Remora
Fifty years ago, Stalin died.
LI woke up to an NPR piece about a museum exhibit dedicated to Stalin's reign in Moscow. The exhibit has attracted elderly, nostalgic Russians who say things like he beat my grandma systematically with iron rods for ten years -- he was a truly great man! He shot my dog, ate my baby, and made Russia strong! Then a reasonable elderly man was interviewed who said that he was neither for nor against Stalin. Sure, he killed 10 million people -- but just think of the alternative! Finally the announcer gives the results of a poll also referred to by this NYT story about Stalin being poisoned:
"Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin's role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed."
This matches an American poll quoted by Nicolas Kristof the other day, which shows that twice as many Americans believe in the devil's existence (65%) than believe in evolution (30%). Kristof uses this poll result to berate American journalists for not being more sensitive to God -- in fact, a few, unpardonably, have made fun of religion. No doubt if Kristoff were a Russian, he would quote the Stalin poll to berate journalists for not being more sensitive to Stalin -- he beat my grandma for twelve years, sodomized my cat, and was a great Russian leader!
The dispute over the number of Stalin's victims still goes on. The NPR report skated over the problem with the comment that Stalin killed "millions and millions" of people. Robert Conquest is the most famous advocate of a very high number -- for instance, that there were eight million people in the labor camps in the thirties, as opposed to four million, the number arrived at by Stephen Wheatcroft, one of the key advocates of lower numbers. This is a quarrel that is regularly interrupted by great gushes of dragon fire from the side of Conquest's friends -- they regularly accuse the other side of being crypto-Stalinists. Wheatcroft published an interesting article about the whole business in Europe-Asia studies a few years ago. The tone of the article is laced with pre-emptive attempts to douse the dragon's breath. Here's the way Wheatcroft edges into his much lower estimate of Stalin's victims:
"From his [Conquest's] recent comments it is difficult to unpick what he now thinks is my `conceptual error'. He is clearly annoyed that I continue to challenge his figures, and in desperation has moved on to attack me for things that I have not said. Conquest's statement that I `claim to present the true, "archival" totals for the victims of Stalinism' is ridiculous, as will be shown below. From his comment and the whole thrust of his recent writings, it appears that Conquest is still claiming that although his Kolyma figures are wrong, the rest of his earlier estimates as restated in The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990) are correct. If this were all, it would not matter so much, and we could leave Conquest to his dreams, but unfortunately other influential scholars appear to be accepting Conquest's claims that the new data confirm his `high figures'.(n4) And so I feel obliged to put the record straight (again).
My response to Conquest is long, because most readers of this academic journal will find it difficult to make sense of his brief comment. They will come away from it with the sense that `the biggest name in the profession' thinks that the work of Wheatcroft and others who attempt to analyse the archival data is `fundamentally flawed' and suffers from `conceptual errors'. It will not matter to them that the technical arguments seem so complex that they cannot follow them. The harm will have been done--Conquest will have shown that he can still answer his critics, and that his earlier assessments or `reassessments' are correct. I hope that the more thoughtful of the readers will go beyond this and will attempt to understand the arguments about the value of these new sources."
The numbers argument most recently surfaced when Stephane Courtois edited The Black Book of Communism, which was published in France, and then translated, to a lot of smoke and dragon breath. J. Arch Getty, who is considered "soft" on Stalinism by the hardcore supporters of Conquest, reviewed the book in the Atlantic. Getty gently counters the idea that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were morally equivalent -- a position recently taken by Martin Amis. He also takes Courtois down a notch:
"Courtois writes that he is not trying to present a "macabre comparative system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror." Yet there is a lot of arithmetic in his presentation, and one gets the impression that he is including every possible death just to run up the score. That impression troubled his distinguished co-authors; Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin sparked a scandal in Paris when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's opinions about the scale of Communist terror, asserting that his introduction was more a diatribe than a balanced scholarly treatment. They felt that he was obsessed with attributing a body count of 100 million to communism, and like several other scholars, they rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sober and damning, told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union."
It is the next paragraph that displays Getty's unforgiveable slackness, according to Conquest's standards:
"Stalin's camps were different from Hitler's. Tens of thousands of prisoners were released every year upon completion of their sentences. We now know that before World War II more inmates escaped annually from the Soviet camps than died there. Research shows that Stalin's camps and deportations, unlike their Nazi extermination counterparts, were planned components of the Soviet economy, designed to provide a stable slave-labor supply and to populate forbidding territories forcibly with involuntary settlers. Rations and medical care were substandard, but were often not dramatically better elsewhere in Stalin's Soviet Union and were not designed to hasten the inmates' deaths, although they certainly did so. Similarly, the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."
Well, LI is a little more sympathetic to the notion of a terror famine. We believe that the famines that befell India from the 1870s to about 1910, and certainly the Bengal famine of the 40s, were terror famines -- famines that were exaccerbated to achieve pre-determined economic and/or political ends. The famine of the 30s, in Stalin's Russia, and that of the late 50s, in Mao's China, are also terror famines by that rather broad definition. We think that the common denominator, here, is a certain kind of central planning. We'd make that argument more exact if we hadn't already wearied our poor readers with it over and over in past posts. ... Probably we'll succumb to the temptation to weary you again, but not now.
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Remora
Democracy, American amnesia
The great moral claim of the belligerent propagandists has been that the War will be fought to bring democracy to Iraq. It is, in fact, their only moral claim - otherwise, the war looks like an attack by an imperial power on a much smaller, and greatly weakened power that invaded a country on which it had a longstanding claim twelve years ago; was duly repulsed; and has since confined its attacks to the kind of factional squabbles that had consumed its separated, northern provinces for eight years. Furthermore, in the eighties, the imperial power in question actively encouraged the weaker power to invade a country on which it had no claim, Iran, and fight it with such weapons as were supplied by a network generously overseen by that imperial power.
So a moral claim, here, is evidently needed in order to counter the history of moral bankruptcy and sheer venality displayed by the imperial power.
Nick Cohen, who is the most coherent of the belligerent apologists, ticks off, and promptly disposes of, the reasons for opposing the war in his column in the Observer this week Cohen, of course, is advocating a war that he made up in his head - he never stoops to defend the war as actually planned by Blair and Bush. This makes defending the War so much more easy. But even for him, the cordon sanitaire between reality and delusion must have been a little shaken by the past week's bullying of Turkey. It gives us a nice preview of what the U.S. means by democracy in the Middle East.
Peter Beinart, in The New Republic, reviews some of the ancient history. Gulf I placed Turkey in the unenviable position of having to provide for a wave of refugees such as are regularly turned back - when they come from such subaltern hellholes as Haiti - by the United States. Turkey doesn't have the moral latitude that comes with 24,000 ballistic missiles, so they had to find someplace for them. In the heat of the moment in 1990, when the U.S. was going about like a horny schoolboy, promising anything in order to get to third base, Turkey was assured economic aid out the wazoo for the period after the war. Third base was achieved; in the detumescent afterwards, the promises we made to Turkey were conveniently forgotten.
