chomsky on biosphere and enforcement

Humanity Imperiled: The path to disaster.

by Noam Chomsky

What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now—assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious — and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

science, galileo and us

Notes on the First Two Paragraphs of Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Gene Ray

The two paragraphs that open Dialectic of Enlightenment (hereafter DoE) set out some key elements of the Frankfurt critique of modernist science. The text, based on transcribed discussions between Horkheimer and Adorno (H&A), was worked up in Los Angeles between 1941 and 1944. Toward the end of that period, Brecht, also in exile in LA, began the collaboration with Charles Laughton that would result in 1947 in the staging of a revised, post-Hiroshima Life of Galileo. In both DoE and Galileo, the problem of science and its broken promise is forcefully, if differently, inscribed. Now as then, the problem is an urgent one.

The following notes belong to a work-in-progress: Galileo in the Force Field reflects on the legacies of modernist science, still-unfolding in world facing biospheric meltdown. More notes and fragments will follow, on the way to book-form. Here, I re-read the remarkable opening of DoE; rereading it, I end up retranslating the first two paragraphs. These are offered, for better or worse, followed by a short commentary and some remarks on the standard translations. In this context (scurvy tunes), the gist of H&A’s paragraphs and their importance for a critical reorientation of science will, I trust, resonate helpfully.

holmes on paglen

Visiting the Planetarium
Images of the Black World
 

by Brian Holmes

Clouds, fields, forests, country roads, empty skies: the video image shows you a landscape seen at random, or for purposes utterly unknown. Its shifting perspectives appear through the visual overlay of a targeting system, controlled by a distant operator. This is a drone’s eye view. The signal was captured from a satellite transmission, maybe intended for Creech Air Base, Nevada. We see a date and a local time, but the position remains blank—it could be in Kosovo or elsewhere in southern Europe. There’s something hesitant, furtive or even lost about the way the drone is scanning through the territory. Suddenly a large wall clock flashes up on the screen. Its face is emblazoned with a dragon-winged creature, threatening and strange, but typical of the emblems used by Air Force reconnaissance teams. Is it supposed to mark a significant moment, a planned operation, a hit? More likely it’s the cypher of some airman’s utter boredom, alone in a cubicle, glued to a monitor, staring at meaningless foreign landscapes whose very banality has become part of the secret.
   
The video was given to Trevor Paglen by one of his collaborators—people who are intensely curious about what goes on in the restricted zones of the Pentagon’s “black world.” It was then edited and folded into a larger body of work, to be shown in galleries and museums. Thus it has the status of a clue, an index, rather than a document strictly speaking. It points to a set of pressing questions that involve the uses of vision, the potentials of art and the bases of sovereignty. These questions coalesce around a major paradox: the existence of a secret world that is increasingly palpable, increasingly present. Why has the invisible become so banal, why does it crop up everywhere? Paglen does not answer individually. Instead, he seems intent on exploring — and, to whatever degree possible, on reversing — the social conditions of perception that allow multibillion-dollar weapons systems and vast clandestine intelligence networks to “hide” in the broad daylight of a democracy that is also an empire.

new false start

New START's Big Winners: US Nuke Complex, Pentagon, and Contractors

by Darwin Bond-Graham

(17 Sept 2010)

Passage of New START in a 14-4 vote out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is already being hailed by Democrats and arms control NGOs as a substantial victory. A floor vote for ratification is now apparently set to occur after the elections.

While ratification is by no means guaranteed, there are several clear winners already: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet General, Alliant Techsystems, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories, Y-12 nuclear labs, the Pentagon, and Bechtel Corporation.

While much noise has been made about the New START treaty's cut to the nuclear weapons stockpile, the actual required reduction in arms may be as low as 8%, or 162 warheads out of a total of thousands. Furthermore, keep in mind too that this only affects deployed strategic warheads, not "tactical" weapons, and not weapons in the "reserve" stockpile.

So why the big deal? Why are both sides fighting like mad over a treaty that really requires virtually no change to the status quo US-Russia relationship and US nuclear stockpile?

atomkraft? nein danke

On Saturday a large and spirited demonstration marched through Berlin’s governmental quarter, filling the air with drumming, whistles and catcalls. The largest anti-nuke demo seen in Germany since the years of Chernobyl was organized with impressive rapidity in response to Merkel’s backdoor deal with the nuclear power industry. At the front of the demo were farmers and tractors from the Wendland, where the Gorleben nuclear waste storage site remains a perennial flashpoint for resistance. Otherwise, it looked and felt like an inter-generational sampling of the middle classes – confirmation of the mainstream character of opposition to nuclear power in Germany.

Organizers claim 100,000 people took to the streets in protest. Police under-counters countered with 40,000. Even splitting the difference at 70,000, this was a mobilization too large to be ignored. And with all the grassroots and activist networks involved, as well as parties (Greens, SPD, die.Linke), it’s not likely to be a one-off. The networks are already focused on Gorleben: there is a buzz that this year they may actually be able to stop the Castor train with massive blockades.

Merkel’s governing CDU-FDP coalition had been signaling for weeks that it would seek to roll back the scheduled phase-out of German nuclear power plants enacted by Schröder’s SPD-Green government with strong public support in 2002. Nuclear power company CEOs went into a closed-door meeting with Merkel’s economic minister and party leaders late Sunday morning, on 5 September. When they came out in the wee hours before dawn on the following Monday, the deal was done: Germany’s 17 nuke plants would extend operations for an average of 12 years beyond the currently scheduled shut-down dates, the extensions subsidized with massive state hand-outs. The scandal is in the form as well as the content: Merkel’s initiative, undertaken without any mandate and initially opposed by her own environmental minister, is the literal negation of democracy.
GR

to gorleben

After Chernobyl, nuclear power lost whatever legitimacy it had managed to attain by relentless spin and obfuscation. Aside from safety problems in the plants themselves, the radioactive waste produced is a problem that has never been solved or honestly confronted. Moreover, the nuclear power industry is practically the condition of the nuclear weapons complex with which it merges on many levels. So long as nuclear power persists, nuclear weapons remain possible; only by shutting down the nuclear power complex will the abolition of nuclear weapons be realized dependably. In this light, IAEA and NPT are the administrative-diplomatic instruments of the dominant states, with the US at their head: crucial parts of an enforcement regime by which the global social process is reproduced. The re-branding of nuclear power as the great clean hope for managing climate change without relinquishing the logic of accumulation and infinite growth doesn't change the underlying reality. Anyone who doesn’t want to talk about imperialism had better keep silent about nuclear energy.

The radioactive waste produced by Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants is stored in Gorleben, in the Wendland region of Lower Saxony. The waste first goes for reprocessing to the La Hague facility in France. From there it is shipped back to Germany by train on the notorious annual “Castor” transport, always in November. Two interim depots close to the Elbe River hold the toxic material while construction continues on a “permanent” depot in the underground salt dome there.

Resistance to the Castor trains has been broad and determined. Direct action tactics have included locking sit-down blockades on the tracks. In 2004, the police failed to clear the tracks near Harlingen, and a protester was killed when the Castor train severed his leg. This is enforcement by state terror, against which pulses the re-gathered courage and resilience of those who won't be cowed.
GR

For more, see Ausgestrahlt and Castor Nix.

on the german green resurgence

In the week after Merkel’s deal with the nuke industry was made public, polls registered a sharp spike in support for the Green Party. Nationally, they are suddenly polling 22 percent, and in Berlin are approaching 30 percent. Whether this represents a durable shift in the parliamentary landscape remains to be seen.

In any case, it is a good time to remember the instructive trajectory and shabby fall of the German Greens over the last decade. Formed in the aftermath of 1968 and the repression of the student movement, the Greens advanced four clear principles: ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. Initially at least, the Greens’ stylistic affronts to the conservative German political class were accompanied by an alternative vision that included some substantively radical challenges to the status quo.

Over time a split emerged, however, that would prove fatal. The Realos, oriented toward electoral campaigning and longing to participate in a governing coalition, eventually banished the Fundis, who held to the founding principles. Under Fischer, the Greens were transformed from a party of principle to one more instance of neo-liberal opportunism. They were soon rewarded with power and major portfolios. As Foreign Minister, Fischer’s first major test came with the crisis of Yugoslavia. He proved pliable, presiding over and defending with double-talk the first foreign deployment of German troops since World War II. And he never looked back – non-violence indeed.

