The malleability of 'race' in wartime posted by lenin

Thomas Nast's infamous depiction of 'The Ignorant Vote' is one particularly pungent example of how the metaphysics of 'race' works. Although the Irishman is labelled 'white', the racial morphology deployed makes him darker and ape-like. The cartoon or caricature just happens to be the ideal means of conveying it, because of the liberties you can take with the physical form. You can see clearly that it is a system of similes and allusions, a disorderly complex of metaphors. In the context of war, the visual metaphors of cartoonists are part of the repertoire in the poetastry of genocide. In this case, the fangs and green tinted skin would not be out of place in Nazi anti-semitic propaganda. Of course, it required a labour of revision to manufacture the correct racial stereotypes in the Pacific theatre of WWII, since - as in the Boxer Rebellion, only with the roles reversed - there were good 'Orientals' and bad ones. Take a look at this comparison: "How To Tell Japs from Chinese". In it, the American racial warrior - not a bit different from the Nazi racial warrior in his build, looks and comportment - explains how to distinguish the good 'Asiatic' from the bad one. The good one smiles easily, has European-American eyes, normal feet, evenly set teeth. The bad one scowls, is slanty-eyed, has bucked teeth and weird feet. Of course this deranged bollocks was never intended to be an actual field guide for the befuddled American soldier - it was intended to make it easier to kill and ultimately exterminate those Japanese weirdos.

Racial doctrine therefore proves to be extraordinarily ductile given the exigencies of war. In both subsequent major Asian wars, there were good 'Asiatics' and bad ones. So, during the Korean War, the good pro-American Korean was shown to be under spiritual and racial assault from the quasi-satanic Muscovite-controlled savages from the North. Thus, the old green tint and the claws were out again. The bestiary was put to work again. Suffice to say, the US war was as close to a war of annihilation as anything since Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the use of nukes was being seriously considered). The Vietnam War, though apparently complicated by the 'good guys' in the south, was increasingly obviously a war against almost the entire Vietnamese population. Hence, the 'dinks' and 'gooks' and 'savages' were relatively straightforward to depict, especially for the children. This war, of course, became increasingly genocidal, as the back room boys devised increasingly intensified anti-civilian warfare. The explicit use of racial caricatures of this kind became a source of embarrassment for the American government following the civil rights struggle, the race riots and the formal abolition of southern segregation, although one remaining respectable form of racism was that directed against Arabs and Muslims, and so it remains. Of course, once again, you can always find some good Arabs, ones who are strangely Americanised, whose skin is lighter, whose eyes are more European, whose values are 'Western'. This is how 'race' works: if you want to 'lighten' or 'darken' someone, you just use your imagination. Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three... There's nothing to it.

One final example. Here is a respected pro-war journalist in a liberal newspaper at the height of the self-congratulatory euphoria over the war in Yugoslavia:

" Do Albanians look like Serbs?

"No. Of course the differences are only approximate but it is often very easy to tell a Serb from an Albanian in Kosovo long before he or she opens his mouth.

"The Serbs often have black or dark brown hair and are generally darker and more heavily built than Albanians. Their appearance is fairly typical of southern Slavs. By contrast, the Kosovars look Celtic to a British eye. They have curly hair, which is often blonde or rust coloured, and their skin tends to be very pale and covered in freckles. Their eyes are often green or blue and their build is much more slender than that of the Serbs. They have longer heads. It is not surprising that they look so different as they belong to different races that have very rarely intermarried." (Marcus Tanner, 'WAR IN THE BALKANS: THE BALKAN QUESTION; KEY ISSUES BEHIND THE WAR EXPLAINED', The Independent, 11 May 1999).

The great war of 1999, then, was a war on behalf of the Milky Bar kid against some squat, Slavic barbarians.

Labels: 'race', imperialism, racism, serbia, war, yugoslavia

John Singer Sargent at War posted by Yoshie

John Singer Sargent was born on 12 January 1856. He was an official war artist in 1918, commissioned to paint a work symbolizing cooperation between Britain and America during World War 1. A leading portraitist of high society, he was not known for his interest in politics, and yet his paintings of war allow the viewer to glimpse the Janus-faced brotherhood of warriors in class society and its political implications.

Take his "Gassed" and "Tommies Bathing."

Gassed, 1918


Tommies Bathing, 1918

It is solidarity with comrades, much more than loyalty to an abstract idea of nation or obedience to their superiors, that keeps men at war.

"He didn't have to go to Iraq. He chose to go. He wanted to be with his brothers." These are the words of the clearly distraught and heartbroken mother of Thomas, a marine recently killed in Iraq, describing her son's fatal decision to extend his enlistment in order to deploy with his unit. Of course, his family tried to convince him otherwise, but Thomas was adamant that "abandoning" his comrades as they headed into harm's way was not an option. . . . We fight, then, neither to achieve victory nor to kill an "enemy." We fight and, like Thomas, we die, because we love and could not live with the guilt and the shame of abandoning our brothers. (Camillo Mac Bica, "The Brotherhood of Warriors: The Love That Binds Us" MRZine, 19 March 2007)

In other words, the ruling class grasp what is best and noblest in men, their love for one another; mutilate it by excluding the Other -- enemy soldiers and civilians and homosexuals in their own ranks, for instance -- from men's love; and exploit it for their profit. "Gassed" reveals the physical and spiritual consequences of mutilated and exploited love; "Tommies Bathing" shows what love can be in a world without war.

Labels: iraq, war

Official: Iraqi resistance is 'decent' posted by lenin

Never mind General Dannatt's plea for us to rally round the troops despite the unpopularity of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His comments about the Iraqi resistance are not well-reported online, but he was shown on Channel Four news describing them as "Iraqi nationalists", concerned about the well-being of the country and therefore "not bad people". It doesn't appear to be on any news site at all so far as I can tell, and his speech has not been transcribed on the Ministry of Defence website (which seems a bit strange). This is obviously an embarrassment since it completely undermines everything that Blair and Brown have said about it, and what the Bush administration continue to insist upon despite their own very comprehensive reports on the matter.

If anyone finds a transcript, or a single online report of these remarks, please post it in the comments box.

Update. Thanks to 'Dave S' in the comments box:

Labels: afghanistan, anti-war, army, general richard dannatt, iraq, war

"To save America, we need another 9/11" posted by lenin

Via Antiwar.blog, this little stool of lunacy is exposed to fresh air:

Because we have mislaid 9/11, we have endless sideshow squabbles about whether the surge is working, if we are "safer" now, whether the FBI should listen in on foreign phone calls, whether cops should detain odd-acting "flying imams," whether those plotting alleged attacks on Fort Dix or Kennedy airport are serious threats or amateur bumblers. We bicker over the trees while the forest is ablaze.

America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

If it is to be, then let it be.

Now, I expect you get it: he's only telling a little joke. He doesn't really think that thousands of Americans should be shredded and incinerated so that Americans will stop bickering: he simply thinks it's funny to say so. It is an ironic lament for the lost pro-imperialist consensus, a sorrowful titter over the deflation of fevered American nationalism. Still, it lets a rather mangy, vicious cat out of the bag: given the choice between compromise, adversarial review, democratic grassroots challenge of state policy, and strict ideological conformity, timidity and death, the neocons will always choose the latter. That's reassuring.

Labels: 9/11, kriegsideologie, war

Planetary Oblivion: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love capitalism. posted by lenin

I am told that David Aaronovitch is planning a book entitled 'Voodoo Histories' which is (oh, bless), a book about 'conspiracy theories'. Presumably in an inspired moment, he thought that title up all by himself, (although why should it be that the terms for mystical nonsense so frequently refer to beliefs attributed to colonised Others - Wheen's 'Mumbo-Jumbo' is such an example?). This flood of tributes to various kinds of supposedly irrational belief (religion, pomo, New Age, etc) is itself the latest outbreak of obscurantist drivel, a fetish, a symptom of the utter lack of intellectual and moral responsibility among the literati. Having been accessory to something approaching genocide its awful criminality, these guys - the contemporary equivalents of Julius Streicher - want to say something about irrational beliefs and their pernicious effects on politics. A moment's reflection would surely compel the conclusion that the main types of irrational belief formation that threaten humankind are those that enable colossal damage to be done to us and our life-support systems. I mean to say that those incorrect beliefs that are encouraged by corporate-funded propaganda are covering for the worst, ongoing threat to human life that we have ever faced, bar nuclear war.

Suppose the oil corporations were correct in one single respect - that the predictions so far made by all the prestigious scientific bodies and global panels such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are all wrong to date. Suppose, however, that instead of being dire pessimists, these bodies have been outrageously happy-go-lucky in their assessments, and that things are much worse than we have so far understood. As George Monbiot points out, this is what is entailed by a recent NASA-led study:

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).

The effects?:

As well as drowning most of the world’s centres of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”

And what's stopping the government from doing something about it? Why is the Stern Report so pathetic in its recommendations? Why does it so irrationally propose to solve a problem with means that its authors explain will not solve the problem? Oh, business as usual. The CBI - the ruling class in congress - might withdraw its support. The newspapers aren't exactly communicating much of this urgent reality or the political consequences, because fossil fuels is good advertising revenue. In fact, the state of scientific knowledge seems to make as little impress on this situation as the putative good intentions of the very powerful. Perhaps some sectors of the ruling class are unwilling to see the environment in which their system operates disintegrate, which is going to take place without urgent action in the next couple of generations. Yet they balk at the costs of the necessary measures, perhaps correctly assessing that they could trigger a social revolution (I mean it). Perhaps BP really does mean Beyond Petroleum. Perhaps Shell really is turning green in the face. Yet, for some mysterious reason (something to do with capital accumulation or, to be even more technical, profit), they continue to mine the ancient remains of carbon-based life-forms, sending tremendous pulses of carbon dioxide into an ecosphere that is not equipped to handle it, thus effecting massive chain-reactions that will eventually obliterate the basis on which much of the ruling class subsists. (It might also do something rather nasty to you and I, but we don't really count except as labour power.) And the core industries continue to insist that all is rosy. If it isn't rosy, it's murky - very complex, unclear, mixed signals etc. Aside from the 1.2 million road deaths each year, which we are not supposed to notice, the implanting of oil use into the - you might say - genetic make-up of advanced capitalist economies is driving a global series of oil wars. Oil is not the only cause of conflict in Nigeria, Angola, Colombia, Russia, Aceh and so on, but it is a commodity unlike any other, and ensuring its profitable distribution and transportation is a very important goal for the world's ruling elites. In the same way, coltan wasn't the only cause of conflict in the Congo, it simply happened to cohere and augment every other cause of the conflict. Sadly, if someone wanted to write a Black Book of Capitalism, those particular instances would be far down the list of depravity. Capitalism is organised crime, but these are among the lesser busts that could be made.

Of course, as Monbiot also points out, by a colossal and ugly historical irony, the regions most responsible for what we tweely refer to as 'climate change' are those that would be struck last, and struck least. Those that will drown to death or have to flee with clutched belongings to overcrowded and shrinking land masses will not be the wealthy. Those who will starve to death because of the ruination of fertile soil, lack of water and reduced crop yields will not be Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. As New Orleans showed, the increasing frequency and intensity of tropical storms will not be borne by the rich, who will have guards perched beside housebound turrets with automatic weapons aimed, in case anyone comes a-begging. And if they can batten themselves down in gated fortress communities, the ruling classes would sooner ride out the deluge than part with a solitary iota of their power and wealth to alter the course of this calamity. This is the same class of people who are callous enough to poison us on a regular basis: who still try to sell children tobacco as a lifestyle choice (and not as it might more properly be understood, as a style of death); who vend unhealthy slop and call it diet food; who give us carcinogens in our food and atmosphere; who pump fumes into our environment that give us bronchitis and asthma; who allow shit to go into our burgers with letting on; who allow toxic chemicals into our food; who give us BSE (and then try and blackmail us into Buying British); who give us radiation poisoning and asbestos sickness; who give us unsafe environments to work in; etc etc etc. These are not our allies in the struggle against planetary oblivion.

The most menacing and dogmatic voices of unreason are therefore: the mad extremists who insist on continuing in our present state of affairs; the utopian idealists who think that it can bring us a poverty-free, well-fed, sustainable planet; the evildoers who profit from it; the cool psychopaths who try to charm us into believing that all will be well; the cruel men of violence who will go to all lengths to conserve and defend the system. Root out the evil ideology within, I say. We have been indoctrinated for too long by this slavish cult of capitalism, and I say we have endured enough together.

Labels: environment, famine, planetary destruction, war

Perpetual Peace and the End of History posted by lenin

Have a look at the following charts, the first from a study by the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management entitled, 'Peace and Conflict 2003' (click to enlarge):





From these, you would gather that there has been a rapid drop in warfare of all kinds since 1992, and that wars are a risk principally in poor countries without liberal institutions. On that basis, you might concur with the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit that, while the risks of war will resurge in context-specific settings, 'globalisation' is slowly guiding us toward a more stable (and less impoverished) future. In this view, the role of stable liberal capitalist states is to manage the occasional crises as societies graduate toward fuller integration into the global economy with liberal institutions and guaranteed property rights. The 'old battles' of left and right thus dispatched, it will be a relatively simple matter to maintain perpetual peace and remove the means of coercion to the background of human societies. This is the kind of doctrine that the former diplomat Robert Cooper promulgates: "there are pre-modern states - often former colonies - whose failures have led to a Hobbesian war of all against all: countries such as Somalia and, until recently, Afghanistan. Second, there are post-imperial, postmodern states which no longer think of security primarily in terms of conquest. A third kind are the traditional 'modern' states such as India, Pakistan or China which behave as states always have, following interest, power and raison d'état." It goes without saying, which is why he doesn't say it, that liberal European and North American capitalist states are the 'postmodern' ones who never think about things such as conquest (but should, in his view).

It is not quite so simple, according to Christopher Cramer's book Civil War Is Not A Stupid Thing. For instance, consider another set of figures devised through a different lens. The Uppsala Conflict Database provides an invaluable amount of free data on the level, range and types of global conflict. Here are couple of charts from their site (click to enlarge):





The trend in the rate of conflicts is the same for both high and low-intensity warfare. While it is clear that the rates of warfare did decline after 1992, the drop is nowhere near as sharp, and it remains at roughly the level it was before the highest point of conflict during the 1980s. The number of interstate wars declines, while the number of 'internal' wars increases. As Cramer observes, these analytical frames are not merely descriptive: to describe a war as 'internal' is to direct the focus to a particular aspect of conflict and away from others. If a war is largely fought within a given terrain, largely by actors indigenous to it or nearby, this does not mean that international forces are not powerfully involved: consider the 'civil war' in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, or indeed any number of conflicts in which the US, UK and France in particular have intervened in or stimulated, or orchestrated. Their armies may not be involved, and increasingly we rely on private mercenaries (as per Sandline International or Blackwater USA). Yet they are directly involved. There are also wars waged by states against non-state movements, and in the past these would have been classified as 'extra-systemic' (anti-colonial wars in particular). This category has disappeared largely as imperial territories acquired the character of nation-states. Yet what if Chechnya were to win its war for independence? What is now considered a civil war within Russia would be an extra-systemic one. When did war begin, and when did it end, in Iraq? The US had been rapidly escalating a campaign of systematic bombing coupled with sanctions throughout the 1990s, arguably a state of de facto low-level, highly asymmetrical war, with Iraq's luckless inhabitants as hostages. There are forms of mass state-led orchestrations of violence, such as Gujarat in 1992 and 2002, which are not classified as civil war because they are directed against civilians and pose no threat to the state at any stage. Additionally, some wars that originate as civil wars progress into genocide rapidly, as in Rwanda. A further observation is that the extraordinary peak of conflict during the 1980s and at the end of the Cold War doesn't represent a sharp increase in the outbreak of wars so much as an accumulation of them over fifty years, which suggests that these wars have been extremely difficult to end once initiated. In other words, the two perceptions that war is becoming less frequent and less intense, and that war is limited to areas with weak states and 'underdeveloped' economies, are fundamentally unsound. Cramer adds there are too few observable trends to make many useful generalisations about what we might expect in the future. The variety of wars characterised as civil wars is far too broad in terms of origins, casualties, battle intensity, social actors involved, causes etc to produce secure categories.

Yet, one such category has proven to be rather popular with a certain kind of post-Cold War liberal - people like Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw and Hans Magnus Enzenburger, who had been Leftists while there remained a Soviet Union - and that is the 'new war'. In this view, wars are unpolitical, usually organised around 'identity' rather than a clear programme of social change, brutal beyond any limit that might be imposed by international law or political norms - essentially a form of extended criminal activity, leeching off global financial and commodity networks in what is ominously described as 'black globalisation'. The theorists of 'new wars' also look to a post-military age, even if they are slightly less willing to accept overt empire than people like Robert Cooper. However, the empirical basis of their claims has been comprehensively undermined, as discussed here. The rate of civil wars was certainly not increasing during the period of the 'new wars'; their barbarity was on the whole a little bit less intense than Cold War ventures; the prominence of 'identity' politics wasn't absent in the Cold War period and was then, as it is now, intermingled with other political programmes (the Anglo-French axis in African politics has long outlived the colonial era and the Cold War, while the secessionism of Croatian leaders was not more important than the secessionism of Moise Tshombe in the Congo); and transnational financial and commodity flows were at least as important if not more so than during the Cold War ('conflict diamonds' being an analogue of 'conflict heroin').

Cramer has an interesting approach, which is to regard these wars on a continuum of violence that extends right into liberal democratic polities, from outright civil war in Mozambique, in which the establishment of property rights was every bit as conflictual as it was in Cromwell's Ireland, to sustained low-level class violence in Brazil, with perpetual clashes with the MST and favelas for instance, to sporadic clashes between strikers and the army in South Africa and ongoing forms of social violence in Europe and the United States. Social peace is maintained in advanced capitalist societies by organised violence that is usually extruded from the explicit theatre of politics. Yet there are examples of extreme domestic state violence, usually where population groups are seen to disrespect the fundamental (until then, apparently harmless) boundaries of property-based societies. The attacks on Waco or on the MOVE organisation in the US are two such instances. But the most violent periods in the history of modern liberal polities has been in the prolonged transition to capitalism: the enclosures, the revolts, the enslavement and colonisation, the class warfare, the mass hangings, the genocides and so on. Contempory conflict in 'developing' nations can thus be understood as part of the process of the "primitive accumulation" of capital. The 1975-1992 Mozambican civil war, mentioned before, is thus seen as being driven by a conflict over the accumulation of land and the establishment of conditions for successful capitalist agriculture. Aside from the specific business of acquiring and converting property into capital, the overal process of transition produces turmoil. Karl Polanyi observed that without the intervention of Tudor and Stuart states, the conversion to a market society, the enclosures, the transformation of humanity and land into capital, would have been a disaster sufficient to wipe out most of Europe's human beings.

Several new phases in this so-called "primitive accumulation" have been opened up in recent years: the clean sweep in Russia and Eastern Europe; the neoliberalisation in India and Latin America; the reconstitution of private capitalist class power in China; the rapid acceptance of neoliberalism by nominally leftist parties in most advanced capitalist states etc. The aggressive programmes of the happily defunct Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and similar initiatives by the World Trade Organisation, seek to extend this process. These policies don't necessarily cause wars in and of themselves any more than they cause the process of "primitive accumulation", but they have the capacity to aggravate an already existing set of conditions, or interact with other elements (such as arms and commodities markets, financial flows, 'ethnic' or identitarian tensions etc). Cramer's argument thus rebukes both the liberal view of violence as something surpassed by (post)modern states, and the liberal view of development as something that is technical, and can be achieved with a careful management of pain and consequences by very knowledgeable graduates from Oxford or MIT. Development is a deeply political process with powerful motors toward violent conflict, and capitalist development is not less so than any other kind despite the formal disavowal of political violence in capitalist ideology. The process of transition, it should be said, is not one with a determinate end. At no point is every form of commons enclosed and privatised, and nor could it be: there remain struggles over who will possess how much, what will belong to all and what will belong to a few, what conditions will apply to the labour force and how oppressed groups will be treated within the social hierarchy. And, as it is a crisis-ridden system, managed and sustained in large part by the projection of extreme force, the fantasy of perpetual peace and a post-military society is (at least this side of the socialist revolution) a dense revisionist palimpsest that papers over centuries of historical reality.

Labels: capitalism, civil war, clash of civilisations, end of history, peace, war