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“Two sides to every story Somebody had to stop me I'm not the same as when I began I will not be treated as property” Public Image - John Lydon In 2004, LI compared what was happening in Iraq to a chess game. This was a radically simplifying image, meant only to highlight the fact that, a., “American strategy” was not the salient factor, by that time, in Iraq’s affairs in spite of the myopic depictions of the American newspapers; and b., there would be no deus ex machina, no special suspension of the laws of causality, for the Americans. Whenever the governing class confronts one of those crises that results from a combination of erroneous assumptions and its own deepseated corruption, it immediately begins to evoke a suspension of the laws of causality, along the lines of “… but if Iraq improves in the next three months,” etc.Behind the cloud that is supposed to hide cause and effect, the elites scramble to put in place the usual deals and violence. But of course, in 2003 the el

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit                 thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye                 defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination LI doesn’t have the equipment to respond to the news from Baghdad. The evil done yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, going all the way back to the invasion, the massive links in that chain forged by criminals in Washington – and the mediate links through all of the criminals, literally, on the streets of Baghdad – and the inevitable tit for tat braiding of all Iraqi blood for blood – the incredibly stupid sudden grab for Sadr in 2004, balanced and exceeded by the razing of Fallujah in 2004, while the zombie American war crowd howled, like the dead in the Odyssey, blind bats attracted to blood sacrifices, the sportifs getting hardons from the purple revolution - exhausts the pittance of my empathy and imagination, which is contained in only so much nerve and neuron,

“Who was safe? No one. From the moment that the devil was taken to be the revenger of God, from the moment that one wrote, under his dictation, the names of those who could pass into the flames, each had, day and night, the terrible nightmare of the stake.” - Michelet That the devil would be inside God as his hitman is, in a sense, part of the white magic mythology – that mythology that reconciled the pains of man to the benignity of the deity, with the assumption that God allowed evil as a part of the scheme for the greater good. For other stories (for instance, that God enjoyed evil as well as good, or even that the devil’s evils disguised his own dark good intents) – they sank to the nasty Gnostic bottom, where only the poets muck about. The Devil inside God is God’s devil – and, LI would claim, there at the very origin of human organization. It is an Uncle Tom Devil, and I know it intimately. These quotes are picked out of the the Gauffridi chapter in Michelet’s La Sorciere – to wh

LI has a small pain in the back this morning, due to some pinched nerve business going on in the lower lumbar region. And we have a debt on our mind – we floated this Lenin as the inventor of the modern party structure theme posts and posts ago, and hoped to have the wrap up with the usual bloggish smash and grab rampage through What is to be done? But… what is to be done? There are tides in the affairs of LI when we simply weaken, when the hams unclench, when we emanate a distinct aura of boredom. Not that we are bored, but … we are boring. The intellect dims, the jokes fall flat, either sucked into a black hole of infradig reference or limping around like retired vaudevillians. Every word that comes out of our keyboarding fingers has a vaguely p.r. sound – the blackboard scraping sound of cliché. So – we truly want to pursue the dialectic between agent and percipient, we want to poke and prod Lenin’s idea of the party as the manufacturer of theory, and to call y’all’s attention to th

The NYT hosts an extremely alarming op ed piece today by a Mark Moyar. Moyar apparently teaches at the U.S. Marine academy – which is the reason the piece is alarming. It is a survey of the Diem era in Vietnam that is almost wholly mythical, which is not surprising given the book that Moyar apparently wrote: ''Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965” In the 1920s, the Weimar government never seriously attempted to eradicate the proto-fascist culture of the German military – and lived, or rather died, to regret it. The myth that has arduously been cultivated in the American military about that extended war crime, our Hardy Boy’s adventure in genocide in Vietnam, has grown and ramified. Amusingly, this is what Moyar thinks was happening in Diem’s Vietnam in the fifties: “When the South Vietnamese sects defied the authority of the Saigon government in the spring of 1955, the American special ambassador, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, urged Diem to compromise with them. Efforts to s

Imagine, then, Lenin. In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party. Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? LI is not interested in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, so much as trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream