keep the pork flowing:
To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets.
Yes, there's nothing inherently American about fearmongering and corruption. The Kremlin knows full well that the missile defense system which Bush is installing in Poland doesn't work. But it looks threatening, and is a handy bogey-man to shake at the Russian people. Then again, the missile base is just a beachhead for the coming horde of NATO forces that will soon be bristling on Russia's border, so the Kremlin's alarm at the placement is not just rabble-rousing. And of course, there is also the fact that the missile base could easily accomodate offensive weapons as well as the boondoggled duds. The threat to Russia from U.S. missiles and NATO encroachments is considerably more real and substantial than the idea that Russia poses any kind of genuine threat to America.
To be sure, Russia, and China, do pose a genuine threat to the American elite's idiotic, arrogant agenda of forcing its will on the entire world. Thus the frothing nonsense and belligerent posturing -- and murderous military adventures -- of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment will go on. But as we've often noted here before, none of this has anything to do with the genuine interests or well-being or security of the American people. That is just not "a question of interest" to our moneyed elites and our ludicrous, "purpose-driven" politicians.
An ex-Hitler Youth certainly knows a thing or two about fascism -- so when Pope Benedict XVI weighed in with a warning about the resurgent state-backed racism and repression in the birthplace of the pernicious right-wing doctrine last Sunday, it provoked a firestorm in Italian politics.
As we have noted here earlier, that ever-indictable oligarch, Silvio Berlusconi, is back in power once again, and once again he is leading a coalition of corporate cronies, rabid nationalists and factions that proudly proclaim their descent from Benito Mussolini's original fascist party. This time around -- in the brave new post-9/11 world, where Western "democracies" no longer have to disguise their authoritarian tendencies but instead boldly embrace lawless "unitary executive" powers and police-state tactics -- the balding, preening ass of Rome is stepping out in his true colors: basic blackshirt.
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country....
Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. [More on the Camorra's increasing symbiosis with the state here.] The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."
Berlusconi and his neo-fascists routinely make great shows of their deep Catholic piety. (Thank God religion is not cynically exploited in American politics!) But now the Pope -- who as young Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth then served briefly in the armed forces of Nazi Germany, apparently in a non-combatant role -- has thrown his weight behind a campaign by Italy's top Catholic weekly, Famiglia Cristiana. The Guardian has the story:
In an editorial on Friday, condemning recent government moves against immigrants and Roma, the magazine said it was to be hoped fascism was not "resurfacing in our country under another guise". The jibe outraged Berlusconi's supporters, many of whom are themselves pious Catholics.
The leader of his parliamentary group in the upper house, Maurizio Gasparri, announced he would personally sue the priest who is Famiglia Cristiana's editor while the junior minister with responsibility for family affairs, Carlo Giovanardi, said the magazine was "possessed by ideological malice".
At first Vatican spokemen tried to soothe the troubled waters with a statement that the magazine did not speak for the Pope. But two days later, Herr Ratzinger delivered an address that clearly backed the magazine's message:
Silvio Berlusconi's government was today engaged in a vigorous damage limitation exercise after Pope Benedict appeared to lend his immense moral authority to speculation that Italy was in danger of returning to fascism under the tycoon's hardline, rightwing leadership.
In his customary midday Sunday address, the pontiff expressed concern at "recent examples of racism" and reminded Catholics it was their duty to steer others in society away from "racism, intolerance and [the] exclusion [of others]"....The pope's comments were interpreted by Berlusconi's critics as a signal that the Vatican was not climbing down or distancing itself from Famiglia Cristiana's interpretation.
Benedict cited in his address the story from Matthew's gospel of Jesus's encounter with a pagan woman and how he rose above his initial misgivings to perform a miracle for her daughter.
The pope said: "One of humanity's great conquests is indeed the overcoming of racism. Unfortunately, however, there are new and worrying examples of this in various countries, often linked to social and economic problems that nonetheless can never justify contempt or racial discrimination."
The paper notes a further irony. The Vatican -- led by perhaps the most conservative pope in the last century, a man who once headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once better known as the Inquisition) -- has mounted a much stronger resistance to Berlusconi's blackshirtism than the political opposition:
So far, church leaders have been far more outspoken in their criticism of the government's policies than Italy's main, centre-left opposition party. Earlier this month, they succeeded in blocking an attempt by the mayor of Rome to pass a measure - seemingly aimed at Gypsies - that banned people from rummaging in garbage containers. In June, Famiglia Cristiana said a government plan to take the fingerprints of Roma children was "indecent".
