chansons de geste

2010-02-27T17:01:00.001-08:00

Peacemakers also see the world as it is

2010-01-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

by Colman McCarthy

As with a berg of ice in a shipping lane, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, Norway, was a collision between peacemaking and war-making.

Several times he mentioned Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. “There’s nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in their creed or lives,” he said. But the praise was faint, the tone patronizing. “I face the world as it is,” said the nation’s latest war president, implying that Gandhi and King were dwellers in another world where they and the rest of dream-driven pacifists have their heads either in the clouds or in the sand. “There will be times,” Obama said, “when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

He meant violent force, the force of bombing, the force of the gun and grenade, the interrogator’s garrote -- not the kind of force in which King and Gandhi placed their faith: moral force, the force of noncooperation, the force of justice, the force of well-organized resistance and the force of fighting fire not with fire but with water.

Three years after King was in Oslo collecting his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he said: “Here is the true meaning of compassion and nonviolence -- when it helps us see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. From his view we may indeed see the basic weakness of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

Those lines were from an antiwar speech in April 1967, when the Vietnam War was cresting. Editorials in both The Washington Post and The New York Times dismissed it as the ill-informed babble of a pacifist lightweight who should stick to civil rights and leave foreign policy issues to the enlightened ones who “face the world as it is.” Both newspapers, which endorse the Bush-Obama war in Afghanistan as strongly as they once did the war in Vietnam, would surely write off King’s antiwar views were he around to express them today.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize -- with a straight face as he defended his war policy -- Obama said that “compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize,” his accomplishments “are slight.”

Did his giants include Desmond Tutu? The 1984 laureate said in 2002: “The war on terrorism will not be won as long as there are people desperate with disease and living in poverty and squalor. Sharing our prosperity is the best weapon against terrorism.”

Or perhaps Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the 1980 recipient who wrote in Christ in a Poncho: In “nonviolent combat, what we do is just exactly what nice players aren’t supposed to do. We refuse to play by one of the rules of the system tries to foist on us: the rule that says you have to counter violence with violence. If your opponent can get you to swallow that idea, then they can unleash still greater violence upon you. The essential thing in nonviolent combat is for us to render those tactics inoperative by refusing to play by the rules and by imposing our own conditions instead.”

Or Oscar Arias Sánchez, the winner in 1987: “Three billion people live in tragic poverty, and 40,000 children die each day from diseases that could be prevented. War is a missed opportunity for humanitarian investment. It is a crime against every child who calls out for food rather than for guns.”

That, too, is the world as it is -- not the fantasy world of Obama and his war council, who believe that one more killing spree in Afghanistan will bring peace, one more surge and evil will be conquered, one more show of force and we’ll finally show ’em.

[Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington.]

Hegel on Force and Understanding and Self-Consciousness

2009-11-06T16:05:00.000-08:00

Timothy Franz

What is the purpose of the “inverted world” argument?

The purpose of the “inverted world” argument is to show us that consciousness is self-consciousness, or that what is is a self relating to itself. Self-consciousness is present from the description of sense-certainty onwards, but we do not realize the necessity or the fact of consciousness as being always conscious of its self. Indeed, sense-certainty tries to escape from self-consciousness, while perception merely regards the action of self-consciousness as so much deception and obscuring of the object. While the inverted world argument shows self-consciousness in its operation, it is an altogether complicated argument with many implications. For example, it is tied up with “force” and “understanding” – or two concepts that necessarily evoke each other.

Force is a concept that scientific man develops, and to arrive at it we have used understanding – for force is what stands under the phenomena we observe. Understanding supersedes perception as a conceptual form of greater perspicuity. Perception involves the Lockean untangling of what is essential and unessential in objects; it attempts to specify what is primary or secondary in a thing – what is really real – and the resultant confusion between properties and things and how they relate gives way to the “scientific” positing of inner forces that bind objects in themselves and to others just as they appear to us.

The Hegelian presentation of the argument can at first lead to some confusion in readers whose perceptual common sense has become rather scientific (do we really look at things as possessing primary and accidental properties, or does that kind of perception now have its place in developmental psychology, in young children?). To the question regarding how a grain of salt can be one thing while having many properties, it is now common to say that Sodium Chloride is something that forms cube-like molecular structures that, through the media of atmosphere and our chemically evolved biological sensing structures are perceived as white and tart-tasting. But in unpacking this explanation, Hegel can explicate the operation of force, understanding, and self-consciousness – using the inverted world argument and showing how the explanation of force is at the same time (as an explanation) neither conceptually all-encompassing nor satisfactory to self-consciousness.

First, looking closer at Sodium Chloride (and we can now take photographs, dimly, of molecular structures and see lattice-works of atoms), we admit to ourselves that the holding-together of these atoms and molecules can only be explained by forces: electrical, gravitational, weak and strong atomic, subatomic, etc. In fact “substance really is a play of forces.”[1] Hegel describes how one force solicits another, and there is constant eliciting of forces. “The interplay of the two Forces… being determined as mutually opposed” becomes the “absolute flux” which expresses itself in differentiation.[2] Over these paragraphs, he mirrors our scientific practice that eventually realizes force as a field or flux of forces which is law-obeying. Hence, our understanding of the inner working of things interests itself in Law as truth.

Admittedly scientific practice likes to deal in theories. One theory stands until a more accurate tallying of the empirical data can be given by another theory. For example, scientists have tested theories of gravitation and found Einstein’s to give a more accurate account of the moon’s movement than Newton’s. Nevertheless, whether the word is theory or Hegel’s Law, the point is that we posit an “inner” or “beyond” to appearances. The beyond is the lawfulness of the field of force, and as we posit such a beyond, we understand a “supersensible world.”

As Hegel explains, the supersensible world is not empty. It is not a dimension devoid of substance. To the contrary, it actually is the phenomena, the appearances. What the supersensible explains is what we perceive. Yet over and above mere perception, when sensual things appear to us, we understand, perhaps immediately, the supersensuous as the explanation of those things via lawfulness of forces. We understand salt as molecules structured and measured by forces. And furthermore, our understanding via the supersensuous shows itself in our language; just as language betrayed sense-certainty, showing its contradiction by speaking the universal instead of the particular thing, it again speaks the universal here. By speaking of, say “the rose in my garden” the word is the “intellectual ‘Idea’” of a rose – the word is the genus no matter how one may point to this rose.[3]

But introducing language into the discussion complicates the issue. In the above paragraph, we saw that the supersensible world qualifies the sensual world of appearances. However, the sensual world also qualifies the supersensuous. This is a double movement. Hegel explains the double movement by giving us two supersensible worlds, and by finally explaining this double movement as both the inverted world and the proof and action of self-consciousness.

As we’ve seen, the first supersensible world explains appearances via laws. We understand with aid of explanation. But what is explanation? When we say that the supersensible world is its appearances, we really say that the laws merely are what they explain. A tautology is in play. Yet if we simplify and look closer, at the level of Hegelian logic, “[w]hen we say A=A, we both distinguish and identify. The equal to itself repels itself but also unites itself.”[4] The Hegelian “unity of unity and difference” which resolved the difficulties in the previous chapters acts here at a higher level of ascendancy towards truth. So the (first) supersensuous world is in a way identical and different from the sensual world.

And the identity of that identity and difference is the second supersensuous world – Gadamer says it is the proper supersensuous world – which inverts the first. It inverts because while the supersensuous explains the sensual, the sensual conditions and substantizes the supersensuous. In this, we see what the (first) supersensuous lacks: it entirely lacks the flux and movement and change of the sensual (as did the first words of sense-certainty, indeed any words). “[W]e detect the very thing that was missing in the law, viz. the absolute flux itself…”[5] But now the supersensible world contains, in a way, the sensuous, changing flux and its constant, unchanging law; “it is both: the law and the perversion (perversion is a translation of das Verkehrte which is valid here since the phenomenon will perniciously never be the same as or as pure as the law, and that is also what is meant by the supersensuous and the sensuous being identical and different).”[6]

The second or proper supersensuous world has the capability of showing self-consciousness to itself. It can do this, since in its “universal blood” the world relates to itself and is in that manner a self-consciousness. The action of the supersensuous and the sensuous, evoking and suppressing each other, being identical and different, reveals the relating of the world to itself. Hegel gives a description of the Whole, which for him is equal to self-consciousness: on the one side is the “inner world”, on the other the “inner being [the ‘I]” and in between the appearances, which vanish – this is the Whole of “the undifferentiated selfsame being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for which equally these moments are immediately not different – self-consciousness.”[7]

So in this way “[t]his second supersensible world is… the inverted world.” But the inverted world is not just the second supersensible world. There is a “law of inversion” by which we as self-consciousness invert; inversion is our activity. Examples may be given: Hyppolite speaks of the gospels and Gadamer and Hegel both speak of crime and punishment. However, we may stick with the example given here of the inversion of the first supersensuous world into the second, for that takes places at a higher acendency to truth and aids us in becoming aware of self-consciousness. We understand then how self-consciousness took reality as sense-certainty, as perception, as an interpretation of forces, and will look to the rest of the book for its development.

[1] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hegel’s Dialectic, Five Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. P. C.

Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, pg. 38.

[2] Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1977, pg. 84-90.

[3] Rosen, Stanley. G.W.F. Hegel, An Introduction to the Science of Widsom. South Bend,

Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 1977, pg. 146.

[4] Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pg. 135.

[5] Hegel, pg. 95.

[6] Gadamer pg. 46.

[7] Hegel pg. 103.

25 Years Ago: India erupts in anti-Sikh violence in wake of Gandhi assassination

2009-11-02T23:42:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1974, pogroms targeting the religious minority kill 3,000 and leave tens of thousands more homeless. Most of the violence takes place in Delhi.

Leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party and the military stand by amidst the violence, and in some cases encourage it. Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister within hours of his mother’s assassination, comments in the midst of the pogroms that “when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”

Indira Gandhi was assassinated in retaliation for Operation Bluestar, a military campaign against non-violent Sikh separatists in the Punjab that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.

Interview with Slavoj Zizek

2009-10-29T01:02:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Derbyshire

Published 29 October 2009

NS: What relationship, if any, do you think your work has to the mainstream, normative, liberal political philosophy done in English and American universities?

SZ: I noticed something -- maybe I'm just generalising this; I don't know to what extent this is a rule-- I noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard, the left-liberal standard, most of them do not work in political philosophy properly but, as it were, hide themselves as literary critics or philosophers. It's as if it's an excess which requires you to change genre. Another tendency of these "radicals" is moralization connected with legalization. It's a certain pose in which they want to deliver the message that they are really more radical. But this excess of radicality only concretely articulates itself in some kind of a general moralistic outrage -- "what are we doing to immigrants?!" I think they often tend to be a little bit hypocritical. I always read the liberal anti-communists, liberal leftists - they're interesting, one can learn from them. I read a wonderful essay by Orwell from 1938. There he has a wonderful analysis of the typical leftist liberal. He says they ask for a change, but they do it in a hypocritical way: they ask for a change but it's almost as if to make sure that no real change will happen.

Don't you suspect a little bit that there's something of this in today's typical radical liberal - in today's anti-immigrant campaign for instance? The standard idea is to say, like my friend Alain Badiou in France, "those who are here are from here". That is to say, no check for roots, open to all of them. Legalize everything. The problem is that they know very well that this radical opening will never happen. So it's very easy to have a radical position which costs you nothing and for the price of nothing it gives you some kind of moral superiority. It also enables them to avoid the truly difficult questions. For example, my conflict with my radical leftist friends is when they want total openness and so on. I say to them, are you aware that anti-immigrant are mostly spontaneous, lower working-class attitudes? They talk as if some big imperialist power centre decides to be against immigrants. No! If anything, capital is more liberal about immigrants. So, I think this is not a good thing - I think of all these theorists, like Giddens and Held, who are left-wing, but left within the establishment ...

NS: Would you say that thinkers of that sort, establishment leftists if you like, are insufficiently materialist?

SZ: Exactly, exactly. Apart from their very general anti-capitalist thunder -this is my biggest reproach to them. Despite the financial crisis, we do not have a serious leftist attempt to deal with what, in old Marxist terms, we called the critique of political economy. It's obvious to me that Marx has to be repeated, but repeated not as he was. Isn't it clear today that with all the problems of natural resources, intellectual property and so on, that the whole notion of exploitation, if it has any meaning at all should be radically redefined? I don't see enough work of this sort. I think it's either some kind of an abstract, moralistic politics where you focus on groups which are obviously under-privileged -other races, gays and so on- and then you can explode in all your moralistic rage. Or, another thing that I really hate as a leftist who tries to be a communist - did you notice how the standard academic left likes nothing more than an attempted revolution going on, but far away from where you are? Today it's Venezuela, which is why I like to be critical from time to time of Chavez. It's a very comfortable position: you can do all the dirty work, you struggle for your career, compromises in your country in the west, but your heart is somewhere far away but it in no way affects what you are doing. This is another thing which I think is a fake.

So, if anything was proven by this financial crisis, it is that apart from left-radical Keynesians like Paul Krugman, with whom I'm sympathetic, I don't see any serious counter-proposal by the left.

NS: So we have lost the political economy in Marx?

SZ: There are some marginal good signs - Moishe Postone is one of the few people who really asks the question, what to do with Marx's political economy today? Then there are of course some economists and so on - David Harvey, for example, But the question is not properly addressed and that's very sad. If you read the predominant cultural left, you'd have thought that Marx's Capital is some kind of treatise on commodity fetishism and other cultural phenomena. Sorry, but Marx meant it as a critical theory of society, giving a diagnosis and so on. I think things today call for analysis. Let me give me your analysis - don't be afraid, I will be short.

I claim that we have two opponents: pro-capitalist liberals and old Marxists, as far as they still exist. They claim that it's the same capitalism going on. This is obviously not true - in China and other places, something new is emerging. Then you have all these, I call them, ironically, "post-theorists" - like Giddens, for example. I claim that their work is, unfortunately, a journalistic patchwork. Many leftists say: we know what is wrong - capitalism, imperialism. We just don't know how to mobilise people; the problem is political. But I think we don't know what's going on.

This is typical theoretical arrogance. We don't know what is going on. This is the point of my book: terrific new things are emerging. What's going on in China today is something very ominous. Here I disagree with liberals who say, wait for another ten years and we'll have another Tiananmen in China. I doubt it. Something genuinely new is emerging today in the guise of what are ridiculously called "Asian values", authoritarian capitalism. A capitalism which, we can see now, is doing better in the crisis than the west. A capitalism that is more dynamic and efficient than our Western, liberal capitalism, but precisely as such functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. My pessimism is that this is the future. This is what I think we should watch. This is why I wrote that piece about Berlusconi [in the LRB], which many people thought was crazy - Berlusconi's still democratically elected, after all. But I see signs of this new authoritarianism. There's a kind of total devaluation of politics. Of course, this new post-democratic capitalism will take different forms. There will be Asian values, more traditionally authoritarian; in Russia, it's emerging; in Italy, it's emerging in its own way. This is the fear. We who pretend in some way to be more radical, where we should make a pact with honest liberals is precisely along this axis: we should all be aware that what was precious in the liberal democratic legacy. What, for example, Hannah Arendt noticed in the US during the Vietnam War. What fascinated her was the level of public debate - people in town meetings debating. This is disappearing.

NS: Arendt thought political participation was an intrinsic good didn't she?

SZ: The problem I have with her is that she dismissed the economy as the space of truth, so to speak. For her, the economy was just utilitarian stuff. The authentic big politics doesn't happen there for her. But we need what Marx called a political economy. You know the basic Marxist insight that politics is not just politics - politics is in the economy. We should rehabilitate this. Isn't this becoming clear? And here's somewhere else where I don't agree with many leftists: you know this Toni Negri mantra - "Empire", nation states no longer matter and so on. It's crazy. If there is a lesson from so-called postmodern, post-68 capitalism, it's that the regulatory role of the state is getting stronger. So much for this stupid story, the state disappearing etc. Not true! More and more if you want to have a company today, you have to be so deeply entwined with the state apparatus.

This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it's too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let's withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I'm an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible. This is why I supported - ok, my support doesn't mean anything, but as a public gesture- Obama. I think the battle that he is fighting now for healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The real core of the anti-Obama campaign is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is how freedom of choice is something beautiful, but works only against a very thick background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. This is the problem. As I like to emphasise here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don't have a choice in choosing my water provider. It's imposed by where I live. But, my god, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society - water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare. This precisely opens up the choice, opens up the freedom for other choices. Another important thing, and here I agree with that great British sceptic, John Gray (I don't agree with his conclusions), who says today we are forced to live "as if" we are free. We are all the time bombarded choices -and he's not making the old, boring Marxist point that these are inessential choices. No, the point is rather that you are obliged to choose without even having the background qualification to make the choice.

My position isn't that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of a blow will made against this freedom of choice ideology, it will be a great victory worth having fought for.

NS: Those short-term gains shouldn't be underestimated?

SZ: No. That was Critichley's misunderstanding of me: as if I wanted to sit down and dream of a big revolution. All I'm saying is that one should distinguish between short-term battles worth fighting and short-term battles where your protest is of the kind that those in power like. There was a little bit of that in the marches against the Iraq war. Everyone was satisfied. Those who organised the protests knew they wouldn't change anything. Blair like the protests - he or Bush said, you see, this is what we want in Iraq: a society in which people will be able to protest like we do. So, one should be very careful when doing something which appears as a protest measure. How does it really function? And it's not difficult. If you look closely, you always know what you are doing.

NS: You're talking about the ideological function of protest.

SZ: More than ever, the battle to be won is ideological. I don't mean in any obscure, pseudo-Marxist sense - it's a very spontaneous ideology. But isn't it interesting that the most influential public intellectual in political matters is Noam Chomsky, who knows practically nothing about political theory. I met a guy who recently had lunch with Chomsky and he told me that Chomsky said something very sad: Chomsky said that today we don't need theory. Power is cynical and all we need to to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree. I don't think you just have to tell the truth in this factual sense. Truth in the sense of facts - facts are facts and they are precious, but they can work this way or that. A nice example here: there is a new generation of Israeli historians who are much more open about Jewish violence against Arabs before independence. And people say, "my god, they are telling the truth!" But this truth was easily appropriated by zionists, who say, "you see, that's how you fight wars - we had to do it." If you don't change the ideological background, facts alone don't do the job.

NS: That's an argument for theory in the critical sense then?

SZ: Yes, sorry: I'm an old fashioned continental European! Theory is sacred, we need it more than ever.

NS: The first chapter of your new book is called "It's Ideology, Stupid!" And it strikes me that ideology is, for you, the most important conceptual tool bequeathed to us by Marx.

SZ: Yes, but if you read the concept of ideology the way I develop it in my other books, I'm critical of Marx. Ideology is not so-called "superstructure", a shadowy realm and real things are happening elsewhere. For me, the core of Marx's theory of ideology is not to be found in the German Ideology, and those stupid, simplistic, youthful works, which are totally outdated. But in Capital, when Marx speaks about commodity fetishism, he speaks about fetishism as some kind of ideology, even if he doesn't use the term ideology. Here Marx outgrew his early simplicities, the distinction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. This is the lesson of this crisis. Even intelligent neo-conservatives recognise that we are in deadlock and there is no way out. Someone like Fukuyama asks to what extent the functioning of the economy rests on people's ideological attitudes - whether they trust each other, what they think and so on. One big false rumour can practically ruin a small country today. So, I'm not saying that everything dissolves into psychology or whatever. No, the trick is precisely to see what extent the economy itself, in order to function, has to rely on the fact of ideological attitudes. And this is what fascinates me.

I don't have answers. When people ask me what we should do about ecology, the financial crisis - my god, what do I know? What I can do, as a critical intellectual, is to ask the right questions. Sometimes the way you formulate or perceive a problem can be itself be part of the problem. The classical example is tolerance. Why is it that we today automatically translate or perceive problems of racism or sexism into problems of tolerance.

NS: It's the historical legacy of classical liberalism isn't it, going back to Locke?

SZ: Yes, but on the other hand, but look at the great anti-racist struggle of Martin Luther King. He never uses the word "tolerance". For him it would have been ridiculous to say that we blacks want more "tolerance" from the whites. I think it has something to do with what you might call our cultural, post-political capitalism, in which the most passionate struggles are cultural struggles. A large majority of the left doesn't question liberal democracy and capitalism as such. In the same way that when we were young we wanted socialism with a human face, for a large part of today's left, what they want is global capitalism with a human face. This is why the only way you can perceive problems is to transform or transpose them into cultural problems. I don't find this self-evident. Critical intellectuals today should be working to enable people to raise the right questions.

NS: Unlike mainstream political philosophers, you're not that interested in the question of legitimacy are you?

SZ: This focus on legitimate power is the topic on which I would definitely not focus. It's not the topic that I think is crucial. I don't despise democracy, but, for me, democracy, in the formal sense, is precious but it is not in itself a measure of any infinite truth, authenticity or whatever. It's something precious, I know, but we all know this. You can have elections where people get seduced by right-wing populists. And here I'm an unashamed anarchist. I'm ready to say here that the result in some way untrue or false. Even Karl Popper said this. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't fetishise democracy. I'm ready to claim that you can have democratic elections where the majority for a rightist populist and that you have the right to treat that government as illegitimate. I don't think that this formal democratic procedure as such should be taken as equalling legitimacy.

NS: Let's talk about the left's response to the financial crisis. The left has consoled itself with the idea that this crisis is some grand ideological opportunity. Whereas you write that the main victim of the crisis will not be capitalism but the left itself.

SZ: Yes. In the long term, it will work as yet another shock therapy, in the Naomi Klein sense. A kind of shattering of the system which, in the long run, will help make capitalism leaner and meaner. The battle is not lost in advance, however. In the US, for example, what is important is to make acceptable the idea of large, collective actions. We should make this idea acceptable. I'm not saying everything is lost. It's an open battle. Let's not be seduced by the simple idea that this is a crisis and we can use this opportunity to impose our agenda. When the economy is in crisis, the first reaction of the people is to cling to their fundamental principles. So you get this renewed social-demoractic welfarism in the US - Krugman, Stiglitz etc. But at the same time, there was an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. So, it's a battle and we should be aware that battles are always difficult. The only serious true serious proposal that we know about is, on the one hand this Krugman-Stiglitz leftist Keynesianism, and on the other this idea, popularised in Europe and latin America, of basic income. I like it as an idea but I think it's too much of an ideological utopia. For structural reasons, it can't work. It's the last desperate attempt to make capitalism work for socialist ends. The guy who developed it, Robert Van Parijs, openly says that this is the only way to legitimise capitalism. Apart from these two, I don't see anything else.

NS: Van Parijs is associated, as you know, with analytical Marxism. And I was wondering what you make of that strain of Marxist theory?

SZ: I know some British guys and I had a debate with them. It's the same problem with John Rawls. Rawls himself, when he was confronted with his critics, admitted one thing: that his model of distributive justice, the difference principle etc, works on one fateful condition: that there is no resentment. That is to say, given the way we are libidinally structured in modern societies, envy and resentment are crucial. Rawls doesn't take into account the irrationality of envy. Capitalism takes much better of it. Although these analytical Marxists want to be "no-bullshit" analysts, the ultimate image of human being it is based on is way too naïve and utopian. I don't think the socialist project can be reduced to this. But nonetheless I claim that in capitalist relations today, envy is crucial. Never underestimate the power of envy. This is a psychoanalytic insight.

NS: I want to ask you finally about what you follow Alain Badiou in calling the "Communist Hypothesis". You say that the great barrier to the realisation of that hypothesis being the problem of agency. Do you see a new revolutionary agent actor on the horizon?

SZ: No, no. But let me clearly define to you the limits of my communism. My problem with Badious is that he totally dismisses the economy as a site of political struggle. The only real question for me is very simple: was Fukuyama right or not? That is to say, do we have today antagonisms which, in the long term, can be resolved or at least coped with within the liberal-democratic, capitalist frame. This is the question. The way I see it, unfortunately, is that all the problems that we have -ecological catastrophe, problems of intellectual property and so on- can be solved within the liberal-capitalist framework. This era is slowly coming to an end. The problem for me is that if we don't want to end up in some kind of neo-authoritarian society, in which we'll have all our private freedoms (you can have sex with animals and so on), but in which the social space will be depoliticized and much more authoritarian - here we should make a pact with liberals. Only a more fundamental questioning of our society can save us. It's clear that we are approaching some kind of apocalyptic zero-point. So, no, I don't see any immediate agent. I see tendencies of proletarianization. By proletarianization I mean people being reduced almost to a kind of Cartesian zero-level - you are a free agent but deprived of substance. Then it's a question of coalitions, how to do it. My unconditional insight is that we will be pushed into a situation where we will have to make a choice: either we do something or we are slowly approaching a society I'm not sure I'd like to live in.

BAE in talks with military on fatal MRAP rollovers

2009-10-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

By BRENT BURKEY
Daily Record/Sunday News

Updated: 08/28/2008 12:23:27 PM EDT

U.S. soldiers secure the area next to a damaged U.S. mine resistant, ambush protected vehicle (MRAP), after a roadside bomb explosion during an operation in the area of Al-leg, some 40 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq. (Associated Press)

The military is warning that MRAP vehicles that were rapidly designed and deployed to protect troops from improvised explosive devices are at a risk for rollover.

At least five troop deaths have been blamed on the rollovers.

The military's MRAP vehicle fleet went from zero about a year and a half ago to more than 10,000 as of earlier this summer. At the time, about 1,135 had been produced at BAE Systems in West Manchester Township. More than 2,000 have been ordered from the facility.

Kelly Golden, spokeswoman for BAE Systems in West Manchester Township, said the RG-33 model of MRAP is manufactured at its local facility and she is unaware of major incidents with the model.

BAE manufactures elsewhere the Caiman model and has a part in the manufacturing of the RG-31, which has a lead producer of General Dynamics.

Both of those models have been involved in major rollover incidents, helping to prompt the warning.

Golden said the company is in conversations with the military about what can be done to minimize the risk of MRAP rollover, but could not comment further.

All MRAP models have risks of rolling over because of their design, which raises the vehicle's center of gravity high off the ground and lines the vehicle with armor plating, Golden said.The result is a V-shaped vehicle -- as viewed from the front and back -- that helps deflect roadside bomb blasts away from passenger compartments.

Because of the very designs that protect troops, it ends up top-heavy, Golden said.

Add that feature to poor roads and rollovers can result.

"The roads are not what we're used to in the U.S.," Golden said.

The message is especially relevant in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban has boosted demand.

Because of the country's mountainous terrain and unpaved roads, officials will send nearly 800 more RG-31s, the smallest of several different MRAPs the

View a comparison and see how MRAPs are made in our special section

military now uses.

Yet even at a comparatively nimble nine tons, the RG-31 is not immune from tipping. On June 29, three Green Berets drowned when theirs rolled into a canal in southern Afghanistan. The accident is under investigation.

Close to 7,000 of the vehicles are already in use in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon will buy at least that many more.

And despite their bulk, the MRAPs have power steering, air brakes and quick acceleration. These features can lull drivers into thinking they're just handling a bigger version of the smaller and more agile Humvee.

Don't be fooled.

"This ain't your father's Oldsmobile," says the June edition of "Safety Corner," an internal newsletter published by the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned in Quantico, Va.

There have been at least 66 MRAP-related accidents between November and June, according to Defense Department statistics. Nearly 40 of those involved a rollover caused by bad roads, weak bridges or driver error.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

A Tour of the Arts with Brother Glenn

2009-10-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

Beck: JD Rockafeller was a communist

we're all praying for Brother Glenn

2009-10-21T16:11:00.001-07:00

Volunteering is MARXISM! DON'T DO IT!

Inside Jung’s Red Book: Six Questions for Sonu Shamdasani

2009-10-19T17:09:00.001-07:00

By Scott Horton

October 19, 3:46 PM

The long-awaited publication of C.G. Jung’s Red Book is causing ripples in the world of psychology. Notwithstanding its enormous folio size and its hefty price tag, the book is already in its third printing. I put six questions to leading Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, who took the lead in editing the book and translated it from German, together with Mark Kyburz and John Peck.

1. The technical side of this book is fascinating: it is done on folio-sized sheets covered with calligraphy in several different chancery styles, and it is illuminated with captivating images in vivid colors, sometimes using gold-leaf. Did Jung physically execute this book all by himself? What works did he take as models?

Prof. Sonu Shamdasani

Jung did indeed produce the work by himself. In the red leather folio volume, titled Liber Novus (”New Book”), he painstakingly transcribed the manuscript into a calligraphic script, headed with a table of abbreviations, and illustrated it with historiated initials, ornamental borders, and paintings. The paintings initially represent scenes depicted in the text. At a later stage, the paintings become more symbolic, relating to fantasies in his Black Books and representing further elaborations of his private cosmology. The work was clearly modelled after illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, which I presume he would have been familiar with since his student days in Basel, though it is not clear if there was any particular work which he took as a model. The strongest resemblance is to the illuminated works of William Blake, which Jung was familiar with, though it is not clear when he first encountered them.

2. The scripts used seem to follow manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the Age of Faith is coming to an end, and the Renaissance is unfolding—and with it, the crisis of scientific method. Is that coincidental, or does it tell us something about Jung’s purpose in the book?

I don’t think that this is accidental. Towards the end of the second of three parts of the work, entitled Liber Secundus, Jung wrote: “I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages—within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of—others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out.” The psychological history of humanity, as Jung saw it, lived on in the soul. In his view, the secular conflict that broke out at the beginning of sixteenth century had consequences that the Western was still grappling with, and had led to a separation of natural science and religion, which he saw his psychology as attempting to resolve. Consequently, after working on Liber Novus, Jung spent the remaining decades of his life studying the psychology of Western alchemy, arguing that it formed a counterpart to his psychology of the individuation process.

3. Jung frequently writes in the first person. We often discover, however, that the speaker is not Jung but another voice he is channeling. Students of Jung have seen this in other works, like the Seven Sermons, and it has fueled a good deal of criticism of Jung for his departure from accepted scientific method. How do you understand the function of this voice as it appears in the Red Book?

I think the term “channeling” is misleading in this context. What the text presents is a series of fantasies in which dramatic dialogues occur. Jung enters into discussion with the figures that emerge, and then attempts to draw lessons from their exchange. He viewed these characters as different aspects of his personality. The text describes his attempt to recognise and come to terms with these aspects through differentiating the voices, and eventually to integrate them.

Initially, this exercise was an attempt to study what in 1912 he had described as fantasy or undirected thinking, in contrast to directed thinking. At this time in psychology, self-experimentation was widespread, and introspection was one of the most common methods, though coming under increasing contestation. So in this regard, there was no major departure from the self-investigative procedures prevalent in psychology. At the same time, Jung certainly didn’t envisage the resulting work to be scientific: I think it could best be described as a work of psychology cast in a literary and prophetic form.

4. As you have noted, the publication of the Red Book will show the world a new side of Jung’s personality, and one that he apparently intended to show publicly, although his family resisted this decision. What indicators do you have for the claim that Jung expected the Red Book to be published? Why was his family reluctant?

To begin with, one must clearly differentiate Jung’s Black Books, in which he initially wrote his fantasies together with reflections on his mental states, from Liber Novus. The former were records of a self-experiment, while the latter drew in part on these materials to compose a literary and pictorial work. The address “my friends” appears in the book as a refrain. After composing a handwritten manuscript, Jung had it typed and edited it. One manuscript contains editorial suggestions from a colleague. He then transcribed it into the red leather folio volume, again revising the material once more. In 1924, he had this version transcribed once more. Sometime in the mid-1920s, he went back to the earlier draft, and once more made extensive revisions to it. During this period he had extensive discussions with Cary Baynes and Wolfgang Stockmayer concerning publishing it, and the form it should take. Such editorial activity doesn’t make any sense unless Jung was seriously considering publishing it. Although he eventually decided not to publish it during his lifetime, the unfinished epilogue he added to it clearly indicates that he expected it to be read by others. In this, he wrote:

I worked on this book for 16 years. My acquaintance with alchemy in 1930 took me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when Wilhelm sent me the text of the “Golden Flower,” an alchemical treatise. There the contents of this book found their way into actuality and I could no longer continue working on it. To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would also have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences. With the help of alchemy, I could finally arrange them into a whole. I always knew that these experiences contained something precious, and therefore I knew of nothing better than to write them down in a “precious,” that is to say costly book and to paint the images that emerged through reliving it all—as well as I could. I knew how frightfully inadequate this undertaking was, but despite much work and many distractions I remained true to it, even if another possibility never …

In his will, the work was left to the keeping of his family, with no stipulations. However, he also made several verbal statements suggesting that it be donated to an archive and made available for study after a certain number of years. Up till the mid-nineties, the family had been engaged in supporting the publication of his Collected Works in German. It was only as that was nearing completion that the question of what to do with his extensive unpublished manuscripts seriously arose. When I began discussing the work with them in 1997, it had not been closely studied or seriously considered by living members of the family.

When it was discussed, it became clear that Jung had given copies of it to close associates, and that it was not a private, intimate diary, but a work conceived for publication, which formed the bedrock of his subsequent Collected Works, whose genesis couldn’t be fully grasped without studying it.

5. How do you expect publication of the Red Book to affect Jung’s image in the world in the coming years?

I find it easier to foresee the situation, say, in ten years time than in the immediate aftermath of the publication. At that time, the publication will be seen to mark a caesura comparable to the effect of the publication of the Nag Hammadi library on the study of Gnosticism—finally, one is in the position to study the genesis of Jung’s work and what took place in him during this critical period, on the basis of primary documents rather than gossip, speculation, and fantasy. It provides a unparalleled window into how Jung fused his fantasies with his scholarship and attempted to form a science of psychology. One can trace the steps from Jung’s experimentation with his fantasies and his elaborations and reflections on them, through his attempt to forge general principles and to confirm these principles in his work with his patients, and ultimately, in comparative historical research. Works written on Jung will be categorised in terms of a before and after, and ranked accordingly. Only on this basis can biographies of Jung begin to be written. As to the immediate aftermath, commentators are likely to find their preconceptions confirmed therein.

6. One of the striking images appears on folio 36 at the end of Chapter 6, “The Remains of Earlier Temples.” Jung’s marginal notation says it was painted around Christmas 1915. How does this dramatic image relate to the text, and how do you interpret it in the context of Jungian thought?

This is a portrait of Izdubar. Izdubar was an early name given the figure now known as Gilgamesh, based on a mistranscription. It resembles an illustration of him in Wilhelm Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie. Jung discussed the Gilgamesh epic in 1912 in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, using the corrected form. His use of the older form here indicates that the figure is related to, but not identical to the figure in the epic. Jung encounters Izdubar in a fantasy. Jung says that he comes from the West, and tells Izdubar about the setting of the sun, the roundness of the earth, and the emptiness of space. Izdubar wants to know where he gets his knowledge from, and whether there is an immortal land where the sun goes for rebirth. Jung says he comes from a world where this is science. Izdubar is aghast to learn that we can never reach the sun and that he can never attain immortality, and collapses, poisoned by this science. Izdubar wonders if there are two kinds of truth. Jung says that their truth comes from outer things, whilst the truth of Izdubar’s priests comes from inner things. Jung makes a fire with a match and shows him his clock. Izdubar is astonished. However, Jung tells him that Western science has not found a means against death. Izdubar wonders how Jung lives with this poisonous science. Jung says that they have got used to it, and have had to swallow the poison of science. Izdubar asks if they have Gods. Jung says, no, just the words. Izdubar says that they also do not see the Gods. Jung says that science has taken faith from them. Jung says he can’t bare this well, which is why he has gone to the East, to seek the light that they lack. Jung longs for Izdubar’s truth. Izdubar tells him to be careful, as he could be blinded.

In terms of Jung’s thought, this scene stages the encounter between the ancient and the modern, the conflict between the truths of science and the truths of myth and religion, which he hoped to reconcile in the form of his psychology.

Masters of Combat: William Shatner

2009-10-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

2009-10-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

Is Engel Too Opinionated–or Does He Have the Wrong Opinion?
10/13/2009 by Steve Rendall

When NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel recently returned from Afghanistan, he told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "I honestly think it's probably time to start leaving the country." Engel added, "I really don't see how this is going to end in anything but tears."

Engel's comments caused Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (10/12/09) to raise an eyebrow at a reporter stating an opinion: "That sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," wrote Kurtz.

But we had to wonder if what really attracted Kurtz's scrutiny was Engel's stating of an opinion, or the opinion itself?

After all, for years FAIR has documented the phenomenon of journalists stating opinions in support of hawkish U.S. policies with virtual impunity--even when their views were catastrophically in error.

And so we wondered if Kurtz would even have commented if a network news reporter had suggested that the U.S. needed to escalate its military efforts in Afghanistan. We needn't have wondered.

Lara Logan, who holds the same position at CBS News as Engel does at NBC--chief foreign affairs correspondent--may be a more vehement cheerleader for escalation than Engel is for withdrawal. In a recent interview with Bob Orr on CBS News' Political Hotsheet, Logan expressed a disturbing devotion to Gen. David McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and chief proponent of escalating the war there: "I don't understand why no one will listen to the man you put your faith in and said he is the guy who is going to do this for us...."

Since Logan too "sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," we wonder how it is she escaped Kurtz's scrutiny?

For us, it isn't so much that journalists have and express opinions--the public is better served when we know what reporters are thinking--but we are troubled when disapproval and despair over the lost standards of journalistic objectivity are trotted out only for reporters whose opinions are at odds with official views.

So we are glad to know of Logan's hero worship, even if it is at odds with the worthwhile journalistic ethic that says reporters should hold the feet of the powerful to the fire--not massage them.

excellent Frontline program: Obama's War

2009-10-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

didn't daVinci do the Last Supper? maybe Michaelangelo did one too

2009-10-09T19:47:00.001-07:00

2009-09-30T12:31:00.001-07:00

Insanity Trumps Common Sense in Afghan Policy Fight

Monday 28 September 2009

by: Alexander Cockburn, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Obama visits Pentagon. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley / The US Army)

The ripest moment of absurdity last week was the spectacle of Pentagon officials berating The Washington Post for publishing the supposedly confidential assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, prepared by General Stanley McChrystal, America's Man in Charge of that doomed adventure.

The Pentagon asked the Post to cut certain passages on the ground that they would compromise national security.

Since the document is commonly supposed to have been leaked to Bob Woodward by either McChrystal himself or one of his retinue, it seems silly to start whining about the irresponsibility of the press. The record for willful indiscretion is probably held by Henry "Hap" Arnold, the only five-star general to hold the grades of General of the Army and later, during World War Two, General of the Air Force.

Arnold's leak was a famous one. During WWII someone gave a Chicago newspaper the entire order of battle of the U.S. Navy. The newspaper published it in what was undoubtedly one of the most serious security breaches of the era. The identity of the leaker remained unknown for many years. Finally, my brother, Andrew, discovered it a few years ago. It was Arnold, pursuing some ferocious bureaucratic struggle against the Enemy - which was, of course, the U.S. Navy.

Anyone wanting to understand how JFK plunged into the Vietnamese quagmire and how LBJ got in even deeper has only to follow the current fight over Afghan policy. Insanity effortlessly trumps common sense.

By common agreement, the situation is rapidly getting worse. In terms of military advantage, the Taliban have been doing very well, helped by America's bizarre policy of trying to assassinate the Taliban's high command by drones, thus allowing vigorous young Taliban commanders to step into senior positions.

Ahmed Rahid writes in a savage and well-informed piece in The New York Review of Books:

"For much of this year the Taliban have been on the offensive in Afghanistan. Their control of just 30 out of 364 districts in 2003 expanded to 164 districts at the end of 2008, according to the military expert Anthony Cordesman, who is advising General McChrystal. Taliban attacks increased by 60 percent between October 2008 and April 2009....

"In August, moreover - as part of their well-planned anti-election campaign - the Taliban opened new fronts in the north and west of the country where they had little presence before. On election day in Kunduz in the far northeast of the country, considered to be one of the safest cities in Afghanistan, the Taliban fired 57 rockets. The U.S. military has acknowledged the gravity of the situation. 'It is serious and it is deteriorating. ... The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated' in their tactics, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on August 23....

"Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment - at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the U.S. will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful, it will need not only time but international and U.S. support - both open to question.

"After Obama's injection of 21,000 troops and trainers, total Western forces in Afghanistan now number 100,000, including 68,000 U.S. troops. It is likely that Gen. McChrystal will soon ask for more. Obama's overall plan has been to achieve security by doubling the Afghan army's strength to 240,000 men and the police to 160,000; but these are tasks that would take at least until 2014 to complete, if indeed they can be carried out. Meanwhile the military operation in Afghanistan is now costing cash-strapped U.S. taxpayers $4 billion a month.

"Across the region many people fear that the U.S. and NATO may start to pull out of Afghanistan during the next 12 months despite their uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban walking into Kabul. Al-Qaida would be in a stronger position to launch global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to 'liberate' large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever."

After months of derision about Iran's "faked elections," President Hamid Karzai's fakery in the recent Afghan election was too blatant to permit even pro forma denial and can no longer be concealed. The corruption of Karzai's regime is the staple of every news report. CounterPunchers should read the admirable dispatch on this site this weekend by Ehsan Azari.

The oft-announced goal of training an Afghan army and police force is faring no better - in fact, considerably worse - than the efforts at "Vietnamization" 40 years ago. Once furnished with a few square meals, some new clothes and a weapon, the recruits - some of them having been sent by the Taliban to get some basic training - promptly desert.

The expedition to Afghanistan is not popular, either here or in Europe. It is also very expensive. But it has powerful sponsors, starting with Obama, who made it a campaign plank and now may or may not be having second thoughts - but who is showered daily with demented counsels to "stay the course" by his secretaries of state and about 80 percent of the permanent foreign policy establishment. So the involvement will get deeper and the disasters will mount and powerfully assist in the destruction of Obama's presidency, starting with major reverses for the Democrats in the midterm elections next year.

--------

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.

2009-09-17T15:33:00.001-07:00

The party game is over

John Pilger

Published 17 September 2009

For the Afghan villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour’s conference is too late

On the day Gordon Brown made his "major policy speech" on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. "At least" 90 were killed, although Nato prefers not to count its civilian enemy. "It was a scene from hell," said Mohammed Daud, a witness. "Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere." No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.

I saw something similar in south-east Asia. An incendiary bomb had razed most of a thatched village, and bits of charred people were hanging on upended fishing nets. Those intact lay splayed and black, like large spiders.

I have never believed you need witness such a hell to comprehend the crime. A standard-issue conscience is enough for all but the morally corrupt and powerful. Fresh from another dysfunctional photo opportunity with troops in Afghanistan - a contrivance far from the impoverished suffering of that country - Brown "authorised" the Rambo-style rescue of Stephen Farrell, a journalist of British and Irish nationality, at the site of the Nato attack. It was a stunt that went wrong. A British soldier was killed and Farrell's guide, Sultan Munadi, an Afghan journalist, was abandoned and killed. Munadi's family now fully appreciates the different worth of British and Afghan lives.

During the 1914-18 slaughter, Prime Minister Lloyd George confided: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know." Have we not yet advanced over a century's corpses to a point where the likes of Brown are denied their mendacious subterfuge? The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.

The establishment of a permanent US/Nato presence in a resource-rich, strategic region is the principal reason for the war. The British are there because that is what Washington wants. Preventing the Taliban from storming our streets is reminiscent of President Lyndon B Johnson's plaint: "We have to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California."
There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trail made that clear. He has been told as much by British intelligence and security services. Brown's own security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence and grief to his own people.

More than MPs' fake expenses, it is this corrupting and trivialising of life and death that mark a fitting end to the "modernised" Labour Party, the party of criminal war. Do the delegates preparing for the party's annual rituals in Brighton comprehend this? It says enough that most Labour MPs never demanded a vote on Blair's bloodshed in Iraq and gave him a standing ovation when he departed. One timid motion proposed by the "grass roots" at Brighton might be allowed. This concludes that "a majority of the public believe that the war [in Afghanistan] is unwinnable". There is no suggestion that it is wrong, immoral and based on lies similar to those that led to the extinction of a million Iraqis, "an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide", according to one scholarly estimate.

This is largely why the game of parliamentary politics is over for so many Britons, especially the young. In 2005, a bent system allowed Blair to win with fewer popular votes than the Tories in their catastrophe of 1997. New Labour's greatest achievement is the lowest turnouts since universal voting began. Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed their practices as an inspiration "for the whole economy". At the recent meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing, and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in Britain is now the widest since 1968.

New Labour's causes and effect extend from the one in five young people denied employment, education and hope to the £12m that Blair coins in a year, "advising" the rich and lecturing to them at £157,000 a time. For Blair's and Brown's more extreme mentors and courtiers, such as the twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, this represents the most sought-after achievement of all: the positioning of Labour to the right of the Tories, though it is probably correct to say the two main parties have converged, competing feverishly with each other to threaten cuts in public services in order to pay for the bailing out of the banks and for the drug lords of Kabul. There is no mention of cutting the billions to be spent on replacing Trident nuclear submarines designed for the defunct cold war.

The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift. For those Afghan villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour's conference is too late. At the very least, the party's "grass roots" might ask themselves why.

Hal Draper: Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968? (January 1967)

2009-09-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

IN 1968, when the presidential sweepstakes come up again, liberals all over the country are likely to face the California Syndrome. At the risk of sounding like a Californian, I’m referring to the political pattern that was acted out in the recent Brown-Reagan [1] contest in that state – whose denizens have this in common with New Yorkers, that they tend to think that whatever is happening in their state is What’s Happening. Sometimes it is.

In ’68 the problem is going to be: vote for Lyndon Johnson [2] again or not. Among all those schizophrenic people you know whose heart is in the famous Right Place – viz. a little left of center – ulcers are going to ulcerate, psychiatrists’ couches will get political, and navels will be contemplated with a glassy stare. Johnson or Nixon? Johnson or Romney [3]? Johnson or Reagan [4]? Johnson or anybody? As a matter of fact, even before this point is reached, there bids fair to be a similar pattern inside the Democratic Party machine itself: Johnson or Kennedy-Fullbright, [5] or its equivalent.

Now radicals have been wont to approach this classic problem with two handy labels, which in fact are fine as far as they go. One is called the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, and the other is called the Lesser Evil pattern. Neither of these necessarily quite describes What’s Happening. To see why, let’s take a quick look at both of them in terms of 1968.

The ’68 race could be a Tweedledum-Tweedledee affair, and it may be. For example, Johnson versus Governor Romney. One can defy even Max Lerner [6] to insert even a razor-thin sentence between the politics respectively represented by these two millionaires. In fact, there is bound to be a sector of liberal sentiment which would indeed see the Lesser Evil in Romney, since there is as yet no evidence that Romney is quite as rascally a liar as the present Leader of the Free World. But roughly speaking, these two are politically indistinguishable: this is the defining characteristic of the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern. (The sociological label for this invented by the professorial witch-doctors is Consensus Politics.)
In contrast, the Lesser Evil pattern means that there is a significant political difference between the two candidates, but –

To explain the “but,” let’s take – for reasons that will appear – not a current example, but the classic example.

The day after Reagan’s election as governor of California, a liberal pro-Brown acquaintance met me with haggard face and fevered brow, muttering “Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler? Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler?” Did he mean Reagan was Hitler? “Well,” he said darkly, “look how Hitler got started ...” A light struck me about what was going on in his head. “Look,” I said, “you’ve heard of Hitler, so tell me this: how did Hitler become chancellor of Germany?”

My pro-Brown enthusiast was taken aback: “Why, he won some election or other – wasn’t it – with terror and a Reichstag fire and something like that.” – “That was after he had already become chancellor. How did he become chancellor of Germany?”

Don’t go away to look it up. In the 1932 presidential election the Nazis ran Hitler, and the main bourgeois parties ran Von Hindenburg, the Junker general who represented the right wing of the Weimar republic but not fascism. The Social-Democrats, leading a mass workers’ movement, had no doubt about what was practical, realist, hard-headed politics and what was “utopian fantasy”: so they supported Hindenburg as the obvious Lesser Evil. They rejected with scorn the revolutionary proposal to run their own independent candidate against both reactionary alternatives – a line, incidentally that could also break off the rank-and-file followers of the Communist Party, which was then pursuing the criminal policy of “After Hitler we come” and “Social-fascists are the main enemy.”

So the Lesser Evil, Hindenburg, won; and Hitler was defeated. Whereupon President Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, and the Nazis started taking over.

The classic case was that the people voted for the Lesser Evil and got both.

Now 1966 America is not 1932 Germany, to be sure, but the difference speaks the other way. Germany’s back was up against the wall; there was an insoluble social crisis; it had to go to revolution or fascism; the stakes were extreme. This is exactly why 1932 is the classic case of the Lesser Evil, because even when the stakes were this high, even then voting for the Lesser Evil meant historic disaster. Today, when the stakes are not so high, the Lesser Evil policy makes even less sense.

In 1964, you know all the people who convinced themselves that Lyndon Johnson was the lesser evil as against Goldwater [7], who was going to do Horrible Things in Vietnam, like defoliating the jungles. Many of them have since realized that the spiked boot was on the other foot; and they lacerate themselves with the thought that the man they voted for “actually carried out Goldwater’s policy.” [8] (In point of fact, this is unfair to Goldwater: he never advocated the steep escalation of the war that Johnson put through; and more to the point, he would probably have been incapable of putting it through with as little opposition as the man who could simultaneously hypnotize the liberals with “Great Society” rhetoric.)

So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.

New development

For the moment, so much for the Lesser Evil pattern. But there is an interesting difference between the classic case (Hitler and Hindenburg in 1932) and the Johnson-Goldwater case. There really was a significant political difference between Hitler and Hindenburg; the general himself would never have fascized Germany. If he called the Nazi to the chancellorship, it was because he believed that the imposition of government responsibility was the way to domesticate the wild-talking Nazis, that the burden of actually having to run the country would turn the “irresponsible” extremists into tame politicians like all the others, in the pattern usually seen (as with the Hubert Humphreys [9]). But Hindenburg himself was not a Hitler and he really was a Lesser Evil. What the classic case teaches is not that the Lesser Evil is the same as the Greater Evil – this is just as nonsensical as the liberals argue it to be but rather this: that you can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.

This latter pattern is what has been going on in this country for the last two decades. Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right.

The lib-labs would then swoon, crying “The fascists are coming!” and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right. The lib-labs were kept happy enough if Hubert Humphrey showed up at a banquet to make his liberal speeches; or, before that, by the Kennedy myth which bemused them even while the first leader on this planet poised his finger over the nuclear-war button and said “Or else!” With the lib-lab votes in a pocket, politics in this country had to move steadily right-right-right-until even a Lyndon Johnson could look like a Lesser Evil. This is essentially why – even when there really is a Lesser Evil – making the Lesser Evil choice undercuts any possibility of really fighting the Right.

But now notice this: when the Lesser Evil named Johnson was elected in 1964, he did not call in the Greater Evil to power, as did Hindenburg. He did not merely act in so flabby a manner that the Right wing alternative was thereby strengthened – another classic pattern. These patterns would have been old stuff, the historic Lesser Evil pattern in full form.

What was bewildering about Johnson was that the Lesser Evil turned out to be the Greater Evil, if not worse. Was it then the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, after all? Am I merely then saying that the apparent difference between Johnson and Goldwater (even within the framework of capitalist politics) was just an illusion? Is the conclusion merely that all capitalist politicians have to be the same, that therefore the case against voting for the Lesser Evil is that there is no Lesser Evil?

I don’t think that’s the answer; I think there is a third pattern around, which is neither Tweedledee-Tweedledum nor the classic Lesser Evil choice. If the Johnson-Goldwater contest was one example, then an even better one was provided by the recent Brown-Reagan race. For Pat Brown really is a liberal, whatever you may think of Johnson; and thereby hangs the tale.

Because this genuine liberal, Pat Brown, acted for eight years as governor of California in no important respect differently from what a conservative Republican would have done. The operative word is acted. He sold out the water program to the big landholding companies as his two Republican predecessors never dared to do. He fought tooth and nail for the bracero system [10] as no Republican governor of an agricultural state dared to do.

It was he (not Clark Kerr [11]) who in 1964 unleashed an army of police against the Berkeley students. After the Watts uprising, it was he who named John J. McCone’s commission to whitewash the whole business, and who then supported the right wing’s anti-riot law to intimidate the ghetto. It was Brown who gave the liberal Democratic CDC the final decapitation when he personally mobilized all his strength to oust Si Casady as CDC head. [12] If half of this had been done by a Reagan, the lib-labs would be yelling “Fascism” all over the place. (As they will during the next four years, no doubt.)

And I repeat that I don’t think this took place simply because Pat Brown was a Tweedledee reflecting image of Reagan. Here is a somewhat different interpretation:

A profound change has taken place in this country since the days of the New Deal – has taken place in the nature of capitalist politics, and therefore in the two historic wings of capitalist politics, liberalism and conservatism. In the 1930’s there was a genuine difference in the programs put before capitalism by its liberal and conservative wings. The New Deal liberals proposed to save capitalism, at a time of deep-going crisis and despair, by statification – that is, by increasing state intervention into the control of the economy from above. It is notorious that some of the most powerful sectors of the very class that was being saved hated Roosevelt like poison. (This added to the illusions of the “Roosevelt revolution” at the time, of course.) Roosevelt himself always insisted that a turn toward state-capitalist intervention was necessary to save capitalism itself; and he was right. In fact, the New Deal conquered not only the Democratic but the Republican Party. When Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal were succeeded by Eisenhower’s regime, the free-enterprise-spouting Republican continued and even, intensified exactly the same social course that Roosevelt had begun. (This is the reality behind the Birchite charge that Eisenhower is a “card-carrying Communist”!)

In the three and a half decades since 1932, and before, during and after a second world war which intensified the process, the capitalist system itself has been going through a deep-going process of bureaucratic statification. The underlying drives are beyond the scope of this article; the fact itself is plain to see. The liberals who sparked this transformation were often imbued with the illusion that they were undermining the going system; any child can now see that they knew not what they did. The conservatives who denounced all the steps in this transformation, and who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new stage, were also imbued with the very same illusion. But even Eisenhower – who has never been accused of being an egghead, and who, before he was nominated for the presidency, made exactly the same sort of free-enterprise-hurrah speeches as Reagan was paid to make for General Electric – even he was forced to act, in the highest office, no differently from a New Deal Democrat. Because that is the only way the system can now operate.

Fruits of lesser evilism

Under the pressure of bureaucratic-statified capitalism, liberalism and conservatism converge. That does not mean they are identical, or are becoming identical. They merely increasingly tend to act in the same way in essential respects, where fundamental needs of the system are concerned. And just as the conservatives are forced to conserve and expand the statified elements of the system, so the liberals are forced to make use of the repressive measures which the conservatives advocate: because the maintenance of the system demands it. [13] Just as when Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley [14] and then invoked it against striking workers. What is more, because the liberal politicians can point a warning finger towards the right and because the lib-labs will respond to it, they are even more successful than the conservatives in carrying out those measures which the conservatives advocate. It is not necessary to claim that even that pitiful man, Hubert Humphrey, is merely a hypocrite. No, I fully believe, myself, that he is as sincere a liberal as the next lib-lab specimen. It is liberalism which requires the examination, not Humphrey’s morals. Nor was that even more pathetic man, Adlai Stevenson, simply a rascal when he found himself lying like a trooper at the UN in the sight and knowledge of the whole world. [15]

So besides Tweedledee-Tweedledums and besides the Lesser Evils who really are different in policy from the Greater Evils, we increasingly are getting this third type of case: the Lesser Evils who, as executors of the system, find themselves acting at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes worse. They are the product of the increasing convergence of liberalism and conservatism under conditions of bureaucratic capitalism. There never was an era when the policy of the Lesser Evil made less sense than now.

That’s the thing to remember for 1968, as a starter.

Top of the page

Notes

1. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Democrat): California state attorney general, 1951-59; Governor of California, 1959-67

2. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Texas Democratic vice-president was sworn in as president in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He went on to win election to a full term in a landslide against GOP candidate Barry Goldwater in the presidential race in 1964. At the time of the writing of this article, Johnson was planning to run as president; but he later announced he would not seek another term as president after the January, 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the U.S.’s inability to win the war in Vietnam and his poll figures dropped precipitously.

3. George W. Romney: Served three consecutive terms as governor of Michigan, from 1962 to 1968. Chairman of American Motors Corp. from 1954-1962, and a contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

4. At this time, Ronald Reagan was the Republican governor of California. He later (1980) was elected president and served two terms. His presidency personified the new drift to the right in U.S. politics – a ruling class backlash against the political and social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. He was famous, like the current president, for making inane statements such as: “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

5. This refers to a hypothetical 1968 presidential ticket of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. J. William Fulbright. Kennedy served as attorney general in brother John F. Kennedy’s brief presidential administration, and then became a senator in 1964. He was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Fulbright of Arkansas (who once employed Bill Clinton as an intern) was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was an early Vietnam hawk who became a leading establishment opponent of the war.

6. A well-known liberal newspaper columnist of the day.

7. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee who ran against Johnson in 1964. He advocated using nuclear weapons to defoliate Vietnam.

8. Johnson ran for president in 1964 promising to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. When he won the election, he did the opposite, sending hundreds of thousands more troops.

9. Hubert Humphrey: elected as vice president with President Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1964, and he was his party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1968.

10. The bracero program: a post Second World War government-sponsored plan aimed at importing low-paid Mexican labor to the U.S. Mexicans under this program were allowed to come and work in the U.S., but were required to return to Mexico when their work term expired.

11. President of the University of California system during the Berkeley students’ famous Free-Speech fights in 1964.

12. Original note by author: The reader is referred to the October 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine for a brilliant (and detailed) exposition of all this, including an analysis of how it all could be done by a man who really is a liberal. Ramparts does this in terms of concrete facts; in this article I am generalizing.