The Fundis reorganized as the Ökologische Linke, or ÖkoLinX as it is also known, and renewed their commitment to radical change. The ÖL's five-point stance is critical and unequivocal: 1. Against capital and for solidarity and radical ecology; 2. Against patriarchy and for feminism; 3. Against racism and for internationalism; 4. Against militarism; and 5. Against the state and for grassroots democracy. Despite the guiding presence of the often brilliant Jutta Ditfurth, the ÖL was punished with marginalizing ostracism. It remains active, and is never missing from any important demo or protest action. But its fate speaks much about the compromises required by capitalist pseudo-democracy. Only the pressure from below of larger radical movements can dissolve the stasis.

Wherever the Green Party will go from here, it is not likely to be radical. Before Merkel’s nuke fiasco, Green politicians were busy cozying up to the CDU and dreaming publicly of a Conservative-Green coalition. "Now we are preparing ourselves to become the ruling party."(Renate Künast) Its current orientation and leadership is irredeemable; its corrupted realism does insult to the color green. Real change in the party would take a revolution from below. The real crises of objective processes call for nothing less.
GR

against forgetting

"Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it 'the way it really was.' It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious."

Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940), thesis VI.

It's a struggle - to remember the victims, to mourn and ask again what is to be done. To denounce the criminals and their crimes, refuse the unceasing invitations to their victory celebrations, their false reconciliations and commanded identities.

Genocidal techno-power is no accident. It is an appearance-form of a master logic: the unfolding of a global social process, capitalist modernity and its proliferating antagonisms, the sequential crystallizations of the social force field, its relations and tendencies.

The moments and turns of class struggle on a global scale, the hot house of racing accumulation and imperialist rivalry, the emergency mutations of the capitalist state, administration and integration, the use and normalization of terror - in a word, enforcement.

Now, this year, the spectacle announces, "the world" will commemorate Hiroshima Day. And for the first time, an official US envoy will "attend" ceremonies in the city destroyed by the first use of nuclear WMDs on this day 65 years ago.

What is the meaning of this "envoy" and this "attendance"? Does it announce that the perpetrating state will now express some form of official regret or apology? No. And what if it did? The only statement that would not be another dissembling victory of conformism would be a the speech of serious acts and measures toward disarmament and nuclear abolition.

Instead, the official rhetoric in this direction is covering a massive increase in US spending on the nuclear arsenals: 'modernization' processes that will lock in these WMDs and the US state's continuing dependence on them for another half-century.

The struggle against forgetting is waged from the bottom up. It has nothing to do with the official commemoration of states or the pseudo-critical mouthing of national stains. The work of this struggle is ours to do, with hell hounds at our heels.

GR

day of infamy

Guerrilla street theater by the Carnival of Democracy Players, Sarasota, Florida, 6 August 2001.

Photos by Gaby.

ghost sited

Greg Sholette sends this snapshot from his Return of the Atomic Ghosts project.

co-opting zero

Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement

by Darwin BondGraham

No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film.  Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation.  The Soviets glorified their revolution with The Battleship Potemkin.  Then there was Triumph of the Will.

A typical propaganda film tugs at emotions and invokes fears.  It invokes dark threats to "the people," and it offers up solutions extolling state and corporate power.  Unlike a political documentary it will not criticize the state or corporations.  Instead it will celebrate great men as our leaders and saviors.  Distinct from a run-of-the-mill political documentary, a propaganda film butchers the complexity and contradictions that permeate politics and real life, presenting things in simplistic moral terms.  Functionally, propaganda is mobilized to secure popular support for a primary, often hidden agenda that is not apparent in the film's narrative.  Propaganda is a tool used by elites to secure the consent of the masses, channeling their anxieties.

Now hitting theaters is one of the most dangerous propaganda films produced in decades.  Countdown to Zero "traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs."  A promotional blurb on the film's web site claims that it "makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal today."

Before I go any further in explaining Countdown as a propaganda film I should note that not all propaganda need be the product of a secretive and manipulative council of elites behind some curtain.  Instead, the many contributors to Countdown and its promotional efforts have different motivations and intentions.  What makes this film a coherent piece of propaganda is its medium, style, and likely effects on the US political climate.  There are powerful actors who will use it for nefarious ends.