God knows, one hates to agree with Herr Ratzinger about anything. As The Times noted shortly before his election in 2005: "His condemnations are legion — of women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an 'objective disorder.'" Of course, Ratzinger is not actually any more hardline and draconian than his predecessor, the media celebrity John Paul II -- after all, it was JP2 who installed Ratzinger as the enforcer of the faith in 1981 and backed his strictures right down the line.
But the Pope's intervention on behalf of the scapegoats of crony capitalism -- not only in Italy, but around the world, where corrupt and greedy elites increasingly try to hide the ruin they have made of their own nations by pointing the finger at Evil Others -- is most welcome.
When it comes to determining the true thrust and implication of world events, the old adage is still valid: "Follow the money."
The lust for long green is not the sole determinant of state policies, of course. For example, there are also the psychosexual anxieties of blustering elites, the soul-corroding pathology of political ambition, the ignorance and arrogance of the powerful and the privileged, the herd instinct that can drive whole populations into self-deluding frenzies of nationalistic fervor -- all kinds of factors in the mix. But money is never not in the center of things.
This is especially true in systems where war and rumors of war have become the foundation of the national economy. This is the ultimate condition of every empire (or rather the penultimate position; the ultimate position is the inevitable decline and fall). And the United States, with its globe-spanning military empire, is no exception. Here we have a nation that has stripped its own industrial base, brutally neglected its educational system, allowed its physical infrastructure to rot, and driven its small-holding farmers from the land, dispossessing its own citizens and degrading their communities, all for the short-term profit of a moneyed elite -- and, what's more, has based its prosperity on the profligate and disproportionate use of a finite resource which it cannot produce in sufficient quantities within its own borders.
Andrew Bacevich discusses this latter point this way in his new book, The Limits of Power, in a passage picked out by Bill Moyers which puts the American people in the frame along with our predatory elite:
"The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad."
The decades-long quest for military-enforced dominance of geopolitical affairs has been both producer and product of this ravenous system. And now, the war machine is pretty much the only thing left. It has eaten all our seed corn, and must keep prowling constantly in foreign lands to feast on the resources of others. So war and the ever-present threat of war will continue to be the driving forces of American policy, at home and abroad, both in the public and private sectors – because that's where the money is. Big money, gargantuan money, money out the wazoo. And what's more, it's free money – because most of it comes from the taxpayers, through insider sweetheart deals that very often guarantee profits for the crony contractor. No muss, no fuss, no risk – just gravy.
And so the Russian response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia – "Six Days That Changed the World!" as the deathless (or rather, death-filled) headlines proclaim – has been the usual win-win situation for the war-profiteers in the cockpit of the American corruptocracy, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal writes for those who really count in American society – the movers and shakers and shifters of Big Money – so you can often get a better analysis of what's really going on than you would from, say, the New York Times, with all its weighty think-tank lumber. The headline from Saturday's WSJ story says it all: Attack on Georgia Gives Boost To Big U.S. Weapons Programs.
Just as the rash and bloody deed of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili – who assaulted South Ossetia in a ferocious sneak attack -- gave the Kremlin war machine the excuse it needed to flex its muscles, so the Russian response has been a godsend for the Pentagon. Now you see why we need all them big new weapons we've been hankering for, say the boys from Hell's Bottom: we got to keep them Russkies down. And of course, in keeping with the noble tradition of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment, a top Democrat (an erstwhile hero of the "anti-war" movement, no less), is in the forefront of the Pentagon's fear-mongering gobble at the pork barrel. From the Journal:
Russia's attack on Georgia has become an unexpected source of support for big U.S. weapons programs, including flashy fighter jets and high-tech destroyers, that have had to battle for funding this year because they appear obsolete for today's conflicts with insurgent opponents.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has spent much of the year attempting to rein in some of the military's most expensive and ambitious weapons systems -- like the $143 million F-22 Raptor jet -- because he thinks they are unsuitable for the lightly armed and hard-to-find militias, warlords and terrorist groups the U.S. faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been opposed by an array of political interests and defense companies that want to preserve these multibillion-dollar programs and the jobs they create.
When Russia's invading forces choked roads into Georgia with columns of armored vehicles and struck targets from the air, it instantly bolstered the case being made by some that the Defense Department isn't taking the threat from Russia and China seriously enough. If the conflict in Georgia continues and intensifies, it could make it easier for defense companies to ensure the long-term funding of their big-ticket items.
For example, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha, quickly seized on the Russia situation this week, saying that it indicates the Russians see the toll that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking on the U.S. military. "We've spent so many resources and so much attention on Iraq that we've lost sight of future threats down the road. The current conflict between Russia and Georgia is a perfect example," said Rep. Murtha during a recent visit to his district.