13. It is worth noting that although the trend toward statification that Draper describes began to shift by the late 1970s toward “globalization,” i.e. more neo-liberal capitalist policies, the same political pattern was apparent. Not only Republicans Reagan and Bush, but also Democrat Clinton, carried out the neo-liberal policies. Therefore Draper’s point that liberalism and conservatism tend to converge around the particular historic interests of the ruling class still applies.

14. Taft-Hartley: 1947 labor bill that curtailed the rights of unions. Among other things, it empowered the government to obtain an 80-day injunction against any strike that it deemed a peril to national security. The act outlawed sympathy strikes or boycotts (boycott against an already organized company doing business with another company that a union is trying to organize), denied legal protection to workers on wildcat strikes, and outlawed the closed shop.

15. Adlai Stevenson: US diplomat & Democratic politician; governor of Illinois 1949-1953; Democratic presidential candidate 1952, 1956; US ambassador to UN 1961-1965. Famous for making a presentation to the UN in 1962 revealing the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. Stevenson’s presentation denied important facts. For example, the U.S. had recently launched an armed CIA invasion of Cuba – landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Stevenson denied U.S. involvement. Stevenson also left out of his presentation the fact that the U.S. had placed nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union.

Mid 90s Obama

2009-08-24T13:22:00.001-07:00

Adolph Reed’s 1996 assessment of Obama, shortly after the latter won his
first Illinois state senate race:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of
foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth
Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and
vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat
on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His
fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of
authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale
solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process
over program -- the point where identity politics converges with
old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I
suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics,
as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.
So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We
have to do better.”

“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in
Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
(New Press, 2000)

My Lai Massacre Leader Speaks

2009-08-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

— By Osha Gray Davidson | Sun August 23, 2009 9:18 AM PST

—Courtesy Flickr user pinkfloyd_anotherbrick

Forty-one years after leading his Army unit in the massacre of between 300 to 500 unarmed old men, women, children and babies in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, the former Lieutenant William Calley spoke publically for the first time about the killings.

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," he said. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Several years ago, pursuing the project I discussed here recently, I managed to reach Calley on the phone. Brusque, but not rude, he made it clear that there would be no interview. He left open the possibility that that could change. If it did, he’d call.

I didn’t expect he’d ever talk to me or any other journalist, so, I was surprised Friday when I read that he had done an interview of sorts – answering questions at his local Kiwanis club and from the lone reporter invited, last Wednesday.

What are we to make of Calley’s contrition?

Online comments at the local newspaper’s website are mostly sympathetic:

"Thank you, Mr. Calley, for having served us."

"It's not appropriate to judge anyone involved."

"This guy was wrong. But his point is valid that he was following orders."

There we go: "Just following orders."

It was only a matter of time before someone brought that out. As Chris Rock said in a different context, "That train’s never late!"

Dick McMichael, the one reporter at the Kiwanis talk, pressed Calley on this point. McMichael writes:

"When asked if obeying an unlawful order was not itself an unlawful act, he said, ‘I believe that is true. If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a second lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them – foolishly, I guess."

Foolishly?

Here’s an account, based on court documents, of how the destruction of My Lai began, written by Doug Linder, a professor of constitutional law who has taught and written extensively about My Lai:

By 8 a.m., Calley's platoon had crossed the plaza on the town's southern edge and entered the village. They encountered families cooking rice in front of their homes. The men began their usual search-and-destroy task of pulling people from homes, interrogating them, and searching for VC. Soon the killing began. The first victim was a man stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after him. A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a temple, kneeling and praying. They were all executed with shots to the back of their heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from their homes and herded to the plaza area.

Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle, US Army

What happened next is recounted by soldier Paul Meadlo, testifying at Calley’s court marshal. Here, he’s being questioned by Captain Aubrey Daniels, lead prosecutor in the case.

A: [Calley] came up to me and he said, You know what to do with them, Meadlo, and I assumed he wanted me to guard them. That's what I did.

Q: What were the people doing?

A: They were just standing there....

A: [Calley] said, How come they're not dead?" I said, I didn't know we were supposed to kill them." He said, I want them dead." He backed off twenty or thirty feet and started shooting into the people -- the Viet Cong -- shooting automatic. He was beside me. He burned four or five magazines. I burned off a few, about there. I helped shoot ‘em.

Q: What were the people doing after you shot them?

A: They were lying down.

Q: Why were they lying down?

A: They was mortally wounded.

Q: How were you feeling at that time?

A: I was mortally upset, scared, because of the briefing we had the day before.

Q: Were you crying?

A: I imagine I was....

Q: Were there any Vietnamese there?

A: Yes, there was Viet Cong there. About seventy-five to a hundred, standing outside the ravine....

A: Then Lieutenant Calley said to me, We've got another job to do, Meadlo".

Q: What happened then?

A: He started shoving them off and shooting them in the ravine.

Q: How many times did he shoot?

A: I can't remember.

Q: Did you shoot?

A: Yes. I shot the Viet Cong. he ordered me to help kill people. I started shoving them off and shooting.

Q: How long did you fire?

A: I don't know.

Q: Did you change magazines?

A: Yes.

Q: Did Lieutenant Calley change magazines?

A: Yes.

Q: How many times did he change magazines?

A: Ten to fifteen times.

Q: How many bullets in a magazine?

A: Twenty, normally.

Q: How was Lieutenant Calley armed?

A: He had a M-16.

Q: What were the people doing after you and Lieutenant Calley shot them?

A: The people were just lying there, with blood all over them.

Q: What was the condition of the people?

A: I can't say what their condition was. I didn't get down in the ditch and check them out.

Q: Were they wounded?

A: They had wounds in the head, in the body, in the chest, in the stomach.

Q: Where were you when you shot at those people?

A: We was standing on top of the ravine and shooting down.

Q: Did you miss?

A: On automatic? Yes.

Q: Did Lieutenant Calley miss?

A: On automatic? Yes.

Q: Was anyone still alive when you stopped firing?

A: I couldn't tell whether they was mortally wounded. I didn't check them out.

On March 29, 1971, the jury of six military officers found Calley guilty of multiple counts of premeditated murder. Calley was sentenced to life in prison.

But conservatives were outraged over Calley’s treatment and the convicted murderer became a right-wing cause. The national commander of the VFW fulminated, “There have been My Lais in every war. Now for the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty.”

In his indispensible book, Nixonland, Rick Perlstein describes how President Richard Nixon, catching the scent of a possible political advantage, took off in fast pursuit.

"On April 1 Nixon made the call to Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ("That's the one place where they say, 'Yes, sir,' instead of 'Yes, but'"). The House of Representatives broke out in spontaneous applause at the news. And a man convicted by fellow army officers of slaughtering twenty-two civilians was released on his own recognizance to the splendiferous bachelor pad he had rented with the proceeds of his defense fund, as featured in the November 1970 Esquire, complete with padded bar, groovy paintings, and comely girlfriend, who along with a personal secretary and a mechanical letter-opener helped him answer some two thousand fan letters a day."

Outraged by Nixon’s politization of the military justice system, prosecutor Daniels sent his commander in chief an extraordinary letter.

Sir: It is very difficult for me to know where to begin this letter as I am not accustomed to writing letters of protest. I can only hope that I can find the words to convey to you my feelings as a United States citizen and as an attorney, who believes that respect for law is one of the fundamental bases upon which this nation is founded....

When the verdict was rendered, I was totally shocked and dismayed at the reaction of many people across the nation. Much of the adverse public reaction I can attribute to people who have acted emotionally and without being aware of the evidence that was presented and perhaps even the laws of this nation regulating the conduct of war.

These people have undoubtedly viewed Lieutenant Calley's conviction simply as the conviction of an American officer for killing the enemy. Others, no doubt out of a sense of frustration, have seized upon the conviction as a means of protesting the war in Viet-Nam. I would prefer to believe that most of the public criticism has come from people who are not aware of the evidence as it was presented, or having followed it they have chosen not to believe it.

Certainly, no one wanted to believe what occurred at My Lai, including the officers who sat in judgment of Lieutenant Calley. To believe, however, that any large percentage of the population could believe the evidence which was presented and approve of the conduct of Lieutenant Calley would be as shocking to my conscience as the conduct itself, since I believe that we are still a civilized nation.

If such be the case, then the war in Viet-Nam has brutalized us more than I care to believe, and it must cease. How shocking it is if so many people across the nation have failed to see the moral issue which was involved in the trial of Lieutenant Calley-- that it is unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women, children, and babies.

But how much more appalling it is to see so many of the political leaders of the nation who have failed to see the moral issue, or, having seen it, to compromise it for political motive in the face of apparent public displeasure with the verdict.... [Emphasis added.]

In view of your previous statements concerning this matter, I have been particularly shocked and dismayed at your decision to intervene in these proceedings in the midst of the public clamor. Your decision can only have been prompted by the response of a vocal segment of our population who while no doubt acting in good faith, cannot be aware of the evidence which resulted in Lieutenant Calley's conviction. Your intervention has, in my opinion, damaged the military judicial system and lessened any respect it may have gained as a result of the proceedings.

You have subjected a judicial system of this country to the criticism that it is subject to political influence, when it is a fundamental precept of our judicial system that the legal processes of this country must be kept free from any outside influences. What will be the impact of your decision upon the future trials, particularly those within the military?

Not only has respect for the legal process been weakened and the critics of the military judicial system been supported for their claims of command influence, the image of Lieutenant Calley, a man convicted of the premeditated murder of at least 22 unarmed and unresisting people, as a national hero has been enhanced, while at the same time support has been given to those people who have so unjustly criticized the six loyal and honorable officers who have done this country a great service by fulfilling their duties as jurors so admirably.

Have you considered those men in making your decisions? The men who since rendering their verdict have found themselves and their families the subject of vicious attacks upon their honor, integrity and loyalty to this nation.

It would seem to me to be more appropriate for you as the President to have said something in their behalf and to remind the nation of the purpose of our legal system and the respect it should command.

I would expect that the President of the United States, a man whom I believed should and would provide the moral leadership for this nation, would stand fully behind the law of this land on a moral issue which is so clear and about which there can be no compromise.

For this nation to condone the acts of Lieutenant Calley is to make us no better than our enemies and make any pleas by this nation for the humane treatment of our own prisoners meaningless.... [Emphasis added]

While in some respects what took place at My Lai has to be considered a tragic day in the history of our nation, how much more tragic would it have been for this country to have taken no action against those who were responsible.

That action was taken, but the greatest tragedy of all will be if political expediency dictates the compromise of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent unlawfulness of the murder of innocent persons, making the action and the courage of six honorable men who served their country so well meaningless.

In August, Daniels’ fears were realized. Calley’s sentence was reduced to twenty years. In April 1974, just as the final act of the Watergate scandal was being played out, Calley’s sentence was again reduced, cut in half to ten years. In 1975, after serving just three and a half years, Calley was paroled.

Perhaps the most perceptive -- and relevant -- observation about My Lai was made back in 1970 by psychohistorian Robert J. Lifton, who had served as an Air Force psychiatrist in Asia in the early 1950s. Lifton had contributed a chapter to the book, War Crimes and the American Conscience.

My Lai epitomizes the Vietnam War, not only because every returning soldier can tell of similar incidents, if on a somewhat smaller scale, but also because it is an expression of the psychological state characteristic for Americans fighting that war. It illustrates the murderous progression of deception and self-deception -- from political policy to military tactics to psychological aberration.

While transcribing Lifton's quote just now, an image flashed in my mind. It took a moment to realize it wasn't from My Lai, but from Abu Ghraib. I saw the photo of Spc. Sabrina Harman grinning and giving the thumbs-up sign, her pretty face only inches from the ice-covered corpse of a prisoner who had been tortured to death in a prison shower, by Americans whose leaders, having learned nothing from the tragedy of My Lai, had once again set our nation on that murderous progression that ends, inevitably, with images of the dead.

Abu Ghraib

2009-08-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

Guess What? He's a Terrible President

2009-08-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Both President Obama’s health care plan and his presidency are going down the toilet.

This is well, and right, and just as it should be.

Obama is turning out to be a disastrous president, wholly unsuited for the times and our national and global challenges, and his job approval ratings reflect this.

In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton – and who would’ve thought that was possible – to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin’ punch every other year or so. (We’re also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but that’s another story.) What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom – as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed – to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. In addition to not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating ‘bipartisan’ (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.

Is this president so deluded that he believes there are limitations on what the right will do not only to the republic, for which Obama seems to have only passing regard, but also to his presidency, for which we might imagine he would have at least some concern? Does the Kumbaya Kid think that regressives won’t seek to annihilate him every bit as much as they did Bill Clinton, even as they are obsessing at this very moment over harebrained conspiracy stories challenging his very legal right to be president, his very citizenship? Does this guy who seems to want, more than anything, for everyone just to be happy and sing along in the same key, still really believe in bipartisanship, at the very moment when the very people with whom he is negotiating are reinforcing the most absurd and inflammatory lies asserting the elder-cide intentions of his health-care bill?

Sorry. Did I say “his health-care bill”? Problem number one here is that there’s no such thing. As in just about everything else of consequence this administration has been involved in, he seems quite content to simply defer to Congress and allow the sausage-making process on the Hill to generate precisely the policy abomination one might expect, with all the political liabilities we’ve come to know and love from such a dispiriting collection of 535 (minus two or three) moral midgets.

Sorry. Did I say “defer to Congress”? Looks like I goofed again. What this really means – and this is problem number two – is deferring to a select group of members of Congress. In particular, conservative Democrats and supposedly moderate Republicans (you know, like fuel-efficient Hummers). Right now, for example, probably the two most important actors in America on the healthcare question are Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley. Both have received massive campaign contributions from the industries which have most at stake in this legislation. No doubt, however, that’s entirely a coincidence. What they are doing right now, and what Obama is allowing them to do, is nothing less than neutering any serious aspects of healthcare reform. In the end, having succeeded at doing that, and being the tail that wags the entire dog of this 300 million person country, Grassley won’t even vote for the bill, nor will any Republican. As in the stimulus bill, Obama continues to allow legislation to be murdered by a thousand cuts. All in the name of some bipartisanship god he has taken to worshiping, even though none of the knife-wielders will be around to go anywhere near the stinking corpse they’ve created when it’s eventually tossed up on the congressional slab for a vote. Seems pretty nutty to me, but I guess when you stop and think about it, Obama’s definition of bipartisan participation in the legislative process really does make sense after all: Republicans murder the bill, then Democrats vote for it. Everybody gets to play a part. Everybody contributes.

From what can be gathered so far, the legislation will accomplish very little in terms of real reform, will diminish existing health-care programs, will nevertheless still exacerbate the explosion of national debt, and will not even begin to kick in until 2013. Hey, for all the good this will do Americans, why not just complete the job and have all the benefits go to people living in Kuala Lumpur?

Will healthcare be universal in America, bringing this country into line with the standards of what every other industrialized democracy has practiced for the better part of a century? No. Will we massively increase the amount of actual health care we provide while eliminating the incredible bloat in costs of our predatory, special-interest oriented system by adopting the obvious no-brainer choice of the single-payer model? Fat chance. Will a real public option even be created, which might instantly show up the incredible profiteering and waste in the insurance industry, while simultaneously giving lie to the endless rhetoric about private sector efficiency and government bungling? No, there won’t (but President Obama wants you to know he appreciates your asking). The Capitulation Administration signaled this week that it is giving up on that as well. Because of Republican opposition, of course. You remember those guys don’t you? The folks who have such small minorities in Congress that they can’t even muster forty percent of Senate votes to block consideration of legislation by filibuster?

That’s who Obama is caving to. That’s who’s in charge. It seems that we regular folks are in the process of getting a fresh education about the way American politics really works. Evidently, there’s a new algorithm I wasn’t aware of. It goes like this: When Republicans control Congress and the White House, they rule. When Democrats control Congress and the White House... Republicans still rule. Okay. Well at least we know how it works. And it’s not necessarily all bad news, either. No point in fussing with those messy elections anymore!

Meanwhile, one needn’t dig deep into the bowels of the thousands of pages of legalese contained within the five separate health-care proposals now making their way through Congress in order to figure out whether they contain good news or not. You can tell a lot about somebody or something just by the company they keep. Suffice it to say that both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars running ads on television in favor of healthcare “reform”. I can hardly think of a handier or more pure litmus test for determining whether this is good legislation or not. If those guys are for it, and especially if they’re spending millions to make it happen, it’s a very safe bet that I’m against it. And if those industries are for it, it’s a very safe bet that the deal is they get rich and we get nothing. Except maybe poor. And sick.

The pharmaceutical ads are especially galling, proving that there really is nothing immoral enough to be excluded from the discourse of American politics. These spots feature the two actors who portrayed Harry and Louise – the very same marionettes who whored themselves back in 1993 and got a paycheck in exchange for making sure that tens of millions of Americans would be denied health care in every year since then. Now they’re back, this time advocating for legislation rather than against it, and sanctimoniously telling us that “it’s about time” that “we may finally get healthcare reform”. When “Sally” – slayer of American healthcare for a few shekels of blood money – righteously intones that, “with a little more cooperation, a little less politics, and we can get the job done this time”, I want to reach into the television and detach her head from the rest of her. She certainly isn’t making any use of it. I’d go for the heart, but that seems to have been removed long ago. Is there some reason that these people haven’t been taken out back and shot? And, failing that, do they have some sort of new, special, high-tech pillows that allow folks like this to sleep at night despite a 40,000 ton conscience crushing down on their skulls?

Now why in the world would the insurance and pharmaceutical industries be running ads in favor of healthcare reform? I’m just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the deals that a certain Barack Obama has cut with them behind the scenes, promising to limit to pathetically minimal amounts any future inhibitions on the trough-gorging to which they’ve grown well accustomed. In agreements which the New York Times has delicately characterized as “potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric”, Obama has bought the support of these industries for a pittance. At least, that is, a pittance of his capital. The true costs will continue to fall on tens of millions of Americans with no or lousy healthcare, including the tens of thousands who die each year because of that simple fact. In exchange for their political support, our ‘socialist’ president secretly promised the pharmaceutical and insurance industries that their costs under any new legislation would be capped at $80 and $155 billion, respectively, over ten years time. In short – nickels and dimes.

One might be excused for beginning to get the feeling that what Obama really wants from healthcare reform is simply to be able to say that he did it. No matter that there is almost no reform in his healthcare reform legislation. No matter that he doesn’t even have his own proposal, but is deferring to the worst elements of a legislative body that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American corporate interests. No matter that whatever little effect the legislation will have won’t even begin to be seen for another four years, and then will be phased in after that, over yet another period of several years. And no matter that, even after the law goes into effect, this country will continue to suffer from all the major maladies of a system designed principally to provide profits for a few, rather than healthcare for all.

What continues to astonish me, however, is what passes for political calculus in the White House these days. I never assumed that Obama would necessarily be any different from Bill Clinton, in the sense that he might actually have a set of good progressive politics or that he might actually give a damn about the American public. No disappointment there (although did he have to be even worse than that, more like Bush than Clinton?). However, I always assume that almost all politicians are completely consumed by the one thing that Clinton was ever truly passionate about: self-interest.

But, even purely from that narrowest of perspectives, does the Obama team actually believe that their strategy is helping their guy politically? Do they really like the way that their failure to articulate a plan, or even a set of fundamental principles, has worked out in terms of shaping the debate over healthcare? Is it really their belief that they can go to the voters in 2012 and win their hearts with a nothingburger healthcare plan, passed three years prior, and due to fully kick in three years hence? I hate more than a root canal sans novocaine to sound like one of the regressives whom I so very much loathe, but if this is the level of political sophistication to be found in the Obama White House, then, no, as a matter of fact, I really don’t want this clown negotiating with Vladimir Putin.

Barack Obama has given us the worst of all worlds. Passage of a healthcare reform bill – even something barely remotely worthy of the name – now seems like a dubious proposition. If it does pass, it won’t be worth squat. Meanwhile, all the ugliest and most deceitful tactics of regressive politics have floated to the surface in the cesspool of American political discourse, weakly countered at best by a White House that could make SpongeBob SquarePants look like the love child of Genghis Khan and Joseph Stalin by comparison, and is so lame that it couldn’t anticipate and inoculate against these assaults that any fool who wasn’t entirely comatose over the last three decades could plainly see were coming. Worst of all, when the smoke finally clears, this debacle will entail a massive discrediting of so-called liberalism, and a severe imperiling of the Democratic Party (not that it much matters) in the next two election cycles. Think about that for a second. How absolutely, utterly, magnificently inept does one have to be to have revived the hopes of the GOP, a mere 200 days after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left office? Not just any idiot could pull off a stunt that big, I tell ya. A job like that requires a world-class moron.

What Obama should have done is simple, and therefore all the more astonishing that they missed it. First off, he should have formulated a serious plan (perhaps in faux negotiations with certain key congressional leaders, to make them feel powerful and included, perhaps not), and stuck with it. At the very least, he should have articulated three or four non-negotiable key principles that he demanded from any healthcare legislation. These should have revolved around ideas that are simple to grasp and clearly beneficial to non-elite Americans. He should have sold that plan at big staged events, such as televised addresses to both houses of Congress – rather than these pathetic press conferences he keeps giving, where the press can ask any question they want, and where an unscripted Professor Wonk rambles out ten minute answers, chock full of pauses and clauses, guaranteed to anesthetize his audience or divert their attention entirely, to another subject altogether (can you say “Henry Lewis Gates”?).

He should have named enemies, right from the beginning. He should have warned Americans about what these people would do in the ensuing weeks and months. And he should have called them out on it, angrily and by name, when they in fact did it. When they started lying and frightening senior citizens in order to protect their legalized scams from reform, he should have slugged them so hard they were knocked on their fat corporate asses, never to rise again. He should’ve called them greedy, selfish, treasonous traitors who are willing to lie and steal to further enrich their bloated selves, while tens of thousands of Americans die every year from lack of medical care.

Above all, what Obama should have done was shown some passion. The unflappable conciliatory professor act has got to go. Here’s a newsflash (evidently) for the Obama White House: If the president has any desire to sell his policies, he’s got to sell his policies. If he wants to lead, he has to lead. And if he wants our support, he’s got to tell us why this is important. With juice. Mr. Folksy isn’t getting it – not by a long shot.

Finally, Obama should’ve jammed his plan down the throats of Congress, where – though you’d never know it – his party commands massive and filibuster-proof majorities. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think the nineteenth century model of the presidency is particularly appropriate here in the twenty-first. We got Social Security and the rest of the New Deal programs because Franklin Roosevelt twisted arms on Capitol Hill. We got Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights because Lyndon Johnson nearly pulled those arms out of their sockets, jamming his bills through a reluctant Congress by means of big carrots, bigger sticks, and razor-sharp strategy.

What did Millard Fillmore get? James Buchanan? If you can’t remember, don’t worry – it doesn’t mean that you’re deficient as a student of American history. It just means that they didn’t get anything worth remembering. Why is it that, in our time, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush get everything they want from Congress, while Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – even after they’ve completely sold out to Wall Street, and even when they have massive majorities in Congress – wind up as if they’re the main source of entertainment for the fellas on Cell Block D? Neither FDR nor Harry Truman nor Lyndon Johnson would recognize the Democratic Party anymore. Unless they inadvertently mistook it for a squashed bug in the foyer of the GOP’s headquarters.

Having lived through the incredibly dismal Clinton era, I’m not exactly surprised to have another Democratic president whose only real constituents can be found in corporate boardrooms. I am, however, shocked to have one who seemingly learned nothing from the experience of the Clinton years, who appears to be even more conciliatory than the foolish “Please sir, may I have another?” Clinton himself was, and who apparently lacks any real instinct even for political self-preservation.

So I have to ask: Hey, Barack. How’s this working out for you? In eight months time you’ve squandered a massive and historic opportunity. You’ve resuscitated a murderously evil political party that, with a little shove in the right direction, might instead have been buried dead forever. You’ve let just about anybody say just about anything regarding you and your policies, without consequence. People are running around claiming that you’re gonna kill grannies, and millions believe them. You’re being pilloried for the bogus failures of the British healthcare system, and your mealy-mouthed-room-temperature-yesterday’s-leftover-oatmeal proposal – such that you even have one – doesn’t even bear the slightest resemblance to the NHS.

You’ve produced nothing of consequence in your Hundred Days, nor even in two hundred. Historians will not mention you in the same breath as FDR, but rather right alongside the wondrous Mr. Fillmore. You’ve responded to epic crises with half-measures that have produced quarter-results. In the short period of your presidency, your job approval ratings have fallen from the high sixties to the low fifties. In addition to those numbers beginning to look a lot like the guy with a cane walking onto your stage, they represent twice the drop an idiot named George W. Bush sustained during his first eight months in office. Maybe because he accomplished far more in that time. Far more (horrid though it was), as a matter of fact, than you are likely to do in four years, at the rate you’re going. Far more, even with a split Congress. How about that, Brother Barack? You’re getting your ass kicked by the worst president in all of American history.

So, dude, how’s this working out for you?

For me? Not so good. I was hoping for something else. Know what I mean?

I will say, however, that you seem to be a very, very nice young man. Yes, yes – very nice indeed. Definitely.

So much so that I give you my word: If I ever want someone for my president who is so nice that he even lets vicious political savages tear him to shreds while they’re wrecking the country at the same time...

I promise that you’ll have my vote.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

John Pilger: Obama and Empire

2009-08-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Road Socialism!

2009-08-14T21:51:00.001-07:00

Americans Outraged at Sudden Realization Interstate Highways Are Government-Run

As the debate continues to rage on over whether or not the U.S. should include a public, government-funded plan in its healthcare reform, many citizens abruptly noticed that the federal government funds and regulates all Interstate Highways in the nation, and has done so for over 50 years.

Now, many are up in arms over the largest public works project in history, which has somehow gone unnoticed since the mid-20th century.

"I can't believe I didn't think of this before," said conservative analyst Paul Dobson, slapping his forehead in disbelief. "We were all so focused on the idea of the government ruining healthcare forever that we forgot how President Eisenhower -- who was obviously tricked by President Barack Hussein Obama -- already ruined our highways by building and then socializing them in the 1950s."

Dobson further clarified that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, but rather a time-traveling fiend who was born in the strange, alien fields of Mars.

Republican Senator Jim DeMint agreed, saying that like public healthcare, the government-funded Interstate is unconstitutional.

"Despite the obvious private applications of the Interstate, some people have tried to pass this $425 billion boondoggle off as purely a military exercise," he scoffed. "That makes about as much sense to me as saying that public healthcare could be considered a matter of national security because we'll be less safe if large portions of our populace are broke and sick all damn the time."

Now that Americans like Dobson have remembered that the U.S. has a public highway system, they are beginning to assemble and organize against it, demonstrated at a recent rally in a remote, roadless area of Montana that attracted over three people.

"If we rely on the government to build our roads, we'll all be waiting in line for seven years, just to enter an onramp!" shouted one man, holding a sign reading "A Road Is A Road To Socialism Road". "Well, I said no to socialism transportation, and to date, I've built over 14 feet of my own road that I can travel on, tax free."

Critics of the Interstate say that opening the entire system up to the free market would allow a few large corporations to control the nation's transportation grid, which they would profit from by charging high tolls to people with pre-existing crappy cars.

For those with no cars, Dobson says access to the Interstate -- now renamed the Best Buy Street Zone sponsored by Microsoft -- could be gained by simply buying a car.

"It's pretty simple," he beamed. "And while they were at it, those people could also go ahead and go to college, and be sure to save lots of money for retirement, too. Those are all smart ideas that anyone should feel free to use."

In one recent poll, a certain number of Americans said that now that they've heard the Interstate is a socialist nightmare, they want no part of it.

"I heard that once you get on a nationalized road, tanks will run you over if you aren't a liberal," said one elderly woman, shaking with fear. "We ought to make government stick to decent American causes, like building the military and running Medicare."

"I heard," added another man ominously, "that if you surpass a certain speed, you run the risk of being tossed into jail by some kind of government police force...probably because they're afraid of you discovering time travel and realizing that President Barack Obama is an alien fraud."

Books That Counter Our "Training" To Make War

2009-08-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

By John Pilger

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say "Britain's resolve is being put to the test" as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need "to be trained and educated". Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people . . .

Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

In their modern classic Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky describe how war propaganda in free societies is "filtered" by media organisations, not as conscious "crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalisation of [elite] priorities and definitions of newsworthiness". In the wake of the US invasion of Vietnam, in which at least three million people were killed and their once-bountiful land ruined and poisoned, planners of future bloodfests invented the "Vietnam syndrome", which they identified perversely as a "crisis of democracy". The "crisis" was that the "general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power". Afghanistan and Iraq now have their syndromes.

With this in mind, I respectfully urge readers to put aside the holiday reading lists in the newspaper review pages, with their clubbable hauteur, and read, or read again, books as fine as Manufacturing Consent, which help make sense of extraordinary times.

As Herman and Chomsky decode principally the American media, an ideal companion is Newspeak in the 21st Century, by David Edwards and David Cromwell (published next month by Pluto). The founders and editors of the outstanding website www.medialens.org present a fluent dissection of Britain's liberal media, employing the kind of rigour that shames those who proclaim their impartiality and independence from vested power. Read also A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan, who describe the rise of an "invisible government" invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "Propaganda," said Bernays, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans, so what I did was to try and find some other words." The other words were "public relations", which now consumes much of journalism.

The latest achievement of PR is the "Obama phenomenon". In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (published in the US by Paradigm), Paul Street peels away the mask in perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States.

Not enough laughs? Pack Joseph Heller's Catch-22, still unmatched in its demolition of the idiocies and lies of the killers who promote wars. Try this:

"Anyone," says Dr "Doc" Daneeka, "who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so
I can't ground him."
Yossarian: "OK, let me get this straight.
In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying."
Dr "Doc" Daneeka: "You got it . . ."

Kurt Vonnegut's equally black and brave and hilarious Slaughterhouse Five is my other favourite war book.

"How's the patient? [the colonel] asked.
"Dead to the world."
"But not actually dead."
"No."
"How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

Faber recently published Harold Pinter's Various Voices: 60 Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics (1948-2008). It is a gem from Pinter on everything from Shakespeare, night cricket and Arthur Miller's socks to murderous great power:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless . . . while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

If you have not already read it, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is a rare treat: a view of humanity so precisely, beautifully, honourably, yet almost incidentally expressed. In the "bantering inconsequence" (F Scott Fitzgerald) of effete modern fiction, no one touches McCullers or, for that matter, Pete Dexter, whose Paris Trout is the great unsung book of the American South, or Richard Ford, whose Rock Springs is a masterly collection, among his others, on the mysteries between men and women. And don't forget Albert Camus's The Outsider, about a man who will not pretend: a parable for today. Happy holidays.

John Pilger has been awarded Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize www.johnpilger.com

Wired Magazine Slammed!

2009-08-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

in the New Statesman

Consuming the Cultural Product

2009-07-31T16:44:00.000-07:00

By RON JACOBS

Britney Spears, American Idol, Desperate Housewives ... The material that passes for popular culture has never been so vapid. Indeed, it's almost too easy to ridicule this stuff sold to viewers and listeners the world around. There is no enlightenment involved in the merchandise presented to us by car companies, banks, and other commercial failures whose primary intent is to convince us that our future involves us spending our money on their products. Indeed, there is not even a pretense or supposition that there should be any enlightenment in the equation. So, we spend our time watching and listening to these entertainment products while we work out how we'll get that new car shown to us every ten minutes during the commercial break.

Trotsky wrote that "every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art." While one might be hard pressed to justify most television shows and most pop music as art, they are what pass for culture. Once, a conversation with a friend who worked as a college faculty member turned to the question of whether film and music reflected or created popular trends and thought. In other words, does the culture we absorb influence us or do we influence it. Naturally, there is no conclusive answer to this question and we did not reach one that day. However, there are some clear examples of each. To begin with, television shows like the quasi-fascist "24" and its less unnerving predecessors like the 007 series of films exist to instill a fear not only of the enemies of the state but of the state itself. Thusly, we are encouraged by these obviously propagandistic works to ignore or consent to whatever illegal and immoral actions taken by those who claim to protect us. Furthermore, we are subconsciously trained to identify the state's enemies as our own. Reality shows like "Cops" further this consciousness.

To substantiate the other side of the coin let me turn to the most popular rock band of all time, The Beatles. These young men arguably began as consumers who picked up musical instruments and replicated the music of their musical heroes, most of whom were bluesmen from the United States. They went on to become the most popular rock group of the 1960s and a cultural phenomenon with out parity. When the band grew their hair long and talked about LSD, were they propagandizing a new way of life or were they reflecting a way of life already in existence? To put it differently, did the Beatles and other rock bands lead the youth of the western world into the counterculture or did the counterculture consume the bands into its community? There is no clear answer to this, of course. The relationship was symbiotic at best and parasitic at its worst. Just like the later phenomenon of hip-hop, the streets created the music and the music in turn mutated, reflected and popularized the culture. Unfortunately, the aspects which were popularized were those that challenged the dominant system the least. In rock music that turned out to be the sex and drugs. In hip hop it turned out to be the sex, drugs and money. Politics and the sense of community were removed in favor of an individualistic pursuit of gratification. In other words, the capitalist ethos prevailed. This makes sense, of course, given that we live in a capitalist society and the companies that produce the music are instrumental players in that society's economy.

Even on the occasion where something truly remarkable that serves a purpose beyond titillation comes into the cultural marketplace--a phenomenon seen in cinema and music more than television--the coverage of the work and its creators is often trivialized if it is covered at all. This was brought home to me recently as I watched the coverage of the Golden Globe Awards at a friend's house. Little was said about the meaning of the films presented but thousands of words were wasted on the clothing worn by various actors and actresses as they walked around outside of the event showing off for the cameras. In the media coverage the following day, more print space was used describing people's clothing and who they were with than on the works that were nominated. When it comes to music, reviewers tend to delve a bit deeper. However, at the end of the year, it is usually the musical works that made the most money that are celebrated in the media events viewed by the general public. This usually means that the works with the least meaning are those which are publicized most. This in turn propels even more sales, leaving works of consequence to linger in the CD bins until they are dropped by the industry.

Books are quite similar. Hundreds, if not thousands of titles, are rarely acknowledged by the media, while certain authors monopolize the sales charts and the minds of the reading public. I see this phenomenon daily as a library worker. Thousands of dollars are spent buying books that read very similar to the last work by an author, while other literature is never ordered. Well-read people end up reading materials that not only endorse the thought processes of the dominant culture of consumption and alienation, but are convinced that they are consequently somehow more enlightened than those that don't read. Once again, we return to the question of which influences which. For example are second- and third-rate crime authors like Patricia Cornwell popular because people like her writing or are these authors popular because the advertising budgets behind them convince people that they should read them precisely because they are popular?

I'm listening to Jimi Hendrix's performance of "Machine Gun" from a concert he performed in Berkeley in May, 1970 while people rioted in the streets against the US invasion of Cambodia. This song is not only a prayer for peace and love. It is about the massacre of Blacks in the streets and Vietnamese in the jungle. It is also a cry for an end to greed and the wars it causes. It is a condemnation of the masters of war and a cry of defiance. I don't think it will be appearing in a commercial any time soon. Do you think Obama has this song on his iPod? Would it make a difference if he did?

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

The Revenge of Geography

2009-07-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Revenge of Geography

By Robert D. Kaplan

Page 1 of 8

May/June 2009

People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict.

Illustration by Aaron Goodman for FP

When rapturous Germans tore down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it symbolized far more than the overcoming of an arbitrary boundary. It began an intellectual cycle that saw all divisions, geographic and otherwise, as surmountable; that referred to “realism” and “pragmatism” only as pejoratives; and that invoked the humanism of Isaiah Berlin or the appeasement of Hitler at Munich to launch one international intervention after the next. In this way, the armed liberalism and the democracy-promoting neoconservatism of the 1990s shared the same universalist aspirations. But alas, when a fear of Munich leads to overreach the result is Vietnam—or in the current case, Iraq.

And thus began the rehabilitation of realism, and with it another intellectual cycle. “Realist” is now a mark of respect, “neocon” a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being “fatalists” or “determinists.” Now they are applauded as “pragmatists.” And this is the key insight of the past two decades—that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.

So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

Indeed, what is at work in the recent return of realism is the revenge of geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint. So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

If you want to understand the insights of geography, you need to seek out those thinkers who make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy—those authors who thought the map determined nearly everything, leaving little room for human agency.

One such person is the French historian Fernand Braudel, who in 1949 published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. By bringing demography and nature itself into history, Braudel helped restore geography to its proper place. In his narrative, permanent environmental forces lead to enduring historical trends that preordain political events and regional wars. To Braudel, for example, the poor, precarious soils along the Mediterranean, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred ancient Greek and Roman conquest. In other words, we delude ourselves by thinking that we control our own destinies. To understand the present challenges of climate change, warming Arctic seas, and the scarcity of resources such as oil and water, we must reclaim Braudel’s environmental interpretation of events.

The full article is way too big to post here, read the rest here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4862

John Pilger in Chicago

2009-07-15T10:13:00.001-07:00

Mourn on the 4th of July - by John Pilger

2009-07-11T20:48:00.001-07:00

Liberals say that the United States is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, but behind the façade little has changed. With his government of warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, Barack Obama is merely upholding the myths of a divine America

The monsoon had woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. “We are here not to kill,” said the sergeant, “we are here to impart the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86.”

Page 86 was headed WHAM. The sergeant’s unit was called a combined action company, which meant, he explained, “we attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite. Standing in a jeep on the edge of a paddy, he had announced through a loudhailer: “Come on out, everybody. We got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you.”

Silence. Not a shadow moved.

“Now listen, either you gooks come on out from wherever you are, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”

The people of Tuylon finally came out and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were kept for the colonel’s arrival. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled.

“Mr District Chief and all you folks out there,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. You see, back home, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you good folks to share in our good fortune.”

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Davy Crockett got a mention. “Beacon” was a favourite, and as he evoked John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”, the marines clapped, and the children clapped, understanding not a word.

It was a lesson in what historians call “exceptionalism”, the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”, was unspeakable. As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained”.

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were dispensed. These included tributes to the “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam, where they were “determined to stop communist expansion”. In Iraq, other true hearts “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”. What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.

“History without memory,” declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, “confines Americans to a sort of eternal present. They are especially weak in remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did for them.” Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941 divined the “American century” as an American social, political and cultural “victory” over humanity and the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit”.

None of this is to suggest that vainglory is exclusive to the United States. The British presented their often violent domination of much of the world as the natural progress of Christian gentlemen selflessly civilising the natives, and present-day TV historians perpetuate the myths. The French still celebrate their bloody “civilising mission”. Prior to the Second World War, “imperialist” was an honoured political badge in Europe, while in the US an “age of innocence” was preferred. America was different from the Old World, said its mythologists. America was the Land of Liberty, uninterested in conquest. But what of George Washington’s call for a “rising empire” and James Madison’s “laying the foundation of a great empire”? What of slavery, the theft of Texas from Mexico, the bloody subjugation of central America, Cuba and the Philippines?

An ordained national memory consigned these to the historical margins and “imperialism” was all but discredited in the United States, especially after Adolf Hitler and the fascists, with their ideas of racial and cultural superiority, had left a legacy of guilt by association. The Nazis, after all, had been proud imperialists, too, and Germany was also “exceptional”. The idea of imperialism, the word itself, was all but expunged from the American lexicon, “on the grounds that it falsely attributed immoral motives to western foreign policy”, argued one historian. Those who persisted in using it were “disreputable purveyors of agitprop” and were “inspired by the communist doctrine”, or they were “Negro intellectuals who had grievances of their own against white capitalism”.

Meanwhile, the “city on the hill” remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about realising Luce’s dream and recolonising the European empires in the postwar years. This was “the march of free enterprise”. In truth, it was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state capitalism, which left half the world’s wealth in American hands. The cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Described as “negotiations about economic stability”, the conference marked America’s conquest of most of the world.

What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, “was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these “international” institutions, and an “invisible government” of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.

Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954.

Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity. “By the early 1950s,” wrote Noam Chomsky, “20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony’ of the ‘American way of life’ . . . Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks.”

The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war (which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of food, known as “agripower” (which receives $157bn a year in government subsidies).

Barack Obama is the embodiment of the “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that “everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but “US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all”. It is as if “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening . . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British “influence”, albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land “where miracles happen”. Justin Webb, until recently the BBC’s man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the “city on the hill”.

Behind this façade of “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance” (Walter Lippmann), ordinary Americans are stirring perhaps as never before, as if abandoning the deity of the “American Dream” that prosperity is a guarantee with hard work and thrift. Millions of angry emails from ordinary people have flooded Washington, expressing an outrage that the novelty of Obama has not calmed. On the contrary, those whose jobs have vanished and whose homes are repossessed see the new president rewarding crooked banks and an obese military, essentially protecting George W Bush’s turf.

My guess is that a populism will emerge in the next few years, igniting a powerful force that lies beneath America’s surface and which has a proud past. It cannot be predicted which way it will go. However, from such an authentic grass-roots Americanism came women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership. In the late 19th century, the populists were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. In the Obama era, the familiarity of this resonates.

What is most extraordinary about the United States today is the rejection and defiance, in so many attitudes, of the all-pervasive historical and contemporary propaganda of the “invisible government”. Credible polls have long confirmed that more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves. They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even “anti-American”.

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interests call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity.

“There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

Kidnapping, Sex, Power, Divine Ordinance!

2009-07-11T14:07:00.001-07:00

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qu'il faut bien citer ce qu'on ne comprend point du tout dans la langue qu'on entend le moins

2009-07-01T08:59:00.001-07:00

"Because," answered the scholar, "one must quote what one doesn't understand at all in the language one understands the least."

The Sternenverlag book-store in Düsseldorf, near Graf Adolf Platz, offers, on their fourth floor, what is called an antiquariat. First I purchased Ernst Jünger's Annäherungen, his book on drugs and psychedelic experimentation which I had considered the stuff of legend and somehow lost to the world. It cost 44 Euro, I think. After, I bought a smaller volume, Ein Inselfrühling, regarding the Jünger brothers' trips to Rhodes and Sicily (in the attached Aus der Goldenen Muschel). That exhausted the supply of books I was currently desirous of. However, I had enough curiosity in the (younger) Jünger brother, Friedrich Georg, to buy the green-covered former library copy of his Dalmatinische Nacht. That, and Hölderlin's Hyperion. I should have known enough, however, to purchase all of their Gottfried Benn.

Now, in the states, I continued this buying spree with EJ's Siebzig Verweht, a five-volume diary begun at the age of seventy, and Zwei Schwestern, Gespräche, Die Perfektion der Technik, Grüne Zweige, and a translation, Homer's Odyssee, all by FG Jünger.

Just this moment I finished Grüne Zweige, Ein Erinnerungsbuch, so thought I could write some account of what I have found out from the new reading. I began in Düsseldorf, obviously, at the kitchen table of my subsection of the Clemens' house, to read Annäherungen while waiting for Spongebob Schwammkopf to play on the little thirteen inch screen. Over a couple days I read through the introduction to the first section regarding beer and wine. I should explain that the book covers drugs (caffeine and tobacco through LSD and mescaline) and intoxication, not excepting such endeavors as battle, gambling, etc. The title means, roughly, approximations -- and in the sense of moving ever closer to something. Many of his thoughts escaped me, but I was entranced, as intended, by his first encounter with beer, when his troop of youthful wanderers (the Wandervögel), something like a more loosely organized boy-scout group, happened upon a brewery in some distant forest and secured a visit. They found themselves soon drinking freely and singing with the Braumeister.

Ich hatte bis dahin kaum Bier getrunken; der Stoff erschien mir bitter, fade, unangenehm. Hier war es anders: der Durst, aber auch die Gesellschaft, veränderten den Geschmack. Zugleich wurden ungeahnte Kräfte frei. Ich machte neuartige Beobachtungen. [I had until then hardly ever drank beer; the stuff seemed to me bitter, flat, unpleasant. Here it was different: the thirst, but also the company, changed the taste. Immediately, powers unsuspected were set free. I made new kinds of observations.]

Maybe one more quote can illustrate something of the neo-Platonic observations he primarily concerns himself with -- the type of "approximation" he thinks of: "Im Wein ist Wahrheit" -- das bedeutet nicht, daß sie in ihm verborgen ist. Das Wort meint eher, daß er etwas gewahren läst, das immer und außer ihm gegenwärtig ist. Der Wein ist ein Schlüssel -- das Gegenwärtige wird zum Eintretenden. [In vino veritas -- that does not mean that truth is hidden in the stuff. The phrase means, rather, that it lets something be granted which is always present outside of it. Wine is a key -- that which is present turns into that which enters (enters, initiates...; or perhaps... that which is present penetrates(?)).]

Anyway, I stopped because I realized it was an important book that I should return to with better ability. I turned instead to Friedrich Georg and found what first seemed like a German Hemingway -- at least regarding his simplicity of style -- combined with a Robert Aickmanesque sense of the strange. Anstatt mir das Mysteriöse klar und deutlich zu machen, war ich damit beschäftige, mir das Klare und Deutliche mysteriös zu machen. [Instead of making the mysterious straight and clear for myself, I occupied myself with making what was straight and clear mysterious.] I read Dalmatinische Nacht at the kitchen table and finished it sitting outside in the sunlight of the Clemens' garden.

The setting of the small garden proved the best; I don't think I have enjoyed a better climate in mid-day than that of Düsseldorf at that time. Whitish birds flew ahead, so fast I could not tell what they were. I saw plaques for award winning Tauben on the walls of the porch -- so those must have been doves that flew overhead. Apparently, Herr Clemens had tagged and tracked doves as a hobby his whole life long. He had just stopped because of his bad back. Later, he showed me an antique wooden Uhr with which he somehow tracked and recorded these birds that flew at least as far away as Barcelona. Frau Clemens explained, as he walked away, that the sight of the Uhr now made him very sad.

Dalmatinische Nacht was simple to read; the short stories within are as follows: Laura, Der Sekretär, Der Wechsel, Felizitas, Dalmatinische Nacht, Beluga, Major Dobsa, and Zwischen Mauern. The title story immediately provokes the most passion and thought. From 24 February 1952, Heinrich Wiegand Petzel's dialogues with Heidegger: "At the end we spoke about Friedrich Georg Jünger's Dalmatinische Nacht. I told of the impression this novel had had on Gertrude Eysoldt. When I recently visited her in Ohlstadt, she re-created all the events of the book as a sequence of dramatic events -- seen with the eyes of a great actress."

The story itself is simple, as I recall it. A man walks down a mountain, returning from a pleasurable exploration of the peaks and trails to his friend's estate somewhere on the wild Dalmatian coast. The man is, like all Jünger main characters, calm, intellectual, adventurous, and self-preserving. The friend, Aleksandar, is described as large, a bear, something primal, both powefully friendly and hospitable, yet easily disdainful or injurious to those that impinge upon himself and his freedom. The estate gives the impression of classical proportions, with a grand terrace overlooking the sea. Stairs lead down to the vineyards and gardens; the estate produces wine (called Opolo), olives, and other local foods which Aleksandar is fiercely proud.

To sum it up, the main character swims in the ocean, the two eat and drink the local fish and delicacies late into the night, and talk. A monk and a marine gendarm stop by, are lightly mocked by the drunken Aleksandar, and pass along. Eventually Aleksandar needs to sleep, and Jünger's character helps the two servants carry him beneath a tree. By this time the wine has coursed through our protagonist's body, and he finds himself transformed, or taken to an elation with which he finds himself silently enraptured by the entire locality -- the sea, the night, the place and its food and drink. Eventually, I believe, the sun rises and he takes himself off again for the mountains.

If EJ's On the Marble Cliffs was German magical realism, as I've heard it is classified, then this must be the apotheosis of the genre. One reads it not knowing the precise year; Aleksandar seems like a benevolent local sovereign or warlord of sorts, whose independence is necessary to the proper cultivation of the land. Yet one is always and already asking how long this independence can last. It's a perfect moment, and at once tragic. So, the novella sets up a visit, a stop-over, in the essence of this Dalmatian locality -- in an episode or an Aufenthalt, all too ephemeral, in which the true essence of the place shows itself. The perception of this essence owes a lot to tourism and travel, the kind of spiritual wandering that EJ took part in with the Wandervögel and the Jünger brothers continued, often together, after WWI. In EJ's collected journals, one can find the Dalmatinischer Aufenthalt, which would probably deepen a reading of the novella.

Further regarding travel, Petzet's book tells us that "when Ernst Jünger was about to start his trip to East Asia in 1966, Heidegger included a saying of the old sage [Lao-Tsu] in his letter to Jünger." The quote is as follows:

Nicht zum Tor hinausgehen
und die Welt kennen,
Nicht zum Fenster hinausspähen
und den Himmel ganz sehen:
Geht man sehr weit hinaus,
weiss man sehr wenig.
Darum der Weise:
nicht reist er,
doch er kennt,
nicht guckt er,
doch er rühmt,
nicht handelt er,
doch er vollendet.

In Jan Ulenbrook's translation:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world,
Without looking out the window
One can see the whole heavens:
The further one goes
The less one knows
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir
Identifies without having to see
Accomplishes without having to act.

I think the last line might have some more to do with the sage becoming complete without engaging in forms of business or exchange, though I am not entirely sure. In any case, this makes me think about my own travels. There is a pride and comfort in mapping out one's favorite worldly landmarks. I know if someone told me to go where the via Orazio overlooks the old man's bocce ball field, I could be there in half a day. Or I could go to where Conrad IV was beheaded. And maybe I could still find the abandoned train station near the horse corral, or where the English teacher and his daughter lived, in Ramadi. And one wonders how certain things change. If I were to go to that old tower on the hill across from Caserta Vecchia, would the stone rubble inside still be strewn in that certain way? Are the occult books still on display in the lower chamber of that 7th century church in Procida?

At one level, for me, travel resembles some old computer games. Think of Bungie Corp, releasing, first for the Mac, one excellent game after another. Pathways into Darkness, Marathon (1, 2, and 3), and the Halo games -- they are all the same, really. You begin with a point, which is you, and you move yourself around until you have brought light to all twists and turns in the map. The pleasure is in knowing each room, each artifact, and entity. You know what corpses are where and how to talk to them. There is comfort in tracking the unique touches the creators let fall here and there; a crack in the wall, a piece of stone on the ground.

And usually an artificial intelligence assigns the missions. Other artificial intelligences fight to control you and what missions and locations you are teleported to. So you travel from planet to ship, discovering and destroying. I remember a long time ago telling Gallagher that life really and truly should be like that. A weapon, a uniform, and worlds, with strange beings and scripts, to explore at the behest of an artificial intelligence -- perhaps itself a cover for something more mechanical than human, or perhaps pure contingency -- who can teleport and ship you anywhere. In retrospect, one should truly be careful of what one wishes, even in some apparently affectless suburbia.

I read recently, though have forgotten where, that the antidote against a proclivity to exoticism is to get to know people rather than just scenery. I think that's very wise and true. However, that originary New Englander, H.P. Lovecraft, has it in a letter to his aunt: "It may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me, except as components of a general landscape and scenery. My life lies not among people but among scenes. My local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. I am always an outsider; but outsiders have their sentimental preferences for visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England that I must have, in some form or other. Providence is part of me. I am Providence."

How often have I felt like that? There is pleasure in such a mien, but inside it, and making it as pleasurably sad as it is, is the thought that it isn't entirely right. Or that there is a lack. On some level there must be something, a providence, demi-urge, artificial intelligence, world contingency, military command, that can lead you around the world in such a way that it is revealed to you as a giant waiting room, perhaps entirely undifferentiated from the chambers of the computerized Marathon ship or Mayan pyramid. Perhaps this is a necessary step in thinking, should one seize it rightly. After all, one already knows the stories of the holy grail, and of countless other "artifacts"; one has already read, with the Jünger brothers, Orlando Furioso and Orlando Innamorato, having tracked the travels, gains and losses, of the knights around the known world. Does Heidegger's proferred words from Lao-Tsu represent a maturity? If so, how far was Friedrich Georg along the path to this maturity in his Dalmatinische Nacht?

***

Aside from this unintended digression I should mention that I also read Grüne Zweige, Gespräche (in which I first heard the word Schirokko -- there is a conversation in which EJ and his Napolitano girlfriend fight and he accuses her of being affected by it), Ein Inselfrühling (Rhodes sounds like an amazing place to go), and Zwei Schwestern. This last I should write about in another entry. It is a bizarre novel with another typical Jünger character living out a long stay in Rome during the early part of Mussolini's rule.

http://www.blauenarzisse.de/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=353&Itemid=35

Oh, uhh, here's Milva and Vangelis. Sorry.

"How can you let this go on?" (exactly, McCoy - stop the pain!)

2009-06-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

US defence policy - and F-35 - under attack

2009-06-20T14:32:00.001-07:00

Decade-old notions about US tactical aircraft strategy and planning have come under a sustained assault from academic institutions closely linked to military and government power structures. The attacks have been timed - perhaps coincidentally - in a period of transition.

Within the last month, separate analyses produced by Rand and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have been leaked or released into the public domain even as long-term plans are due to be questioned and revised by the first new president to take office since George Bush in January 2001.

The Rand and CSIS reports both deliver sharply critical outlooks for the future of US airpower. The first suggests that the superior technology of next-generation US fighters are no match for superior numbers and geographic advantage. The second, entitled America's Self-Destroying Airpower, concludes failures of strategy and planning have made the US military-industrial complex its own worst enemy.

The 80-slide Rand briefing on the Pacific Vision wargame, dated in August and publicly published first by Flight's The DEW Line blog, attacks the US Air Force's steadfast reliance on stealth and technology, showing how a mix of Lockheed Martin F-22s and F-35s could be defeated in the Taiwan Straits by an opposing Chinese force with vastly greater numbers of aircraft and missiles.

The F-35 has so far been the target of intense scrutiny about the Lockheed-led industry team's ability to deliver on the programme's ambitious performance goals. The Rand study, however, appears to challenge whether the performance goals are relevant in a future conflict, even if Lockheed's design and production system can achieve them.
In one Pacific Vision scenario, three regiments of Chinese Sukhoi Su-27s overwhelm six F-22s - the maximum number, according to Rand, defending the Taiwan Straits at any one time - by skirting their defensive screen and shooting down the USAF's orbiting tankers.

In the same briefing, a series of three back-up slides never presented publicly by Rand created an international crisis for the F-35 programme, as government officials in Australia, the Netherlands and the USA were forced to answer highly critical comments that the Lockheed F-16 replacement "can't turn, can't climb and can't run" when matched against even legacy fighter aircraft.

DISAVOWAL

Rand has disavowed the critical remarks about the F-35 as not intended for public release and, unlike the main presentation, not peer-reviewed. Additionally, Rand says: "Recently, articles have appeared in the Australian press with assertions regarding a war game in which analysts from Rand were involved. Those reports are not accurate. Rand did not present any analysis at the wargame relating to the performance of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, nor did the game attempt detailed adjudication of air-to-air combat. Neither the game nor the assessments by Rand in support of the game undertook any comparison of the fighting qualities of particular fighter aircraft."

Maj Gen Charles Davis, programme executive officer for the JSF, also dismissed the Rand briefing as irrelevant to the F-35's actual combat abilities. "We talked to the individuals involved in the wargame, and looked at the scenario. It did not involve an air-to-air scenario," Davis says. "Three days of full-time work analysing the wargame and we found exactly nothing relating to the programme. The exercise involved basing capacity around the Pacific Rim. It was a logistics and deployablility exercise, not a battle."

Despite reassurances from Rand and programme officials, Australian defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon was forced to defend the programme from criticisms based on Rand's briefing. Australia has selected the F-35 to replace its General Dynamics F-111s, but is also considering follow-on orders of Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets if there are further delays.
Tom Burbage, Lockheed vice-president and general manager for the F-35, says: "It is clear [Rand's analysts] don't understand the underlying requirements of the F-35 programme, the capabilities needed to meet those requirements or the real programmatic performance of the JSF team."

Even so, the USAF is likely to face difficult choices about future tactical fighters even if the programme's promises about the F35's performance, cost and schedule are accurate, says the CSIS analysis, which was authored by Anthony Cordesman and Hans Ulrich Kaeser.

"Major questions exist as to whether key aircraft procurement programmes will be 'force shrinkers' rather than 'force multipliers'," Cordesman and Kaeser write. They go on to describe widespread breakdowns across the US military's acquisition system for developing and fielding modern combat aircraft.

"There now are far fewer programme alternatives if any key programme runs into trouble, failed methods of cost analysis are still in play without adequate cost-risk analysis or use of regression analysis, and the pressure to 'sell' programmes by understating cost and risk have all combined to push air modernisation to the crisis point," the authors say.

The report cited recent aircraft inventory figures reported by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. The combined US tactical fighter inventory - including USAF, US Navy and US Marine Corps fleets - declined from 5,783 in 1992 to 3,542 in 2008 - nearly 39%. The sharpest fall was during the first eight years, as the inventory plummeted 31% up to 2000. Several aircraft types, such as the EF-111 and Lockheed SR-71, were retired during this period and not replaced. The report also notes that similar reductions took place for transports, tankers and helicopters.

"Current plans for aircraft modernisation are not affordable unless aircraft costs are sharply reduced, deliveries are delayed years longer than planned, or funding shifts to lower cost variants or upgrades of older types. The only alternative is a major increase in real defence spending," Cordesman and Kaeser write.

"There is an ill-concealed struggle to solve the problems in a failed procurement system by either raising the defence budget or somehow getting more funding at the expense of other services and programmes. The US defence procurement system has effectively become a liar's contest in terms of projected costs, risk, performance and delivery schedules," they add.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates has introduced a different set of priorities for modernisation of combat equipment across the board. Rather than emphasising next-generation fighters capable of defeating "near-peer" threats, Gates has tried to shift the focus to a range of current threats, especially counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism missions. If a new USAF leadership heeds Gates' call, unmanned air vehicles might take budgetary priority over air dominance assets, such as more F-22s.

