the expulsion of the triumphant beast

LI’s mind, this morning, keeps drifting to the title of one of Giordano Bruno’s pamphlets: The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. There seems to be something magically coordinate between that title and the scheduled appearance of President Bush this evening. Bush is, of course, going to announce that the final result of the listening tour he conducted among his cabinet, numerous public toilets at D.C. subway stations, and in the attic of his ranch in Crawford has led him to chose to send 20,000 phantom soldiers to Iraq in the hope that this will lead to victory. Victory will come, according to the President, when the stars are covered with blood, the night is as bright as the day, and the last Islamofascist is strangled with the guts of the last polar bear.

Yes, there is some coordination between Bruno’s mock apocalypse and the apocalyptic mockery of this Presidency.

The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast was an expensive pamphlet. It cost Bruno his hide – officially, he was burned at stake by the Church because of the heretical views he expressed in it. Of course, those views had to be found by trained allegorists, since the pamphlet is a dialogue about the ‘reformation’ of the Zodiac. It appears that Jupiter is unsatisfied with the Zodiac’s current figures, old guys from long decayed systems of superstition. Momus, acting as the devil’s helper, suggests many criticisms of these figures to the Lord of Lords – for instance, he says of Orion

„On this, Neptune asked, what, o Gods, do you want to do with my favorite, my dear, Orion is the one I’m talking about, who, as some etymologists believe, causes the heavens out of pure fear to urinate? Then Momus answered: Let me, o Gods, make a suggestion! There’s a Napolitan saying that goes, the macaroni falls into the cheese – which is what we are faced with. This one truly understands performing miracles on every side, and as Neptune well knows, he can wander over the waves of the sea without sinking, yes, without getting his feet wet, and in consequence he can do other beautiful little tricks – now, lets send him down [to exist] among men.“ (my translation of a German translation )

To which Jove said:

“Now do you know, said Jove, what I am deciding to do concerning that one [Orion] in order to avoid any possible future scandal? I want him to go down to earth; and I shall command that he lose all power of performing bagatelles, impostures, acts of cunning kind actions, and other miracles that are of no worth, because I do not want him together with the other to be in a position to destroy whatever excellence and dignity are found and exist in things necessary to the commonwealth of the world.” (translated by Arthur D
Imerti)

Now, if the Zodiac is to be reformed, and superstition is to be swept from the skies like so many old cobwebs carried off by a good huswife’s broom, one would expect that a sort of festival of reason would install, in their place, symbols of our mental dignity. O shades of the French Revolution! But this is to underestimate Bruno’s own peckerwood sense of dialectics – for Bruno, the ludicrous is not opposed to reason, but exists at its secret thumping heart. Thus, Jove suggests sending an ass up to the sky – asinine reason, heehawing its way through infinity! which necessarily encompasses nothingness…

This tickles the line of thought I’ve been pursuing lo these many and weary posts through this blog. But lets return to one of the tricks of our own urinating Orion – with which I began. While not exactly a giant hunter – the Bush administration’s giant hunter is best known for scattershooting an old lawyer – certainly the administration seems to love engaging in sleight of hand games. And LI suspects that reforming the zodiac – taking down the war culture – has to be the end result of opposing the Bush administration. It isn’t a question of just withdrawing from Iraq - it is a question of destroying a whole system of superstitions, the economic and cultural interlocking of a giant, war producing mindset – planetset in the name of … well, that is the question.

…

LI has noted the vast fluffing of General Petraeus in the press. David Ignatius publishes another paen in his WAPO column today. The subject is Petraeus’ apparently brilliant insight that successful counter-insurgency strategies don’t involve the massive projection of force guided by the precept of optimally guarding each individual soldier from risk. Wow! If this is what it takes to be a military genius, I suppose LI should apply to West Point – we made this point what, two years ago? Three years ago? Here’s Ignatius on Petraeus’ field manual:

The field manual summarizes some of the lessons that commanders have learned in Iraq: Long-term success "depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government's rule." Killing insurgents "by itself cannot defeat an insurgency." Local commanders "have the best grasp of their situations" and should have the freedom to adapt and react to local conditions. As many officers ruefully admit, the Army is learning these lessons three years late -- but perhaps that's still in time to make a difference.

