Allan Nairn responds to Obama's statement in Chile

"Well, there’s no change in U.S. policy. Obama visited the tomb of Archbishop Romero in Salvador, but the U.S. is like the killer who shoots his victim and then brings flowers to the funeral. It’s appropriate for a killer to ask forgiveness, as the Chilean journalist was saying, but that’s the last stage. That’s after the killer has been taken off the streets, tried and jailed. Chile has done that. Those who perpetrated the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in '73 and killed more—tortured and killed more than 3,000 civilian activists, the leading survivors have been put on trial and jailed by the Chilean government. General Contreras, for example, the old head DINA, the secret police, is serving a sentence of 289 years. Chile has done that. The U.S.—the U.S. has not. So, it's up to—it’s up to people to enforce that, because the U.S. is still acting in a lawless manner all over the world. And El Salvador is a good example, because it’s quite parallel to what the U.S. is doing today."

"There were four key facts about the Archbishop. In 1980, in February, the Archbishop wrote to then-President Carter asking him to stop supporting the Salvadoran military. Romero was attacking the U.S. support for this military, which had, at that time, for two decades, been helping the Salvadoran National Police, National Guard, Treasury Police and army to assassinate local activists. On March 23rd, Romero gave a sermon in which he attacked the chain of command. He told Salvadoran troops to disobey their superiors and refrain from killing civilians. The next day—he was assassinated. He was shot in the heart."

"...he was assassinated by the forces of Major d’Aubuisson, a political offshoot of the Salvadoran death squads, which were created and backed by the U.S., as I documented extensively years ago. At his funeral, six days later, 250,000 Salvadorans turned out. Snipers on the roofs fired into the crowd, killed 42 people—an amazingly precise parallel to what happened last Friday in Yemen.

As the Yemeni people were turning out against the U.S.-backed regime there, snipers on the roofs killed perhaps 52 people. We don’t yet know whether those Yemeni snipers were U.S.-trained, but we do know that the Green Berets are there training that armed force and the U.S. itself is sending missiles into Yemen. In Iraq, the U.S. adopted what they call the Salvador Option: backing the Interior Ministry death squads, which from ’04 to ’07 killed thousands. So, what the U.S. did in El Salvador is being reproduced today, and Obama is carrying it on."  -ALLAN NAIRN

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/24/as_obama_completes_first_latin_america

drawbacks

The drawbacks of intervention in Libya

"While humanitarian considerations are often invoked in defense of intervention, humanitarianism is far from the only issue on the table. Other reasons that have been adduced in favor of intervention in Libya include vindicating international norms, re-establishing the leadership of the US in the region, preventing spill-over of the refugee crisis into Europe, and the stabilization of world oil markets. The Libyan people are struggling to change their regime on their own terms and there is no reason to presume an overlap between these various logics of intervention and their interests." 


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Finkelstein on Political Apostasy

"Yet, an apostate is usually astute enough to understand that, in order to catch the public eye and reap the attendant benefits, merely registering this or that doubt about one's prior convictions, or nuanced disagreements with former comrades (which, after all, is how a reasoned change of heart would normally evolve), won't suffice.  For, incremental change, or fundamental change by accretion, doesn't get the buzz going: there must be a dramatic rupture with one's past.  Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.  A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky.  It's the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has "grown up" - i.e., grown out of one's "childish" past.  It's hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals - Gitlin's Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism… - that doesn't include a hysterical attack on him.  Behind this venom there's also a transparent psychological factor at play.  Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn't.  Hating to be reminded, they keep trying to shatter the glass.  He's the demon from the past that, after recantation, no amount of incantation can exorcise."  -Norman G. Finkelstein, from "Fraternally Yours, Chris"

Saturday Night ("Dialectical") Bingo

“To undertake to combine so many elements alien to one another is to harbor within oneself a great disturbing force. To reproduce so many passions is not to calm one’s own. A lamp which is hot enough to fuse whole peoples is hot enough to consume its very hearth …. The souls of our fathers still throb in us for the pains that have been forgotten, almost as the man who has been wounded feels an ache in a hand he has lost.” 

-Jules Michelet, from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station

“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provide it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.”  -Herman Melville, from Billy Budd

“People remember. They’ll remember specific people who broke their balls. That’s the way people are, and they will be shitting for those people. You know, if you’re thinking about the world, how the world looks to the Negro [sic]—here’s how the world looks to the American Negro: he’s a convict rioting in a corrupt prison, and if they do kill Pat O’Brien, so what? The conditions are bad, and sloppy, and that’ll be the scene.”

-Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce

“Only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want the old way, and when the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph.”  -Vladimir Lenin, from Left-Wing Communism

“…“sublation”—the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation) .... the survival of the past as the sublated can simply be reduced to the modality of a memory, which, further, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation …. so in each instant of time the past survives in the form of a memory of what has been—that is, as the whispered promise of the present. That is why the past is never opaque or an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been predigested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: “sublated” Greece survived as objective memories .... That is why the present can feed on the shades of the past, or project them before it .... The past is never anything more that the present and only recalls that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole future of humanity.”  -Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination

“[Great men] must be named heroes insofar as they have drawn their goals and vocations not only from the tranquil ordered streams of events sanctioned by the reigning system, but from a source whose content is hidden and has not yet attained actual existence, in the still subterranean internal spirit which knocks for admittance to the external world, and breaks its way in, because it is not the almond which suits this kernel.”  -Georg W. F. Hegel, via Althusser

"Your Co-Pay for this Visit is 25 Dollars"

Cassandra Bang's "Snarkipedia"

State as Private Property

Gangster State
by darkhousemedia

Video/Effects: Patricia Wells
Sound: Brian Routh
Voice: Michael Parenti
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"There is nothing more "private" than a state community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance." 
-Slavoj Žižek,  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Ancestral Gates

Open the Gates

Within the city of the burning cloud,

Dragging my life behind me in a sack,

Naked I prowl, scourged by the black

Temptation of the blood grown proud.

Here at the monumental door,

Carved with the curious legend of my youth,

I brandish the great bone of my death,

Beat once therewith and beat no more.

The hinges groan: a rush of forms

Shivers my name, wrenched out of me.

I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see

The end and the beginning in each other’s arms.

-Stanley Kunitz

from The Collected Poems
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Get serious. Get political. Orient yourself toward the masses. Extend yourself beyond the middle-classes. Establish bonds within the working-classes. Forget ambition as it's played out. Forget 'achievement' as it's been defined to you. Forget all perfections of the status quo. Forget about the 'inevitability of change'. Forget all these that remove you from the class struggle. "By hook or by crook." Forgetting. And Remembering.

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"Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to... Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"  -George Orwell, 1984

Our Original Sin Was to be Born

For the unemployed, what to do with oneself is a daily dilemma. For those who have no safety net, no family to turn to, no spare bed to count on, it's easily an upset to the balance (even in the wealthiest country in the world!) between having and not having decent shelter and living conditions, adequate food and water sources, a means to feed one's family, and so on, delineating unto the extreme of the socio-economic spectrum, one of daily terror and survival. For those of us who have those things, some security, we bide our time, but with no study vision. Does action require vision? Perhaps for the poet. But this is not a landscape for poetry, the job market. We're each of us born with an outstanding debt--just like the Christian dogma of Original Sin--to the established system, order and caste of cold hard cash. That is to say, Capital. Our original sin was to be born. (In a capitalist order, at that!)


Genuine humanism pre-supposes providing for the needs of human beings in a structural way--a way that cannot be rolled back or undone, anymore than can be the historical abdication of divine rule by monarchs, or the felling of absolutism, in its previous manifestations. Times seem to bare witness to the pretext of revolution, whether peaceful (as in Madison or Cairo) or armed (as in Libya; as in Nepal, lest we forget); the striving toward social and economic justice, in sway to the momentum that old revolutionaries and hard-line leftists referrenced as "a living history."*
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*"It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law .... has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science..."  -Friedrich Engels,
from Preface to the Third German Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Struck for the Morning World

This curious riddled dream I dreamed last night,--

Six years ago I dreamed it just as now;

The same man stooped to me; we rose from bondage,

And broke the accustomed order of our days,

And struck for the morning world, and light, and freedom.

What does it mean? Why is this hint repeated?

What anguish does it spring from, seek to end?

-Conrad Aiken 

from poem "Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait"
in Selected Poems

"No War but Class War"

Noam, 1993

Technocracy, Profoundly Ambiguous

I posted the following excerpt from new left thinker, André Gorz's Strategy for Labor, because it strikes me as highly relevant, in spite of what many are calling the next big wave of the labor movement in America, convulsing throughout the mid-west and elsewhere. 

Within the period that followed the post-war epoch, and especially following Reagan's historically unprecedented assault on worker's rights and trade-union activity (firing the air-traffic controllers in the early 80's), technocracy has come in league with union structure and in vogue within union ideology. To a degree, this is inevitable within a capitalist society, as elucidated famously by Lenin and of course before that by Marx.  The worker will not realize his potential so long as his trade-union makes sure he is not taken advantage of and assures him a decent wage, and so on. Lulled and bribed into veritable inactivity.  

Marx, in The Holy Family, says, "The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery...." Let us find this difference which amounts to "slavery", where it lies between freedom and independence.