But now, once again, the U.S. has a hard on. This time the Turkish government decided to play hard to get, and tried to bargain for some billions to compensate for the inevitable loss of further billions when Iraq is invaded. However, the Turkish government has to deal with the inconvenient fact that 90% of the population is opposed to the war. Well, the government made its deal, under intense U.S. pressure, but the Turkish parliament doesn't go along. Well, what happens next? Democracy be damned, if this is how Turkey is going to act, the U.S. will withdraw that aid - which is mostly in the form of loans, anyway, further indebting the place whose economy was basically a collateral casualty of the last war - while our warships ride outside the Turkish coast, apparently waiting for the Turkish military to squeeze the duly elected government. Even if the Turks cave and the U.S. gets to use Turkey as a vector into Iraq, don't bet on the U.S. keeping its word about that aid.
So, lets play with a scenario, shall we? The U.S. installs some exile Iraqi government into the niche once heated up by Saddam Hussein's bottom. The oil is still pumping, in this scenario. Here's the question: on the one hand, reconstruction costs in Iraq will probably engulf all the money created through the oil trade for the next five years - at least according to a Business Week article we've previously cited, and certainly according to those, like Nick Cohen, who justify the war in terms of Saddam Hussein's crimes and misrule. On the other hand, American taxpayers are now seeing that the war has cost around 80 billion dollars, and that occupying Iraq is going to cost another eighty billion dollars. Question: who gets that money?
Nick Cohen asks us to believe that the U.S., with one hundred thousand troops in the place, will not squeeze the Iraqi regime those troops put into office in order to take the political heat off of Bush.
LI thinks Cohen is fantasizing. The choice will come down to withdrawing the troops, or taking the money. Taking the money will, essentially, mean stealing from the starving. Would Bush do this to shore up his presidential chances? In a heartbeat. And that can only be accomplished by brute force. It is just the kind of spark that will start a guerilla war of the kind we see in Israel. Just as in Turkey, the US interest will trump democracy. But unlike in Turkey, or rather - like the Turkey that is periodically taken over by the military -- the factional struggle will have just begun. To pretend that one can squeeze past this scenario by sneering at the protesters as mere defenders of their insular prosperity is simply dishonest. The people on the streets of London February 15th, from whose pocketbooks Cohen basically expects to pay for an occupation that has every chance of devolving into another American supported despotism, are either to be considered by Cohen as a fact in his case for the war - in which case he will have to explain how the money is going to be extracted from them, or how the war's goals are going to be accomplished if the money isn't extracted from them. It is that simple.
No wonder the Ultra secret, in this war, is how much the Pentagon projects it will cost.
Democracy, American amnesia
The great moral claim of the belligerent propagandists has been that the War will be fought to bring democracy to Iraq. It is, in fact, their only moral claim - otherwise, the war looks like an attack by an imperial power on a much smaller, and greatly weakened power that invaded a country on which it had a longstanding claim twelve years ago; was duly repulsed; and has since confined its attacks to the kind of factional squabbles that had consumed its separated, northern provinces for eight years. Furthermore, in the eighties, the imperial power in question actively encouraged the weaker power to invade a country on which it had no claim, Iran, and fight it with such weapons as were supplied by a network generously overseen by that imperial power.
So a moral claim, here, is evidently needed in order to counter the history of moral bankruptcy and sheer venality displayed by the imperial power.
Nick Cohen, who is the most coherent of the belligerent apologists, ticks off, and promptly disposes of, the reasons for opposing the war in his column in the Observer this week Cohen, of course, is advocating a war that he made up in his head - he never stoops to defend the war as actually planned by Blair and Bush. This makes defending the War so much more easy. But even for him, the cordon sanitaire between reality and delusion must have been a little shaken by the past week's bullying of Turkey. It gives us a nice preview of what the U.S. means by democracy in the Middle East.
Peter Beinart, in The New Republic, reviews some of the ancient history. Gulf I placed Turkey in the unenviable position of having to provide for a wave of refugees such as are regularly turned back - when they come from such subaltern hellholes as Haiti - by the United States. Turkey doesn't have the moral latitude that comes with 24,000 ballistic missiles, so they had to find someplace for them. In the heat of the moment in 1990, when the U.S. was going about like a horny schoolboy, promising anything in order to get to third base, Turkey was assured economic aid out the wazoo for the period after the war. Third base was achieved; in the detumescent afterwards, the promises we made to Turkey were conveniently forgotten.
But now, once again, the U.S. has a hard on. This time the Turkish government decided to play hard to get, and tried to bargain for some billions to compensate for the inevitable loss of further billions when Iraq is invaded. However, the Turkish government has to deal with the inconvenient fact that 90% of the population is opposed to the war. Well, the government made its deal, under intense U.S. pressure, but the Turkish parliament doesn't go along. Well, what happens next? Democracy be damned, if this is how Turkey is going to act, the U.S. will withdraw that aid - which is mostly in the form of loans, anyway, further indebting the place whose economy was basically a collateral casualty of the last war - while our warships ride outside the Turkish coast, apparently waiting for the Turkish military to squeeze the duly elected government. Even if the Turks cave and the U.S. gets to use Turkey as a vector into Iraq, don't bet on the U.S. keeping its word about that aid.
So, lets play with a scenario, shall we? The U.S. installs some exile Iraqi government into the niche once heated up by Saddam Hussein's bottom. The oil is still pumping, in this scenario. Here's the question: on the one hand, reconstruction costs in Iraq will probably engulf all the money created through the oil trade for the next five years - at least according to a Business Week article we've previously cited, and certainly according to those, like Nick Cohen, who justify the war in terms of Saddam Hussein's crimes and misrule. On the other hand, American taxpayers are now seeing that the war has cost around 80 billion dollars, and that occupying Iraq is going to cost another eighty billion dollars. Question: who gets that money?
Nick Cohen asks us to believe that the U.S., with one hundred thousand troops in the place, will not squeeze the Iraqi regime those troops put into office in order to take the political heat off of Bush.
LI thinks Cohen is fantasizing. The choice will come down to withdrawing the troops, or taking the money. Taking the money will, essentially, mean stealing from the starving. Would Bush do this to shore up his presidential chances? In a heartbeat. And that can only be accomplished by brute force. It is just the kind of spark that will start a guerilla war of the kind we see in Israel. Just as in Turkey, the US interest will trump democracy. But unlike in Turkey, or rather - like the Turkey that is periodically taken over by the military -- the factional struggle will have just begun. To pretend that one can squeeze past this scenario by sneering at the protesters as mere defenders of their insular prosperity is simply dishonest. The people on the streets of London February 15th, from whose pocketbooks Cohen basically expects to pay for an occupation that has every chance of devolving into another American supported despotism, are either to be considered by Cohen as a fact in his case for the war - in which case he will have to explain how the money is going to be extracted from them, or how the war's goals are going to be accomplished if the money isn't extracted from them. It is that simple.
No wonder the Ultra secret, in this war, is how much the Pentagon projects it will cost.
Monday, March 03, 2003
Remora
The Exile's Temptation
C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de r�volutionner pour la vertu que de r�volutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des sc�l�rats violent les formes contre les hommes honn�tes, on sait que c'est un d�lit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation m�me ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, � les regarder comme des choses sacr�es, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honn�tes violent les formes contre des sc�l�rats, le peuple ne sait plus o� il en est ; les formes et les lois se pr�sentent � lui comme des obstacles � la justice" -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
What would I see the War like if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremecy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
The Exile's Temptation
C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de r�volutionner pour la vertu que de r�volutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des sc�l�rats violent les formes contre les hommes honn�tes, on sait que c'est un d�lit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation m�me ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, � les regarder comme des choses sacr�es, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honn�tes violent les formes contre des sc�l�rats, le peuple ne sait plus o� il en est ; les formes et les lois se pr�sentent � lui comme des obstacles � la justice" -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
What would I see the War like if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremecy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
Saturday, March 01, 2003
Remora
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden -- Freud,
Charles Krauthammer attends, so we are told, at all the high tables in D.C., and is one of the muskateers of The Project for the New American Century, which plays a role in today's politics similar to the role played by Committee on the Present Danger http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm played in the good old days of Ronald Reagan.
Krauthammer presently plays the Id to the Bush court. While Paul Wolfowitz has been forced to straight-jacket his thoughts into the super-ego of officialdom, Krauthammer is free to express the desires that really roil the inner circle. This is important. Where the Id is, with the Bushes, the super-ego will surely follow, and trail in its wake the whole set of opinion makers, rationalizing madly. It's Freudian law applied to the Hof. Just look at tax policy. In 2000, only the wildest ideologues of plutocracy would have come out solidly against the Income Tax and in favor of sales taxes to finance the state. Slowly, though, it has dawned on even the NY Times business page that this is precisely Bush's strategy, as was remarked in this article on Bush's bizarre pension tax plan:
"Many analysts say the retirement proposals mesh with what appears to be Mr. Bush's long-term goal of removing most taxes on investment income and toward a system that essentially taxes only consumption."
So -- the rule should be, pay attention when the Id speaks. And thus spake Krauthammer in his latest. First, in typical Id style, he cannot believe -- he cannot believe at length, he cannot believe from his head to his boots -- that all of these, these obstacles have been thrown in the way of our desire. The pack desire. The desire that has sharpened his teeth. Well, it all has to come out somehow. And -- by the merest coincidence -- it comes out first in the form of rather mocking the fact that the U.S., at this crucial juncture, is being asked to take black nations seriously. The incredulity infects his writing. He trembles. Angola, Guinea, the Congo -- places that, eventually, we will have to recivilize with might and main, and here we are, bending over for them.
"The entire exercise is ridiculous, but for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world -- and the long-suffering Iraqi people -- of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant."
To get permission of a black nation like Guinea -- does this upset the master-slave order of the world (the imperialist epoch now looked back upon so nostalgically) or what? And it can even become habit forming. We know how quickly the bully can deliquesce into the masochist. We know where that leads. It leads to perversity, and perversity leads to France. For who, really, is the problem here? Who stands between our virility and its consummation? A dozen times France. France, as Krauthammer says, which "pretends to great power status." A fake, then -- and, as all fakes to desire, a fetish, a deviation into sexual energies that we really don't want to go into in this post. Family reading, you know.
So, the Id, the loud mouth at the end of every canal and the beginning of every orifice, it wants to know -- how will we hurt this deviant? Krauthammer comes up with the appropriate answer:
"First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.
Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us."
To exterminate them -- it is an old wet dream of the Ids. Bullied, he lies in bed, and dreams of torturing his enemies. Older, his aggressions somewhat under control, he merely verbalizes. Althought the thought of France "in line" -- LI believes that this is an image out of the Id's subconscious repertoire. You line up the prisoners to be executed. You line up the soldiers that you will order into battle. Lines are at once the preferred sexual position of power and the geometry of death in which power annihilates itself, and all within its graps. Scorched earth, death marches. That line, France at the end of it, humiliated as we were humiliated, bowing to Guinea.
Alas, meanwhile the super-ego is trying to tiptoe around those oil contracts. After all, the superego keeps telling everyone, this isn't a blood for oil transaction -- this is about democracy! Yet the question of the spoils rather begs the question of democracy. As in, isn't a force that dictates who the spoils belong to exercizing -- to put it at its most delicate, to put a Blair-ite fuzz on it -- a rather non-representative force? Because, of course, the great crusade for democracy -- a crusade in so many ways -- is confronted, at the outset, with the paradox that the people it democratizes might just operate in radically un-American ways. The people might not be sufficiently appreciative of the American libido, and we just don't like that. We cherish our Id.
Regrettably, this will require postponing democracy until political maturity can be expected among the Iraqi peoples such that they, too, can cherish the American Id. It sits on top of us all.
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden -- Freud,
Charles Krauthammer attends, so we are told, at all the high tables in D.C., and is one of the muskateers of The Project for the New American Century, which plays a role in today's politics similar to the role played by Committee on the Present Danger http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm played in the good old days of Ronald Reagan.
Krauthammer presently plays the Id to the Bush court. While Paul Wolfowitz has been forced to straight-jacket his thoughts into the super-ego of officialdom, Krauthammer is free to express the desires that really roil the inner circle. This is important. Where the Id is, with the Bushes, the super-ego will surely follow, and trail in its wake the whole set of opinion makers, rationalizing madly. It's Freudian law applied to the Hof. Just look at tax policy. In 2000, only the wildest ideologues of plutocracy would have come out solidly against the Income Tax and in favor of sales taxes to finance the state. Slowly, though, it has dawned on even the NY Times business page that this is precisely Bush's strategy, as was remarked in this article on Bush's bizarre pension tax plan:
"Many analysts say the retirement proposals mesh with what appears to be Mr. Bush's long-term goal of removing most taxes on investment income and toward a system that essentially taxes only consumption."
So -- the rule should be, pay attention when the Id speaks. And thus spake Krauthammer in his latest. First, in typical Id style, he cannot believe -- he cannot believe at length, he cannot believe from his head to his boots -- that all of these, these obstacles have been thrown in the way of our desire. The pack desire. The desire that has sharpened his teeth. Well, it all has to come out somehow. And -- by the merest coincidence -- it comes out first in the form of rather mocking the fact that the U.S., at this crucial juncture, is being asked to take black nations seriously. The incredulity infects his writing. He trembles. Angola, Guinea, the Congo -- places that, eventually, we will have to recivilize with might and main, and here we are, bending over for them.
"The entire exercise is ridiculous, but for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world -- and the long-suffering Iraqi people -- of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant."
To get permission of a black nation like Guinea -- does this upset the master-slave order of the world (the imperialist epoch now looked back upon so nostalgically) or what? And it can even become habit forming. We know how quickly the bully can deliquesce into the masochist. We know where that leads. It leads to perversity, and perversity leads to France. For who, really, is the problem here? Who stands between our virility and its consummation? A dozen times France. France, as Krauthammer says, which "pretends to great power status." A fake, then -- and, as all fakes to desire, a fetish, a deviation into sexual energies that we really don't want to go into in this post. Family reading, you know.
So, the Id, the loud mouth at the end of every canal and the beginning of every orifice, it wants to know -- how will we hurt this deviant? Krauthammer comes up with the appropriate answer:
"First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.
Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us."
To exterminate them -- it is an old wet dream of the Ids. Bullied, he lies in bed, and dreams of torturing his enemies. Older, his aggressions somewhat under control, he merely verbalizes. Althought the thought of France "in line" -- LI believes that this is an image out of the Id's subconscious repertoire. You line up the prisoners to be executed. You line up the soldiers that you will order into battle. Lines are at once the preferred sexual position of power and the geometry of death in which power annihilates itself, and all within its graps. Scorched earth, death marches. That line, France at the end of it, humiliated as we were humiliated, bowing to Guinea.
Alas, meanwhile the super-ego is trying to tiptoe around those oil contracts. After all, the superego keeps telling everyone, this isn't a blood for oil transaction -- this is about democracy! Yet the question of the spoils rather begs the question of democracy. As in, isn't a force that dictates who the spoils belong to exercizing -- to put it at its most delicate, to put a Blair-ite fuzz on it -- a rather non-representative force? Because, of course, the great crusade for democracy -- a crusade in so many ways -- is confronted, at the outset, with the paradox that the people it democratizes might just operate in radically un-American ways. The people might not be sufficiently appreciative of the American libido, and we just don't like that. We cherish our Id.
Regrettably, this will require postponing democracy until political maturity can be expected among the Iraqi peoples such that they, too, can cherish the American Id. It sits on top of us all.
Friday, February 28, 2003
Remora
DEMS WAKE UP FROM YEARLONG SLEEP, ASK "WHA'S HAPPENING?"
Which should be the headline to the NYT piece on the hearing held to determine the 'price' of our beautiful occupation of Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the lead administration meretrician on the case (hey, shouldn't there be such a word? Meretrician -- it is an apt description for the present administration's way with figures). He comes a day after Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army let the cat out of the bag "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq." Wolfowitz, a man who has made a vast study of war -- why, he's read several books on the subject by various Kagans -- is, of course, shocked that we would ever listen to some old no doubt senile duffer sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually served in the military -- a service devoutly to be avoided by the key members of this administration when they were in their machine gun bearing primes. Here are a few grafs:
"Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
"We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion ."
And, from the end of the article, the ever more Rumsfeldian Rumsfeld:
"Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.
Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I've already decided that. It's not useful."
The word fascist is over-used, mainly to describe theocrats of Osama bin Laden's pursuasion -- but surely the blending of bullying and rhetoric, here, the overtness of the lie and the incorrigibility to shame when the lie is found out, carries delicious hints of Mussolini.
Now, to wake up the Dems about this kind of thing, you have to creep up behind them and say Boo. You have to do that for about three years. They are the party of Rip Van Winkle, Li'l Abner, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
David Corn, doing the wrap up about the intellectual corruption rampant among the Dem establishment that lead up to the fatal vote last year allowing Bush to assume war powers as he will, drew up the painful chronicle of the business, killing the softly with their own quotes, these Dem senatorial types who voted Bush while claiming they were voting for, oh, the UN or something. And he put his finger on the reason the Dems failed in the midyear elections:
"My apologies. I should realize that war -- or pre-war -- does not always adhere to logic. But the meta-message of the Dems also is grounded in a fallacy. They argue Bush cannot be trusted to oversee the U.S. economy. Yet, at the same time, the Democrats -- meaning almost every national elected Democratic leader and 60 percent of the Democratic Senators and 40 percent of the House Democrats -- maintain Bush can indeed be trusted to precipitate and carry out a war. An insensitive, country-club-hanging corporate-lackey who will say anything and screw the middle-class to help out his rich pals, on one hand. But a wise and outstanding (moderate and deliberative, as Biden would say) defender of the nation who deserves loyalty and support, on the other. Can Democrats spell "disconnect"?"
....
We've been reading a book by the Washington Post correspondant, Nathan C. Randall, about the Kurds: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Randall writes about the refugee rush after the last war and reminds us that the end of the Kurd disaster came when the French -- the French -- came out and pressed upon the reluctant Bush administration the decision to push back Saddam H. from the three provinces of Northern Iraq. Kouchner,Mitterand's junior minister for humanitarian affairs, did the groundwork to prepare this with Ankara.
What strikes us about this is that if the Bush administration had really wanted international support for a war against Iraq, it would have been very easy to build on this history. France would have had a much more difficult time opposing an action that incorporated a strong French precedent. History is woven out of gaps: and we think this gap is significant. Since it has been universally un-recalled, we wonder if this isn't motivated -- a piece of the unconscious floating behind a piece of amnesia. One of the goals, it seems, of the Bush people is to wean the country from the naive trust in such organizations as the UN -- which has been the object of rightwing vituperation since its founding by Roosevelt and various covert communists in his administration oh so long ago. If the Bush's really wanted to build a case that would convince France, the obvious move would be to cite precedents to which the French were not only party, but prime mover. But the more general Bush objective has obviously been to squelch any precedent for buffering American hegemony. When Aznar, Spain's prime minister and Bush's only friend in Spain, asks that Donald Rumsfeld be stifled, he is obviously thinking that the rulebook says, hey, we listen to our allies because, uh, they are our allies.
That rulebook was written by Walter Lippman and Emily Post.
The Bush's rulebook was written by Mario Puzo.
DEMS WAKE UP FROM YEARLONG SLEEP, ASK "WHA'S HAPPENING?"
Which should be the headline to the NYT piece on the hearing held to determine the 'price' of our beautiful occupation of Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the lead administration meretrician on the case (hey, shouldn't there be such a word? Meretrician -- it is an apt description for the present administration's way with figures). He comes a day after Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army let the cat out of the bag "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq." Wolfowitz, a man who has made a vast study of war -- why, he's read several books on the subject by various Kagans -- is, of course, shocked that we would ever listen to some old no doubt senile duffer sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually served in the military -- a service devoutly to be avoided by the key members of this administration when they were in their machine gun bearing primes. Here are a few grafs:
"Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
"We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion ."
And, from the end of the article, the ever more Rumsfeldian Rumsfeld:
"Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.
Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I've already decided that. It's not useful."
The word fascist is over-used, mainly to describe theocrats of Osama bin Laden's pursuasion -- but surely the blending of bullying and rhetoric, here, the overtness of the lie and the incorrigibility to shame when the lie is found out, carries delicious hints of Mussolini.
Now, to wake up the Dems about this kind of thing, you have to creep up behind them and say Boo. You have to do that for about three years. They are the party of Rip Van Winkle, Li'l Abner, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
David Corn, doing the wrap up about the intellectual corruption rampant among the Dem establishment that lead up to the fatal vote last year allowing Bush to assume war powers as he will, drew up the painful chronicle of the business, killing the softly with their own quotes, these Dem senatorial types who voted Bush while claiming they were voting for, oh, the UN or something. And he put his finger on the reason the Dems failed in the midyear elections:
"My apologies. I should realize that war -- or pre-war -- does not always adhere to logic. But the meta-message of the Dems also is grounded in a fallacy. They argue Bush cannot be trusted to oversee the U.S. economy. Yet, at the same time, the Democrats -- meaning almost every national elected Democratic leader and 60 percent of the Democratic Senators and 40 percent of the House Democrats -- maintain Bush can indeed be trusted to precipitate and carry out a war. An insensitive, country-club-hanging corporate-lackey who will say anything and screw the middle-class to help out his rich pals, on one hand. But a wise and outstanding (moderate and deliberative, as Biden would say) defender of the nation who deserves loyalty and support, on the other. Can Democrats spell "disconnect"?"
....
We've been reading a book by the Washington Post correspondant, Nathan C. Randall, about the Kurds: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Randall writes about the refugee rush after the last war and reminds us that the end of the Kurd disaster came when the French -- the French -- came out and pressed upon the reluctant Bush administration the decision to push back Saddam H. from the three provinces of Northern Iraq. Kouchner,Mitterand's junior minister for humanitarian affairs, did the groundwork to prepare this with Ankara.
What strikes us about this is that if the Bush administration had really wanted international support for a war against Iraq, it would have been very easy to build on this history. France would have had a much more difficult time opposing an action that incorporated a strong French precedent. History is woven out of gaps: and we think this gap is significant. Since it has been universally un-recalled, we wonder if this isn't motivated -- a piece of the unconscious floating behind a piece of amnesia. One of the goals, it seems, of the Bush people is to wean the country from the naive trust in such organizations as the UN -- which has been the object of rightwing vituperation since its founding by Roosevelt and various covert communists in his administration oh so long ago. If the Bush's really wanted to build a case that would convince France, the obvious move would be to cite precedents to which the French were not only party, but prime mover. But the more general Bush objective has obviously been to squelch any precedent for buffering American hegemony. When Aznar, Spain's prime minister and Bush's only friend in Spain, asks that Donald Rumsfeld be stifled, he is obviously thinking that the rulebook says, hey, we listen to our allies because, uh, they are our allies.
That rulebook was written by Walter Lippman and Emily Post.
The Bush's rulebook was written by Mario Puzo.
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Dope
"10 � Then Hanani'ah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.
11 And Hanani'ah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.
12 � Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hanani'ah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,
13 Go and tell Hanani'ah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.
14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have given him the beasts of the field also.
15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hanani'ah the prophet, Hear now, Hanani'ah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."
Jeremiah, of course, lived in a primitive time, before mass produced protest signs. Limited Inc, however, enjoys all the fruits of modern technology, including the aforesaid mass produced protest signs, one of which we spotted yesterday, going into Book People. It said American for Peace, white caps on a red background. It was stapled to a stake, and intended for the good b�rger with the lawn and all the trimmings -- which we would be, Lord thou knowest, if only we had a weekly salary, a decent career, a future and a past, sex, kids, a car. Having none of those and two dollars on us, one buck in quarters, one buck in paper, we approached the Peace guy, who said the signs were three bucks. Dilemma! We wanted to spend our paper dollar, and one or two of our quarters, on getting a cup of java from the coffee shop inside Book People. So here it was, at last -- the social comforts or the stirn prompting of the moral law within us. The choice. And then, suddenly, the guy standing next to us bought us the sign, just dished out three bucks as pretty as you please.
Jeremiah's sign would no doubt have been a little more glorious -- something like "peace, peace, but there is no peace," written in letters of blood -- but ours looks pretty spiffy, wedged into our apartment window.
...
Prophecy is a dangerous business. You go around breaking yokes, thinking you are speaking God's own truth, and then God makes a yoke out of you. As per Hanani'ah, one of history's also runs. No book in the bible named for him. The visionary poets from Dante to Ginsburg, do they look back, do they instance Hanani'ah? Nope. Jeremiah even got to be a bullfrog in the days of my youth -- there he was, mentioned in a pop song. Hanani'ah however remains in the dustbin of history. And you'll notice why he is in the dustbin of history. He predicts an easy victory over Babylon. That just wasn't smart.
As we can see from this startling article in the City Journal by Stanley Kurtz, After the War. City Journal is put out by the Manhattan Institute, another rightwing think tank. We came upon it in a sour mood, after reading the extremely silly report on the protest in London by Julia Magnet (whose thesis, popular right now on the right, is that anti-semitism can be compressed into anti-Israel-ism, which can be further compressed into anti-Sharon-ism -- so that any objection to Israel's foreign policy is just a matter of Jew-hating). Magnet, while priding herself on being pro-Israel (and thus, by her convoluted logic, philo-semitic), makes no bones about having contempt for all Moslems. Through these blinders, the million people who turned out in London are transformed into some future brown-shirt army. This is a pandering hysteria that will, we prophesy (yoke on back) eventually haunt those who condone it.
The Kurtz thing surprised us. Kurtz is a thinker at another rightwing think tank -- as Jeremiah said, in another context, according to the number of thy cities were they think tanks, oh America, and according to the number of the streets of D.C. have ye set up telegenic wonks to that shameful thing, tax free foundation money -- and so we would have written him off. At the moment, even though, in their heart of hearts, real conservatives know that there is something screwy in the Wilsonian enthusiasm they are all supposed to be experiencing at the thought of America's infinite involvement in imposing democracy around the world, real conservatives are not going to be expressing that thought and getting those looks from their comrades. This is a world of groupthink.
Well, Kurtz's essay treads on my territory -- he actually goes back to the analogy all the rightwingers love, the British empire, and asks Hobson's question: is it really the case that the British government, defying all the rules of governments ever known, extended itself with suffering and tax dollars in order to bring democracy to the heathen? The answer is no. Although we aren't absolutely happy with Kurtz's reasoning, we do think that this is a step in the right direction .... besides which, it is what we've been trying to write an essay about ourselves. Kurtz doesn't quite go all the way -- he doesn't mention the dreaded word, famine -- but he does hint that the golden picture of the British Raj painted by people like Robert Kagan has more to do with PBS costume dramas than reality.
Kurtz is, first, cautious about the idea that democracy can be imposed from above. Well he should be. If there is anything that binds together Anglo conservativism for the past two hundred twenty some years, it is that revolutions from the top impose an arbitrary order, the order of the abstract thinker, on the natural order of society. This is the lesson of Burke, who applied it not less to India than to France. Here's Kurtz's grafs on the subject:
"...If Iraq currently lacks a modernizing, democratizing class, like Japan�s samurai bureaucrats, might it not be possible to create a sector of Iraqi society that embraces liberal principles�a new, modern bureaucratic class that could then spark a liberalization of the larger society and the government, just as the samurai did in Japan?
In fact, there is a good historical precedent for just such a development: that is precisely what happened when the British ruled India. British rule in the subcontinent, let it be said at once, is a highly imperfect model of democratization. The Raj was often cruel and exploitative. And though a few British thinkers and bureaucrats may have understood the Raj�s 150-year imperium as the midwife of Indian self-rule, for the most part the British brought democracy to the Indians more or less by accident, in fits and starts. But by educating and training�and employing�English-speaking Indians to assist them in administering the empire, the British ended up forging a liberal-minded indigenous class that eventually could run a modern nation on its own.
A pivotal figure in this development is Ram Mohan Roy (1772�1833), the so-called father of modern India. Broadly educated in Indian languages, he went on to master English and work for the British East India Company, where he developed ideas that led to the first modernizing movement within Hinduism�a crucial stage on India�s path to modern democracy. Roy shows how it is possible to take an ancient, nonmodern tradition (like Islam, say) and�without seeming to violate it, and indeed while cherishing much that is valuable in it�to transform it substantially and adapt it to the modern condition. Roy used the philosophical ideas found in the earliest Hindu scriptures to criticize the polytheism and some of the practices of popular Hinduism, such as sati�widow burning. Yet he indignantly rejected the disdain for Hinduism that Christian missionaries and British liberals so casually showed. Immersed in Hinduism�s rich philosophical tradition, Roy defended Hindu pride against British prejudice and simultaneously argued for liberalizing change within the Hindu tradition. The surest route to modern life for Muslim societies may be just such an internal reformation of their Islamic tradition rather than a forcible extirpation of it. If democracy is to succeed in the Middle East, an Islamic Roy may have to arise."
Now that Kurtz has broached the subject, he boldly ventures out a little more.
"While Indian cultural values remain strong in India, Macaulay in a sense got his way, as well. Macaulay�s Minute began the process of relative Anglicization and accelerated the cultural transformation that Roy had begun, a transformation that pushed India into the modern world.
Before the new indigenous elite arose, however, at least one early-nineteenth-century British modernizing effort failed disastrously, proving that it is not enough to blow up existing social structures and assume that, when the dust settles, the fragments will re-form into something recognizably modern. Liberal British administrators wanted to shatter the power of traditional village landlord elites and give individual farmers control over their own land. Like famed Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto today, they believed that once the right property relations were in place, an explosion of free enterprise and productivity would follow. It didn�t happen. The British destroyed the traditional Indian system of village rule and created a market in land, but the Indians showed no signs of developing a liberal, capitalist ethos. Private ownership by itself was insufficient to bring deeper cultural change. So British administrators had to step in, at great and ultimately unsupportable expense to the British Treasury."
Of course, the last sentence is nonsense -- Indians paid for the administration of India, as Kurtz surely knows. He doesn't get into the details of exactly how the modernizing effort failed -- but it is the heart of our perhaps never to be completed essay on James Fitzjames Stephen that the 20th century conservative myth -- that central planning is confined to socialism -- ignores its roots, which are just here, in India. The Benthamite/Laissez faire idea was to "modernize" India along approved capitalist lines with centrally planned laws that would re-do the whole village economy, monetize the place, and bring about relationships of exchange among the happy farmers. Kurtz delicately skirts around the fact that this planning is directly implicated in the worst famines of the nineteenth century. But that he even ventures out far enough to cast doubt on the neo-colonialist projects a-bornin' in D.C. cocktail parties is pretty brave, as far as it goes.
So hallelujah, intelligent life on the right! But I'm not going to break my yoke quite yet.
"10 � Then Hanani'ah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.
11 And Hanani'ah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.
12 � Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hanani'ah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,
13 Go and tell Hanani'ah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.
14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have given him the beasts of the field also.
15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hanani'ah the prophet, Hear now, Hanani'ah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."
Jeremiah, of course, lived in a primitive time, before mass produced protest signs. Limited Inc, however, enjoys all the fruits of modern technology, including the aforesaid mass produced protest signs, one of which we spotted yesterday, going into Book People. It said American for Peace, white caps on a red background. It was stapled to a stake, and intended for the good b�rger with the lawn and all the trimmings -- which we would be, Lord thou knowest, if only we had a weekly salary, a decent career, a future and a past, sex, kids, a car. Having none of those and two dollars on us, one buck in quarters, one buck in paper, we approached the Peace guy, who said the signs were three bucks. Dilemma! We wanted to spend our paper dollar, and one or two of our quarters, on getting a cup of java from the coffee shop inside Book People. So here it was, at last -- the social comforts or the stirn prompting of the moral law within us. The choice. And then, suddenly, the guy standing next to us bought us the sign, just dished out three bucks as pretty as you please.
Jeremiah's sign would no doubt have been a little more glorious -- something like "peace, peace, but there is no peace," written in letters of blood -- but ours looks pretty spiffy, wedged into our apartment window.
...
Prophecy is a dangerous business. You go around breaking yokes, thinking you are speaking God's own truth, and then God makes a yoke out of you. As per Hanani'ah, one of history's also runs. No book in the bible named for him. The visionary poets from Dante to Ginsburg, do they look back, do they instance Hanani'ah? Nope. Jeremiah even got to be a bullfrog in the days of my youth -- there he was, mentioned in a pop song. Hanani'ah however remains in the dustbin of history. And you'll notice why he is in the dustbin of history. He predicts an easy victory over Babylon. That just wasn't smart.
As we can see from this startling article in the City Journal by Stanley Kurtz, After the War. City Journal is put out by the Manhattan Institute, another rightwing think tank. We came upon it in a sour mood, after reading the extremely silly report on the protest in London by Julia Magnet (whose thesis, popular right now on the right, is that anti-semitism can be compressed into anti-Israel-ism, which can be further compressed into anti-Sharon-ism -- so that any objection to Israel's foreign policy is just a matter of Jew-hating). Magnet, while priding herself on being pro-Israel (and thus, by her convoluted logic, philo-semitic), makes no bones about having contempt for all Moslems. Through these blinders, the million people who turned out in London are transformed into some future brown-shirt army. This is a pandering hysteria that will, we prophesy (yoke on back) eventually haunt those who condone it.