My favorite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a big hand in drafting, is a section titled "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations." The headings give the flavor of these unconventional ideas: "Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be." (Green Zone residents, please note: "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.") "Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction." "Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot." And this military version of the Zen riddle: "The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is, the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted." (As the host nation takes control, "Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more risk to maintain involvement with the people.")

The abiding lesson of this manual comes in one of Petraeus's paradoxes, and it ought to be engraved as the cornerstone of U.S. policy going forward, regardless of whether there is a troop surge: "The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well." In making this point, Petraeus cites the godfather of counterinsurgency warriors, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who said when he was U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971: " We can't run this thing. . . . They've got to run it."

The last paragraph is, of course, itself fluff. What we are doing Well is – protecting American troops. The same thing that General McClellan did well in 1862. Compare this to, say, our post from June 26th, 2006, with which I will end this here long long long post:

... This misses the bloody crux, the structure, the very moral economy of the American way of warfare. If forces are kept to a minimum and if force is proportioned to some threshold point beyond which you antagonize the population, you will, inevitably, suffer much higher casualties. If American soldiers winnow through a village, looking only for insurgents, they are much likely to be injured or killed than if they plow through the village in the balls out, mega-American way. And the soldiers know that. The American soldier has been trained to think that the preservation of his life is the prime objective. He has been raised in the spirit of McLellan, and advances with the firepower of Grant, which is why America always wins the wars that it loses. This is why the American soldier is good in a battlefield situation such as presented itself in WWII, or in the First Gulf War, and entirely sucks at counterinsurgency. And will always suck. Because the higher risk brings with it the question: what am I doing here? Since American interests have nothing to do with the Iraq war – it was commenced and continued solely to serve the vanity of a small D.C. clique – the only way to keep waging it as what it is in reality – the usurpation of American forces for mercenary purposes on the part of a power mad executive – is to wage it with as few American deaths as possible. The Bush doctrine converges with the Powell doctrine – overwhelming force = lucrative contracts to war contractors + lack of visible sacrifice to the Bush base.

The logic here is inexorable. Either a greater number of Americans die, or a greater number of Iraqis die. Americans have decided to pretend that the greater the number of Iraqi deaths, the more the Americans are winning. That, of course, is bullshit. Which is why the argument that the U.S. troops should stay in for humanitarian reasons is bullshit – the logic of American strategy will continue to maximize the number of Iraqi deaths, or it will have to face the repulsion of American public opinion as American deaths go racheting up. It won’t do the latter. The rulers actually fear the American population in their nasty, prolonged wars. Fear that the population doesn't want to fight. This is their worry. This is what they work at. Both parties, it goes without saying. This is what all the bogus talk about "will" is about.

They are afraid of us. Doesn't that imply that they have something to be afraid about?

Stab this war in the back.

The Basho of economics

No doubt, this is of no interest to anybody but me. So, excuses in advance. But ... guess what? The book I translated - the Basho of Economics, by Silja Graupe - has been accepted by the Ontos Press. Publication, boys and girls!

So allow me to be totally gross for a second and quote from the acceptance letter. This is so gross I advise you to shield your eyes and come back to Limited Inc when I have something better to lay before you.

Here it is. The quote. Our acceptance letter. Ha ha ha!

I just had a look at the translation. As I expected, Roger did a truly outstanding job--the result is faithful to the 'intellectual feel' of the original yet reads as smoothly and lively as an original text (and the technical terminology is recaptured expertly, with great precision and sensitivity--congratulations to both of you, Roger and Silja, to the splendid result of your intense and dedicated collaboration on this project!)

Life is good. The champagne's on me. How much is it a bottle again, bartender? ...

The Nietzsche Peace Tribunal initiative

LI checked around to see how Peace was doing this weekend. You remember peace – as in, ain’t gonna study war no more and other songs popular in kindergarten. During the hoopla that preceded putting Jerry Ford in the ground, there was surprisingly little talk about peace – which would have surprised people in the seventies. Nixon couldn’t make a foreign policy move without invoking Peace. Even Reagan would genuflect to Peace.

Interestingly, I don’t have an aural memory of Bush using the word. Surely he has at some point – but not as though Peace were, ultimately, a Goddess that we must assuage. Talking about this with my brother the other day, I told him that there is a phrase, hypocrisy is the tithe vice pays to virtue. He repeated the phrase a little doubtfully – my bro immediately gets suspicious when I get all epigrammatic and shit. He didn’t think it lessened Nixon’s crimes that he used the word Peace. Myself, I was just trying to look on the bright side!

The first thing I noticed is that the newspapers are floating another trivial project – a mere 100 billion dollars to “replace” our aging nuclear missiles with brand new ones, which might require underground testing. Now, if somebody was talking about spending 100 billion dollars to extend health coverage for people in my income bracket (the botched lowest 10 percent), there would, of course, be an outcry. We can’t do things like that. But for the peculiar geometric shape we all know and love, the Pentagon, 100 billion dollars is really a computer blip. After all, that 100 billion will flow to the people who need and deserve it most – the network of war industries out there, just aching to employ our finest engineers, who in turn are always just aching to see Free Enterprise unleashed upon the lazy masses. There’s nothing like an exception in an ideology to make it go down like sugared urine.

We did like the comments by one of the Pentagon Generals who, obviously, was interrupted in the middle of some sweet, erotic daydream about launching his pretties on the fuckin’ Russkie Islamofascists:

“Administration officials and military officers like General James Cartwright, head of the Strategic Command, which controls the nation's nuclear arsenal, argue that because the United States provides a nuclear umbrella for so many allies, it is critical that its stockpile be as reliable as possible.

"We will not 'un-invent' nuclear weapons, and we will not walk away from the world," Cartwright said in an interview. "Right now, it is not the nation's position that zero is the answer to the size of our inventory."

He added: "So, if you are going to have these weapons, they should be safe, they should be able to be secured, and they should be reliable if used."

Safety and reliability! That’s the ticket. If we must kill 2 million people, we want them to be the right 2 million people, after all. What kind of barbarians do you think we are? The NYT newspaper reporter did not record if he zipped up before or after this statement of the case, but surely those strong words must have left some telltale stain upon his uniform trousers.

Looking around for more hopeful Peace stuff, we went to the blog of the Perdana Peace Initiative, supposedly launched to criminalize war. Unfortunately, the signatories of the blog, all members of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, have an inverted idea of peace. For them, peace seems to involve the total increase of conflict.

It was not Saddam Hussein’s death warrant that Nouri Al-Maliki signed so publicly but his own political and moral downfall along with that of the militias and gangs he is leading. The haste and the glee with which Maliki rushed through the execution exposes clearly the sole division that exists in Iraq, between the occupation and its local lackeys and the Iraqi population and its resistance to America's murderous agenda. This execution finds its place within an American strategy that at the least seeks to humiliate Iraq and at worst aims to foment mass civil strife if not a wider regional conflict.

The criminal Maliki government cannot now be recognised by any
government, institution, association or citizen as either a protector of Iraq and its people, or of legality and Iraqi custom.
Only the Iraqi national popular resistance is the guarantor and
protector of Iraqi sovereignty and the continuity of the Iraqi state.

The national popular resistance is the only legal authority that can
represent the Iraqi people and determine a path towards peace and
stability in Iraq.”

Notice the very sound of this - it is the language of the secret policeman as he breaks your glasses. It goes on and on, pretty much an anti-Shiite screed. While of the opinion that Hussein was lynched and his lynching used as a sign that the government and its allies desire the crushing of the Sunni population, we would think that a peace organization would do some general deploring and then advise negotiation – for negotiation between all parties in Iraq is, really, the only way out. There are models for this – for instance, the negotiation that ended the war in Northern Iraq between Kurdish factions in the 90s. Negotiation involves, first, less intransigence about legitimacy. It involves, second, a minimum of self policing. But such is not the route taken by this supposed peace organization, which apparently thinks that there is one thing called the national popular resistance. If only there were! And the use of the usual branding words – Hussein as the legitimate head of the government, Maliki as a criminal, etc., etc. – are so much useless confetti. Hussein, it should perhaps be recalled to these representatives of the Peace goddess, launched a devastating war against Iran in 1980, thus making legitimacy a mask for the far greater crime of warmongering.

There are legislators in the Kuwaiti parliament who are calling for retaliation against those governments that have expressed shock at Saddam’s death. What do you expect from Kuwaiti parliamentarians? But this antique, militant and futile language from supposed peace activists is as depressing as the tortures, explosions, and casualties it countenances. Poor Bertrand Russell, whose name is now being used as a shell to disguise calls to further mass murder! LI is very tempted to form a real Peace tribunal, and name it after Nietzsche.

America's new plan in Iraq: theocracy and mass murder

The NYT pokes through the ashes of Saddam Hussein’s execution in a long article that tells us what this occupation has wrought. In one of history’s practical jokes, the phrase that American warmongers can’t get enough of when talking about Iran – those mad mullahs, that mullah ridden country, the word mullah repeated like a charm against the evil of the evil axis – has become the term that designates the government that has been installed, step by step, in Iraq, with the Americans playing the role of sublimely unconscious instruments. This fact, somehow, never crops up when the Americans are discussing why they are in Iraq – the official version, which has been erected like the Berlin wall in the MSM, is that Americans stand for “democracy.” Here is a salient paragraph from the NYT article about Iraq’s “democracy”:

“Mr. Khalilzad had suggested that the Iraqis get a written ruling approving the execution from Midhat al-Mahmoud, the chief judge of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council; Mr. Mahmoud refused. Then, the Iraqis played their trump card: a call to high-ranking Shiite clerics in the holy city of Najaf, asking for approval from the marjaiya, the supreme authority in Iraqi Shiism. When his officials reported that they had it, Mr. Maliki signed a letter authorizing the hanging. It was 11:45 p.m.”

Let’s be clear, as your average Pentagon voxbox likes to say: the government in Iraq is another Shiite mullah led state. Victory – the precious relic that Bush has carried over from his cheerleader days – means simply that the Shiite mullahs crush the Sunnis. That’s it. Victory is the triumph of a paler form of Khomenei-ism, and this has been acknowledged, in practice, by this administration. The Sunni insurgents have every reason, at the moment, to fight, and fight as hard as they can, since their extermination is on the table. The upcoming murders of American soldiers, the blood of whom is on Bush’s head, will only serve either to cement the mass murder and the installation of a theocracy or to fail at that mission. That’s it.

The good news from Iraq yesterday was that corpses were found on Haifi street hung from streetlamps – a more merciful form of murder, surely, than getting the dentist drill through your eyeball, favored by the Badr brigade and the Mahdi militia.

Cursing our rebel in chief

LI read the NYT article about the planned surge, and we have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we want the troops out now. On the other hand, deepening the military failure in Iraq and crippling American power for the next decade, which is what the Bush plan will result in, does have some advantages over the long term. To use a phrase right wing commentators apply to Arabic governments, D.C. only really understands humiliation. On the one hand, the increase in American troops is really an increase in targets and shooters, and will lead to pointless violence in the service of an impossible end. There is no pro-American force left in Iraq – save quasi-independent North Iraq. That North Iraq is pro-American and hosts no American troops is not a coincidence – if American troops are deployed there, soon enough the cracks in the Kurdish system, papered over after the 96 civil war, will reappear.

The Bush plan calls, ultimately, for 20,000 more troops. News reports indicate that there are only 9,000 more troops to send at the moment. Having inflicted a generational wound on the officer caste, the administration does seem determined to recycle volunteers until they are stressed beyond use.

It is an interesting strategy. At the moment, the U.S. has pretty much left Afghanistan to the mercies of the ad hoc NATO forces. Our ally, Pakistan, has given al Qaeda the kind of territory within which to train whatever paramilitary troops it needs – and al Qaeda is good at taking advantage of these respites. It took advantage of the Sudan sojourn to design the embassy hits, of the shelter provided by the Taliban to target the WTC, and now, under the benign Musharref and with the blind eye given by this administration, who knows what wonders will emerge from the deeps? Neglecting the terrorists so that they can make attacks is pretty much priority number one in the long long long long war – otherwise, its absolute ridiculousness is pretty quickly exposed. It would be a short short short war, and where is the power and profit in that?