Go tell it, Brother John! Ivan's on the march, and he's headed straight for downtown Latrobe. If we don't get them Raptors up pronto, they'll be dishing up borschtburgers at McDonald's next week. [Bernard Chazelle has a somewhat different take on Russia's motivations over at A Tiny Revolution.]
But behind all the bull-roaring in the Beltway, the Journal cuts to the chase with admirable dispatch:
Some Wall Street stock analysts early on saw the invasion as reason to make bullish calls on the defense sector. A report from JSA Research in Newport, R.I., earlier in the week called the invasion "a bell-ringer for defense stocks."
…The change in administration [after the 2008 election] comes at a time of record profits and sales in the industry, reflecting historic highs in defense spending. Yet budget pressure is already undeniable. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan require laying out almost $12 billion a month and the Pentagon faces a massive tab for repairing and overhauling equipment when troops start coming home.
Now, the Russian situation makes the debate over the equipping of the U.S. military a front-burner issue. "The threat always drives procurement," said a defense-industry official. "It doesn't matter what party is in office."
And here our candid if unnamed war-profit maven has neatly encapsulated both the last century of American policy – and the next century as well: "The threat always drives procurement. It doesn't matter what party is in office." His vatic pronouncement should be emblazoned on billboards, streamed constantly beneath the natterers on TV news, and chiseled in marble on the Capitol Dome. For it is, in a very real sense, what America is about today: Threat. War. Procurement. Profit.
And never doubt the bipartisan nature of this self-devouring system. For even as Democratic "anti-war" icon John Murtha is saber-rattling at Moscow, Democratic "anti-war" icon Barack Obama is saber-rattling at Tehran in the official party platform that his aides have just completed. As Jonathan Schwarz reports, Obama's platform insists that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program – despite the finding by the Bush Administration's own intelligence agencies that it does not. And of course, it goes without saying that this non-existent program is such an overwhelming threat that Obama has pledged that he will be – wait for it – "keeping all options on the table." From Schwarz (see original for links):
Sure, America's intelligence agencies concluded last year December that Iran no longer has a nuclear weapons program. But what do they know? Surely the Democratic Party is far more informed about the situation than them, which is why the Democrats refer to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" in their just-finalized 2008 platform:
Prevent Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons The world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That starts with tougher sanctions and aggressive, principled, and direct high-level diplomacy, without preconditions…. We will present Iran with a clear choice: if you abandon your nuclear weapons program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, you will receive meaningful incentives; so long as you refuse, the United States and the international community will further ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions inside and outside the U.N. Security Council, and sustained action to isolate the Iranian regime… By going the extra diplomatic mile, while keeping all options on the table, we make it more likely the rest of the world will stand with us to increase pressure on Iran, if diplomacy is failing.
Note also that the Democrats are going to be "keeping all options on the table." I've always wondered whether this phrase includes the possibility of America and Israel giving up all their nuclear weapons. I mean, that's an option—surely if all options on the table, that means our complete nuclear disarmament is there on the table with all the rest of them.
So the beat – and the beat-downs – will keep going on, around the world, and fear will keep driving procurement, no matter what party is in office. As long as we want to guzzle and glut and "project dominance" in every corner of the world, war is all we've got.
First Georgia, now Poland. The Bush Administration announced Thursday that American soldiers will begin manning missile sites in Poland -- part of an agreement that surpasses even the NATO treaty in binding Washington to an armed response to any attack on Polish soil.
Spokesminions for President George Butt-Thumper said the installation of the missile base is designed to protect Poland from an intercontinental missile attack from Iran. (The perfidious Persians' long-standing plans to conquer Poland are well-known, of course.) The minions say that the missiles and troops are not at all intended as a threat to Russia, which is being slowly encircled by NATO bases and American missiles -- despite solemn promises from Washington to refrain from, er, encircling Russia with NATO bases and American missiles.
But while Butt-Thumper was playing coy about the latest interjection of American cannon fodder into the now-roiling region, the Poles were admirably frank: they wanted a signed, ironclad deal that would force Americans to fight for them -- unlike the hapless Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili, who depended on a nod and a wink from militarist factions along the Potomac (apparently John McCain and his neocon crowd) when launching his own sneak attack on South Ossetia. [Justin Raimondo has more on this.]
As we all know, Misha was left up Saakashvili Creek without a paddle when the U.S. cavalry failed to ride to his rescue as expected. (Can there be any other explanation as to why he would launch his tiny military on a reckless adventure that was certain to provoke a massive Russian response? Obviously he thought Uncle Butt-Thumper would back him up.)