On its surface Countdown to Zero is about nuclear disarmament, but deeper down the film is making a very specific case that isn't about disarmament at all.  Its political function will prove to be quite different.  Countdown is joining a suite of political campaigns and other propagandistic efforts, the point of which is to build support for increased US spending on nuclear weapons, as well as a more belligerent foreign policy, based around Islamophobic depictions of "terrorists" and "rogue states."  Countdown is likely to be used by hawks to drum up support for military action against Iran, North Korea, and other states that would dare to transgress the current near-monopoly that a handful of states have on the bomb.

beyond enforcement

Beyond Enforcement:

Traversing State Terror and the Politics of Fear

by Gene Ray

Crises arrive, as if from somewhere, fall like night, bear down, take hold, bite like jaws of teeth, squeeze like vises, break like storms or bubbles: effects ripple pitilessly, positions crumble, assets vanish in a spreading slippage, a sucking from below, an awful culling of the weak and exposed. Planetary meltdowns loom, impend.  Economies grow, and slow, but must grow, must be made to grow, to expand, spiraling incessantly, an immense entwining of flows, the dance of commodities, the “ever new production of the always-the-same.” And resources deplete, oil produced over millennia is turned to fume in two centuries, atoms are split, waste accumulates, like a darkening shadow, a hovering toxin, another ghost of capital. And still the frenzied racing, the rivaled eyeing, muscles flexing, markets judging, terminal arsenals still on fifteen-minute alert, a world awash in arms, skies filling with terminator drones.

    

Within a given social process, a field of forces and relations in motion, one generated tendency becomes a dominant, mastering logic. One antagonistic logic, a calculus of advantage, a mode of instrumental reason joined to a relation of domination, spreads, expanding its field, overtaking, overwhelming, deranging, pulverizing, liquidating whatever constrains it, consolidating, entrenching, and becomes global – the master logic of a global social process. And reason thereby recoils, becomes unreason, hostile and heedless, eating its own tail. Capitalist modernity and the social world, ours, it has produced: a world turned against its producers escapes all control, is seen finally to have been a terminal, omnicidal logic, busily, blindly undermining its own conditions, the ecological basis, biosphere, the condition of life on earth.

terror and nuclear politics

But wait, you’re always going on about nukes, and now Obama has made a commitment to reduce them, but you’re still complaining!

Any reductions of nuclear arsenals are welcome, that goes without saying. The problem is rather in what is not said and not done, what is done instead – what’s really going on by means of such “small steps” is the continuing refusal of the decisive and radical step of nuclear abolition.

In the case of certain problems, the strategy of small steps is an evasion. Any reduction of carbon emissions is also, on the face of it, a good thing. But reductions that are far below the rate needed to prevent catastrophic climate change are inadequate and cynical, since they deliberately avoid the essential problem. In that sense, they are politically bogus: they give us the false comfort and security that things are being done, that our smart masters are on it, taking steps in the right direction. Thus our protests and demands for change are emptied of urgency, rendered superfluous.

Moreover, carbon trading schemes reveal what’s behind this fraudulent refusal to change the status quo of unquestioned growth: the market invents ways to capitalize on the fear and real threat of global warming. Misery rendered profitable, disaster capitalism. 

As a technic of terror and genocide, nuclear WMDs have to be refused decisively and absolutely. In this they are like the historical problem of slavery: the liberation of any individual slave is to be celebrated, but only the radical move of abolishing slavery in toto, as an institutionalized social relation, is an adequate political solution.

In Obama’s nuclear posturing (the treaty with Russia in combination with the Washington summit), we have to recognize what he declines to do, refuses to refuse: instead of cutting the knot and pushing for abolition and a secure process of disarmamant (the real conditions for the “nuclear-free world” once lip-served), he opts to manage the status quo. He tries to preserve all existing power relations and asymmetries: a reduction of warheads, but business as usual.

Instead of a clear renunciation of the doctrine of nuclear first strike, he gives us a lawyer’s re-definiton that threatens Iran and North Korea (as signers of the NPT) with a first strike, while Israel (as a non-signer with an arsenal of some 200 nukes) gets yet another pass on its state of exception.