The Kurtz thing surprised us. Kurtz is a thinker at another rightwing think tank -- as Jeremiah said, in another context, according to the number of thy cities were they think tanks, oh America, and according to the number of the streets of D.C. have ye set up telegenic wonks to that shameful thing, tax free foundation money -- and so we would have written him off. At the moment, even though, in their heart of hearts, real conservatives know that there is something screwy in the Wilsonian enthusiasm they are all supposed to be experiencing at the thought of America's infinite involvement in imposing democracy around the world, real conservatives are not going to be expressing that thought and getting those looks from their comrades. This is a world of groupthink.
Well, Kurtz's essay treads on my territory -- he actually goes back to the analogy all the rightwingers love, the British empire, and asks Hobson's question: is it really the case that the British government, defying all the rules of governments ever known, extended itself with suffering and tax dollars in order to bring democracy to the heathen? The answer is no. Although we aren't absolutely happy with Kurtz's reasoning, we do think that this is a step in the right direction .... besides which, it is what we've been trying to write an essay about ourselves. Kurtz doesn't quite go all the way -- he doesn't mention the dreaded word, famine -- but he does hint that the golden picture of the British Raj painted by people like Robert Kagan has more to do with PBS costume dramas than reality.
Kurtz is, first, cautious about the idea that democracy can be imposed from above. Well he should be. If there is anything that binds together Anglo conservativism for the past two hundred twenty some years, it is that revolutions from the top impose an arbitrary order, the order of the abstract thinker, on the natural order of society. This is the lesson of Burke, who applied it not less to India than to France. Here's Kurtz's grafs on the subject:
"...If Iraq currently lacks a modernizing, democratizing class, like Japan�s samurai bureaucrats, might it not be possible to create a sector of Iraqi society that embraces liberal principles�a new, modern bureaucratic class that could then spark a liberalization of the larger society and the government, just as the samurai did in Japan?
In fact, there is a good historical precedent for just such a development: that is precisely what happened when the British ruled India. British rule in the subcontinent, let it be said at once, is a highly imperfect model of democratization. The Raj was often cruel and exploitative. And though a few British thinkers and bureaucrats may have understood the Raj�s 150-year imperium as the midwife of Indian self-rule, for the most part the British brought democracy to the Indians more or less by accident, in fits and starts. But by educating and training�and employing�English-speaking Indians to assist them in administering the empire, the British ended up forging a liberal-minded indigenous class that eventually could run a modern nation on its own.
A pivotal figure in this development is Ram Mohan Roy (1772�1833), the so-called father of modern India. Broadly educated in Indian languages, he went on to master English and work for the British East India Company, where he developed ideas that led to the first modernizing movement within Hinduism�a crucial stage on India�s path to modern democracy. Roy shows how it is possible to take an ancient, nonmodern tradition (like Islam, say) and�without seeming to violate it, and indeed while cherishing much that is valuable in it�to transform it substantially and adapt it to the modern condition. Roy used the philosophical ideas found in the earliest Hindu scriptures to criticize the polytheism and some of the practices of popular Hinduism, such as sati�widow burning. Yet he indignantly rejected the disdain for Hinduism that Christian missionaries and British liberals so casually showed. Immersed in Hinduism�s rich philosophical tradition, Roy defended Hindu pride against British prejudice and simultaneously argued for liberalizing change within the Hindu tradition. The surest route to modern life for Muslim societies may be just such an internal reformation of their Islamic tradition rather than a forcible extirpation of it. If democracy is to succeed in the Middle East, an Islamic Roy may have to arise."
Now that Kurtz has broached the subject, he boldly ventures out a little more.
"While Indian cultural values remain strong in India, Macaulay in a sense got his way, as well. Macaulay�s Minute began the process of relative Anglicization and accelerated the cultural transformation that Roy had begun, a transformation that pushed India into the modern world.
Before the new indigenous elite arose, however, at least one early-nineteenth-century British modernizing effort failed disastrously, proving that it is not enough to blow up existing social structures and assume that, when the dust settles, the fragments will re-form into something recognizably modern. Liberal British administrators wanted to shatter the power of traditional village landlord elites and give individual farmers control over their own land. Like famed Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto today, they believed that once the right property relations were in place, an explosion of free enterprise and productivity would follow. It didn�t happen. The British destroyed the traditional Indian system of village rule and created a market in land, but the Indians showed no signs of developing a liberal, capitalist ethos. Private ownership by itself was insufficient to bring deeper cultural change. So British administrators had to step in, at great and ultimately unsupportable expense to the British Treasury."
Of course, the last sentence is nonsense -- Indians paid for the administration of India, as Kurtz surely knows. He doesn't get into the details of exactly how the modernizing effort failed -- but it is the heart of our perhaps never to be completed essay on James Fitzjames Stephen that the 20th century conservative myth -- that central planning is confined to socialism -- ignores its roots, which are just here, in India. The Benthamite/Laissez faire idea was to "modernize" India along approved capitalist lines with centrally planned laws that would re-do the whole village economy, monetize the place, and bring about relationships of exchange among the happy farmers. Kurtz delicately skirts around the fact that this planning is directly implicated in the worst famines of the nineteenth century. But that he even ventures out far enough to cast doubt on the neo-colonialist projects a-bornin' in D.C. cocktail parties is pretty brave, as far as it goes.
So hallelujah, intelligent life on the right! But I'm not going to break my yoke quite yet.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Remora
Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants. - Edward Gibbon,
LI imagines that the War has been a godsend for the British papers -- right now, you have to go to the Guardian, the Independent, even the Telegraph to find out what is going on. Except for the LA Times, American papers seem to have aligned themselves unilaterally with the unipolar power in a uni-fiesta.
This, we think, is not really due to media enthusiasm for the war -- that does exist, but outside of the WashPost it doesn't govern the way the papers are working on this issue. It is due to the vacuum which goes by the name of the Democratic Party. One of the oddities of the two party system is that the papers, and the news, can't comprehend the world beyond it. And if they can't comprehend it, they can't report on it, they can't analyze it, they can't spoon feed it to their readers -- they can't do anything the Press is supposed to do.
This mutually corrupting interdependence is naturally effected by the decline of one of those parties. And if ever there were a party in decline, it is the Democratic Party. Bested by Bush in a coup, bested again in the elections last year, bested as a money machine, bribed in the nineties by the corporate interests to taking positions directly contrary to their grass-roots base, unable to represent that base or replace it, led by non-entities who range from the truly unctuous (Joseph Lieberman) to the truly obnoxious (John Kerry), it is hard to see how this party is going to survive as an opposition, or as a real pole of power.
As a sign of this, consider that in D.C., attention is riveted as much on the Oxley grift as on Iraq.
Apparently, Democratic relics are being denied the milk and honey that flows to the defeated and to the suckers-up in the form of lobbyist sinecures. The Republicans are pursuing unilateral power on all fronts, apparently, and at warp speed. Is this going to be good for democracy or what? It upsets Dems politicos. The consolation prizes in politics are sweet. No matter how repulsive your personality, no matter how badly you've been battered by the folks back home, or how you've spent your career shitting on them, you and your little court of aides can still lick up the gravy in D.C. by using your contacts for private good. The P.R. firms, the pseudo think tanks, the boards of directors, the lobbying groups! It's Pinocchio at the fair. Well, big bad wolf Tom DeLay wants there to be only Republicans at the fair, and not utterly corrupt Democratic marrionettes and he's doing his best to Republicanize the place. Its rather like Richard Nixon's Vietnamization -- there are a few collateral casualties along the way.
The Dems, of course, are up in arms. Not to have their fair share of treats at the fair is intolerable! They might roll over about Iraq. They might roll over about the nutty tax cuts. They might allow Ashcroft to burn the Bill of Rights in his office fireplace. They might act in utterly dishonorable ways that are leading the country to disaster. But not to have a position with decent pay (say, +200,000) when you've ended your brilliant career voting for the wealthy and venal, or working for one of those geezers who did same -- why, that's cause for a revolt!
The WashPost (which has a relationship to the business of politics much like the Variety's relationship to the entertainment industry) has been featuring the machinations of Representative Oxley, who is the Representative from Anderson Accounting -- a man honorably engaged in making peculation safe for the stock option set.
Oxley, genius that he is, strongarmed the Mutual Funds lobbying group to fire the Democrat they hired. Here are the grafs on the grift:
"The K Street Project, which involves top Republican lawmakers and party officials, was designed to track the party affiliation and political contribution of hundreds of lobbyists in Washington. The data are made available to lawmakers -- so they can deny access to Democrats if they so choose -- and to top party officials so they can lobby companies and trade associations to hire Republicans for top-paying jobs. The ethics committee in 1998 admonished then-Majority Whip DeLay for pressuring the Electronic Industry Association not to hire former Rep. David McCurdy (D-Okla.) to run the group.
Democrats said they would base their call for an investigation of Oxley on a Feb. 15 report in The Washington Post that detailed how Oxley and his staff have leaned on the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund industry's main lobbying arm -- to oust Democratic lobbyist Julie Domenick. Six sources, Republicans among them, told The Post that two of Oxley's top aides told industry officials that a House investigation of the industry was linked to ICI's strong ties to Democrats. Oxley spokeswoman Peggy Peterson said, "Rumors of some quid pro quo are exactly that: rumors."
We urge our readers to email their congressmen in support of Project K street. It is probably the best chance we have for reforming politics as it now stands.
Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants. - Edward Gibbon,
LI imagines that the War has been a godsend for the British papers -- right now, you have to go to the Guardian, the Independent, even the Telegraph to find out what is going on. Except for the LA Times, American papers seem to have aligned themselves unilaterally with the unipolar power in a uni-fiesta.
This, we think, is not really due to media enthusiasm for the war -- that does exist, but outside of the WashPost it doesn't govern the way the papers are working on this issue. It is due to the vacuum which goes by the name of the Democratic Party. One of the oddities of the two party system is that the papers, and the news, can't comprehend the world beyond it. And if they can't comprehend it, they can't report on it, they can't analyze it, they can't spoon feed it to their readers -- they can't do anything the Press is supposed to do.
This mutually corrupting interdependence is naturally effected by the decline of one of those parties. And if ever there were a party in decline, it is the Democratic Party. Bested by Bush in a coup, bested again in the elections last year, bested as a money machine, bribed in the nineties by the corporate interests to taking positions directly contrary to their grass-roots base, unable to represent that base or replace it, led by non-entities who range from the truly unctuous (Joseph Lieberman) to the truly obnoxious (John Kerry), it is hard to see how this party is going to survive as an opposition, or as a real pole of power.
As a sign of this, consider that in D.C., attention is riveted as much on the Oxley grift as on Iraq.
Apparently, Democratic relics are being denied the milk and honey that flows to the defeated and to the suckers-up in the form of lobbyist sinecures. The Republicans are pursuing unilateral power on all fronts, apparently, and at warp speed. Is this going to be good for democracy or what? It upsets Dems politicos. The consolation prizes in politics are sweet. No matter how repulsive your personality, no matter how badly you've been battered by the folks back home, or how you've spent your career shitting on them, you and your little court of aides can still lick up the gravy in D.C. by using your contacts for private good. The P.R. firms, the pseudo think tanks, the boards of directors, the lobbying groups! It's Pinocchio at the fair. Well, big bad wolf Tom DeLay wants there to be only Republicans at the fair, and not utterly corrupt Democratic marrionettes and he's doing his best to Republicanize the place. Its rather like Richard Nixon's Vietnamization -- there are a few collateral casualties along the way.
The Dems, of course, are up in arms. Not to have their fair share of treats at the fair is intolerable! They might roll over about Iraq. They might roll over about the nutty tax cuts. They might allow Ashcroft to burn the Bill of Rights in his office fireplace. They might act in utterly dishonorable ways that are leading the country to disaster. But not to have a position with decent pay (say, +200,000) when you've ended your brilliant career voting for the wealthy and venal, or working for one of those geezers who did same -- why, that's cause for a revolt!
The WashPost (which has a relationship to the business of politics much like the Variety's relationship to the entertainment industry) has been featuring the machinations of Representative Oxley, who is the Representative from Anderson Accounting -- a man honorably engaged in making peculation safe for the stock option set.
Oxley, genius that he is, strongarmed the Mutual Funds lobbying group to fire the Democrat they hired. Here are the grafs on the grift:
"The K Street Project, which involves top Republican lawmakers and party officials, was designed to track the party affiliation and political contribution of hundreds of lobbyists in Washington. The data are made available to lawmakers -- so they can deny access to Democrats if they so choose -- and to top party officials so they can lobby companies and trade associations to hire Republicans for top-paying jobs. The ethics committee in 1998 admonished then-Majority Whip DeLay for pressuring the Electronic Industry Association not to hire former Rep. David McCurdy (D-Okla.) to run the group.
Democrats said they would base their call for an investigation of Oxley on a Feb. 15 report in The Washington Post that detailed how Oxley and his staff have leaned on the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund industry's main lobbying arm -- to oust Democratic lobbyist Julie Domenick. Six sources, Republicans among them, told The Post that two of Oxley's top aides told industry officials that a House investigation of the industry was linked to ICI's strong ties to Democrats. Oxley spokeswoman Peggy Peterson said, "Rumors of some quid pro quo are exactly that: rumors."
We urge our readers to email their congressmen in support of Project K street. It is probably the best chance we have for reforming politics as it now stands.
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