But there was none of that boneheaded shilly-shally for the Poles. They took advantage of the Bush Regime's panicky anxiety to look big and tough in front of the Russians and quickly sealed the missile base deal, wringing concessions that Washington had been resisting for 18 months.
The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, put plainly what his country wanted out of the agreement: “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later — it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of — knock on wood — any possible conflict.”
Poland has an understandable fear of Russia, which has invaded and occupied its territory several times -- most recently, of course, in collaboration with the Bush Family's old business partners, Nazi Germany. Then again, Poland invaded and occupied Russia a few times too, back when it was a major power. Major powers tend to do that kind of thing. Which is why, as I noted in a recent comment exchange, one should be eternally suspicious of any person or group who takes control of massive, inhuman structures like states, because of our common human propensity to abuse power -- and to justify those abuses by claiming they are done in the name of some higher ideal. This applies no matter what system a particular state is based upon: capitalism, communism, theocracy -- or the grotesque chimera that now holds sway in both the United States and Russia: lawless, militarist authoritarian corporate-cronyism.
An American military move into Poland is the height of folly -- then again, we have been living on those dizzy heights for a number of years now, so there's nothing new in that.
But speaking of business partners, so much of the current unpleasantness would never have arisen if the dastard Putin had not begun hoarding Russia's natural resources for his cronies instead of giving it away to Butt-Thumper's buds. One recalls those halcyon days of yore when BP and Shell were striking fat oil and gas deals with Russian partners. Back then, Putin was Butt-Thumper's "soulmate," invited down for barbecues in Crawford. Back then, Putin was praised in the American media as the strong, steady hand that Russia needed, "a man we can do business with." Back then, Putin's astonishingly savage rampage through Chechnya and his installation of a regime of brutal thugs to preside over its remains were lauded as part of the war against Islamofascist terror.
But that was then and this is now. In the past few years, as the Kremlin has tightened its grip on Russia's oil and gas reserves and its indispensable pipelines to Europe, as it has grown rich from the spike in oil prices sparked by Bush's wars and threats of war, as its has rolled back Big Oil's presence in Russia -- often in harsh and humiliating ways -- Putin has steadily emerged in Western eyes as a tyrant, a bully, an ogre who threatens the stability of the entire world. (How long will it be before he is dubbed "the New Hitler"?)
The actual nature of Putin's regime has never mattered to our freedom-loving elites. The only "foreign policy" question they have is this: "Will they play ball? Will they fork over?" If Putin had only let the Western elite have a nice juicy slice of the Russian pie -- and maybe joined in one or two of Butt-Thumper's wars -- why, he could have romped and scampered around the region all he liked. But he didn't, and so now we have a "new Cold War," with Washington pouring oil on the fires in the Caucus and stirring the embers of fear and suspicion on the Russian-Polish frontier.
What next? Landing an expeditionary force in Vladivostok?
UPDATE: As'ad AbuKhalil weighs in with these observations (in separate posts, here and here):
My favorite thing about the whole coverage of the Georgia situation in the U.S. is the way the White House and media are feigning outrage over Russian actions. They just are aghast that a country can send its troops (across the border) under pretext of national security and defense. I mean, the U.S. would never ever send troops, say 10, 000 miles away from its border, under those pretexts. Never.
If I were Putin, I would have toppled the Georgian government, and installed a puppet government and then I would have said: We are here in Georgia at the invitation of the "democratically-elected" government of Georgia, and we will stay in Georgia as long as we are needed, and not one day longer. And I will make decisions on the basis of my military commanders on the ground, and in consultation with the new government of Georgia."
Time pressures preclude proper blogging today, but as our astute commenter Scott Douglas notes, Seamus Milne has an excellent commentary on Georgia and Russia in today's Guardian, so I'm just going to expropriate great swathes of it here:
The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government". Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century".
Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?
You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.....
Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.
The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.
Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo - whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time.
The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close...[See our previous post on this subject here.]
But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush's father [more on this here], but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.
Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.
By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power....
Ah yes, but "sensible reckonings" are in short supply these days, especially among the courtiers and scribes of the Potomac Empire. Bush's insertion of American troops into Georgia, ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid, is a dangerous and completely unnecessary intervention. (Is it really not possible to get humanitarian aid into a European country without U.S. military assistance?) It also a perfect illustration of Milne's observation of the obvious fact that American foreign policy is driven by the elite's compulsion for "unipolar domination" of world affairs, as we noted here yesterday.
You can see this in the braggadocio of a "senior Pentagon official" who inadvertantly gave the game away about the true nature of the "humanitarian" mission. He told the New York Times that the "relief effort" was meant to "show to Russia that we can come to the aid of a European ally, and that we can do it at will, whenever and wherever we want."
This is not the language of sober professionals guiding the affairs of a great nation, but the schoolyard bluster of two-bit bullies, seeking to allay their own weakness and anxiety with apish displays of force.
II. But while Bush and Co. strut and swagger with tough Cold War talk aimed at Russia, their ongoing destruction of the American Republic continues unabated -- assisted, as it has been every step of the way, by the very institutions that are meant to preserve American liberty and keep a check on tyranny.
Winter Patriot has the goods on a recent federal court ruling that absolves all government personnel of guilt for any crime they may commit on the public payroll. As WP notes, the ruling goes beyond the "Nuremberg defense" favored by Nazis and accomplices in crime and atrocity the world over -- "I was only following orders" -- to add a whole new line of justification: "I was only giving orders."
The ruling, by Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle -- a long-time right-wing apparatchik -- must be seen to be believed. As Reuters reports:
Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.
"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.
WP's excellent analysis of the ruling and its implications should be read in full. But here is a taste, from his conclusion:
So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.
Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?
And these are the people who preach to the world about democracy and freedom and rule of law.
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood to Richard Ryckoff --
Smedley Butler talked about that thing you're observing, as did Ike Eisenhower on his last speech as POTUS. Many since those two have commented on the fraud of Star Wars, not the least of which is the problem of space junk pi...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Say what you will about America (and I'm not an American fanboy, wingnut or liberal), at least it doesn't have the kind of openly and unapologetic, far-right, fascist, racist political parties that actually win elections and seats that Europe does. ...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Say what you will about America (and I'm not an American fanboy, wingnut or liberal), at least it doesn't have the kind of openly and unapologetic, far-right, fascist, racist political parties that actually win elections and seats that Europe does. ...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Nice summary Chris. Dan Mcdougall at the Guardian has more on the two Gypsy children that drowned. An excerpt:
[url]http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18475[/url]
[quote]On the morning of 17 July, Cristina and Violetta, along with the...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism "He may be a bastard murderous pope, but he's *our* bastard murderous pope"
Now if we could just get him to adjudicate (pontificate?) how many houses Jesus owned, we could work out whether he was elitist or not.
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Government by insiders. Government as "this thing of ours." You in on this thing? You're set for life. You outside this thing? Listen, you and your grandkids have got to pay for this thing. It sure ain't free.
Great bubbling chunks of the American p...
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Suggestion: Gather all the wives and children of all Raytheon staff and shareholders at 870 Winter Street
Waltham, MA 02451, and invite the Russians to lob a few ICBMs at that target. Then we will know how effective Patriot missiles are, and how safe...
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Paul Craig Roberts recently published a piece in which he tells that his graduate-school mentor told him point-blank that foreign countries do Uncle Sam's bidding because Uncle Sam pays them to do so. The example he offered is Tony Blair, who, even t...
Immortal Communion: One Lowly Word and the Subversion of Power
Friday, 11 April 2008
1. Boris Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, is best remembered for its star-crossed love story and its sweeping panorama of the Russian Revolution – themes amplified in David Lean's 1965 film version, a beautiful travesty which has largely supplanted the book in the public mind. But within his conventional narrative of shattering passions and historic upheavals, Pasternak subtly diffuses a deeply subversive philosophy that overthrows power structures and modes of thought that have dominated human life for thousands of years. Yet remarkably, this far-reaching, radical notion is based on one of the most humble concepts and lowly words in the Russian language: byt. The word has no precise equivalent in English, but in general it means the ordinary "stuff" of life: the daily round, the chores, the cares and duties, the business and busyness that drives existence forward. The connotations of byt are not always positive; it is frequently associated with another Russian word, poshlost', a more pejorative term for the miserable muck of daily life that can trap a noble soul yearning for transcendent heights – for shattering passions and historic upheavals, perhaps. Benjamin Sutcliffe has described this association well in his extensive analysis of the notion of byt in Russian literature by women:
"The 'everyday' is a problematic concept that Russian culture consistently links with women. Byt is not only povsednevnaia zhizn' (daily life), but also a corrosive banality threatening higher, often intellectual aspirations…. Vladimir Nabokov connects byt to poshlost', the soul-killing realm of the crass and insensitive. In an even more sepulchral metaphor, Andrei Siniavskii compares Soviet culture to a pyramid: the grandiose grave of a hollow society whose time has passed. Byt is the sum of both those constituent parts, often seen as 'women’s work' (care for the self, care for others, maintaining a household) and the negative adjectives ascribed to them: petty, small-scale, mundane, exhausting, repetitive, and ultimately deadening."
In contrast to this mundane and deadening level stands the realm of the transcendent: the "great questions" of life, the grand abstractions – nation, faith, ideology, honor, prosperity, family, security, righteousness, glory – for which millions fight and die. It's the world of power, fuelled by the dynamic of dominance and servitude – a dialectic that governs relationships in every realm: political, economic, religious, artistic, personal. Everywhere, hierarchies abound, even among the most professedly egalitarian groups, from monasteries to movie sets, from ashrams to activist collectives. Everywhere we find, in Leonard Cohen's witty take, "the homicidal bitchin'/That goes down in every kitchen/To determine who will serve and who will eat." This, we are given to understand, is the real world, the important world, far above the tawdry, tedious humdrum that fills the dead hours between epiphanies and exaltations. The Russian Revolution is of course one of history's great manifestations of this dynamic, where the "transcendent," world-shaking abstractions of ideology and high politics (imperialism, capitalism, revolution, Bolshevism) uprooted whole nations and produced suffering and dehumanization on an almost unimaginable scale. The modern era's "War on Terror" bids fair to surpass the Revolution in this regard, with its wildly inflated rhetoric and grand abstractions, its epiphanies of violence and exaltations of terror – on both sides – inflaming a conflict that has already devoured nations and destabilized the entire globe. The dominance paradigm – so thoroughly worked into our consciousness, so ever-present in our interactions, large and small, public and private – is the engine driving this vast machinery of death and ruin. But below this "higher plane" lies the reality of byt. Far from the soul-killing muck that Nabokov found so distasteful, in Pasternak's hands the true nature of byt is revealed: creative, sustaining, nurturing, an infinite source of meaning. For the most part, the novel conveys this indirectly, in passages where Pasternak shows us byt in action – people going about their work, having quiet conversations, preparing food, fixing stoves, tending gardens, washing floors – or in the richly detailed backgrounds and descriptions given for minor characters who pop up briefly in the narrative then are rarely, perhaps never, seen again. Over the years, some critics have decried these passages as the clumsy strokes of a fictional amateur, a poet gamely trying and failing to match the rich plenitude of Tolstoy's novels. (And to be fair, the English translations of the novel, though serviceable, are hobbled by clunky prose that ill-serves the original Russian.) But surely Pasternak, a writer of immense talent and intelligence, knew exactly what he was doing with these portions of the novel. The "clumsy" strokes that brake and complicate the grand narrative are central to the book's meaning. "Zhivago" means "the living," its root word is "life." And life is immense, comprising every aspect, every atom of reality. "Life, always one and the same, always incomprehensibly keeping its identity, fills the universe and is renewed in every moment in innumerable combinations and metamorphoses," as Zhivago says at one point. It is in the careful observation and deeply felt experiencing of the details of daily life that the meaning of existence can be found – or rather, consciously created. Elsewhere in the novel, Pasternak deals with more openly with this theme, especially in one of the book's central chapters, made up of a diary that Zhivago keeps when his family have been driven from Moscow by the privations of the Revolution – and by Zhivago's own political unreliability, which stems from his refusal to hew to any party line and its grand, impersonal abstractions, its distorted caricatures of the infinite complexities of human reality. They are living off the land, deep in the countryside, their whole life taken up by the struggle to survive: byt in its starkest terms. Only at night, their work done, can they turn to their books, the handful of Russian classics they've taken with them into exile. The whole chapter is like a marvelous concerto, blending and concentrating all of the novel's themes and variations in what appears to be the most artless of forms: the ramblings of a private journal. Among the many passages that illustrate the relation of byt to the "overworld," the realm of dominance and hierarchy, this one stands out:
"What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn't that they didn't think about these things, and to good effect, but they always felt that such important matters were not for them. While Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky worried and looked for the meaning of life and prepared for death and drew up balance-sheets, these two were distracted, right up to the end of their lives, by the current individual tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. And these individual things have since become of concern to all; their work has ripened of itself, like apples picked green from the trees, and has increasingly matured in sense and sweetness."