This confirms what Susan Watkins recently concluded in New Left Review: “The role of the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation] Treaty is to insure the nuclear privileges of the haves against the have-nots.” For NPT, read “Non-Protestation Treaty.”

The NPT is one process, among others, aiming to “lull protestation” and bring rebellious states to heel – meaning make them submit to the global order of managed imperialist rivalry, IMF and debtors prison. "Play by the rules" means the rules we dictate.

With regard to nuclear terror, the only real (as opposed to pseudo-) solution is to abolish this category of WMD without exception, a political goal that only the US could convincingly undertake to lead. In contrast, the nuclear club’s retention of member privileges against the excluded is the maintenance of a system of domination – the continuation of global class war by whatever means.

The reality, yet to be faced in political debates, is that the terror and anxiety generated by nuclear arsenals has specific enforcement functions: this terminal genocidal power of state violence, demonstrated on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and by numerous tests in the decades following, is an ultimate deterrent to any substantive change in the given relations of domination. “If you push us too far, and really threaten our power, well, then...”

Moreover, these enforcement functions have transformed processes of "governance" in ways that further constrain and block movements for real democracy and change. These scurvy posts have often pointed to the historical mutations in the US state, which carry special weight given the role of the US war machine in enforcing the global order and insuring that changes develop along certain lines rather than others.

Let’s sum up these mutations: The security and command imperatives of the bomb, in combination with new sectors of profit, transformed a constitutional democracy (imperio-capitalist) into a pseudo-democratic national security regime (imperio-capitalist). The bomb, exerting its own needs and logics over the state as a constant pressure, generated powerful tendencies toward secrecy and increasing concentrations of executive power.

Since 1945 these tendencies transformed the constitutional balance among branches of government, creating a de facto extra-constitutional regime in which exceptional executive privileges and encroachments became normalized. This opened the way, in the Cold War conjuncture, to massive expansions of covert programs, with all the associated opportunities for abuses.

In this light, the restrictions temporarily placed on President and CIA (the prohibition on assassinations, for example) following revelations in the wake of Watergate were a brief pause, a momentary counter-tendency to bomb-generated pressures. The Reagan presidency and Iran-Contra represented the reassertion of these dominant tendencies within the US state. The Bush-Cheney neo-con regime confirmed the overall push toward increasing secrecy, surveillance and executive power, and the Obama administration now confirms its bipartisan character 

A major shift in the strategic logic of the bomb following the end of Cold War bipolarity has not greatly altered or derailed this trajectory of the US national security state initiated in 1945. Many things have changed, but this hasn't. The so-called war on terror provides the needed justifications to continue the normalization of exception, permanent state of emergency, and deepening merger of war machine, science and entertainment industry.

Thirty years ago, E.P. Thompson warned us that nuclear weapons have to be grasped not as things but as social processes. Since those important debates, this problem keeps slipping from conscious attention. While much more critical work in this direction needs to be done, it’s clear that WMDs function as factors of terror within a much vaster system of social control.

To challenge the war machine at the enforcing nexus of this system is to challenge the global rule of capital. These tendencies are far more powerful than any individual politician, and the interests entrenched therein have repeatedly shown their willingness to defend their power and privilege by all means.

Obama, alone, could not have challenged these tendencies and the power they have produced. At most, he could have moved strongly to place the real problem on the agenda for genuine public debate. He did not, but without pressure from below, why should he do so, to his own risk? (There's a dialectic here, and we are naive if we wait for an invitation from power to pay attention, speak out and organize our demands into political force.)

Only states are capable of making and deploying nuclear weapons. These are beyond the means of militant groups and networks, and claims otherwise, whoever makes them, are a lie intending to terrorize. Such is the politics of fear, and Obama has accepted its terms and obligations.

A world in which states are not permitted to make and accumulate WMDs would be a more democratic and transparent world – one of radically increased possibilities for reorganizing social relations.

But a world without WMDs would have to be struggled for, from below and outside, as well as inside the state, with patience, realism and radical aim. But only thus will the rule of terror be broken; it won't be a gift from above. Evading these realities does not escape their power; the repressed returns, and all movements of emancipation will sooner or later have to face this one.

Ecological sanity and the liberation of nature, the master logic of capital accumulation, the global enforcement regime and its fantasy forms of enjoyment: all these belong to a single problematic. They are inseparable; each opens up on the other.

  

Susan Watkins, "The Nuclear non-Protestation Treaty, NLR 54 (Nov/Dec 2008).

Edward Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization" NLR I/121 (May/June 1980)

Raymond Williams, "The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament," NLR I/124 (Nov/Dec 1980)

war porn (1): joysticks

When quantity passes into quality, the whole situational context is altered and a new situation emerges.

As demonstrations of new powers of genocidal violence and state terror, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were qualitative leaps of this kind. These new social facts entered history, objectively changing everything.

The scale of the Nazi genocide, meticulously planned and accounted for behind a veil of Nacht und Nebel, was only retrospectively exposed.

The vast Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons on secret presidential order was kept from the American public until the weapons were actually used; Truman triumphantly announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a fait accompli.

Today, right now, we are living through another qualitative leap in the power of terror and death. But unlike these precedents, this leap has just begun and can still be stopped.

This one, if it is not stopped, will likely be the real legacy of the dirty so-called war on terror.

Without shame or apologies, Obama of the Nobel Peace Prize is presiding over a rapid escalation in the force of unmanned drones used by the US military and CIA for surveillance and assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen.

Introduced by Bush II in tiny numbers, there are now an estimated 7000 drones in operation – and the number is rising fast.

Bomb and missile-carrying drones such as the MQ-1 Predator (cost: $20 million per system) and MQ-9 Reaper ($53 million each) are flown by “joysticks” from air-conditioned rooms in Langley, Virginia, and Creech Air Force Base north of Las Vegas. “War porn,” the troops call it.

 A small number of defense contractors, including Boeing subsidiary Insitu and General Atomics, will split the $3.5 billion allotted for drones in the 2010 budget.

To assassinate Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on 5 August 2009, it took the CIA sixteen drone attempts over fifteen months, killing between 207 and 321 people in the process. How many were civilians? “Disputed,” but the war wagers are sure it’s worth it.

Evidently, so are Israel, Germany and the UK, all of which fly their own fleet of combat drones. Every state that can, obviously, will follow.

Is Finnegan awake? No paranoia needed, to read the writing on this screen.


Already in development: insect-size “nano” drones, which, The New Yorker reports, “can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

Reflect on that, in the glare of the last decade. Reflect on the leap in objective power the state gains by this. Reflect on the state of “democracy” and the rule of exception. Can anyone doubt this will alter social reality and the possibilities for a future?

For now, it takes the appearance-form of assassination power (always with “collateral” killing) – but this obviously does not exhaust potential applications. (And again: where is the outrage and debate over this policy of assassination? Is it now already normalized?)

Reality: killer robotics will expand and combine with qualitative increases in powers of surveillance (think: merger of Google with the NSA) unless massive public outcry and determined protest prevent it.

For the moment, there’s still time to organize it.

Sources:
“Drones Are Lynchpin of Obama’s War on Terror,” dossier by Spiegel Online, 12 Mar 2010.

Interview with P.W. Singer (author of Wired for War), Democracy Now, 6 Feb 2009.

Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker, 26 Oct 2009

genealogy of the current regime

“Le fer brûlé. Le fer brisé, le fer devenu vulnérable comme la chair.”

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959/60

[Iron, material of vaunting structures, symbols of progress from an age of optimism. Ironies of history "made vulnerable as flesh."]

“On August 6, 1945 a New Age began: the age in which at any given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima. On that day we became, at least modo negativo, omnipotent; but since, on the other hand, we can be wiped out at any given moment, we also became totally impotent. However long this age may last, even if it should last forever, it is the “Last Age”: for there is no possibility that its differentia specifica, the possibility of our self-extinction, can ever end – but by the end itself.”

Günther Anders, “Theses for the Atomic Age,” 1959

Collective denials and evasions still in force, blocking, freezing, blinding. Who wants to know, who has time to know, who has the luxury and attention needed to know – and what would anyone do with such knowledge anyway?

Hiroshima: regrettable necessity of the “Good War” against fascism? That lie was long ago exposed, but the exposure still goes unregistered in the place where it counts.

To think and grasp: the global imperialist context 1914-1945 as a single social process (WWI, Russian Revolution, rising US power, defeat of revolution in Germany, fascism in Italy, crisis and Depression, Stalinism, Nazism, crushing of Spanish Republic, WW2, Auschwitz, Hiroshima).

If Auschwitz and Hiroshima cannot be separated from the global process and master logic of capitalist modernity, as it actually unfolded, then what emerges as decisive is the course of class struggle over those three decades. Above all: the defeat of revolution in the capitalist core (Germany, Italy, Hungary) transforms the Russian Revolution into the state capitalism of “socialism in one country,” setting the stage for both Stalinism and Nazism.

Not to say it could not have happened otherwise. Not to deny that this historical period is complex and contradictory. But to acknowledge and to insist on the pressure of the master logic, behind and in the specific processes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

This is what the linkage of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, still so controversial, still so resisted, expresses: not that these event-processes are identical or equivalent, but that they must be grasped and thought together, across their obvious differences. What this “and” says is that both are specific appearance-forms of a single social essence.

And that they in turn transform the way in which this essence will from then on unfold: changing the form of the capitalist state, initiating the normalization of exception. The post-1945, post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima global regime: our social reality.

“Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative forces were developed in a specific global conjuncture of class struggle: they are products of defeats suffered by the exploited and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the weapons of state terror. That is, they are aimed at humanity itself, at the potential humanity carries in itself to overcome its fears and collective self-oppressions and make the social passage from necessity to freedom.”

which terror trumps?

State terror: terminal powers of enforcement.

Auschwitz: objective demonstration of a new state power, administrative-industrial genocide.

Hiroshima: objective demonstration of another new state power, the Weapon of Mass Destruction that self-justifies the merger of science and war machine.

Political necessity of the new regime of exception: an absolute enemy, someone, somewhere, preferably a dark bearded face, an imago to be targeted with trembling and enjoyment, the terminating focus of all displacements in the politics of fear.

This is how the capitalist process reproduces and enforces its own conditions today. And new techno-powers now emerging may also prove qualitative: killer drones and terminator robotics combining with god’s eye satellite and internet surveillance.

Through the chains of mediation – administration, integration, culture industry, spectacle, biopower, “war on terror” – state terror points back to the valorization-accumulation process driving our commodity world, the master logic of capitalist modernity.

But now a new factor points more immediately to the same master logic: collapsing ecologies, degradation and depletion, species extinction and climate change.

In the form of looming planetary meltdown, the capital accumulation process itself becomes directly genocidal.

The more the economies grow, the warmer it gets perforce, sentencing more to misery and death, bringing us all closer to critical tipping point. But in a capitalist world, economies that don’t grow also mean unemployment, misery and death: neo-imperialist war machine.

The alternative to this viciously self-terminating “progress”: global reorganization, collective passage to non-domination, a sustainable social logic.

Formerly, in Marxist vision, this passage was the leap to freedom. Today, the urgency with which it begins to bear down makes it appear rather on the side of constraint: the rational self-constraint now demanded by the same instinct for self-preservation that long ago reversed into its irrational opposite.

Benjamin: revolution as the emergency brake on a runaway train.

The actual problem we face: how to organize the reorganization in a non-catastrophic way.

Eros, the liberation of nature, passes through the passage to classless society, but does not end there.

Ecological meltdown begins by impacting us differently but must end by imposing humanity on us indifferently. Could this constraining imperative then bypass the class struggle, realizing its aims more directly?

Maybe, but not likely, so long as the entrenched regime of class relations retrenches and enforces, as it now is doing.

Which terror trumps? Monstrous question for politicized erotics.

exemplary delusion

“Bomb Power translates directly to information power. Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission.”

“And the power of secrecy that enveloped the Bomb became a model for the planning or execution of Anything Important, as guarded by Important People. Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began to specialize in secret keeping.”

Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010


In the wake of Hiroshima, a new structural-strategic trend: the long-term concentration of executive power, mutating the US state. Wills traces, step by step, the formation of the new regime: a National Security State operating beyond and largely against the US Constitution.

Wills documents the crimes and abuses accumulated by every president from Truman to Bush II, shifting power steadily to the executive branch and there merging with the war machine.

To Wills’ conclusions, we would only need to add: this mutation of the US state unfolding from a new power of terror corresponds to its enforcing functions in the post-1945 global order.

In all of this Obama takes his place, here as elsewhere brings no change.

executive toothpaste

The merger of emergency executive and war machine within the US state is evidently bigger than Obama.

Tone shifts aside, he and his cabinet have drawn back from draw down.

With only minor, token exceptions and despite the complaints of Republicans, the Obama executive has maintained, reinforced and even continued to expand the apparatus, positions and prerogatives put in place by Bush.

Substantially, the war on terror continues. The politics of fear are played in a pleasingly different key, but one year on the logic of homeland security persists where it matters.

Emergency expansions of executive power, once established, are incredibly difficult to roll back. We would need to imagine the conditions for a transition to democracy in the US analogous to post-dictatorship periods in Spain, Chile or Greece. Leonard Cohen, but where is the struggle?

Carte blanche executive violation of standing treaties, secret presidential programs and expenditures, covert acts of war, normalized assassination and “extraordinary renditions,” suspension of habeas corpus and torture by proxy (all evidently in practice under Obama): whether granted by special authorization of Congress or simply unopposed and unprosecuted, such abuses of law clearly liquidate the Constitution.

They effectively reconstitute a new relation between the branches of government – something only Constitutional amendment could do legally. Checks and balances to constrain arbitrary power have been drastically enfeebled.

Q: So why do Congress and Supreme Court endorse the new regime by a mix of approval, silence and inaction? Why do they not “jealously guard” their own designated powers? Where, the trumpeted instinct for "liberty"?

Why, for example, is Kucinich all alone in crying foul (if that mild aside be a cry).

Is it safer in the dark? Is the new militaristic regime too “popular”? Is the populace asleep, apathetic, distracted, too confused and depressed?

Is it the sum of all these, converging with and reinforcing concentrated economic power - the "nexus of profit and secrecy"?

Given the conditions of winning Congressional elections and reelections, is it preferable to feign blindness and hand over powers at the slightest invocation of security shibboleths?
If so, in what ways? Who gains what, by what process?

And the Court, what is the Court after Bush v. Gore? A degraded reflector of the corporate-partisan force field at any given moment - a belated, arbitrary dialectic between presidential power of nomination and nine mortal lifelines.

A very partial, very unsatisfying hint at the weight and momentum of processes, once the changed facts in the state have taken hold:

“It is often too late for the toothpaste to be put back into the tube.”
Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010

what was habeas corpus?

“The National Security State is in permanent constitutional crisis.”
Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010

Wills traces the development of the US national security state from the Manhattan Project to the continuing so-called war on terror. He emphasizes its illegality, its violation of the US Constitution.

Given that demagogues like Glenn Beck are constantly waving and thumping the constitution on the airwaves of fear and hate, Wills’ intervention is absolutely necessary and vital.

But it will be necessary to go beyond the role of the fetishization of founders and foundings in the race-baiting and hate-mongering discourse of tea parties, and beyond even the categories of legality and constitution, to clarify what has happened and continues to happen.

For although he notes in passing the orgies of profiteering that have shadowed the war machine, the horizon of Wills’ analysis stops short of that “automatic subject” and “animated monster” we know from Das Kapital.

The real problem that collectively constrains us is not the character and actions of the US state, as destructive as these are. The real problem is the master logic generated by capitalist modernity itself, and the challenge is to grasp the mediations between this logic and its contemporary appearance-forms (of which, US imperium is at the moment the most visibly active and exemplary).

Coming posts will attempt little essays in this direction – so far as time, energy and courage last.

galileo's post-hiroshima mea culpa (1)

"For what reason do you labor? I take it the intent of science is to ease human existence. If you give way to coercion, science can be crippled, and your new machines may simply suggest new drudgeries. Should you then, in time, dicover all there is to be discovered, your progress must then become a progress away from the bulk of humanity. The gulf might even grow so wide that the sound of your cheering at some new achievement would be echoed by a universal howl of horror."

Brecht (with Laughton), Galileo, as reworked after August 1945