"The current focus on the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Gates's emphasis on irregular warfare and increased intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability, either requires major trade-offs within current aircraft and other procurement programmes or major increases in the size of the entire defence budget and future defence programmes," the CSIS report says. "His 'strategy' is not really a strategy. It is a mix of concepts and doctrines unrelated to a clearly defined force plan, a modernisation and procurement plan, any form of programme budget and cost analysis, and any measures of time and effectiveness."

The report adds: "The debate over seeking the most advanced systems possible to deter and defeat any peer threat versus giving priority to irregular warfare and IS&R has not been resolved, and is certain to be revived when a new administration takes office."

tactics, techniques and procedures

2009-06-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

"How would you feel about leading some convoys?", asks the other lieutenant. "I'd feel great about it", I say. Isn't that what I came here for? To lead things? Maintenance just runs itself, I'm not needed there. On Saturday I read "The Scarlet Letter". The whole thing. No one noticed that I sat motionless on my bunk all day. The next day I read "The Red Badge of Courage" and watched a couple of movies.

The insurgents are like videogame bad guys or extras in action movies; there are apparently a lot of them but they don't count for much. Poorly armed, disorganized, apparently badly led. Or maybe their central mastermind has told them to just wait for us to leave so they start the REAL offensive, like the North Vietnamese did in 1975. But if the Iraqis are so smart, why did it take them like 6 years to realize that the Russians had invented and produced millions of antitank grenades? All they have to do is throw them from crowds. Not only would they kill us 5 at a time but they'd goad jittery privates into mowing down civilians with machine guns, limbs flying everywhere and organs sprayed across pavement. Remember when the U.S. abandoned that damaged Bradley in Baghdad, I think it was in 2005? Civilians were crawling all over it when the Apaches arrived to destroy it and its gun and its secret radios. A reporter was chopped to bits, live and uncensored.

If the Iraqis got their act together they'd blow this bridge up, they wouldn't even try to destroy our might MRAPs. These new armored vests have a ripcord you can pull to break them into 4 pieces, but there's still no way we'd get out before we drowned. I've tried swimming in boots and uniform and it isn't easy, especially with all the ammo and crap in my pockets, tangled in the harness and the headset cord and the floating debris. I could maybe fit through the quaint little escape hatch but it's way in the back. The doors are so heavy that they open hydraulically, would they even work underwater? What if we landed on our side? Would I even survive the fall? It's not like these things have airbags.

But these things cannot be controlled so are best ignored. The Iraqis are not dedicated supercommandoes. Yes, some of them have a willingness to die, which is a great asset, but we have more: equipment. Training. Air support. At least some kind of discipline. And, best of all, the clipped, comforting radio language, a kind of Newspeak that allows you to send and receive information while parts of your brain focus on other things or do nothing at all, the language of roger, how copy, over, say again?

where there's smoke

2009-06-17T23:51:00.000-07:00

The commander and I are sitting motionless in his office, staring at the wall, eating lollipops and listening to Korn when another lieutenant walks in. "Sir", he asks, "to burn the trash, can we use incendiary grenades instead of gasoline?" "Whoa", says the captain, putting the front legs of his chair back on the floor, "we burn trash?" "What did you think we did with it, sir?" "I didn't think about it." "Can we use gasoline AND incendiary grenades?", I ask.

"Military officers (73%)... are also accorded high levels of trust by the public", said the Gallup Organization in 2002.

here we go again

2009-06-10T23:55:00.000-07:00

"There's only one", says the announcer, "so your choice is easy: Freedom Radio. We've got your forecast for Baghdad, high today of 116, low tonight of 82..." Cain and I ride around in a dusty Chevrolet SUV, filling out forms and dropping them off. "Do we go to Disbursing now?", I ask. "No, Finance", he says. "But we just came from there." "Yeah, we needed to get the SF44s stamped before we could go back." "Oh. Right." In my pocket are two quarters and a nickel, all that remains of the battalion's monthly $50,000. $14,000 on refrigerators. $28 per ice cream scoop. $900 for a meat slicer. $100 for nets on poles to clean trash out of the canal. We're trying to get more money but the process is "byzantine and multilayered", according to my commander.

This is my job. Seven more months of it, seven months before I return to my dark silent house, catless, girlless. Tried again, failed again. The convoy back to the FOB doesn't leave for a few hours yet; we kill time at the bazaar. "You gonna get Sue something?", asks the other lieutenant. "No, I don't really talk to Sue lately." "What? You're just gonna give up? After you were all gung-ho at Shelby?" "She sends me like a 3 line email twice a month. I went through this before, I know how it ends." "Look", he says, "a lot of girls, even though they're not giving the booty to anyone else, they don't know how to show that. You need to send her something, tell her you're thinking of her." "Yeah, well, I appreciate the insight, but I'm the one in IRAQ. It's just... I don't know. Too much work, or something. She never sends me a thing, not even a letter." "Look, here!", he says, pointing to a mannequin wearing a tiny sequined genie outfit, "send her this! She'll love it." "Um, no. " "You really think it's time to give up on ol' Sue?" I shrug. "It's been time. It was time a long time ago. I can't just drive over there and change her mind again. I mean, it sucks, but... whatever. There's just nothing I can do from here."

"She told me to give her 10 inches and make it hurt", says the gunner's voice over my headset, "so I gave it to her twice and punched her in the face!" Laughter. "Watch this bongo truck at 3 o clock." "Roger." A filthy piece of parachute cord dangles from the ceiling; Cain slaps it towards me. "We ought to put a bell on the end of that," he says. "What's your problem? You're looking all sourpuss", he asks. "Frustrated, I guess. How many times do we have to ride over here to find out we did some memo wrong and we have to come back?" "Don't feel bad", he replies, "there was a captain in there who said he came in FIVE TIMES in the past three days, and they STILL turned him away." "Why?" "I don't know, something was formatted wrong."

Thoroughly Modern Marx

2009-06-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

from Foreign Policy magazine

The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.

Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the “contradictions” inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation.

Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognizant of what he called the “most revolutionary part” played in human history by the bourgeoisie—those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

But Marx was no booster of capitalist globalization in his time or ours. Instead, he understood that “the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” foreseeing that the development of capitalism would inevitably be “paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.” Marx identified how disastrous speculation could trigger and exacerbate crises in the whole economy. And he saw through the political illusions of those who would argue that such crises could be permanently prevented through incremental reform.

Like every revolutionary, Marx wanted to see the old order overthrown in his lifetime. But capitalism had plenty of life left in it, and he could only glimpse, however perceptively, the mistakes and wrong turns that future generations would commit. Those of us now cracking open Marx will find he had much to say that is relevant today, at least for those looking to “recover the spirit of the revolution,” not merely to “set its ghost walking again.”

If he were observing the current downturn, Marx would certainly relish pointing out how flaws inherent in capitalism led to the current crisis. He would see how modern developments in finance, such as securitization and derivatives, have allowed markets to spread the risks of global economic integration. Without these innovations, capital accumulation over the previous decades would have been significantly lower. And so would it have been if finance had not penetrated more and more deeply into society. The result has been that consumer demand (and hence, prosperity) in recent years has depended more and more on credit cards and mortgage debt at the same time that the weakened power of trade unions and cutbacks in social welfare have made people more vulnerable to market shocks.

This leveraged, volatile global financial system contributed to overall economic growth in recent decades. But it also produced a series of inevitable financial bubbles, the most dangerous of which emerged in the U.S. housing sector. That bubble’s subsequent bursting had such a profound impact around the globe precisely because of its centrality to sustaining both U.S. consumer demand and international financial markets. Marx would no doubt point to this crisis as a perfect instance of when capitalism looks like “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”

Despite the depth of our current predicament, Marx would have no illusions that economic catastrophe would itself bring about change. He knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, breeds and fosters social isolation. Such a system, he wrote, “leaves no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” Indeed, capitalism leaves societies mired “in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” The resulting social isolation creates passivity in the face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from coming together to take up radical alternatives to capitalism.

Marx would ask first and foremost how to overcome this all-consuming social passivity. He thought that unions and workers’ parties developing in his time were a step forward. Thus in Das Kapital he wrote that the “immediate aim” was “the organization of the proletarians into a class” whose “first task” would be “to win the battle for democracy.” Today, he would encourage the formation of new collective identities, associations, and institutions within which people could resist the capitalist status quo and begin deciding how to better fulfill their needs.

No such ambitious vision for enacting change has arisen from the crisis so far, and it is this void that Marx would find most troubling of all. In the United States, some recent attention-getting proposals have been derided as “socialist,” but only appear to be radical because they go beyond what the left of the Democratic Party is now prepared to advocate. Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, for example, has called for a $2 million cap on certain Wall Street salaries and the enactment of a financial transactions tax, which would impose an incremental fee on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets. Marx would view this proposal as a perfect case of thinking inside the box, because it explicitly endorses (even while limiting) the very thing that is now popularly identified as the problem: a culture of risk disassociated from consequence. Marx would be no less derisive toward those who think that bank nationalizations—such as those that took place in Sweden and Japan during their financial crises in the 1990s—would amount to real change.

Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for “centralization of credit in the banks of the state” that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes’ winning “the battle of democracy” to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it.

“From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance,” Buiter wrote, is “a small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind.” Clearly, you don’t need to be a Marxist to have radical aspirations. You do, however, have to be some sort of Marxist to recognize that even at a time like the present, when the capitalist class is on its heels, demoralized and confused, radical change is not likely to start in the form of “a small step for the lawyers” (presumably after getting all the “stakeholders” to sit down together in a room to sign a document or two). Marx would tell you that, without the development of popular forces through radical new movements and parties, the socialization of finance will fall on infertile ground. Notably, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, radical forces inside many of Europe’s social democratic parties put forward similar suggestions, but they were unable to get the leaders of those parties to go along with proposals they derided as old-fashioned.

Attempts to talk seriously about the need to democratize our economies in such radical ways were largely shunted aside by parties of all stripes for the next several decades, and we are still paying the price for marginalizing those ideas. The irrationality built into the basic logic of capitalist markets—and so deftly analyzed by Marx—is once again evident. Trying just to stay afloat, each factory and firm lays off workers and tries to pay less to those kept on. Undermining job security has the effect of undercutting demand throughout the economy. As Marx knew, microrational behavior has the worst macroeconomic outcomes. We now can see where ignoring Marx while trusting in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” gets you.

The financial crisis today also exposes irrationalities in realms beyond finance. One example is U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for trading in carbon credits as a solution to the climate crisis. In that supposedly progressive proposal, corporations that meet emissions standards sell credits to others that fail to meet their own targets. The Kyoto Protocol called for a similar system swapped across states. Fatefully however, both plans depend on the same volatile derivatives markets that are inherently open to manipulation and credit crashes. Marx would insist that, to find solutions to global problems such as climate change, we need to break with the logic of capitalist markets rather than use state institutions to reinforce them. Likewise, he would call for international economic solidarity rather than competition among states. As he put it in the Manifesto, “United action, of the leading . . . countries, at least, is the first condition for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

Yet the work of building new institutions and movements for change must begin at home. Although he made the call “Workers of the world, unite!” Marx still insisted that workers in each country “first of all settle things with their own bourgeoisie.” The measures required to transform existing economic, political, and legal institutions would “of course be different in different countries.” But in every case, Marx would insist that the way to bring about radical change is first to get people to think ambitiously again.

How likely is that to happen? Even at a moment when the financial crisis is bleeding dry a vast swath of the world’s people, when collective anxiety shakes every age, religious, and racial group, and when, as always, the deprivations and burdens are falling most heavily on ordinary working people, the prognosis is uncertain. If he were alive today, Marx would not look to pinpoint exactly when or how the current crisis would end. Rather, he would perhaps note that such crises are part and parcel of capitalism’s continued dynamic existence. Reformist politicians who think they can do away with the inherent class inequalities and recurrent crises of capitalist society are the real romantics of our day, themselves clinging to a naive utopian vision of what the world might be. If the current crisis has demonstrated one thing, it is that Marx was the greater realist.

Leo Panitch is Canada research chair in comparative political economy and distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and coeditor of the annual Socialist Register.

My John Stossel Post of a few months back could have used this short clip

2009-06-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

Balochistan is the ultimate prize

2009-05-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

It's a classic case of calm before the storm. The AfPak chapter of Obama's brand new OCO ("Overseas Contingency Operations"), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror") does not imply only a surge in the Pashtun Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). A surge in Balochistan as well may be virtually inevitable. Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon's. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan's area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan's natural gas, it accounts for less than 4% of Pakistan's 173 million citizens. Balochs are the majority, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the provincial capital, is considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon, which for all its high-tech wizardry mysteriously has not been able to locate Quetta resident "The Shadow", historic Taliban emir Mullah Omar himself. Strategically, Balochistan is mouth-watering: east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and boasting three Arabian sea ports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Gwadar - a port built by China - is the absolute key. It is the essential node in the crucial, ongoing, and still virtual Pipelineistan war between IPI and TAPI. IPI is the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline", which is planned to cross from Iranian to Pakistani Balochistan - an anathema to Washington. TAPI is the perennially troubled, US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, which is planned to cross western Afghanistan via Herat and branch out to Kandahar and Gwadar. Washington's dream scenario is Gwadar as the new Dubai - while China would need Gwadar as a port and also as a base for pumping gas via a long pipeline to China. One way or another, it will all depend on local grievances being taken very seriously. Islamabad pays a pittance in royalties for the Balochis, and development aid is negligible; Balochistan is treated as a backwater. Gwadar as the new Dubai would not necessarily mean local Balochis benefiting from the boom; in many cases they could even be stripped of their local land. To top it all, there's the New Great Game in Eurasia fact that Pakistan is a key pivot to both NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of which Pakistan is an observer. So whoever "wins" Balochistan incorporates Pakistan as a key transit corridor to either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field or a great deal of the Caspian wealth of "gas republic" Turkmenistan.
The cavalry to the rescue
Now imagine thousands of mobile US troops - backed by supreme air power and hardcore artillery - pouring into this desert across the immense, 800-kilometer-long, empty southern Afghanistan-Balochistan border. These are Obama's surge troops who will be in theory destroying opium crops in Helmand province in Afghanistan. They will also try to establish a meaningful presence in the ultra-remote, southwest Afghanistan, Baloch-majority province of Nimruz. It would take nothing for them to hit Pakistani Balochistan in hot pursuit of Taliban bands. And this would certainly be a prelude for a de facto US invasion of Balochistan. What would the Balochis do? That's a very complex question. Balochistan is of course tribal - just as the FATA. Local tribal chiefs can be as backward as Islamabad is neglectful (and they are not exactly paragons of human rights either). A parallel could be made with the Swat valley. Most Baloch tribes bow to Islamabad's authority - except, first and foremost, the Bugti. And then there's the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) - which both Washington and London brand as a terrorist group. Its leader is Brahamdagh Bugti, operating out of Kandahar (only two hours away from Quetta). In a recent Pakistani TV interview he could not be more sectarian, stressing the BLA is getting ready to attack non-Balochis. The Balochis are inclined to consider the BLA as a resistance group. But Islamabad denies it, saying their support is not beyond 10% of the provincial population. It does not help that Islamabad tends to be not only neglectful but heavy-handed; in August 2006, Musharraf's troops killed ultra-respected local leader Nawab Akbar Bugti, a former provincial governor. There's ample controversy on whether the BLA is being hijacked by foreign intelligence agencies - everyone from the CIA and the British MI6 to the Israeli Mossad. In a 2006 visit to Iran, I was prevented from going to Sistan-Balochistan in southeast Iran because, according to Tehran's version, infiltrated CIA from Pakistani Balochistan were involved in covert, cross-border attacks. And it's no secret to anyone in the region that since 9/11 the US virtually controls the Baloch air bases in Dalbandin and Panjgur. In October 2001, while I was waiting for an opening to cross to Kandahar from Quetta, and apart from tracking the whereabouts of President Hamid Karzai and his brother, I spent quite some time with a number of BLA associates and sympathizers. They described themselves as "progressive, nationalist, anti-imperialist" (and that makes them difficult to be co-opted by the US). They were heavily critical of "Punjabi chauvinism", and always insisted the region's resources belong to Balochis first; that was the rationale for attacks on gas pipelines. Stressing an atrocious, provincial literacy rate of only 16% ("It's government policy to keep Balochistan backward"), they resented the fact that most people still lacked drinking water. They claimed support from at least 70% of the Baloch population ("Whenever the BLA fires a rocket, it's the talk of the bazaars"). They also claimed to be united, and in coordination with Iranian Balochis. And they insisted that "Pakistan had turned Balochistan into a US cantonment, which affected a lot the relationship between the Afghan and Baloch peoples". As a whole, not only BLA sympathizers but the Balochis in general are adamant: although prepared to remain within a Pakistani confederation, they want infinitely more autonomy.
Game on
How crucial Balochistan is to Washington can be assessed by the study "Baloch Nationalism and the Politics of Energy Resources: the Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan" by Robert Wirsing of the US Army think-tank Strategic Studies Institute. Predictably, it all revolves around Pipelineistan. China - which built Gwadar and needs gas from Iran - must be sidelined by all means necessary. The added paranoid Pentagon component is that China could turn Gwadar into a naval base and thus "threaten" the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. The only acceptable scenario for the Pentagon would be for the US to take over Gwadar. Once again, that would be a prime confluence of Pipelineistan and the US empire of bases. Not only in terms of blocking the IPI pipeline and using Gwadar for TAPI, control of Gwadar would open the mouth-watering opportunity of a long land route across Balochistan into Helmand, Nimruz, Kandahar or, better yet, all of these three provinces in southwest Afghanistan. From a Pentagon/NATO perspective, after the "loss" of the Khyber Pass, that would be the ideal supply route for Western troops in the perennial, now rebranded, GWOT ("global war on terror"). During the Asif Ali Zardari administration in Islamabad the BLA, though still a fringe group with a political wing and a military wing, has been regrouping and rearming, while the current chief minister of Balochistan, Nawab Raisani, is suspected of being a CIA asset (there's no conclusive proof). There's fear in Islamabad that the government has taken its eye off the Balochistan ball - and that the BLA may be effectively used by the US for balkanization purposes. But Islamabad still seems not to have listened to the key Baloch grievance: we want to profit from our natural wealth, and we want autonomy. So what's gonna be the future of "Dubai" Gwadar? IPI or TAPI? The die is cast. Under the radar of the Obama/Karzai/Zardari photo-op in Washington, all's still to play in this crucial front in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

BlackLight Power Inc. Makes Power with New Paradigm of Physics

2009-05-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

Blacklight Power, Inc. (BLP) of Cranbury, New Jersey[1] is a company linked to the ideas of its founder Randell L. Mills, which he self-published in a treatise entitled The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics (GUT-CP). In the book he claims that chemicals, under controlled experiments, may react catalytically with atomic hydrogen to generate an ultraviolet plasma. The company claims that the special plasma byproducts predicted by GUT-CP, called "hydrinos", have been experimentally observed to have an energy state below what quantum mechanics refers to as the ground state of hydrogen.[2] By 2009 BLP has raised about sixty million dollars in venture capital.[3][4] The company subsidiary, Millsian Inc., has developed and released a molecular modeling program based on the book.[5]
Mills' claims that much of standard particle physics, while having experimental validation, should be rejected due to its reliance on overfitting
Mills first announced his hydrino state theory in April 25, 1991 in a press conference in Lancaster, as an explanation for the cold fusion phenomena that had been revealed in 1989. According to Mills, no fusion was actually happening in the cells: all the effects would be caused by the hydrogen atoms which shrinked as they fell to a lower state. The increased proximity between the shrinked atoms would cause them to fusion sporadically. Some of those atoms would be deuterium atoms (a hydrogen atom with one extra neutron), which would explain why there were occasional readings of neutrons. No experimental evidence was offered by Mills, and his claim went unanswered and ignored by the scientific community.

Blacklight technology is based on the innovative Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics (GUT-CP) which is the theory that physical laws (Maxwell's Equations, Newton's Laws, Special and General Relativity) must hold on all scales. The theory is based on an often overlooked result of Maxwell's Equations, that an extended distribution of charge may, under certain conditions, accelerate without radiating. This "condition of no radiation" is invoked to solve the physical structure of subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules.

In exact closed-form equations with physical constants only, solutions to thousands of known experimental values arise that were beyond the reach of previous theory. These include the electron spin, g-factor, multi-electron atoms, excited states, polyatomic molecules, wave-particle duality and the nature of the photon, the masses and families of fundamental particles, and the relationships between fundamental laws of the universe that reveal why the universe is accelerating as it expands. GUT-CP is successful over 85 orders of magnitude, from the level of quarks to the cosmos.

The Self-Aware Universe

2009-05-27T00:41:00.001-07:00

An Interview with Amit Goswami
[Abridged]
by Craig Hamilton - What is Enlightment?

WIE: In your book The Self-Aware Universe you speak about the need for a paradigm shift. Could you talk a bit about how you conceive of that shift? From what to what?

Amit Goswami: The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.
Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness.That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

WIE: In your book you refer to this new paradigm as "monistic idealism." And you also suggest that science seems to be verifying what a lot of mystics have said throughout history—that science's current findings seem to be parallel to the essence of the perennial spiritual teaching.

AG: It is the spiritual teaching. It is not just parallel. The idea that consciousness is the ground of being is the basis of all spiritual traditions, as it is for the philosophy of monistic idealism—although I have given it a somewhat new name. The reason for my choice of the name is that, in the West, there is a philosophy called "idealism" which is opposed to the philosophy of "material realism," which holds that only matter is real. Idealism says no, consciousness is the only real thing. But in the West that kind of idealism has usually meant something that is really dualism—that is, consciousness and matter are separate. So, by monistic idealism, I made it clear that, no, I don't mean that dualistic kind of Western idealism, but really a monistic idealism, which has existed in the West, but only in the esoteric spiritual traditions. Whereas in the East this is the mainstream philosophy. In Buddhism, or in Hinduism where it is called Vedanta, or in Taoism, this is the philosophy of everyone. But in the West this is a very esoteric tradition, only known and adhered to by very astute philosophers, the people who have really delved deeply into the nature of reality.

WIE: What you are saying is that modern science, from a completely different angle—not assuming anything about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life—has somehow come back around, and is finding itself in agreement with that view as a result of its own discoveries.

AG: That's right. And this is not entirely unexpected. Starting from the beginning of quantum physics, which began in the year 1900 and then became full-fledged in 1925 when the equations of quantum mechanics were discovered, quantum physics has given us indications that the worldview might change. Staunch materialist physicists have loved to compare the classical worldview and the quantum worldview. Of course, they wouldn't go so far as to abandon the idea that there is only upward causation and that matter is supreme, but the fact remains that they saw in quantum physics some great paradigm changing potential. And then what happened was that, starting in 1982, results started coming in from laboratory experiments in physics. That is the year when, in France, Alain Aspect and his collaborators performed the great experiment that conclusively established the veracity of the spiritual notions, and particularly the notion of transcendence. Should I go into a little bit of detail about Aspect's experiment?

WIE: Yes, please do.

AG: To give a little background, what had been happening was that for many years quantum physics had been giving indications that there are levels of reality other than the material level. How it started happening first was that quantum objects—objects in quantum physics—began to be looked upon as waves of possibility. Now, initially people thought, "Oh, they are just like regular waves." But very soon it was found out that, no, they are not waves in space and time. They cannot be called waves in space and time at all—they have properties which do not jibe with those of ordinary waves. So they began to be recognized as waves in potential, waves of possibility, and the potential was recognized as transcendent, beyond matter somehow.
But the fact that there is transcendent potential was not very clear for a long time. Then Aspect's experiment verified that this is not just theory, there really is transcendent potential, objects really do have connections outside of space and time—outside of space and time! What happens in this experiment is that an atom emits two quanta of light, called photons, going opposite ways, and somehow these photons affect one another's behavior at a distance, without exchanging any signals through space. Notice that: without exchanging any signals through space but instantly affecting each other. Instantaneously.
Now Einstein showed long ago that two objects can never affect each other instantly in space and time because everything must travel with a maximum speed limit, and that speed limit is the speed of light. So any influence must travel, if it travels through space, taking a finite time. This is called the idea of "locality." Every signal is supposed to be local in the sense that it must take a finite time to travel through space. And yet, Aspect's photons—the photons emitted by the atom in Aspect's experiment—influence one another, at a distance, without exchanging signals because they are doing it instantaneously—they are doing it faster than the speed of light. And therefore it follows that the influence could not have traveled through space. Instead the influence must belong to a domain of reality that we must recognize as the transcendent domain of reality.

WIE: That's fascinating. Would most physicists agree with that interpretation of his experiment?

AG: Well, physicists must agree with this interpretation of this experiment. Many times of course, physicists will take the following point of view: they will say, "Well, yeah sure, experiments. But this relationship between particles really isn't important. We mustn't look into any of the consequences of this transcendent domain—if it can even be interpreted that way." In other words, they try to minimize the impact of this and still try to hold on to the idea that matter is supreme.
But in their heart they know, as is very evidenced. In 1984 or '85, at the American Physical Society meeting at which I was present, it is said that one physicist was heard saying to another physicist that, after Aspect's experiment, anyone who does not believe that something is really strange about the world must have rocks in his head.

WIE: So what you are saying is that from your point of view, which a number of others share, it is somehow obvious that one would have to bring in the idea of a transcendent dimension to really understand this.

AG: Yes, it is. Henry Stapp, who is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says this quite explicitly in one of his papers written in 1977, that things outside of space and time affect things inside space and time. There's just no question that that happens in the realm of quantum physics when you are dealing with quantum objects. Now of course, the crux of the matter is, the surprising thing is, that we are always dealing with quantum objects because it turns out that quantum physics is the physics of every object. Whether it's submicroscopic or it's macroscopic, quantum physics is the only physics we've got. So although it's more apparent for photons, for electrons, for the submicroscopic objects, our belief is that all reality,all manifest reality, all matter, is governed by the same laws. And if that is so, then this experiment is telling us that we should change our worldview because we, too, are quantum objects.

WIE: These are fascinating discoveries which have inspired a lot of people. A number of books have already attempted to make the link between physics and mysticism. Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters have both reached many, many people. In your book, though, you mention that there was something that you felt had not yet been covered which you feel is your unique contribution to all this. Could you say something about what you are doing that is different from what has been done before in this area?
AG: I'm glad that you asked that question. This should be clarified and I will try to explicate it as clearly as I can. The early work, like The Tao of Physics, has been very important for the history of science. However, these early works, in spite of supporting the spiritual aspect of human beings, all basically held on to the material view of the world nevertheless. In other words, they did not challenge the material realists' view that everything is made up of matter. That view was never put to any challenge by any of these early books. In fact, my book was the first one which challenged it squarely and which was still based on a rigorous explication in scientific terms. In other words, the idea that consciousness is the ground of being, of course, has existed in psychology, as transpersonal psychology, but outside of transpersonal psychology no tradition of science and no scientist has seen it so clearly.
It was my good fortune to recognize it within quantum physics, to recognize that all the paradoxes of quantum physics can be solved if we accept consciousness as the ground of being. So that was my unique contribution and, of course, this has paradigm-shifting potential because now we can truly integrate science and spirituality. In other words, with Capra and Zukav—although their books are very good—because they held on to a fundamentally materialist paradigm, the paradigm is not shifting, nor is there any real reconciliation between spirituality and science. Because if everything is ultimately material, all causal efficacy must come from matter. So consciousness is recognized, spirituality is recognized, but only as causal epiphenomena, or secondary phenomena. And an epiphenomenal consciousness is not very good. I mean, it's not doing anything. So, although these books acknowledge our spirituality, the spirituality is ultimately coming from some sort of material interaction.
But that's not the spirituality that Jesus talked about. That's not the spirituality that Eastern mystics were so ecstatic about. That's not the spirituality where a mystic recognizes and says, "I now know what reality is like, and this takes away all the unhappiness that one ever had. This is infinite, this is joy, this is consciousness." This kind of exuberant statement that mystics make could not be made on the basis of epiphenomenal consciousness. It can be made only when one recognizes the ground of being itself, when one cognizes directly that One is All.
Now, an epiphenomenal human being would not have any such cognition. It would not make any sense to cognize that you are All. So that is what I am saying. So long as science remains on the basis of the materialist worldview, however much you try to accommodate spiritual experiences in terms of parallels or in terms of chemicals in the brain or what have you, you are not really giving up the old paradigm. You are giving up the old paradigm and fully reconciling with spirituality only when you establish science on the basis of the fundamental spiritual notion that consciousness is the ground of all being. That is what I have done in my book, and that is the beginning. But already there are some other books that are recognizing this too.

WIE: So there are people corroborating your ideas?

AG: There are people who are now coming out and recognizing the same thing, that this view is the correct way to go to explain quantum physics and also to develop science in the future. In other words, the present science has shown not only quantum paradoxes but also has shown real incompetence in explaining paradoxical and anomalous phenomena, such as parapsychology, the paranormal—even creativity. And even traditional subjects, like perception or biological evolution, have much to explain that these materialist theories don't explain. To give you one example, in biology there is what is called the theory of punctuated equilibrium. What that means is that evolution is not only slow, as Darwin perceived, but there are also rapid epochs of evolution, which are called "punctuation marks." But traditional biology has no explanation for this.
However, if we do science on the basis of consciousness, on the primacy of consciousness, then we can see in this phenomenon creativity, real creativity of consciousness. In other words, we can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species. And so we can now fill up these gaps that conventional biology cannot explain with ideas which are essentially spiritual ideas, such as consciousness as the creator of the world.

WIE: This brings to mind the subtitle of your book, How Consciousness Creates the Material World. This is obviously quite a radical idea. Could you explain a bit more concretely how this actually happens in your opinion?

AG: Actually, it's the easiest thing to explain, because in quantum physics, as I said earlier, objects are not seen as definite things, as we are used to seeing them. Newton taught us that objects are definite things, they can be seen all the time, moving in definite trajectories. Quantum physics doesn't depict objects that way at all.In quantum physics, objects are seen as possibilities, possibility waves. Right? So then the question arises, what converts possibility into actuality?Because, when we see, we only see actual events. That's starting with us. When you see a chair, you see an actual chair, you don't see a possible chair.

WIE: Right—I hope so.

AG: We all hope so. Now this is called the "quantum measurement paradox." It is a paradox because who are we to do this conversion? Because after all, in the materialist paradigm we don't have any causal efficacy. We are nothing but the brain, which is made up of atoms and elementary particles. So how can a brain which is made up of atoms and elementary particles convert a possibility wave that it itself is? It itself is made up of the possibility waves of atoms and elementary particles, so it cannot convert its own possibility wave into actuality. This is called a paradox. Now in the new view, consciousness is the ground of being. So who converts possibility into actuality? Consciousness does, because consciousness does not obey quantum physics. Consciousness is not made of material. Consciousness is transcendent. Do you see the paradigm-changing view right here—how consciousness can be said to create the material world?The material world of quantum physics is just possibility. It is consciousness, through the conversion of possibility into actuality, that creates what we see manifest. In other words, consciousness creates the manifest world.

Reality and Consciousness

2009-05-27T00:08:00.000-07:00

Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out
Peter Russell

Editor: This is an abridgement of Russell's book, From Science to God.

Thomas Kuhn coined the term "paradigm" to refer to the beliefs and assumptions that underlie a particular science. But beneath all our scientific paradigms lies an even deeper and more pervasive assumption. It is the belief in the primacy of the material world. When we fully understand the world of space, time and matter, we will, it is held, be able to account for everything in the cosmos. Being the paradigm behind all our scientific paradigms, this worldview has the status of a "superparadigm". Eminently successful as this model has been at explaining the world around us, it has very little to say about the non-material world of mind.
Nothing in the physical sciences predicts the phenomenon of consciousness. Yet its reality is apparent to each and every one of us. As far as the current superparadigm is concerned consciousness is a great anomaly.
When paradigm anomalies first arise they are usually overlooked or rejected. Or, if they cannot be so easily discarded, they are incorporated in some way, often clumsily, into the existing model. Witness the attempts of mediaeval astronomers, wedded to Plato's belief in the perfection of circular motion, trying to explain irregularities in planetary motion with theories of epicycles (circles rolling along circles).
Western science has followed a similar pattern in its approach to consciousness. For the most part it ignored consciousness completely. More recently, as developments across a range of disciplines have shown that consciousness cannot be so easily sidelined, science has made various attempts to account for it. Some have looked to quantum physics, some to information theory, others to neuropsychology. But the failure of these approaches to make any appreciable headway into the problem of consciousness suggests that they may be on the wrong track.
All these approaches assume that consciousness somehow arises from, or is dependent upon, the world of space-time-matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within the materialist superparadigm. The underlying beliefs are seldom, if ever, questioned.
When Newton proposed his laws of motion, he turned the problem of what made things move into the foundation stone of his new paradigm; objects continued to move unless acted upon by some external force. When Einstein formulated his Special Theory of Relativity, he took the problem of the constancy of the speed of light and made it an axiom of the new model. I believe we need to do the same with the problem of consciousness. Instead of trying to explain consciousness within the current superparadigm, we need to accept that consciousness is as fundamental as matter—in some ways, more fundamental. When we do we find that the key ingredients for a new superparadigm are already in place; all we need to do is put them together.

Perception and Reality
The key to this new model of reality is an understanding of how we perceive reality. Advances in physics, psychology, and philosophy have shown that reality is not what it seems. Take vision, for example. When I look at a tree, light reflected from its leaves is focused onto cells in the retina of my eye, where it triggers a cascading chemical reaction releasing a flow of electrons. Neurons connected to the cells convey these electrical impulses to the brain’s visual cortex, where the raw data is processed and integrated. Then—in ways that are still a complete mystery—an image of the tree appears in my consciousness. It may seem that I am directly perceiving the tree in the physical world, but what I am actually experiencing is an image generated in my mind.
The same is true of every other experience. All that I see, hear, taste, touch, smell and feel has been created from the data received by my sensory organs. All I ever know of the world around are the mental images constructed from that data. However real and external they may seem, they are all phenomena within my mind.
This simple fact is very hard to grasp; it goes against all our experience. If there is anything about which we feel sure, it is that the world we experience is real. We can see, touch and hear it. We can lift heavy and solid objects; hurt ourselves, if we're not careful, against their unyielding immobility. It seems undeniable that out there, around us, independent and apart from us, stands a physical world, utterly real, solid and tangible.
But the world of our experience is no more "out there" than are our dreams. When we dream we create a reality in which events happen around us, and in which we perceive other people as individuals separate from us. In the dream it all seems very real. But when we awaken we realize that everything in the dream was actually a creation of our own mind.
The same process of reality generation occurs in waking consciousness. The difference is that now the reality that is created is based on sensory data and bears a closer relationship to what is taking place in the real world. Nevertheless, however real it may seem, it is not actually "the real world". It is still an image of that world created in the mind.

The Two Realities
It is important to distinguish between two ways in which we use the word "reality". There is the reality we experience, our image of reality; and there is the underlying reality that has given rise to this experience. The underlying reality is the same for all observers. It is an absolute reality. The reality I experience, the reality generated in my mind, is a relative reality. It is relative to my point of view, my past experience, my human senses and my human brain.
The fact that we create our image of reality does not mean, as some people misconstrue, that we are creating the underlying reality. Whatever that reality is, it exists apart from our perception of it. When I see a tree there is something that has given rise to my perception. But I can never directly perceive this something. All I can ever know of it is the image appearing in my mind.
When, two centuries ago, Bishop Berkeley proposed that we know only what we perceive, his contemporaries debated whether or not a tree falling in a forest made a sound if no one was there to hear it. From what we now know of the psychophysiology of perception, we can say the answer is "No". Sound is not a quality of the underlying reality. There may be movements in the air, but the interpretation of those movements as sound is something that happens in the mind—whether it be the mind of a human being, a dog or a woodpecker.
Similarly with light. Whatever the tree is in physical reality, it is not green. Light of various frequencies is reflected from the tree to the retina of the eye, where cells respond to the amount of light in three frequency ranges (the three primary colors). But all that is passed back to the brain are electro-chemical impulses; there is no color here. The green I see is a quality created in consciousness. It exists only in the mind.
The same is true of our perception of distance. The pattern of light that falls on the retina creates a two-dimensional image of the world. The brain estimates distance by detecting slight differences between data from the left and right eyes, the focus of the eyes, relative movement, and past experience as to the likely size of a tree. From this data it calculates that the tree is fifty feet away. A three-dimensional image of the world is then created with the tree placed "out there" in that world, fifty feet away. Yet, however real it may seem, the quality of space and distance that we experience is created in the mind.

The Kantian Revolution
Long before modern science knew anything about the processes of perception or the structure of matter, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had drawn a clear distinction between our perception of reality and the actual object of perception. He argued that all we ever know is how reality appears to us—what he referred to as the phenomenon of our experience, "that which appears to be". The underlying reality he called the noumenon, meaning "that which is apprehended", the thing perceived.
At the time, Kant's arguments were a watershed in Western thinking. They were, as Kant himself saw, the equivalent of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Whereas Copernicus had effectively turned the physical universe inside out, showing that the movements of the stars are determined by the movement of the earth, Kant had turned the epistemological world inside out, putting the self firmly back at the center of things. We are not passive experiencers of the world; we are the creators of the world we experience.
Because all we ever know is the product of the mind operating on the raw sensory data, Kant reasoned that our experience is as much a reflection of the nature of the mind as it is of the physical world. This led him to one of his boldest and, at the time, most astonishing, conclusions of all. Time and space, he argued, are not inherent qualities of the physical world; they are a reflection of the way the mind operates. They are part of the perceptual framework within which our experience of the world is constructed.
It seems absolutely obvious to us that time and space are real and fundamental qualities of the physical world, entirely independent of my or your consciousness—as obvious as it seemed to people five hundred years ago that the sun moves round the earth. This, said Kant, is only because we cannot see the world any other way. The human mind is so constituted that it is forced to impose the framework of space and time on the raw sensory data in order to make any sense of it all.
Strange as Kant’s proposal may have seemed then, and strange as it may still seem to many of us today, contemporary science is proving him right.

Spacetime
The first significant scientific challenge to the assumption that space and time are absolutes came in 1905 with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. He showed that what we observe as space and what we observe as time are but two aspects of a more fundamental reality, which he called "the spacetime continuum". How much of this continuum manifests as space, and how much manifests as time varies from one observer to another, depending on their motion. Space and time may appear to us to be fixed qualities, but that is because we are not traveling at speeds close to that of light. If we did, things would look very different.
Just what the spacetime continuum itself is like we never know. Einstein agreed with Kant; all we ever know of the underlying reality are the ways in which it appears as the two very different qualities of space and time.
Although observers moving at different speeds may disagree on the amounts of time and space separating two events, they do agree, no matter how fast they may be moving, on the amount of spacetime separating them—what Einstein called the "interval". It is a little like cutting a string in two; cutting it in different places will give pieces of differing lengths, but the total length of string will always be the same. Similarly, any observation divides the spacetime interval into a certain amount of time and a corresponding amount of space, the exact proportions depending on the motion of the observer. (With the difference that the mathematical formula for the combination of space and time is not simple addition; it is more like "space squared minus time squared.")

The "Speed" of Light
In proposing his theory Einstein postulated that the speed of light was a universal constant. However fast you may be traveling, you will always measure the speed of light relative to you to be the same—186,000 miles per second. You can never catch up with light. Even if you were traveling at 185,990 miles per second, light would still pass you by at 186,000 miles per second.
Why should this be so? It seems totally counter-intuitive that the speed of light never varies. But this perplexing behavior takes on a rather different character when we distinguish our image of reality from the underlying reality. Space and time, and hence speed, are aspects of the phenomenal world; they have no meaning, it turns out, for light itself.
According to the equations of Special Relativity, as an observer's speed increases, time slows down, and length (in the direction of motion) contracts. At the speed of light, time has slowed to a standstill and length contracted to zero. Although no object with mass can ever attain the speed of light (the equations predict that it would then have an infinite mass), light itself does (by definition) travel at the speed of light. From light's point of view—and this after all must be the most appropriate perspective from which to consider the nature of light, not our matter-bound mode of experience—it travels no distance and takes no time to do so.
This reflects a unique property of light. In the spacetime continuum, the interval between the two ends of a light ray is always zero. How can we interpret this? We probably should not even try to interpret it. Any attempt to do so would make the mistake of applying concepts derived from our image of reality to the underlying reality. All we need to recognize is that, from light's perspective, this zero interval manifests as zero space and a corresponding amount of zero time.
However, when we in the world of sub-light speeds perceive light, we see a different manifestation of the zero interval. We observe a finite amount of space along with an "equal" amount of time. In our world, the light does travel through space and time. Since the total interval must be zero, the distance covered must exactly balance the time taken—that is, we must always observe 186,000 miles of space for every second of time. This we interpret as the speed of light. But this "speed" is not an intrinsic property of light itself; traveling no distance in no time, light has no need of speed. What we interpret as the speed of light is actually the ratio in which space and time manifest in our perception of reality. It is this ratio that is constant. And this is why all our measurements of the apparent speed of light are constant.

Wave-Particle Duality
The fact that light itself knows no space or time resolves another difficult conundrum. In our image of reality we observe light traveling across space and time and so observe energy traveling from the point of emission of the light ray to its point of absorption. Naturally, we ask how the energy travels. Is it a wave, or is it a particle?
The answer, it seems, is both. In some situations light behaves as a continuous wave spreading out in space—but, curiously, a wave without a medium. In other situations it behaves as a particle traveling through space—but, equally curiously, a particle without mass. Physicists have accommodated these two strange and seemingly paradoxical conclusions by deciding that light is a "wave-particle." In certain circumstances it appears as a wave; in others as a particle.
But if we look at things from light’s point of view, the reality is very different. Since it did not travel through space and time, it needed no vehicle or mechanism of travel. Light itself has no need to be either a wave or a particle. From its own frame of reference—which is probably the most appropriate frame of reference from which to consider light—there is no duality, and no paradox.
The physicist’s conundrum appears only when we mistake our image of reality with the "thing in itself", and try to visualize light in concepts and terms appropriate to our image of reality—that is, waves and particles.

No matter
A photon is a single quantum of action. We are all familiar with quantities such as mass, velocity, acceleration, momentum and energy. Action is just another member of this family, but not one that we come across much in ordinary life. It is defined as the product of momentum and distance traveled, or, equivalently, energy and time. Thus the amount of action of speeding bullet is higher than the same bullet traveling more slowly across the same distance. Double the bullet's mass, and you get twice the action—which accords with our intuitive concepts of action.
To speak of light as pure action is both appropriate and strange, depending upon one’s point of view. In the world we experience, the world in which space and time exist, and light travels great distances at unmatchable speed, light seems to be nothing but action. It never rests; it never slows. From this frame of reference, action seems a most appropriate quality.
From its own frame of reference, however, light never goes anywhere. A photon covers no distance, and knows no time. Nor does it have any mass. Strange then, that something without mass, space or time should be the fundamental unit of action. Strange it may be; nevertheless, that is the nature of the underlying reality. Once again, nothing like what we expected. Nothing like the phenomenon generated in the mind.
Kant argued that space and time are characteristics not of the noumenon, the underlying reality, but of the mind. Quantum theory reveals that the same is true of matter. Matter is not to be found in the underlying reality; atoms turn out to be 99.99999999% empty space, and sub-atomic "particles" dissolve into fuzzy waves. Matter and substance seem, like space and time, to be characteristics of the phenomenon of experience. They are the way in which the mind makes sense of the no-thing-ness of the noumenon.

The Fabric of Reality
When we speak of "the material world", we think we are referring to the underlying reality, the object of our perception. In fact we are only describing our image of reality. The materiality we observe, the solidness we feel, the whole of the "real world" that we know, are, like color, sound, smell, and all the other qualities we experience, qualities manifesting in the mind. This is the startling conclusion we are forced to acknowledge; the "stuff" of our world—the world we know and appear to live within—is not matter, but mind.
The current superparadigm assumes that space, time and matter constitute the basic framework of reality, and consciousness somehow arises from this reality. The truth, it now appears, is the very opposite. As far as the reality we experience is concerned — and this remember is the only reality we ever know — consciousness is primary. Time, space and matter are secondary; they are aspects of the image of reality manifesting in the mind. They exist within consciousness; not the other way around.
Similar claims have often been made in spiritual teachings, particularly Indian philosophy. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra’s, for example, speak of the entire world as chitta vritti, "the modifications of mind-stuff". When physicists hear statements such as this, and take them to be referring to the physical world, they or are understandably perplexed and perhaps dismissive. But when we understand this to be a statement about the manifestation of our experienced world, it begins to make more sense.
If we consider the reality we experience, then we have to accept that in the final analysis they are correct: Consciousness is the essence of everything—everything in the known universe. It is the medium from which every aspect of our experience manifests. Every form and quality we ever experience in the world is an appearance within consciousness.

The Hard Question
As mentioned at the outset, the very existence of consciousness is an insurmountable anomaly for the current superparadigm. How can something as seemingly unconscious as matter ever lead to something as immaterial as consciousness. The two could not be more radically different. The philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed this the "hard question" facing any science of consciousness. Even if we were to fully understand the workings of the brain, down to the tiniest detail, it would still leave unanswered the question as to why any of it should result in a conscious experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect?
The question that is apparently being asked is: How does the underlying reality ever gives rise to consciousness? But never being able to know the underlying reality directly, we are not really in any position to even ask this question, let alone answer it. Indeed, for all we know, consciousness may be an intrinsic quality of the underlying reality In which case there is no hard question to answer.
The question that is actually being asked is: How does the material world—the world of space, time and matter—give rise to consciousness? But this is trying to account for consciousness in terms that are themselves manifestations of consciousness. Space, time, matter, and all the forms and structures we observe in the world, are aspects of the phenomenon arising in the mind; they are aspects of the image of reality appearing in consciousness.
The question we should be asking is the exact opposite. How is that consciousness, which seems so non-material, can take on the material forms that we experience? How do space, time, color, sound, texture, substance, and the many other qualities that we associate with the material world, emerge in consciousness? What is the process of manifestation within the mind?
But this is not a question that science may ever be able to answer. It is more in the domain of the mystic, and others in the more contemplative traditions, who have chosen to explore the nature of consciousness first hand.

Self
Earlier I said that it was probably impossible not to see the world of our experience as "out there" around us. But it may be that some of those who have devoted themselves to meditation and observation of the arising of experience in the mind have developed sufficient inner clarity to see past appearances. Judging from various spiritual texts, they may have recognized, as a personal experience rather than an intellectual insight, that the entire phenomenal world is creation in the mind, and that consciousness is the primary stuff of their universe.
Such people—enlightened ones, we usually call them—are those who have experienced the new superparadigm. For them "I am That, Thou art That, and all this is That", as it is put in the Upanishads, or more simply "All is Brahman" (the Sanskrit word which might be translated as the One, or Essence).
In Western traditions, the same sentiments occur in the statement "I am God". But the word "God" has so many different meanings and associations that such statements are prone to considerable misunderstanding and confusion. To the lay person, the words "I am God" smack of extreme arrogance—particularly if there is the implication that "I", this particular individual human being, is God. To the more religious person, it sounds heretical, if not blasphemous, and some have burned at the stake for it. While to many scientists, such statements are meaningless, the symptoms of some delusion or pathology.
Science has looked out into deep space, back in "deep time" to the beginning of creation, and down into the "deep structure" of the cosmos, the very essence of matter, and is proud to tell us that it finds no need nor place for God—the Universe seems to work perfectly well without his assistance. But whoever said God is to be found "out there", in the realm of space, time and matter? This is a very naive and old-fashioned interpretation of God. When spiritual teachings refer to God they are, more often than not, pointing towards the realm of inner experience, not some thing in the physical realm. If we want to find God, we have to look within, into the realm of "deep mind"—a realm that science has yet to explore.
If we look more closely at the statements of those who have explored deep mind, they seem to be saying that the "I", that innermost essence of ourselves is a universal essence. Whatever we may be conscious of, the faculty of consciousness is something we all share. This consciousness is the one truth we cannot deny. It is the absolute certainty of our existence. It is eternal in that it is always there whatever the contents of our experience. It is the essence of everything we know. And, since every aspect of our experience is a manifestation in the mind, it is the creator of the world we know.
These qualities—truth, absolute, eternal, essence, creator—are amongst those traditionally associated with God. From this perspective, the statement "I am God" is not so puzzling or deluded after all. Although it might be more accurate to say that "I am" is God, or possibly, "God is consciousness".

The Key
The foundation stone of the Copernican Revolution was the realization that the Earth was not still, as had hitherto been supposed, and as daily experience seemed to confirm, but was spinning about its own axis. From this shift in perception was born a radically new model of the cosmos. The foundation stone of this discussion has been the distinction between the reality generated in the mind, and the underlying reality. Most of the time we are not aware of this distinction. We tacitly assume that things are as they appear, and that we are experiencing the world as it is. We think that the tree we see is the tree in itself.
When we realize that they are not the same thing at all, but are very different indeed, a revolutionary new model of reality emerges. Space, time and matter fall from their absolute status, to be replaced by light in the physical realm, and by consciousness (the inner light) in the world of experience. Instead of matter being primary, and the source of everything we know, including mind; consciousness becomes primary, and the source of everything, including matter, as we know it. For a second time, the universe has been turned inside out.
This shift in superparadigm has not happened yet. The existing model runs even deeper than did the geocentric view of the cosmos, and will probably meet even more obstacles than did the Copernican Revolution, (although now, somewhat ironically, it is science not the church that is the establishment, and will be the source of the greatest resistance). Nevertheless, I believe all the pieces are in place, they have only to be put together into a coherent model.
New paradigms stand or fall according to their ability to account for persistent anomalies, and incorporate new findings. The emerging new superparadigm accounts for consciousness—an intractable anomaly for the old model, remember. It offers radically new perspectives on some of the most perplexing problems in contemporary physics. And, most significantly, points towards a resolution of one of the oldest challenges of all—the reconciliation of the scientific worldview with the spiritual.

David Bohm, 1917-1994

2009-05-26T22:39:00.001-07:00

This interview with David Bohm, conducted by F. David Peat
and John Briggs, appeared in Omni, January 1987

In 1950 David Bohm wrote what many physicists consider to
be a model textbook on quantum mechanics. Ironically, he
has never accepted that theory of physics. In the history
of science he is a maverick, a member of that small group
of physicists-including Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner,
Erwin Schrödinger, Alfred Lande, Paul Dirac, and John
Wheeler--who have expressed grave doubts that a theory
founded on indeterminism and chance could give us a true
view of the universe around us.

Today's generation of physicists, impressed by the stunning
successes of quantum physics--from nuclear weapons to
lasers-are of a different mind. They are busy applying
quantum mechanics to areas its original creators never
imagined. Stephen Hawking, for example, used it to
describe the creation of elementary particles from black
holes and to argue that the universe exploded into being in
a quantum-mechanical event.

Bucking this tide of modern physics for more than 30 years,
Bohm has been more than a gadfly. His objections to the
foundations of quantum mechanics have gradually coalesced
into an extension of the theory so sweeping that it amounts
to a new view of reality. Believing that the nature of
things is not reducible to fragments or particles, he
argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands
that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole,
coherent domain, which he calls the implicate order.

Most other physicists discard Bohm's logic without
bothering to scrutinize it. Part of the difficulty is that
his implicate order is rife with paradox. Another problem
is the sheer range of his ideas, which encompass such
hitherto nonphysical subjects as consciousness, society,
truth, language, and the process of scientific theory
making itself.

The son of a furniture dealer, Bohm was born in Wilkes-
Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He studied physics at the
University of California with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Unwilling to testify against his former teacher and other
friends during the McCarthy hearings, Bohm left the United
States and took a post at the University of São Paulo,
Brazil. From there he moved to Israel, then England, where
he eventually became professor of physics at Birkbeck
College in London.

Bohm is perhaps best known for his early work on the
interactions of electrons in metals. He showed that their
individual, haphazard movement concealed a highly organized
and cooperative behavior called plasma oscillation. This
intimation of an order underlying apparent chaos was
pivotal in Bohm's development.

In 1959 Bohm, working with Yakir Ahronov, showed that a
magnetic field might alter the behavior of electrons
without touching them: If two electron beams were passed
on either side of a space containing a magnetic field, the
field would retard the waves of one beam even though it did
not penetrate the space and actually touch the electrons.
This 'AB effect" was verified a year later.

During the Fifties and Sixties Bohm expanded his belief in
the existence of hidden variables that control seemingly
random quantum events, and from that point on, his ideas
diverged more and more from the mainstream of modern
physics. His books Causality and Chance in Modern Physics
and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, published in 1957
and 1980, respectively, spell out his new theory in
considerable detail. In the Sixties Bohm met the Indian
philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and their continuing
dialogues, published as a book, The Ending of Time, helped
the physicist clarify his ideas about wholeness and order.

Recently retired from Birkbeck College, Bohm is now trying
to develop a mathematical version of his implicate-order
hypothesis-the kind of precise, testable theory that other
physicists will take seriously. It is not an easy task,
for Bohm's universe is a strange, mystical place in which
past, present, and future coexist. The objects in his
universe, even the subatomic particles, are secondary; it
is a process of movement, continuous unfolding and
enfolding from a seamless whole that is fundamental. To
test the theory of general relativity, Einstein forecast
that the sun's gravity would bend light waves from distant
stars; he was correct. So far Bohm has been unable to find
an experimental aspect that could support his ideas in the
same way.

Although recently recovered from serious heart surgery,
Bohm continues to make frequent trips throughout Europe and
to the United States, where he lectures, talks to
colleagues, and encourages students. His ideas have been
enthusiastically received by philosophers, neuroscientists,
theologians, poets, and artists.

Bohm was interviewed by John Briggs and F. David Peat,
authors of Looking Glass Universe, over a two-day period
near Amherst College in Massachusetts, where Bohm was
involved in a series of meetings with the Dalai Lama.
Additional comments are taken from a previous interview in
England by writer Llee Heflin.

Omni: Can you recall when you first experienced the sense
of the wholeness that you now express as the implicate
order? Bohm: When I was a boy a certain prayer we said
every day in Hebrew contained the words to love God with
all your heart all your soul, and all your mind. My
understanding of these words, that is, this notion of
wholeness--not necessarily directed toward God but as a way
of living--had a tremendous impact on me. I also felt a
sense of nature being whole very early. I felt internally
related to trees, mountains, and stars in a way I wasn't to
all the chaos of the cities.

When I first studied quantum mechanics I felt again that
sense of internal relationship--that it was describing
something that I was experiencing directly rather than just
thinking about.

The notion of spin particularly fascinated me: the idea
that when something is spinning in a certain direction, it
could also spin in the other direction but that somehow the
two directions together would be a spin in a third
direction. I felt that somehow that described experience
with the processes of the mind. In thinking about spin I
felt I was in a direct relationship to nature. In quantum
mechanics I came closer to my intuitive sense of nature.

Omni: Yet you've said that quantum mechanics doesn't
provide a clear picture of nature. What do you mean?

Bohm: The main problem is that quantum mechanics gives
only the probability of an experimental result. Neither
the decay of an atomic nucleus nor the fact that it decays
at one moment and not another can be properly pictured
within the theory. It can only enable you to predict
statistically the results of various experiments.

Physics has changed from its earlier form, when it tried to
explain things and give some physical picture. Now the
essence is regarded as mathematical. It's felt the truth
is in the formulas. Now they may find an algorithm by
which they hope to explain a wider range of experimental
results, but it will still have inconsistencies. They hope
that they can eventually explain all the results that could
be gotten, but that is only a hope.

Omni: How did the founders of quantum mechanics initially
receive your book Quantum Theory?

Bohm: In the Fifties, when I sent it around to various
physicists-including [Niels] Bohr, Einstein, and [Wolfgangl
Pauli--Bohr didn't answer, but Pauli liked it. Einstein
sent me a message that he'd like to talk with me. When we
met he said the book had done about as well as you could do
with quantum mechanics. But he was still not convinced it
was a satisfactory theory.

His objection was not merely that it was statistical. He
felt it was a kind of abstraction; quantum mechanics got
correct results but left out much that would have made it
intelligible. I came up with the causal interpretation
[that the electron is a particle, but it also has a field
around it. The particle is never separated from that
field, and the field affects the movement of the particle
in certain ways]. Einstein didn't like it, though, because
the interpretation had this notion of action at a distance:
Things that are far away from each other profoundly affect
each other. He believed only in local action.

I didn't come back to this implicate order until the
Sixties, when I got interested in notions of order. I
realized then the problem is that coordinates are still the
basic order in physics, whereas everything else has
changed.

Omni: Your key concept is something you call enfoldment.
Could you explain it?

Bohm: Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold
up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts
in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that
were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like
what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very
common in our experience. All the light in this room comes
in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each
part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded
by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or
a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded
into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an
old-fashioned television set that's not adjusted properly,
the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded
by adjustment.

Omni: You spoke of coordinates and order a moment ago.
How do they tie in with enfoldment? Do you mean
coordinates like those on a grid?

Bohm: Yes, but not necessarily straight lines. They are a
way of mapping space and time. Since space-time may be
curved, the lines may be curved as well. It became clear
that each general notion of the world contains within it a
specific idea of order. The ancient Greeks had the idea of
an increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens.
Modern physics contains the idea of successive positions of
bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on
these bodies. The order of perfection investigated by the
ancient Greeks is now considered irrelevant.

The most radical change in the notion of order since Isaac
Newton came with quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical
idea of order contradicts coordinate order because
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle made a detailed ordering
of space and time impossible. When you apply quantum
theory to general relativity, at very short distances like
ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters, the notion of
the order of space and time breaks down.

Omni: Can you replace that with some other sense of order?

Bohm: First you have to ask what we mean by order.
Everybody has some tacit notion of it, but order itself is
impossible to define. Yet it can be illustrated. In a
photograph any part of an object is imaged into a point.
This point-to-point correspondence emphasizes the notion of
point as fundamental in sense of order. Cameras now
photograph things too big or too small, too fast or too
slow to be seen by the naked eye. This has reinforced our
belief that everything can ultimately be seen that way.

Omni: Aren't the contradictions you have been talking
about embedded in the very name quantum mechanics?