2. Of course, the supreme irony of the relation between the humble, private, "pointless" world of byt and the "real world" of power and exaltation is that the former is actually where any genuine "transcendence" can be found, while the latter is the merely the outgrowth of our most primitive and meaningless urges. For what is the desire to "project dominance," to erect hierarchies, but the elaboration of the same unconsidered instinctual drives that underlie the social structures of the animal world? You can see it in any colony of apes (although they too have their forms of sustaining, nurturing byt). I've written of this elsewhere, but I think it has some application in this context as well:
Is it not time to be done with lies at last? Especially the chief lie now running through the world like a plague, putrescent and vile: that we kill each other and hate each other and drive each other into desperation and fear for any other reason but that we are animals, forms of apes, driven by blind impulses to project our dominance, to strut and bellow and hoard the best goods for ourselves. Or else to lash back at the dominant beast in convulsions of humiliated rage. Or else cravenly to serve the dominant ones, to scurry about them like slaves, picking fleas from their fur, in hopes of procuring a few crumbs for ourselves. That's the world of power – the "real world," as its flea-picking slaves and strutting dominants like to call it. It's the ape-world, driven by hormonal secretions and chemical mechanics, the endless replication of protein reactions, the unsifted agitations of nerve tissue, issuing their ignorant commands. There's no sense or reason or higher order of thought in it – except for that perversion of consciousness called justification, self-righteousness, which gussies up the breast-beating ape with fine words and grand abstractions… Beyond the thunder and spectacle of this ape-roaring world is another state of reality, emerging from the murk of our baser functions. There is power here, too, but not the heavy, blood-sodden bulk of dominance. Instead, it's a power of radiance, of awareness, connection, breaking through in snaps of heightened perception, moments of encounter and illumination that lift us from the slime. It takes ten million forms, could be in anything – a rustle of leaves, the tang of salt, a bending blues note, the sweep of shadows on a tin roof, the catch in a voice, the touch of a hand. Any particular, specific combination of ever-shifting elements, always unrepeatable in its exact effect and always momentary. Because that's all there is, that's all we have – the moments. The moments, and their momentary power – a power without the power of resistance, defenseless, provisional, imperfect, bold. The ape-world's cycle of war and retribution stands as the image of the world of power; but what can serve as the emblem of this other reality? A kiss, perhaps: given to a lover, offered to a friend, bestowed on an enemy – or pressed to the brow of a child murdered by war. Both worlds are within us, of course, like two quantum states of reality, awaiting our choice to determine which will be actuated, which will define the very nature of being – individually and in the aggregate, moment by moment. This is our constant task, for as long as the universe exists in the electrics of our brains: to redeem each moment or let it fall. Some moments will be won, many more lost; there is no final victory. There is only the task.
And of course, that's what byt entails, in both its literal sense and in the heightened, deepened understanding of Pasternak's art: the task, the work, the busyness of sustaining life. One last passage from Zhivago provides a striking encapsulation of this, although a word should be said about the Christian symbolism it employs – a symbolism worked deeply into the plan and language of the entire novel. As Pasternak told one interviewer, the religious symbols were "put into the book the way stoves go into a house – to warm it up. Now they would like me to commit myself and climb into the stove." Later he added: "The novel must not be judged on theological lines. Nothing is further removed from my understanding of the world. One must live and write restlessly, with the help of new reserves that life offers. I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me – it's a lack of humility. "
Here Pasternak, like his Zhivago, resists adherence to any party line, even one that he finds enormously congenial, like Christianity. It is not in pious certainties but in the humble, shifting, temporary coalescences of everyday existence, in byt, that some measure of always-imperfect, always-provisional meaning can be found. But the languages of faith – structures that for centuries were the chief embodiment and expression of the human yearning for illumination, encounter and escape from the brutalities of dominance and servitude – can still serve as vehicles to convey a deeper reality, as Pasternak shows here, in the voice of one of his characters, the philosopher Nikolai Vendenyapin:
"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats – any kind of threat, whether of jail or retribution after death – then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion-tamer with his whip, not the preacher who sacrificed himself. But don't you see, this is just the point – what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments. But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning."
Immortal communion, in the transient, private, churning flow of byt: this is what Pasternak offers as an alternative to the violent estrangement of the "overworld," to its violence and fear, its bombast and lies. This lowly word could bring down empires, and stands in defiance of death itself.
NOTE: This piece was originally written for Exterminating Angel Press. This is the first time it has appeared on this blog.
Great Article. I think you're right when you say that every human being has both of these qualities (the power-hungry and the nurturing). Hard to say, though, which one will prevail in the end.
Wonderful writing Chris! I have this quote on my wall, though i do not know where it comes from: "Finite existence leads the idealism of desire for purpose to a quiet rejection of non-action based on unseen principle."
I'm especially drawn to the construct of the root of human violence and modern war being nothing but apes who "strut and bellow and hoard the best of goods..... or else [who] lash back at the dominant beast in convulsions of humiliated rage", while the wannabes scurry cravenly around the dominant apes "like slaves, picking fleas from their fur in hopes of getting a few crumbs....." for themselves.
"There's no sense or reason or higher order of thought in it - other than that perversion of consciousness called justification, self righteousness, which gussies up the breast-beating ape with fine words and grand abstractions."
Your metaphor works wonderfully on the five-category taxonomy I learned in graduate school studies: war is a fight, a game, a transcendant crusade, a cataclysm, and/or it is just a sin.
Thank you Mr. Floyd. As usual your writing is first-rate and this piece penetrates, I believe, to the most fundamental level of the collective psychological dynamic in evidence now. The "dominator paradigm", with its claims of perfectibility and exalted hierarachy, grips us from the inside, collectively forcing the exclusion and subordination of the commons, the cyclic realities, the community, the "everyday" patterns of wholeness and connectivity. This malignancy is something more fundamental than the domination fantasies of right-wing fascism. Our enemy is not Cheney and his bootlickers or their corporate masters. They are just slaves and most of what passes for progressive opinion and commentary on the internets is froth and distraction. A few sites, like this one, provide corner-of-the-eye hints that the real terrain of significance is the human collective psyche. Somehow, while enveloped in this global madness, enough internal, psychological space must be maintained (perhaps be even a small number of individuals) to allow for the emergence of a new and transformative paradigm. Mr. Floyd, your reading of Pasternak meshs well with C.G. Jung's exposition of "perfectibility" and "completeness". You note that: "It is not in pious certainties but in the humble, shifting, temporary coalescences of everyday existence, in byt, that some measure of always-imperfect, always-provisional meaning can be found." Inside of us, somehow, we must connect and be more complete human beings. And yes, it is in the smallest and most mundane of things where lies the real philosophical gold.
Thank you Mr. Floyd for your insights and fantastic writing. Thanks as well, and warm regards, to all readers of this site.
Mr. Floyd as always your words have the ability to pierce through the densest fog of delusion. I have connected with this piece not simply on a psychological level but also a philosophical-metaphysical plane.
I believe that all life is simply about the experience, the little mundane moments are what make us human, and the recognition of that is hopefully a sign that we are moving beyond the animals with who we share this rock. It is these moments that make us realize just how truly small and insignificant we are when we consider the entirety that makes up reality. The infinite byt in this universe that ticks by incessantly cannot be compounded by interest, cannot be tallied by silicon and gold chips, cannot be suppressed by authoritarian power, cannot even be vaporized by a nuclear blast. It is non-quantifiable, non-qualifiable but yet it's existence is paramount to our own existence, and if seen for what it is can provide us with meaning stronger than faith, patriotism, honor, and fame ever could, and certainly can provide us with more satisfaction than any amount of material goods ever could.
It took months of living in a tiny village with a minority group in SW China until I was able to realize the truth of how powerful experience is. It's ironic how people who live so simply would be the one's to teach me this...but perhaps not so much. Perhaps it's because of the camouflage we use in the city and developed world to cover over our mundane lives, we just aren't able to see reality for what it is. We constantly delude ourselves of the truth. But in the village it's just not possible because the mundane is there in your face all the time, you can't ignore it...or rather you do so but at your own peril. For the countryside has it's wars it's abuse of power and it's jealousy; the difference is that it is recognized for exactly what it is: apes trying to turn one into two by splitting one in half, without thinking about the consequences.
I just want to close by saying that while I have found my solace in the Middle Kingdom, my father found his further north...I grew up on Russian poetry, philosophy, history and literature...this article has cut me to the bone.
Chris captures the truth of how we experience life, beauty, and reality: one second at a time. "Instead, it's a power of radiance, of awareness, connection, breaking through in snaps of heightened perception, moments of encounter and illumination that lift us from the slime." This is the essence of being human, this quality of introspection and enlightenment, the ability to find joy while watching a falling leaf, that makes life itself for us. It is greatly under attack in today's twilight zone world, where we are relentlessly being stamped into the pre-determined mold of brainless, non-sentient conformity set by the corporatocracy, where our unique perceptions and feelings are screened and ruthlessly squashed if outside those boundaries. Notice how many citizens get tasered lately, just for "expressing" themselves at the time? Power to bring down empires indeed, summed up by the phrase "Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness". Which is why we now have to be psychologically castrated by the Establishment, they fear even the most intimate, primal moments of our "being" that much. Take away the "byt" Chris discusses here, substitute 'Merkun Idol, et al, produce the soul-less robots they demand we become, and they're invincible, they've destroyed the human spirit itself. Their thoroughness in the consolidation of their evil empire is truly breathtaking.
Doctor Zhivago (the movie). Maudlin tripe. I shall never forget the resolute Omar writing his poetry in that freezer of a house with icicles and permafrost in his eyebrows. And of course, the noble aristocracy at the mercy of the crazed bolshi peasants. May very well be the funniest movie of the middle 20th century.
When it comes to determining the true thrust and implication of world events, the old adage is still valid: "Follow the money."
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