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"The decadence of political democracy, which technocracy likes to attribute to the senility of the parties and to the backwardness of political ideologies relative to economic realities, has therefore in fact some deeper reasons: it derives from the incapacity--which is in turn due to cultural and educational backwardness--of individuals, organized or not (the owners, political "elites," the bourgeoisie as a class, organized workers), to perform for themselves the management of social production and of society, on whatever level--local, regional, national; the industrial branch, the sector, the city.


Technocratic power, therefore, arises much less as a new form of the direct domination of monopoly capital and more as a contradictory and mediated form of this power. While its members are most often of bourgeois origin, technocracy is not generally the errand boy of the monopolies and does not necessarily wield power as their representative. It is rather the mediator between the particular and contradictory interests of the capitalists on the one hand, the general interest of capitalism on the other, and finally the general interests of society.


The power of the technocracy cannot simply be identified with the direct, totalitarian power of monopoly capital, even though it also is a totalitarian power and even though this power is exercised in fact for the benefit of monopoly capital. Technocrats are much more than the trustees or the representatives of the power of the bourgeoisie as a class; they are rather a "caste": because they alone are specialized in the tasks of coordination and synthesis, they cannot accomplish these tasks without having--and without demanding, by virtue of their work, as an inherent requirement of their work--autonomy with regards to all interests, including the various interests of capitalist groups.


By its very function, technocracy tends therefore to locate itself "above the classes," to deny the necessity for class struggle, to set itself up as mediator and referee and in so doing to enter into contradiction with the classes. The famous "depoliticization" of the masses which technocracy pretends to take note of is not a fact it observes; it is rather the end it pursues, the result it wants to obtain--and does obtain in a very limited degree.  "Depoliticization" is the ideology of technocracy itself. The so-called "neutrality" of the State is the ideology which justifies the power and the domination which technocracy is led to claim for itself by the logic of its situation.


The conflict of technocracy with the working classes as well as with the bourgeoisie is always profoundly ambiguous: this caste refuses from the outset to make decisions on the political terrain. Objectively progressive (or "on the Left") in its conflicts with the monopolies, technocracy is subjectively conservative ("on the Right") in its conflicts with the working class.


Attempting to eliminate in advance the question of power, which it thinks can be held only by professional managers, it tries to keep a clear conscience in the midst of the contradictory criticisms to which it is exposed. Toward the monopolies it internalizes the conservatism of which the Left accuses it by showing that the rationalization measures which it proposes consolidate and protect the capitalist system. Toward the labor movement it boasts of its conflicts with the monopolies in order to underscore its objectively progressive role.


This double game is obviously a mystification: to pretend to keep a balance between a bourgeoisie which is in power and a working class which is not is necessarily to play into the hands of the former. Technocracy is conservative ideologically (subjectively) to the very degree that its objective progressivism serves it as an alibi in its efforts to consolidate the existing System, to arbitrate its conflicts, and to absorb the anti-capitalist forces.


It shares this conservatism with all technicians insofar as they are empiricists. Conductor of an apparatus which interests him only for its smooth and efficient functioning, the technician cares a great deal more for the instrument than for the ends it serves. He lives from the beginning in a ready-made rationality with predetermined purposes which his work and his education do not lead him to question. The only truth, for him, is smooth functioning; and he sees value only in immediately applicable propositions. The rest is utopia."


-André Gorz
from Strategy for Labor (in The New Left Reader, p. 45-47)

Parting Happily With the Past (Here's to...)

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

-Karl Marx

from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"It is instructive for [the modern nations] to see the ancien regime, which in their countries has experienced its tragedy, play its comic role as a German phantom. Its history was tragic as long as it was the pre-existing power in the world and freedom a personal whim--in a word, as long as it believed, and had to believe, in its own privileges. As long as the ancien regime, as an established world order, was struggling against a world that was only just emerging, there was a world-historical error on its side but not a personal one. Its downfall was therefore tragic. 


The present German regime, on the other hand--an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally accepted axioms, the futility of the ancien regime displayed for all the world to see--only imagines that it still believes in itself and asks the world to share in its fantasy. If it believed in its own nature, would it try to hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature and seek its salvation in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, who already died once for their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death--this time a comic one--in Lucian's Diologues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part happily with its past. We lay claim to this happy historical destiny for the political powers of Germany."

-Karl Marx
from "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

From Intro to Slavoj Zizek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Wordsworth's Vantage

Over 200 years ago: French Revolution ~ Haitian Revolution

(First World > Third World > First World)

Today: Tunisia ~ Egypt ~ Libya ~ Yemen ~ Bahrain ~ Oman ~ Syria ~ Iran... ~ Madison, etc.  (Third World > First World > still to come?)

TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE*

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den; -

O miserable Chieftain! where and when

Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There's not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

-William Wordsworth

(Sing Freedom!; an Amnesty International 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, p. 86)

*Toussaint l'Ouverture led the Negro slaves in Haiti against their French masters at the time of the French Revolution. He drove out the French, but they later seized him after asking  him to a meeting to discuss peace; he died in a dungeon in France.

 

Moral boycott

"Our class enemies are in the habit of complaining about our terrorism. What they mean by this is rather unclear. They would like to label all the activities of the proletariat directed against the class enemy’s interests as terrorism. The strike, in their eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of a strike, the organisation of strike pickets, an economic boycott of a slave-driving boss, a moral boycott of a traitor from our own ranks—all this and much more they call terrorism. If terrorism is understood in this way as any action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the enemy, then of course the entire class struggle is nothing but terrorism. And the only question remaining is whether the bourgeois politicians have the right to pour out their flood of moral indignation about proletarian terrorism when their entire state apparatus with its laws, police and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror!"  -Leon Trotsky

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm

Revolutionize the Reformist

Non-violent resistance, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott under the brilliant leadership of a young Martin Luther King, (promulgated to the fore in the act of one Rosa Parks, though hardly the first to have refused to give up a seat), can achieve astounding reforms under the very system that gives rise to their necessity, within it—giving way to “Capital with a human face”, a version not so dominated by the overt remnants of chattel slavery and also what was disastrously and ironically called “reconstruction”. 

Today, we have overt signifiers of the innate repression that exists for us in the west (This will perhaps require an inquiry into what constitutes "west"). In the developments of the previous century, after it was outlawed, “wage slavery” was outsourced. Widespread, globalized, hegemonic, invariably a product of forced coercion by multi-national corporate interest, and by the state-apparatus institutions which exist to look after said interest, namely all those that follow the Washington Consensus: the World Trade Organization (formerly known as GATT), the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank—all more-or-less representative to the rights of corporate plunder. Let's not forget USAID, either. Let’s not forget the rule of law! someone will say. Right, the rule of law. Though, as presently and legally defined, the rule of law tends to always comes from above, not below. 

Those who wield great power are frightened of democracy both in the strike of the boycott and that of the organized guerrilla movement. It is in their favor to keep society as loosely organized as possible for as long as possible. Except for themselves of course. (The capitalists are very well organized, better than any other group in fact. That is the tactic of our class enemy.) The boycott is the worse for them in an open, pluralistic, and civil society. It remains to be seen what we are; to what degree we are civil and barbaric. Our barbarity is indirect, or, if we were apologizing for the "liberal" establishment media, we would use words like, “misdirected”, “unwise”, “imprudent”, so on. It is dehumanized, for certain; culturally obscured, and illegitimate to the core. Like Gandhi said—when asked what he thought of Westernized democracy—“I think it’s a very good idea.”

The law does not come from above. It comes from below, invariably, emanating and germinating from the thrust of democratic values, which historically have root in the enlightenment and liberation of those who produce society’s existing resources, whether technological or spiritual. The elite in society are de facto (and perhaps by definition) spiritually bankrupt and technologically un-innovative when it comes to constructive momentum. As political scientist and media commentator, Dr. Michael Parenti, pointed out with blunted eloquence, (I paraphrase) these are the ones we can thank for the atom bomb, its being dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not to mention the horrors of Southeast Asia, and the Middle East—genocidal campaigns all directly state-sanctioned. The havoc unleashed for half a century and longer upon Latin America, Teddy Roosevelt to Nixon to Bush, Jr.--and in Africa the neo-colonial conditions and comprador capitalism which agonize the people en masse. Lest we forget our own direct American legacy, the most ferocious structural campaign within all of recorded history, resulting in residual endangerment to outright extinction, or genocidal removal to a prescribed territory. Our Native America. Just look for the Oklahoma license plate.

We live in the age and inside the belly of an imperial tyranny, with mass-murder and genocide on-scale with Orwell’s prophetic totalitarian vision of a future under surveillance, oblivious to its own history. We are very close to fulfilling this vision in the west. The poison is coming home, or as Malcolm X, characteristically provocative, said of the President Kennedy assassination, "I think it's a matter of the chickens coming home to roost." 

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PS: Let’s rehash some basic definitions for ourselves. Here are some from my end:

Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie  =  democratic, parliamentary avenues for those without 

economic power; meanwhile, all economic power is structurally restricted to the hands of the few who already “possess” it—what Madison referred to as the “opulent minority.”

Dictatorship of the Proletariat  =  otherwise democratic, besides the initial coercion, forced or negotiated, of said “opulent” minority’s right and ability to monopolize and coerce the remainder of society, personally benefiting from others’ expropriated labor (Also known as the “moneyed” or “business class.”)--by the economic majority, being those who do the actual work and suffer under the very capital they collectively produce, but currently have no personal or collective legal rights to. The principal sufferers and systemic burden-bearers under Capitalism--not to mention disenfranchised investors--having invested blood and desperate generations of old.