Angola (part 2)

I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter�
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters�
I know the names of the summit that manipulated�
I know the names of those who ran�
I know the names of the powerful group who�
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who�
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of�
- Pier Paolo Pasolini

This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."

The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of clich�s that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.

And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.

Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? The American jitters since 9/11. Tick it off, one, two.

- There's the odd paralysis that keeps American troops from sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to actually capture AlQaeda operatives, in contrast with the troop heavy plans to invade a country that happens not to have attacked the US, Iraq.

-There's the unfelt, as yet, paralysis of civil liberties, as if the systematic weakening of our civil freedoms (of speech, of association, of purchase, of due process) was happening somewhere else, at a great distance. It is death by spider bite, death by Ashcroft, and the poison travels in subdermal channels, it operates as the vague threat of power, of something coming down, of a constraint one doesn't know how to name or give a face to.

--There are the truly brain dead, there are the tests that show, in a thousand subtle ways, who the zombies were all along. Like Steven Spielberg, who tells the NYT that he is magnanimously willing to give up his civil liberties to stop "9/11 from ever happening again."(1)

-There are the "organs"� the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all the intelligence agencies that should never have existed in the first place, the state's version of polymorphous perversity. The organs upon which we are dumping money and power to protect the Heimat, while at the same time investigating the multiple incompetencies that demonstrate their structural inability to protect the Heimat. And no, it isn't because the terrorists are terribly clever. This is the new era, the era of terrorism as a hobby. If you can build a model plane, you can hijack a plane. And the FBI's newly expanded ability to penetrate chat rooms won't make a damn bit of difference.

So this is the state of play twelve years after the Fall of the Wall. After the fall of the utopia of rust in Eastern Europe. After the decade of global commercial nihilism, when the plan was... the end of history plan was... draining away what Schopenhauer called the Metphysical Need of Mankind:

'Excepting mankind, no other being wonders about its own existence; to the other creatures, existence is understood of itself so much that it isn't even noticed. Out of the calm regard of the beast the wisdom of nature speaks; because in them the will and the intellect aren't yet far enough apart that their mutual collisions against one another to cause them any curiosity. So the whole of phenomena still hangs from the branch of nature on which it budded, and is at one with the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life objectified) ascends through both realms of consciousless being and then through the long and broad series of beasts, cunning and amiable, does it finally arrive, with the entrance of reason, at Man, and so for the first time at reflection. Because at that moment it begins to wonder about its own works and asks itself, what it is...With this reflection and this astonishment there arises, in humankind alone, the peculiar need for a metaphysics..."

Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.

No culture, no questions, no worries. But the peculiar need for metaphysics pops up in the most curious places, doesn't it? It popped up at Enron. It is popping up about the days and ways of Heimat security, back in the pre 9/11 idyll.

So: LI refuses. We refuse the end of history, we refuse the surrender of the need for metaphysics. You know we are a bunch of resentful failures around here, so what do you expect? But from the perspective of that refusal, we pick up on little stories, we make our trivial little connections.

For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimba, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:

"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."

Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's african explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?

I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?

Notes
1. "Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They're willing to give the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president's side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again." NYT

2. See, for instance, the hilarious obituary of that Christian parfait knight on the NewsMax site. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/26/01047.shtml. De mortuis nil nisi bonum
etc., but still -- I have never read an obituary that congregated so many lies in so little space. It makes me giddy.
3. For a brief summing up of Robertson's interest, and general sleeziness, see this story, by Greg Palast, on his site. Here are three interesting grafs from it:

"Neil Volder, president of Robertson Financial and director of the new bank venture, emphasises that Robertson selflessly donated between 65 and 75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. But that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year - pocket change for a man of Robertson's means.

There was also, says Volder, the $7m he gave to 'Operation Blessing' to alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Robertson's press operation puts the sum at only $1.2m. More interesting is the way the Operation Blessing funds were used in Africa. Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. Operation Blessing bought planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire).

But investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."

4. See this Washington Post piece by Jon Jeter. The election of 1994, which legitimated dos Santos, was dubbed the choice between the Killers and the Robbers by the electorate. Jeter quotes estimates that put dos Santos' fortune in the 2 billion dollar range.