So, just as the Sunnis realize that they are targeted for annihilation by the Iraqi government – the clear message sent by the manner in which Saddam H. was murdered – Bush is proposing an escalation that, inevitably, will rush from one place to another, shredding people along the way, and operating as a reserve force of executioners manipulated by the peculiarly airless circle of Shiite Islamicists who are in charge in Iraq. As the last act of their sanglante orgy, this might cover Bush’s ass until he is squeezed out of office. One can only hope that the perpetual revulsion of all the nations, including the U.S., who have been victimized by his Neronian vanity dogs him in his retirement to his dying day.

occupations - the Sorrow and the Pity

A few years ago, there was a deal of noise around the reissue of the Battle of Algiers – Pentagon honchos had a special showing, policy wonks and pundits got to review the film (showing why they shouldn’t review the film) and, in fact, there were things in the Battle of Algiers that have happened in Iraq – although there is nothing quite like the Battle of Baghdad that we are seeing now, with ethnic cleansing going on inside the city while outside, the Sunni insurgency is turning the screws inch by inch to turn off the city’s services. The more valid comparison might be to the Paris Commune.

However, a film that is just as relevant to the occupation in Iraq is the Sorrow and the Pity. I know that now, because I watched the Sorrow and the Pity for the first time two days ago.

The German occupation of France was spread out over 3 years – much like the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The first occupation was covered by a collaborationist government – much like the second. The first occupation involved resistance to the occupiers, which was labeled terrorism by the occupiers – much like the second (there is a fascinating interview with a former German soldier who tells the story of a German troop, passing by a group of peasants, who – as soon as the troop goes by – unsheathes weapons and kills fourteen of the Germans. And he says, these peasants wore no uniforms. They had no stripes on their sleeves. They were terrorists, and how do you deal with people like that – shades of Americanspeak in Iraq! Shades, actually, of the discourse put about by Israeli officials last summer about Hezbollah. Invading forces are always aggrieved that they have to institute a policy of slaughtering civilians – so much simpler to once and for all devastate a uniformed army. If the occupied aren’t going to cooperate, what are you going to do?). The first occupation also involved a boom in the capital city – while the Germans were stealing as much of the French economy as possible, there was sufficient spending in Paris that the upper middle class had a blast. The race track opened, theater tickets were selling at a premium, there were fashionable dresses on the backs of fashionable gals. Similarly, the second occupation involved a two fold economic fact – mass and stark unemployment, on the one hand, and a boom in consumer goods in Baghdad, on the other hand. Fleeing into Jordan, a middle class Baghdadi family can now take with them quite a few electronic gadgets they could never have purchased under Saddam, or at least under the sanction regime.

It was also interesting to see how the curve of resistance inevitably goes upward. The odd American notion that the occupiers will be resisted less each year comes out of some woozy notion of occupying Germany in 1945. Actually, most occupations have a pretty predictable schedule – the occupation becomes more and more unpopular the longer it goes on. To quench that unpopularity, the occupiers have to become harsher and harsher – they have to engage, at the very least, in discrete ethnic cleansing. A one hundred or two hundred year occupation – say, the occupation of India by the British – requires periodic repressions, plus – in the Indian case – the fragmentation of the former powers, and terror famines.

The two most fascinating characters in The Sorrow and the Pity are the former French nazi, Christian de La Mazière, who is one of those plausible French fascists, and the two peasant resisters, Louis Grave and his brother, Alexis. Both were socialists, of course. The movie was shot within a memory frame close enough to the actual events so that the nonsense about the Communists really not being the backbone of the resistance hadn’t been spread about by the inheritors of the bourgeois indifference or collaboration in France. The notion that the Communists were fighting for the Soviet Union is as laughable as the idea that the British were fighting to make America a hyper-power – but, of course, the reactionary crap spewed out first by the ‘New Philosophers’ and then by a generation of ‘moderates’ has engulfed the period in a very fake revisionism.

France, we are often told, horribly betrayed the Jews who had fled to the country. This is very true. What is elided, here, is that they fled to France partly because the Communist dominated Popular Front initiated the most wide open refugee policy in Europe in the thirties – vastly more wide open than the U.S., which virtuously made it as hard as possible for fleeing Jews to gain entrance, and of course gave no refuge to fleeing Spanish Republicans, etc., etc. So there were, numerically, vastly more Jewish refugees caught in France when the country fell to Hitler. Britain, which could easily have accommodated them in the thirties, of course refused them entrance as much as they could. Varian Fry, the American who, as France fell, saved as many Jews as he could, sending them to the U.S., was reproached by his American superiors at the time and persecuted by the McCarthyites in the early fifties. The U.S. simply grudges refuge to the persecuted – at the present time, for instance, doing all it can to keep out Iraqis who have been stupid enough to trust Americans, and who are fleeing the dental drills of Bush’s friend Hakim’s Badr Brigade. Other countries – Jordan, Thailand, Kenya – scattered throughout the third world have, in the past fifty years, had to set up huger refugee camps and, out of their few resources, support them – but the vastly wealthier Americans never do things like that.

the actor and the hangman

We have been wrestling with a fact we stumbled over a few days ago. We were researching Tom Paine’s years in revolutionary Paris, and his friendships with the group known as the Gironde. And we came across the famous day, in the National Assembly, when the motion was made to grant Jews full civil rights. This moment has been treated as an important symbol, and it is an important symbol. It marked the end of Christendom, for instance – the rotten structure finally collapsing completely. It marked the beginning of modernity – with an appropriate ironic chaser, since the legislation came on the heels of a pogram in Alsace. But we had not realized that the legislation came as a sort of afterthought that day. The topic of extending civil status was brought up by Clermont Tonnerre, but the original objects of that extension were: the hangman and the actor.

Gaston Maugras’ Les comediens hors la lois has the full story:

“

At the opening of the session, Clermont-Tonnerre climbed to the podium to defend his project: “Professions,” he said, “are obnoxious (nuisibles) or not. If they are, it is a habitual crime that justice must reprimand. If they aren’t, the law must be adapted to justice, which is the source of the law. It must reach out to correct the abuse, and not to chop down the tree it is necessary to prop up or correct.”

Then, speaking of the two professions (of hangman [executioner - bourreau] and actor) “that the law puts on the same level, but that are not uninjured by their rapprochment, “he asks for the simultaneous rehabilitation of the hangman and the actor: “for the hangman,” he says, “ it is simply a matter of combating prejudice… All that the law ordains is god: it ordains the death of a crimina, the executioner does nothing more than obey the law. It is absurd that the law says to a man: “do this, and if you do it, you will be guilty of a crime.”

Passing to actors, he demonstrated that, in their regard, the prejudice is established on what they are under the dependence of public opinion. “This dependence makes our glory and it flays them,” he cries. “Honest citizens can represent on the stage the chef-d’oeuvres of the human spirit, works filled with the healthy philosophy that, thus put in a position where every human can appreciate it, has prepared, successfully, the revolution that is now in operation, and you tell them: you are Comediens du Roi, you occupy the national theater, and you are criminal (infame)! The law must not let this crime subsist.”

This sounds like an old and done story, but the issues, here, continue to provoke us – drug dealers and prostitutes, for instance, bear the burden of the crime law even though it isn’t clear that these professions are anything more than wretchednesses made wretched by the law itself. Using the law as a means of showing moral disabrobation is, again, something that was never resolved in the Revolution, and is stilltje unresolved now. However, the historic question for me is how it happened that the hangman, the actor, and the Jew ended up as figures of a certain boundary – the figures that, given civil status, liquidated the Christian state. The Jew as other is now a bit of a philosophical cliché, but the actor and the executioner…

Interestingly, arguing passionately against the removal of the taint against the actor that day was a priest. And the issue moved into Rousseau’s Letter to D’alambert, and the notion that actors bring corruption. About which, more later.