Bohm: Yes. Physics is more like quantum organism than
quantum mechanics. I think physicists have a tremendous
reluctance to admit this. There is a long history of
belief in quantum mechanics, and people have faith in it.
And they don't like having this faith challenged.

Omni: So our image is the lens, the apparatus suggesting
the point. The point in turn suggests electrons and
particles.

Bohm: And the track of particles on the photograph. Now
what instrument would illustrate wholeness? Perhaps the
holograph. Waves from the whole object come into each part
of the hologram. This makes the hologram a kind of
knowledge of the whole object. If you examine it with a
very narrow beam of laser light, it's as if you were
looking through a window the size of that laser beam. If
you expand the beam, it's as though you are looking through
a broader window that sees the object more precisely and
from more angles. But you are always getting information
about the whole object, no matter how much or little of it
you take.

But let's put aside the hologram because that's only a
static record. Returning to the actual situation, we have
a constant dynamic pattern of waves coming off an object
and interfering with the original wave. Within that
pattern of movement, many objects are enfolded in each
region of space and time.

Classical physics says that reality is actually little
particles that separate the world into its independent
elements. Now I'm proposing the reverse, that the
fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and
these particles are abstractions from that. We could
picture the electron not as a particle that exists
continuously but as something coming in and going out and
then coming in again. If these various condensations are
close together, they approximate a track. The electron
itself can never be separated from the whole of space,
which is its ground.

About the time I was looking into these questions, a BBC
science program showed a device that illustrates these
things very well. It consists of two concentric glass
cylinders. Between them is a viscous fluid, such as
glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the
glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop
of dye will be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the
thread gets so diffused it cannot be seen. At that moment
there seems to be no order present at all. Yet if you
slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws back
into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is
visible again. The ink had been enfolded into the
glycerin, and it was unfolded again by the reverse turning.

Omni: Suppose you put a drop of dye in the cylinder and
turn it a few times, then put another drop in the same
place and turn it. When you turn the cylinder back,
wouldn't you get a kind of oscillation?

Bohm: Yes, you would get a movement in and out. We could
put in one drop of dye and turn it and then put in another
drop of dye at a slightly different place, and so on. The
first and second droplets are folded a different number of
times. If we keep this up and then turn the cylinder
backward, the drops continually appear and disappear. So
it would look as if a particle were crossing the space, but
in fact it's always the whole system that's involved.

We can discuss the movement of all matter in terms of this
folding and unfolding, which I call the holomovement.

Omni: What do you think is the order of the holomovement?

Bohm: It may lie outside of time as we ordinarily know it.
If the universe began with the Big Bang and there are black
holes, then we must eventually reach places where the
notion of time and space breaks down. Anything could
happen. As various cosmologists have put it, if a black
hole came out with a sign flashing COCA COLA, it shouldn't
be surprising. Within the singularity none of the laws as
we know them apply. There are no particles; they are all
disintegrated. There is no space and no time. Whatever
is, is beyond any concept we have at present. The present
physics implies that the total conceptual basis of physics
must be regarded as completely inadequate. The grand
unification [of the four forces of the universe] could be
nothing but an abstraction in the face of some further
unknown.

I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of
energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in
there, occasionally coming together and producing an
intense pulse. Let's say one particular pulse comes
together and expands, creating our universe of space-time
and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To
us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater
context, it's a little ripple. Everything emerges by
unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into
the implicate order. I call the enfolding process
"implicating," and the unfolding "explicating." The
implicate and explicate together are a flowing, undivided
wholeness. Every part of the universe is related to every
other part but in different degrees.

There are two experiences: One is movement in relation to
other things; the other is the sense of flow The movement
of meaning is the sense of flow. But even in moving
through space, there is a movement of meaning. In a moving
picture, with twenty-four frames per second, one frame
follows another, moving from the eye through the optic
nerve, into the brain. The experience of several frames
together gives you the sense of flow. This is a direct
experience of the implicate order.

In classical mechanics, movement or velocity is defined as
the relation between the position now and the position a
short time ago. What was a short time ago is gone, so you
relate what is to what is not. This isn't a logical
concept. In the implicate order you are relating different
frames that are copresent in consciousness. You're
relating what is to what is. A moment contains flow or
movement. The moment may be long or short, as measured in
time. In consciousness a moment is around a tenth of a
second. Electronic moments are much shorter, but a moment
of history might be a century.

Omni: So a moment enfolds all the past?

Bohm: Yes, but the recent past is enfolded more strongly.
At any given moment we feel the presence of all the past
and also the anticipated future. It's all present and
active. I could use the example of the cylinder again.
Let's say we enfold one droplet h times. Then we put
another droplet in and enfold it N times. The relationship
between the droplets remains the same no matter how
thoroughly they are enfolded. So as you unfold, you will
get back the original relationship. Imagine if we take
four or five droplets--all highly enfolded--the
relationship between them is still there in a very subtle
way, even though it is not in space and not in time. But,
of course, it can be transformed into space and time by
turning the cylinder. The best metaphor might involve
memory. We remember a great many events, which are all
present together. Their succession is in that momentary
memory: We don't have to run through them all to reproduce
that time succession. We already have the succession.

Omni: And a sense of movement--so you have replaced time
with movement?

Bohm: Yes, in the sense of movement of the symphony,
rather than the movement of the orchestra on a bus, say,
through physical space.

Omni: What do you think that says about consciousness?

Bohm: Much of our experience suggests that the implicate
order is natural for understanding consciousness: When you
are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak
enfolds a large number of words. You don't choose them one
by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate
order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has
behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.

Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly,
it's shared between people as they look at one object and
verify that it's the same. So any high level of
consciousness is a social process. There may be some level
of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but
any abstract level depends on language, which is social.
The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is
inside each person.

Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter.
Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a
significance. The other side of this is the relationship
in which meaning is immediately effective in matter.
Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means
"assailant," your adrenaline flows, your heart beats
faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body
and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you
has changed. If you see that it's only a shadow, there's
an abrupt change again.

That is an example of the implicate order: Meaning enfolds
the whole world into me, and vice versa-that enfolded
meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then
through the world. The word hormone means "messenger,"
that is, a substance carrying some meaning.
Neurotransmitters carry meaning, and that meaning
profoundly affects the immune system. This understanding
could be the beginning of a different attitude to mind-and
to life.

Omni: Descartes held mind and external reality together
with God. You're holding the two with meaning.

Bohm: I say meaning is being! So any transformation of
society must result in a profound change of meaning. Any
change of meaning for the individual would change the whole
because all individuals are so similar that it can be
communicated.

Omni: What do you think might convince the next generation
of physicists, who seem very skeptical, that the implicate
order is worth investigating?

Bohm: The most convincing thing would be to develop the
theory mathematically and make some predictions. A few
years ago The New York Times noted that some physicists
were critical of grand unification theory, saying that not
much had been achieved. Defenders of grand unification
theories said it would take about twenty years to see
results.

It seems that people are ready to wait twenty years for
results if you've got formulas. If there are no formulas,
they don't want to consider it. Formulas are means of
talking utter nonsense until you understand what they mean.
Every page of formulas usually contains six or seven
arbitrary assumptions that take weeks of hard study to
penetrate.

Younger physicists usually appreciate the implicate order
because it makes quantum mechanics easier to grasp. By the
time they're through graduate school, they've become
dubious about it because they've heard that hidden
variables are of no use because they've been refuted. Of
course, nobody has really refuted them.

At this point, I think that the major issue is mathematics.
In supersymmetry theory an interesting piece of mathematics
will attract attention, even without any experimental
confirmation.

Omni: If scientists could accept your theory, would it
change the meaning of nature for them? Would it change the
meaning of science in general?

Bohm: We have become a scientific society. This society
has produced all sorts of discoveries and technology, but
if it leads to destruction, either through war or through
devastation of natural resources, then it will have been
the least successful society that ever existed. We are now
in danger of that.

Where we are going depends on the programs of four thousand
five hundred million people, all somewhat different, most
of them opposed to one another. Every moment these
programs are changing in detail. Who can say where they
are going to lead us? All we can do is start a movement
among those few people who are interested in changing the
meaning.

Omni: You've suggested that it may be possible to develop
"group minds." Could they serve as a potential avenue for
this change of meaning?

Bohm: They could: If we don't establish these absolute
boundaries between minds, then I think it's possible they
could in some way unite as one mind. If there were a
genuine understanding of and feeling for wholeness in this
group mind, it might be enough to change things--though as
the external circumstances gain momentum it becomes harder.
This is important, especially if there is a catastrophe, so
that the notion of group minds might remain in the
consciousness of survivors.

Omni: All that seems to imply a radical change in the
concept of being human.

Bohm: Yes. The notion of permanent identity would go by
the wayside. This would be terrifying at first. The
present mind, identified as it is with the personality,
would react to protect the sense of personal "self" against
that terror.

Omni: That seems to fit in well with your thoughts about
death.

Bohm: Death must be connected with questions of time and
identity. When you die, everything on which your identity
depends is going. All things in your memory will go. Your
whole definition of what you are will go. The whole sense
of being separate from anything will go because that's part
of your identity. Your whole sense of time must go.
Is there anything that will exist beyond death? That is
the question everybody has always asked. It doesn't make
sense to say something goes on in time. Rather I would say
everything sinks into the implicate order, where there is
no time. But suppose we say that right now, when I'm
alive, the same thing is happening. The implicate order is
unfolding to be me again and again each moment. And the
past me is gone.

Omni: The past you, then, has been snatched back into the
implicate order.

Bohm: That's right. Anything I know about "me" is in the
past. The present "me" is the unknown. We say there is
only one implicate order, only one present. But it
projects itself as a whole series of moments. Ultimately,
all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity.

In one sense, everything, including me, is dying every
moment into eternity and being born again, so all that will
happen at death is that from a certain moment certain
features will not be born again. But our whole thought
process causes us to confront this with great fear in an
attempt to preserve identity. One of my interests at this
stage of life is looking at that fear.

The poor - how terrified we were of them

2009-05-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

This piece refers to a just released report by the Irish government that revealed that Irish schools for orphans jointly run on behalf of the State by the Church were oftentimes hellish and abusive places. The 'one shore' and 'another shore' the author points out refers to the difference between the rural, backward west of Ireland were many of the schools were located and the working class east.

ANN MARIE HOURIHANE

Last week the middle-aged were forced to recall the Ireland of their youth, where respectability was the only ideal

LAST WEEK was a terrible time to be a middle-aged Irish person, and presumably this week isn’t going to be much better. Because we remember the orphanages, the industrial schools – whatever inaccurate term was applied to them – the prisons that they kept the poor children in.

The poor children. That is not the poor children, as in “the poor little children”. That is the poor children as in the children of the poor. The poor – how terrified we were of them, when we were children. We were too stupid to realise that all the grown-ups were terrified of them as well.

The buildings in which they kept the poor children were horribly frightening, huge barracks of places, with pale statues in the grounds. We never put a foot inside their gates, except as a dare. We knew they were prisons.

Once or twice you saw the long crocodiles of boys, 13 or 14 years old, who were in some sort of clerical training, and wore long black dresses down to the ground, and they would be coming back from swimming in the local baths with their striped towels rolled up under their arms. Even their towels looked poor. Their haircuts were dreadful. Their teeth were bad. And your mother said it was a disgrace, little boys like that living in a place like that. But you were thinking – and this thought was crystal-clear: thank God it’s not me.

The relief was dizzying.

The grown-ups told you that Jesus loved the poor; as far as you were concerned He was welcome to them. On the other hand, in your culture the sentimentality about the poor and about poverty was extraordinary. In your more heated moments you could fantasise about being poor yourself – fantasies that ended shortly after it was revealed that you were, in fact, a princess who had been mysteriously mislaid by her particular royal family.

And there wasn’t much you didn’t know about orphanages, actually, what with reading your comics, which came from England and usually had an orphan story on the go; and Daddy Longlegs , which came from America and ended, if memory serves, with the orphaned heroine marrying a millionaire.

And then there were the March girls, the sisters in Little Women , who were terribly good to the poor. They even gave their Christmas breakfast to the poor – of course the Marches had live-in help – and the poor were immensely grateful, crying and calling the March girls angels, as well they might. And then Beth March nearly died from a bout of scarlet fever she had contracted while nursing a child of a poor family, and all the sisters gathered round her bed, sobbing.

Your own family might do that as well, if only you could find a poor baby who would have the good manners to have scarlet fever. But of course the Marches were American and, you were broadminded enough to acknowledge, Protestant. Their dad was a Protestant minister.

The Marches in Little Women were the only people you’d ever read about who called themselves poor. They were short of money, even though they had a maid. Jo had to sell her hair in order to raise money in an emergency. You didn’t know anyone who was poor. The grown-ups would say that some rare person you knew was hard-up, but not that they were poor. Only the poor were poor.

The nuns said that they were poor. They had nothing at all, they said. It was a vow they had taken when they’d married Jesus. Sometimes their anger at your privilege would burn through, which at the time you felt was unfair, because you didn’t believe the nuns when they said that they were poor. Because the nuns talked of the poor, and of the nuns who were heroic enough to work with the poor, as exotic monsters who had somehow grown, and still lived, in the strange atmosphere of another planet, fortunately for us all.

No one you’d grown up with ever talked about class. Never. Never. Never. Everybody was the same. Not like in England, which was snobby. No, everybody was the same. And if everybody wasn’t exactly the same, well everybody could be the same if they worked hard. It was simple really. It was a republic. In Ireland you were either one of the Saved or one of the Damned; there was some hard swimming in between.

It would be years before you realised that you had grown and prospered on one shore and that on the other lay not just injustice and waste, but pornographic cruelty.

It would be years before you realised that the privileged in Ireland, from which you had come, far from having a history of uninterrupted sophistication and respectability, were only two generations up from the bog, and kicking the ladder down behind them.

It would be years before you realised that being Irish is about looking respectable and having money: that respectability, and the hoarding of respectability, is the only idea independent Ireland ever treasured. And that is why we were – and still are – so frightened of the poor, and continue to hide them as much as we can.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

Archbishop of Dublin responds to government report

2009-05-06T21:42:00.001-07:00

Up to the Second Vatican Council, Ireland (along with Quebec) could be said to have been the West's only theocracy - psychological control over the entire island enabled all kinds of abuses to either be hidden or just accepted by society - a whole island of people who thought they'd go to Hell unless granted reprieve by a gracious and magnificent clerical class. The Irish government's Ryan Report has revealed that schools for orphanages run by the Church and funded by the State were oftentimes nightmarish hellholes of abuse and cruelty. The entire island is disillusioned and wondering where to go and how to deal with the moral failure of its prime characteristic, the Roman Catholic Church.

Here, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, addresses the order that ran those schools, the Christian Brothers (who are now almost extinct after being one of the world's largest Catholic orders) and demands that they join the Church at large in self-reflection and reform.

Those responsible for decades of abuse must act to restore credibility and help the survivors

WHERE DOES the church go from here? The church has failed people. The church has failed children. There is no denying that. This can only be regretted and it must be regretted. Yet “sorry” can be an easy word to say. When it has to be said so often, then “sorry” is no longer enough.

But “sorry” must always be the first word.

The Ryan report shocked me. But it did not totally surprise me. I was ordained 40 years ago today and at my ordination and that of a friend we had a group of former residents of industrial schools: people of our own age, great people and friends of ours.

As students we had worked in a hostel in Dublin for former residents of industrial schools, especially Artane. Later I worked in a centre in London for ex-prisoners, a large proportion of whom included generations of Irish industrial school residents. The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity.

Sadly, the Ryan report came so late.

Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.

A chaplain to Artane had put much of it writing. A few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney spoke out. When the first efforts were made to reform Artane, it was patently evident that the only change possible was to close it down.

Someone wrote to me this week about an entirely different matter and said: “there is always a price to pay for not responding”. The church will have to pay that price in terms of its credibility.

The first thing the church has to do is to move out of any mode of denial. That was the position for far too long and it is still there.

Yes, there was abuse in other quarters. Yes, childcare policy in Ireland at the time was totally inadequate. But the church presented itself as different to others and as better than others and as more moral than others. Its record should have shown that and it did not. Ryan reveals church institutions where children were placed in the care of people with practically no morals.

Where the church is involved in social care it should be in the vanguard. That is different to a situation in which the church proclaims that it is in the vanguard. In industrial schools the church, with good intentions, became involved in a Victorian model of childcare and became more Victorian than the Victorians, and when Victorianism was shown to be wrong, those responsible did not have the foresight to recognise that and children were exposed to pathological Victorianism.

There is a sense of shock among many good priests and religious at what has happened. But that sense of shock should not slip into a situation in which they feel themselves almost as the victims. No one in the church must ever try to water down or reformulate the suffering of survivors. Let the survivors speak and tell their stories as they experienced them.

What do I say to the religious orders who have been identified as being responsible for what happened? Let me speak to them directly: I think that you have to ask and truly try to answer the question which Ryan has put to you: “What happened that you drifted so far away from your own charism?”

I believe that you owe it to your good members to try to answer that question thoroughly, honestly and in a transparent way. Your credibility and the credibility and survival of your charism depend on the honesty with which you go about that soul searching. This may be a painful task, but it is unavoidable if it is to be possible for your charism to survive. People are angry and disillusioned.

What was lost was more than just a charism. Somehow along the way the most essential dimension of the life of the followers of Jesus Christ got lost by many. The Christian message is a message of love. What the Ryan commission recounts is sadly so very far removed from that. In Jesus’s eyes the poor deserve the best and they did not receive it here.

Even where you have recognised what was wrong, the Ryan report must have brought home to you the extent of what went wrong in a manner which perhaps you were not able to imagine in the past. The facts are now clear and you have to take notice and make some new gesture of recognition.

An agreement was made with government seven years ago. The fact that the mechanisms of fulfilling your side of that agreement have not yet been brought to completion is stunning. There may have been legal difficulties, but they are really a poor excuse after so many years.

Whatever happens with regards to renegotiating that agreement, you cannot just leave things as they are. There are many ways in which substantial financial investment in supporting survivors and their families can be brought about, perhaps in creative ways which would once again redeem your own charism as educators of the poor. In many ways it is your last chance to render honour to charismatic founders and to so many good members of your congregations who feel tarnished.

Sadly, in a very short time another report on the sexual abuse of children will be published, this time about how such abuse was managed in the Archdiocese of Dublin of which I am archbishop. It will not be easy reading. The steps that have been taken to put in place good child safeguarding norms will never wipe away the sufferings of those who were abused. Let the truth, however, come out.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

in a helicopter at night

2009-05-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

The open ramp, the crouching gunner and his weapon silhouetted against the exhaust-blurred lights of Baghdad, an ancient fairy-tale city of white, green, pink, blue, all the hatred and the poverty and the sewage smudged by speed and altitude into something clean and beautiful. Sparks of static dancing among the rotors. Duffels and rucksacks flung into a heap, waving chemical lights, red and blue. Head down, eyes closed, heat and stinging sand on the back of my neck, huge dark insectlike shapes rising into moonlight. Our new home.

"It's pretty chill", says the outgoing motor sergeant from behind his Black and Mild, "we don't have a Burger King or any of that shit, people whine all the time. But at least we're not still shitting in bags and pissing in tubes like they are at xxxxxx." Outgoing artillery, very close; the building shakes. "Yeah... we got some gun bunnies here too." "You get used to the sound?", I ask. "Not really. We got a gym, DFAC, 24 hour hajji store, hajji restaurant. The hajji store will get you internet, SIM cards, whatever." "Uh huh." He wears boots, tshirt tucked into uniform pants, a baseball cap with an eagle head, logo of some AAA ball team.

Rows of armored humvees and the new MRAPs, enormous dusty shapeless things, their streamlined hulls lost under lights and sights and lenses and antennae, add-on armor and faceted turrets and tubular cages for the RPGs. Sloppy, local-built buildings, gaps between blocks, mortar drips. "How long are yall here for, sir?", asks a private. "The whole time", I tell him. "Shit." "You guys the night shift, or just hanging out?" "Oh, we got a mission pretty soon, running some stuff back to yyyyyy." "Ready to get the fuck home!", says a grinning redhaired specialist. "Fuck all yall motherfuckers!" "And Korn, early Korn", says someone else from a knot of soldiers kicking a hackysack. "Uh huh", they agree. Some of them were born in the 1990s: I thought it was a misprint.

Attn: Free Staters

2009-04-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

You want [to comment on] this, don't you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your [keyboard] weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger.

"Anarcho Capitalists" Backed by $25 Billion Corporate Giant

The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

By PAM MARTENS

One of the most audacious and cynical corporate-backed social experiments in living memory, the Free State Project in New Hampshire, has now shifted into damage control mode. Free State operatives learned this past week of my article that appears in the current subscription edition of CounterPunch, taking the first in-depth look at their plan to entice 20,000 out-of-state ultra libertarians and anarchists to move to New Hampshire and implant an extremist brand of free market capitalism: a brand the corporate backers hope will lead to a gutting of business regulations, environmental laws, and return the state to the right wing of the Republican fold. (Currently, all three branches in New Hampshire, known for its pivotal first primary status, are controlled by Democrats.)

An effort at damage control is playing out in the Free Staters’ internet pummeling of this author and a reporter at the Keene Sentinel newspaper in southern New Hampshire, Phillip Bantz, who made reference to the revelations in the CounterPunch piece along with an eyebrow raising quote from a Free Stater on legalizing cannibalism, a demand of some fringe Free Staters.

The attacks have not gone as planned. Over 128 reader responses are now registered in the Keene Sentinel, founded in 1799, which typically receives less than 20 responses to an article. Area residents, known for tolerance, are displaying pent-up fatigue and anger with the agenda of the Free Staters.

Some of the Free State participants call themselves anarcho capitalists, promoting an embrace of free markets and individual freedoms unencumbered by authority of the state. Free State members must formally agree to the premise that “government exists at most to protect people's rights, and should neither provide for people nor punish them for activities that interfere with no one else.” [1] This premise is widely interpreted by Free Staters to mean all tax supported social welfare programs must go, along with zoning and planning and building inspectors. Public education would be replaced with home schooling or private schools.

What has been able to fly completely under the radar for the last seven years, is the role of shadowy think tanks and their corporate money backers in the Free State Project strategy.

On the morning of Friday, February 27, 2004, at the Washington D.C. corporate headquarters of the free market think thank, the American Enterprise Institute, this far-fetched plan was carefully rolled out to the national media. The key speaker at the event was Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project. Dr. Sorens is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The following are excerpts of remarks made by Dr. Sorens at that event, according to a transcript available at the American Enterprise Institute:

“The Free State Project started as an effort to identify the best state in the country for people who favor smaller government and stronger individual liberties to move to…

We started signing up people in September 2001, and our growth was slow in our first few months. However, growth picked up dramatically in late 2002 and 2003, and by August 2003, we had 5,000 signed members…

New Hampshire doesn't have large metropolitan areas, which tend to be left-leaning...

The Free State Project is related to market-preserving federalism in two different ways. First, New Hampshire is poised to benefit if the United States returns to a true model of market-preserving federalism. One example is Social Security. New Hampshire could do much better if it were taking care of its own Social Security program because its residents pay much more in Social Security taxes than they receive back in benefits…

The Free State Project can also contribute to market-preserving federalism and its beneficial workings in another way. Once New Hampshire moves dramatically in a free market direction, we are going to continue to attract individuals and businesses from other states. And other states are going to have to reform their own laws in order to avoid losing their tax base to our state.

So the Free State Project, in more ways than one, I think, is the thin end of the wedge in increasing liberty throughout the United States.” [2]

(Notice what just happened here: unfettered capitalism has been conflated with “stronger individual liberties.” Are we not currently living the economic nightmare that proves the opposite is true? )
One of the most astute questions at this conference came from a man identified in the transcript as William Kelly of Cox Newspapers:

KELLY: My question is for Jason. I was wondering, when you sign people up, do you do any kind of background check on them or anything, to make sure that you're not importing rapists and thieves to New Hampshire?...

SORENS: No background checks. I think libertarians wouldn't like that, too privacy invading and too resource consuming as well. So to some extent this is built on trust. Everyone I've met has been normal and well adjusted.”

Jenna Wolf of the Union Leader out of Manchester honed in on another obvious area:

“Have you talked to residents? What are their feelings about this?”

Dr. Sorens assured Ms. Wolf:

“…we have solicited the opinions of people who live in New Hampshire in our forum…And the responses I have gotten have been overwhelmingly positive, conditional. So long as you are good neighbors and really support the political ideals that you talk about, then they are supportive.”

In just four months, both the lack of background checks as well as resident reaction would blow up in Dr. Sorens’ face.

Just nine days before Dr. Sorens gently rolled out his case to a strategically selected group of free market think tanks and reporters viewed as market friendly at the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute, Tim Condon, at the time the Director of Member Services at the Free State Project, had mapped out an offshoot strategy. The plan was to create a Free Town Project as well – “a low-population town in that same state where Porcupines can congregate….” (Free Staters refer to themselves as Porcupines – upset them at your own risk.) The tiny town of Grafton, New Hampshire was chosen. [3]

Tim Condon is a Tampa, Florida lawyer and one of the original organizers of the Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) in 1991, a group that says it works “to advance the principles of individual rights, limited government and free enterprise within the Republican Party” according to its web site. Unbeknownst to most rank and file Free Staters, Mr. Condon was receiving funds from the RLC. According to the First Quarter 2005 minutes of the RLC of Florida, “On Jan. 4, the National Board of Directors of the Republican Liberty Caucus agreed to pick up some of the expenses of Florida RLCer Tim Condon of Tampa who – in conjunction with his efforts on behalf of the free state project…has been working to develop the New Hampshire RLC, one of the fastest growing RLC chapters in the nation.” [4]

According to Mr. Condon’s own account of how the Grafton plan came about, an “exploratory trip was launched in early February, 2004. This time Porcupines Tim Condon and Zack Bass flew to New Hampshire from Florida, and had help from resident Free Staters in exploring. Also present was Robert Hull, who drove up from New Jersey to join us.”
Zack Bass, according to a June 20, 2004 article in The Boston Globe was actually Larry Pendarvis of Brandon, Florida: “A computer analyst who also goes by the alias Zack Bass, Pendarvis was convicted in Polk County, Fla., in 1997 of more than 100 counts of downloading child pornography, a conviction later overturned on appeal. His other enterprises include a website that peddles mail-order brides from the Philippines with the slogan, ‘Date Locally, Marry Globally.’ ” [5]

According to the Free State Project, it was Mr. Pendarvis who was responsible for setting up a web site targeting local residents [6] and one establishing the goals of the Free Town Project as follows:

The Free Town Project intends to liberate either a New Hampshire Town, or a Western County, by moving in enough Libertarians to control the local Government and remove oppressive Regulations (such as Planning & Zoning, and Building Code requirements) and stop enforcement of Laws prohibiting Victimless Acts among Consenting Adults, such as Dueling, Gambling, Incest, Price-Gouging, Cannibalism, and Drug Handling. [7]

Hostilities flared against the Free Staters in Grafton by residents, followed by a large town meeting and unflattering press. Dr. Sorens has persistently blamed all of this on Pendarvis and dismissed it by noting that Pendarvis was expelled from the Free State Project. Dr. Sorens fails to note that it was he who declined to do background checks and it was his own Director of Member Services at the time, Tim Condon, who has acknowledged in his own article that he was part of the conception and planning of the project and made the exploratory trip to Grafton with Pendarvis (aka Zack Bass) in February 2004.

Dr. Sorens has additional explaining to do. The Mercatus Center lists him as an Affiliated Scholar. It, and its sister organization, Institute for Humane Studies, have funded Dr. Sorens research since at least 2002 according to public records. [8]

Mercatus is the Latin term for markets. Thanks to an in-depth report published in September 2006 by the public interest nonprofit, Public Citizen, and OMB Watch, we know a great deal about the agenda of the Mercatus Center. [9]

Richard Fink, executive vice-president of Koch Industries, Inc., founded Mercatus (then called the Center for Market Processes) at his alma mater, Rutgers University, in the early 1980s. Later, he moved the organization to George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, where it resides today. Mercatus blossomed at George Mason in 1997 after receiving a $3 million grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which was founded by Charles G. Koch, chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries. Koch Industries, an oil and gas giant, is the second largest privately held company in the United States…

The Charles G. Koch Foundation is one of the largest corporate donors to George Mason University, donating over $15 million since 1998 to the George Mason University Foundation, which accepts and manages tax deductible donations on behalf of GMU and its affiliates. The Charles G. Koch foundation frequently earmarks these donations for the Mercatus Center, and in the past two years alone has donated over $2 million to Mercatus…

[As part of its anti-regulatory agenda] Mercatus staffers were pushing rollbacks that would directly benefit their corporate patrons. BP Amoco, Exxon Mobil, and the Kochs, for example, would benefit from 14 of the suggestions…filed in 2001 to weaken the Clean air Act. These petrochemical companies would also benefit from four of the Mercatus Center’s 2002 submissions calling for the weakening of the Clean Water Act…

By far the biggest corporate contributor to the Mercatus Center, and the group with the clearest personal ties to it, is the Koch group of foundations and, through them, Koch Industries. A privately-held $25 billion petroleum, chemical, and agricultural company based in Wichita, Kansas, Koch Industries has good reason to angle for a rollback of environmental standards. In 2001, the company’s petroleum division pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act for releasing benzene, a known carcinogen, into the air at a Texas refinery. Koch agreed to pay $10 million in criminal fines and further agreed to spend $10 million for environmental projects in the Corpus Christi area. In addition, Koch must complete a five-year term of probation and adhere to a strict new environmental compliance program.

In a separate incident, Koch agreed to pay a $4.5 million penalty to settle other Clean Air Act violations at its Minnesota refinery. The EPA also forced the company to spend an estimated $80 million to install new pollution-control equipment at two refineries in Corpus Christi, Texas, and one near St. Paul, Minnesota.

Koch also has had a problem playing by the rules of the Clean Water Act. The EPA found that during a seven-year period in the 1990s, a Koch pipeline subsidiary allowed 300 leaks to remain unstopped, spilling three million gallons of oil into waterways across six states. In January 2000, the EPA leveled $30 million in civil fines against Koch, then the largest U.S. civil penalty, and required Koch to spend an additional $5 million on environmental projects. [10]

A former director of the Mercatus Center’s regulatory program was Wendy Lee Gramm. As former chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 1988 to January 1993, Ms. Gramm’s deregulatory stance toward credit derivatives is widely regarded as a key element in today’s financial market meltdown. According to Public Citizen, “In 1992, as the first step in its business plan to profit on the speculation of energy, Enron petitioned the CFTC to make regulatory changes that would limit the scope of the commission’s authority over certain kinds of futures contracts. Immediately before leaving the CFTC, Gramm muscled through approval of an unusual draft regulation that would do just that – it narrowed the definition of futures contracts and excluded Enron’s energy future contracts and swaps from regulatory oversight. Although her actions were criticized by government officials who feared the change would have severe negative consequences (as, in fact, it did), Gramm was rewarded five weeks after she left the CFTC with a lucrative appointment to Enron’s Board of Directors. Between 1993 and 2001, when the company declared bankruptcy, Enron paid Gramm between $915,000 and $1.85 million in salary, attendance fees, stock option sales, and dividends.”

How much exactly has Dr. Sorens received from the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and George Mason University Foundation? Requests for specific dollar amounts to Dr. Sorens, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and each of the nonprofits was met with silence. Dr. Sorens did take the time to send a seven-page letter to the Editors of CounterPunch demanding a retraction of this author’s first article.

A notice on the web site of the department of Political Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a public funded institution where Dr. Sorens now teaches and conducts research, notes that “Jason Sorens and his co-author William P. Ruger, an Assistant Professor at the Texas State University, San Marcos published a study on Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom with the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. The study presents an evidence based ranking of the 50 states in terms of both their provisions for and protection of personal and economic freedoms. Professor Sorens also continues to oversee a grant from Donors Trust. The grant supports a series of research workshops on ‘Markets and States.’ ” [11]

Exactly 13 days after the study on Freedom in the 50 States was released, the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions in Ohio, another free markets nonprofit, used the document in testimony on a House Bill in Ohio threatening to “initiate legal action” if the bill was signed into law. The testimony noted, from the report, that “Ohio recently ranked 38th in an index of economic freedom amongst the 50 states.” The bill would have eased mortgage loan modifications to prevent foreclosures. [12]

DonorsTrust, now funding Dr. Sorens “Markets and States” workshops, explains itself this way: “DonorsTrust was established as the sole donor-advised plan dedicated to promoting a free society and serving donors who share that purpose. To date, DonorsTrust has received $230 million from these donors who are both dedicated to liberty and to the cause of perpetuating a free and prosperous society through philanthropic means…Know that any contributions to our DonorsTrust account that have to be reported to the IRS will not become public information. Unlike with private foundations, gifts from your account will remain as anonymous as you request.” [13]

These promises of more freedoms from uninvited liberators who are secretly backed by special interests sound eerily familiar. Hopefully, this particular plan has been outed in just the nick of time.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com

in the absence of orders

2009-04-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

Ah, Iraq: the smell of sweat, feet, shit, jet fuel, Black and Milds, Texas Pete. The once sun-baked gravel fields with trailers arranged in orderly grids have given way to dark concrete tunnels roofed over with canvas. I sleep all day, wander this labyrinth for hours at night, a third-world corn maze patrolled by Bongo vans full of darkskinned men in purple jumpsuits, emptying trash, polishing things, pushing squeegees around. Ugandans in tan BDUs check IDs at the mess hall. But wait, if you have a uniform and an M4, aren't you not a civilian?

Like the inkspots everyone's always talking about, the camps around Baghdad have merged into one huge complex. I have been named the "battalion pay agent" and must take a class tomorrow to find out what it's all about. "Will I", I ask the staff sergeant, "at any point during this deployment, have a briefcase full of cash handcuffed to my wrist?" "No", he laughs, "you might have a cargo pocket full of cash."

To be Published Monday on Counterpunch.org

2009-04-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Free State Project

It so happens that Pam Martens has the lead story in our latest newsletter, on a subject linked at the level of economic and philosophical barbarism with the shenanigans on Wall Street she has been exposing for us so diligently. She describes in compelling detail the plans of the Free State Project:

It’s like a bad B movie plot playing out in real life in New Hampshire: a twenty-something political science grad student has an idea for a new economic order. He posts it on the Internet. Over a few years, as disenchantment with Big Brother government grows, the idea takes off. A call goes out from the grad student and his eclectic gang of libertarians and anarchists for 20,000 people from around the country to move into New Hampshire and prove his thesis: (1) that small numbers of hyperactive political agitators can control the political process in a thinly populated state; (2) that free market capitalism will work just fine alongside a system where citizen volunteers, not government, provide all social welfare programs.

Fast forward to today: quiet rural countrysides spotted with maple sugar houses and wild flower meadows are sprouting pockets of political extremism and YouTube videos of defiance against state and local laws.

The grad student is Jason Sorens, at Yale at the time of his epiphany, now a thirty-something assistant professor of Political Science at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Dr. Sorens’ grand experiment, the Free State Project, was spawned in 2001 and is now playing out in 17 towns across New Hampshire, taking on a life of its own, and, frequently, using heavy handed intimidation tactics to assert its will.

Arm yourself with this brilliant expose, so that you will be adequately prepared for astounding fresh disclosures about the Free State project from Martens which we will be printing on this site this coming Monday.

Raimon Pannikar, Hindu Christian

2009-04-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

The road comes to a halt at the foot of the Pyrenees. A green valley extends beyond a classic Spanish mountain village in Catalonia. My rental car creaks and groans as I continue on the bumpy dirt track to Raimon Panikkar’s home, a farm dating from 1717. As if to express a profound faith in God, an ancient church I pass by, stands only a few yards from a yawning abyss. Panikkar once preached here, but he is spending the remaining years of his life writing books. His loyalty does not lie with the church as an institution but as a body of ideas. ‘I distinguish between the church as a living organism and the church as an organization with its council and cardinals,’ he would tell me later on. ‘I am not on the Vatican payroll. I am a priest because it is my calling, not because I am a member of a club. I did not become a priest. I am. It has nothing to do with will power or a decision. You are what you are.’ However, it must have taken a certain measure of will power to acquire a curriculum vitae full of honorary doctorates and distinctions. Panikkar, who was born in Barcelona in 1918 to a Spanish mother and an Indian father, has been associated with universities on almost every continent in the world. He has written about 300 articles and more than 50 books on a wide range of subjects, including Indian culture, metaphysics, interreligious cooperation, philosophy and mysticism. Panikkar studied and worked in Rome, San Francisco and Varanasi, India, before settling down permanently in his isolated Catalonian mountain village some years ago. When I arrive, I search vainly for a doorbell. Through the windows I see crowded bookcases, a piano, menorahs, an organ, Indian statuettes, two leather armchairs, a fireplace, an old-fashioned typewriter, yellowed manuscripts and a simple bed standing on a rough tiled floor. The bell? A door swings open. Panikkar looks like the stereotypical wise hermit: shoulder-length grey hair, tanned face, intense eyes and simple flowing robes. His shawl completes the picture. He asks me how I managed to locate him and says with a laugh, ‘I thought I had found a good hiding place for myself.’ Taking me by the arm, he leads me around the house, as if he wants to make sure that now I have discovered him, I won’t lose him. Only when we have reach his study does he let go of my arm. The conversation that ensues reflects his extraordinarily wide range of interests as someone who is both Hindu and Christian, philosopher and mystic, scientist and priest, Indian and Spaniard, and a speaker of seven languages. The first thing I ask is how he can be a Hindu and a Christian at the same time. Isn’t it difficult to bring conflicting ideas about God and the creation together to form a whole? He regards me with amusement. ‘Why would you join them together into a whole?’ he asks. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather a pity? The nature of our worldly reality is dualistic. There will always be differences, contrasts and friction. Underneath or behind all this there lies a common field. We must allow the differences to exist and learn to look beyond them. You can learn to live in different levels of reality at the same time.’ Panikkar is the living proof of this. He has learned to live with the differences, but he knows that global society has not yet reached this stage and that conflicting schools of thought can have serious consequences, such as religious wars. ‘The world needs to change drastically,’ he says. ‘Reformations imposed by authorities will not work. The age of rules, dogmas and decrees is over because they simply highlight the differences. Nor will revolution have any effect. The time has come for transformation.’ Panikkar believes that the key to this transformation is acceptance. By accepting something, you put an end to inner conflict, and resistance will then change into surrendering to what happens in life. According to Panikkar this acceptance – which is the first step towards transformation – is a female characteristic, and modern civilization needs more of it. His smile is mischievous: ‘We need to have more sexual intercourse – a new marriage between male and female values.’ Is this the proverbial quantum leap in consciousness which many philosophers refer to? ‘The quantum leap is too mathematical, too quantitative for me,’ says Panikkar. ‘What we need is a quality leap. We must find a completely new way of thinking. This is more than simply changing your ideas. It goes even further than changing your mentality. Transformation means transcending the mind – that is, bypassing our rational way of thinking, where contrasts are born. You are no longer guided by your intelligence alone, but you also listen to your heart.’ Panikkar explains that it is only possible to transcend the mind if you realize you are more than your own mind. ‘We must overcome the fatal division between knowledge and love,’ he says. ‘If you go beyond thought, you come into contact with another voice. It is often referred to as “the heart,” but I prefer to speak of “the pure heart.” When you listen to it, you are able to accept everyone and everything. You understand that we are only a part of a wonderful game. Anyone who lives like this makes an optimal contribution to the beauty and happiness of the planet – or, if you prefer, to the whole universe.’ Raimon Panikkar looks forward to this earthly paradise, but I wonder if a good marriage between head and heart is really enough for us to realize this goal. Isn’t disarmament a far more practical and tangible plan? But for Panikkar, there can never be a military disarmament unless it is preceded by a cultural disarmament. ‘If we continue to be inflexible and cling to cultural differences, everyone will constantly feel threatened and the need for military defense will continue to exist,’ he says. ‘Cultural disarmament means a willingness to accept that differences are a part of the game.’ Panikkar sees religion as an important cultural weapon. ‘Religions are languages,’ he says. ‘We can use language to communicate with one another or to wound each other. Many people use language mainly to convince the other person – to win. Others are only prepared to think in their own language and through lack of communication with outsiders impoverish themselves. However, you can also use language to have a real conversation, a dialogue, when you use words to get through to the common spirit.’ Accordingly, he is closely associated with the Parliament of the World’s Religions, an international interreligious organization. ‘It is very important for religions to meet and listen to one another,’ he says. ‘By listening, we learn to speak one another’s language. We must try not to distance ourselves from anything or anyone.’ He is silent for a moment and then adds, ‘Not even from Satan. He is our best ally. He is the first of God’s creatures, the most intelligent of all.’ With a wicked grin, he quotes from Goethe’s Faust: ‘Von Zeit zu Zeit les’ ich den Alten gern’ [DIT MOET NOG NAAR HET ENGELS WORDEN VERTAALD]. The message is clear: Panikkar is not afraid of the devil in any form, including in himself. Instead of rejecting the satanic side of his own character, he fully embraces it and transforms it into an ally. ‘Devils only operate in the dark,’ he says. ‘They are not a threat to people who allow light to touch every part of their soul. It is not the ‘devil’ but fear of the satanic and clinging to a particular ‘truth’ that makes devils of us.’ The tendency of religions, especially those that are monotheistic, to place one truth above all others is ‘a time bomb,’ says Panikkar. ‘By reducing everything and propagating it as the ultimate truth, these institutions become narrow-minded bastions of totalitarianism. When I call out that my God is Absolute, other people are overwhelmed and shut themselves away.’ In the West, Panikkar says, ‘this separatist way of thinking is taken to an extreme. Don’t we love classifications! We have become brilliant at it! We want to define religions, divide them and put them into neat squares, so we label each other as Muslim, Hindu, Jew, or Christian, but this classification creates a clash. If instead we learn to speak each other’s language, we learn to listen to one another. I can only listen to you if I feel sympathy for you. I must like you, trust you and respect you. I must be prepared to enter into your view of the world. A listening attitude – and this is also female – is born of the realization that you cannot have all the answers.’ He falls silent for a while and appears to look right through me to a time in the future. And then, almost beseechingly, he says, ‘Only in this way – through listening – can we achieve world peace. It is not something you can impose, even with the best intentions. You cannot enforce peace. You have to be truly willing to meet and embrace the other person with your whole being.’ Nevertheless, many people appear to have their hands full just coping with themselves. They do not seem able to receive another person with open arms. Even in ‘enlightened’ circles, where people are consciously involved with spiritual growth, there is often an excessive focus on ‘I’: my process, my life, my desires. ‘I have an idea that the West brought a curse upon itself with the advent of individualism,’ Panikkar says. ‘The “I” has been blown up out of all proportions. We use all our strength to enlighten our ego, but that is a disastrous path to follow because there is no such thing as the ego. The ego is an illusion.’ Silently he peers through the window and then continues, almost whispering. ‘Those who think they have no need of God or other people will destroy themselves. Those who look beyond themselves will realize that we are only a part of a larger whole. The wider your field of vision, the more you encompass. A mahatma [great spirit, ed.] encompasses the whole universe. We are not separate; everything is linked. Everything is related. If I do not believe in myself, I cannot believe in anyone else. If I do not believe in myself, I cannot believe in God.’ Panikkar formulates his words carefully. Every word is sampled and savored. He loves words and takes his time finding the one he needs to express precisely what he is feeling at that moment. In his presence words become a little sacred. Every now and then he releases a balloon of thought. It rises and hangs in the air while he leans back to observe it. Sometimes his pronouncements hang somewhat uncomfortably in the air. What does he mean by that, I think to myself. Is there something I have not understood? But when I allow the balloon to float and sink in, I find myself thinking that the process of thinking can be more important than the final answer. My thoughts briefly touch on Krishnamurti, who often allowed a space for thought during a recital. Once, during one of these thought spaces, an overzealous student sprang to his feet with ‘the answer.’ Krishnamurti’s face twisted as he replied, ‘You killed it.’ We allow ourselves too little time for introspection, says Panikkar. ‘We tend to leave the answers to difficult questions about life to the “experts,”’ he explains. ‘But any answer can only help us if we fathom it ourselves. This takes reflection and quiet.’ Panikkar’s prayers begin with stillness, with seeking the emptiness in which he can receive. ‘My prayer is simple; it is like breathing. It is like life itself. I am conscious that I am alive. I open myself and become still. As the Buddhists say, to be still you have to still your desires. You have to purify yourself. I call that self-cultivation. God has given me everything, but I have to cultivate it.’ Self-cultivation finally leads to what Panikkar calls ‘true faith.’ He explains: ‘Faith is an existential openness to the mystery, to the unknown, to silence. It is acknowledging that you do not know all the answers, let alone the questions. It is discovering that you are an unfinished being. Unfinished is very close to infinite, without end.’ In order to express their faith, people clothe it in all sorts of concepts and symbols and with the language available to us on the basis of our culture, which in turn gives rise to systems of faith. ‘Belief is the intellectual articulation of the mystery we call faith,’ says Panikkar. ‘Faith lies at the center of every religion. At this level there are no contradictions, simply because there are no dictions – that is, no words. In the mystic dimension there are no contrasts. We have lost sight of the spiritual dimension of reality and because of this we have no mystic security. We allow ourselves to be ruled by reason, while in fact we are driven by something else: the spirit. We are driven by passion, love and hate. This is quite different from reason. And far more dangerous. These forces need careful cultivation.’ Outside it is starting to get dark. In the mountains we hear the sound of bells as a flock of sheep make their way home to a warm stable. In this village they have probably not noticed, but out there in the world large groups of people have turned their backs on the church in the last few decades. In part, this is because of a liturgy that is sometimes difficult to understand and short-sighted answers from Rome to serious questions concerning life. But many are also disappointed in God. After all, if he is really so almighty, how can he tolerate all this misery? But as far as Panikkar is concerned, a God like this has never existed. ‘It is about time we stopped believing in such a rudimentary God,’ he says. ‘It makes belief impossible. This is also why I am not a monotheist. We ourselves are part of what is divine. We are divine. You don’t have to be a Hindu to claim this. The whole Christian mystery is about just one thing: God who became man in order to make him a god.’ It is for this reason that Panikkar distinguishes between Christ and Jesus. ‘The Christians do not have a monopoly on Christ,’ he says. ‘Christ is the mystery we are all seeking. Christ is the mystery of the alpha and the omega. Jesus was a human being through whom the mystery was able to express itself. I myself was brought to the mystery of Christ through Jesus. But please, let us not reduce and limit Christ to Jesus.’ The idea that the way to God lies only through Jesus is just one of the simplistic, absolutist dogmas the church has dished up for hundreds of years, says Panikkar. The strict division between good and evil and the fixation on sin has created fear and dependence. If we ‘sinful and insignificant creatures’ do wrong, we can only acquire forgiveness by confessing to a clergyman in the same institution that instilled fear in us in the first place – a perfect, diabolical circle. Panikkar sighs. ‘Christianity has paid a high price for this sort of banality,’ he says. ‘The system of confession is based on false compassion to make the sin bearable – for a so-called good cause, and to reduce suffering. I can fully understand that intelligent people cannot bear to put up with this sort of circularity and turn their backs on the church. The liturgy is separate from life, which is serious. My hope is focused on a cross-pollination of religions, because we need one another. Nobody has a monopoly on anything whatsoever.’ The great affinity Panikkar feels with Jesus expresses itself in his desire to draw everyone into his heart, without exception. Like Jesus, he is a man among men – in the world, but not of the world. ‘Bearing the burden of mankind humbles one,’ he says. ‘It is a sobering experience and is good for you. Otherwise you think, “I am a priest, I am pure, I am superior.” Please, no! We are all in the same boat – all a part of this sinful mankind. I know that sin is a reality, but it is not the highest reality. Feeling guilty or sinful is pointless and an escape. Instead of feeling sinful, we should accept responsibility for things that actually happen, like Auschwitz and Guantanamo Bay.’ Despite his great concern, Panikkar is an optimist, for increasingly, his experience isthat the kingdom of God is truly in us. ‘Over the years I have come to understand more and more what this means,’ he says. ‘The Greek word entos can be translated in three different ways. First, the kingdom of God is within you. This concept has resulted in a focus on what is egocentric. Second, the kingdom of God is among you. This has resulted in crusades and wars aimed at actually establishing this kingdom on earth. Third, the kingdom of God is between you. This means developing relationships, being open, being involved. Not shutting yourself away – not acting as if you are pure. Between you means love and friendship – being with a group of friends, if you like, and sharing the joy of being together.’ Despite Panikkar’s passionate plea for the integration of head and heart, his hope lies mainly with the thinkers or philosopher-priests who rule the world – albeit with a delay of two to three generations, which society needs to embrace and integrate new ideas. ‘Philosophers create the patterns of thought on the basis of which society will evolve further,’ he says. ‘All you need is patience. As Hegel said, truth can wait. There is no need to hurry. Don’t worry or make a fuss. You don’t have to prove the truth. You only have to live it.’ This final balloon of thought continues to hover for a while in the air between us. Then he leans back and offers me a final bit of advice: ‘Be honest with yourself, believe in yourself and love yourself as much as possible. Then you will live in peace. Peace spreads all on its own; you don’t need to do a thing. Every action is colored by it. That is the karma of the saints and creates human solidarity. If I am able to make my life a little work of art, then I make the whole universe beautiful. This is how simple and how difficult it is.’

2009-04-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

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Tek Jansen - Hounds of Hell: Ragtime Billy Peaches

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NASA Name Contest

2009-04-12T00:20:00.001-07:00

forego duplicity because death does not respect it

2009-04-09T07:55:00.001-07:00

This is a little disorganized but here it is.

The National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California: a host of new acronyms. We live at the RUBA, the Rotational Unit Bivouac Area, for a few days; we're a 'rotational unit', I guess, rotating through here like all deploying units do. OCs, Observer/Controllers, act as referees. Then, 2 weeks in "The Box", a huge patch of desert dotted with FOBs and COBs and villages and over a thousand role players, Iraqi-Canadians and bums rounded up in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Once upon a time there was a home team, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, who would attack with swarms of tanks and vehicles dressed up to look like tanks to train rotating units for the "force-on-force" fight-the-Russians thing that never happened. Now it's all about talking to sheiks and imams, pressing palms and kissing babies, winning hearts and minds. Maybe all the disorganization and chaos in the brigade isn't really important, maybe the commanders are tactical geniuses who just can't be bothered with things like logistics; maybe when the bullets fly everything will fall into place, as they say.

A week into it, all we do is fix trucks. I have no idea how the overall 'battle' is going and don't really care. Supposedly there's one big plotline, if we shoot up one village all the others will hate us. Maybe. I'm sitting in the command post eating a strawberry banana dairyshake and reading The Audacity of Hope when Captain Dixon, the company commander, sticks his head in the door. "Levis, get out here." A few privates have spent the past few days making a sand table, a big 3-D diorama; it's not really a table, just a 20 by 20 foot piece of ground marked off with engineers' tape; the privates stare at a map, plow up sand to represent hills, pile up little rocks for villages, lay down tape for roads. Now, American and Iraqi officers are gathered around this sand table, describing an attack on some village. Tonight? Captain Dixon whispers in my ear, "there is no paragraph 4 in the oporder. None." The part about service and support. Well, of course, Patton's idea of logistics was to drain the fuel out of half the tanks and keep rolling with the rest of them. These guys can't be bothered with service and support, that's our job, people like me and Captain Dixon, the weenies who worry about this stuff so the combat guys don't have to. One of our majors describes an attack on some village set to kick off at 0200 the next morning. These are real Iraqi officers flown here to train with us, an E-4 translates for them. If you were fluent in Arabic and English, why would you enlist? Why would you not join the CIA or something? There is an OC at this briefing, a full colonel named Dragon. At the conclusion of the plan he rubs his chin and says, "I cannot allow you to go through with this. This? This is your plan? What are your actions on the objective? No. If you carry out this plan everyone will die." The E-4 hesitates, translates; the Iraqis stand, impassive behind their mirrored sunglasses. Colonel Dragon says "At what time can you present another plan?" Great. I guess they're not masters of strategy. Maybe running a combined arms battalion shouldn't be a part-time job.

"What time are you leaving tomorrow?", asks La Contessa, leaving to return to the RUBA for a few days, clean all the equipment, turn in the stuff we borrowed, go back to North Carolina. "Uh, we may be leaving the day after", I reply. He looks at his watch, raises an eyebrow. "You don't know?", he asks. "Sir, I don't think anyone knows." At 0800 the next morning battalion issues an oporder the thickness of a Henderson phone book. We are indeed leaving that day, companies will leave the FOB at 10 minute intervals beginning at 1600; we will be last, at 1710. At 1300 everyone will "conduct a police call": stand in a wide line and walk across the desert to pick up all the MRE wrappers and ammunition pouches that have blown around in the past two weeks. Fine. Around 1200 a message comes over the radio: police call has been changed to 1400. Fine. At 1330 a runner arrives: forget the schedule, just do the police call and then leave whenever you want to. Huh?

An enormous muddle of vehicles, 1200 of them, churning the sand into dust like liquid, like gas, dust in ears and noses, in canteens, between pages, between teeth. The plan is simple: drive past a place where you drop off your ammunition, then go to the "MILES yard", the fenced-in lot where civilians will remove the MILES gear, the Army's Lazer Tag, from the vehicles. We borrowed something like 860 vehicles from Fort Irwin, they have to go through an inspection process before being turned back in; no unit has ever borrowed this many vehicles. We plan to turn them in in like 4 days, which everyone who's ever been here before says is impossible. The Army puts MILES gear not just on rifles, but on tanks, helicopters, everything. When the vehicles get shot a little light goes off and a buzzer sounds to let you know you're dead. We arrive at the MILES yard at dusk, and there is no one there. No one. No civilians, no one directing traffic. 1200 vehicles, battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, HETs, HEMTTs, HMMWVs, everything, a quarter of a billion dollars in equipment just milling around. People start parking the trucks in the huge parking lot next to the MILES lot, the Dust Bowl, and disappearing, off to Burger King or back to the tents. Our guys park their trucks, get out, gather in an instinctive little cluster. "Wait here!", I shout, "give me 10 minutes to find out what's going on! Don't let anyone leave!" I sprint across the Dust Bowl through the swirling dust and the Diesel haze, I can feel my sperm count dropping; lean panting on a metal fence in front of two grinning privates in orange reflective vests, sweat lining my armored vest, soaking into the helmet pads. "Alright, who's priority in the MILES line?", I ask. "Sir?" "The MILES line, which unit is supposed to be first in it?" "Uh, we don't know, sir, we're just here to make sure everyone wears seatbelts." "Seatbelts." "Yessir."

I dash through the gate, 4 or 5 Bradleys are parked in the MILES line, a staff sergeant is talking to some guys. "Hey, sergeant, what unit you with?" "Alpha, sir." "Are you guys supposed to be first?" He turns his head a little, who is this lieutenant and what does he want? I put my hands out, palm-first, "hey, I'm not trying to bump anybody, I'm just trying to find out what the order is." "I don't know, sir, I saw the line was empty and just stuck my guys in here." "Sounds good. I'll grab my guys and do the same." "Roger that. Better hurry before somebody else figures it out."

Back through the gate, past the useless privates, across the Dust Bowl. Two figures in the headlights, Sergeants Reese and Davis. I played a lot of chess with Reese the past 2 weeks, we're equally bad. "I'm thinking about going active duty", she told me over a game one afternoon. "Are you serious? You think this is more like, rewarding than teaching math?" "I don't know. I get paid more here, anyway." "Huh. I think I want to get out and teach. Everyone I know who teaches hates it though." "I definitely don't want to teach high school anymore, I know that." "I used to be a sub in high school. Ah, Reese, the bishop." "The... oh. Right." "Now I can kill all those pawns with impunity." "Did you say 'with impunity'?" "I sure did." I'm glad to see these two, they'll round everyone up and get them moving. "Here's the deal!", I shout over the engines. "No one has any idea who's supposed to go through the MILES line first." "Sir, can we just put our trucks in there then?", asks Reese. "Yes, definitely, go find everyone you can and tell them to get in line and be back here at 6 tomorrow morning unless they hear otherwise." "Roger that."

So the confusion in the brigade actually benefited us, we were supposed to be one of the last companies to turn our stuff in, and instead we were one of the first. Dog eat dog, I guess. Maybe I was spoiled in the Airborne, I learned to expect that plans would be made and understood and stuck to, everyone would know his job and care about it at least a little.

Spring Lake, North Carolina through the portholes, thump of landing gear; "I love them ragged-ass pine trees", someone says. I can see my old barracks from here, buildings I used to run past and live in torn down or boarded up, spraypainted Xs and the word CONDEMN, all those white barracks that were 'temporary' in 1940. Has it really been 8 years? A ride to Henderson, three flat tires on my Explorer and no brakes at all, stick its license plate on the Lynx and set off for the farm at top speed. It wasn't supposed to be like this, to be this long, I've been away for a year already, a year since that two week thing in Greensboro last April, I towed my trailer there so I could buy an industrial refrigerator from some shitbag who never showed up. A year of memories already, the elegant Aberdeen officers' mess overlooking the Chesapeake, fish chowder in white mugs; the Burma Shave-style safety messages at Fort Stewart, Little Bo Peep/has lost her jeep/ it struck/ a truck/ when she fell/ asleep/ safety first; a self-propelled howitzer outlined in Christmas lights, a green garland wrapped around its barrel like rifling; the grim greyness of Camp Shelby.

Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts

2009-04-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

From the Onion

WASHINGTON, DC—In a move designed to make the United States seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," Congress officially changed the nation's name to the Ünited Stätes of Ämerica Monday. "Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, the Ünited Stätes is not to be messed with," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the Ämerican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. A new national anthem is also in the works by composer Glenn Danzig, tentatively titled "Howl Of The She-Demon."

An der Mosel

2009-04-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

Identify these pictures!
So, what's going on with everyone?

Prague's Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating by BussinessWeek Magazine

2009-04-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport