IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE & TERROR
Got this by email, and wanted to share. De has always been on the lookout for the biophobic bases of exterminism, a medicalized pest-metaphor that accompanied the Enlightenment through its ultimate development (to now). More than once, we’ve pointed out here – with regard to the growing proto-fascist movement of the post-Bush political margin – that the first reaction to be mobilized against any Enemy is not hatred, but disgust. Women, of course, have been the models for this kind of dehumanization for many centuries, and, as De pointed out just a few days ago, women’s bodies have been symbolized as objects of disgust – with that perverse and degraded embodiment of women being the unwelcome reminder of death for men – double whammy for women. Exterminators, the kind you look up in the Yellow Pages, actually do practice the ideology of extermin-ism. Killing is cleansing. (Pasteur gets his critique here, too.) Anyway, here it is:
BY Orion Anderson
In … November 2, 2009… I wrote about
“Genocide as an Immunological Fantasy,” summarizing my findings on the
rhetoric that led to the Holocaust. Hitler and other Nazi leaders
conceived of Jews as the source of a “disease” within the body politic
whose continued presence would lead to the death of the nation. Jews, in
the mind of Hitler and other Nazi ideologues, constituted alien or
“not-self” cells within the German body politic. Genocide was undertaken
within the framework of an immunological fantasy: To eliminate or
destroy disease-generating microorganisms in order to “save the nation”
(see my online publication, “Genocide as Immunology: The Psychosomatic
Source of Culture”[1]).
My thanks to Dr. Patricia Campion, Associate Professor of Sociology at
Saint Leo University in Florida, who found my presentation intriguing
and wondered if I found a similar pattern or structure underlying other
genocides or revolutionary movements (I hope readers of this Newsletter
will continue to write to me—conveying your ideas and insights—at
[mailto:rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net] rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net).
After the publication of Hitler’s Ideology[2]—the first book to present
the Holocaust as an outgrowth of the Nazi fantasy of the Jew as a
disease within the body politic—I turned to a study of Lenin to see if
it was possible to uncover the roots of another Twentieth Century
ideology that led to mass-death and immense suffering. I read through
the Collected Works of Lenin[3] at Columbia University (45 substantial
volumes). Did Lenin’s ideology (the foundation of Soviet Communism)—like
that of Hitler—possess a relatively simple and coherent “deep
structure”?
I planned to write a companion to Hitler’s Ideology entitled Lenin’s
Ideology, but ended up reporting my findings in a slim volume recently
reissued as The Nation: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy[4].
In my ongoing research, I continue to pose the question: Do ideologies
that generate mass-murder possess a common structure? Of course, each
episode of revolutionary violence grows out of a unique cultural milieu
and historical moment. However: Is it possible that a similar template
or “hidden narrative” lies at the root of each instantiation?
Various political ideologies claim that eliminating a particular race or
class of people from within the national body will produce positive or
beneficial results; that removing a particular group will lead to
improvement in the nation or people’s health. Ideologies differ in terms
of the nature of the class of people that is conceived to be responsible
for damaging the health of the people and causing them to suffer, e.g.,
the ruling class, the Jew, the capitalist, the landlord, the
intelligentsia, the communist, the infidel, the terrorist, etc. Are
these terms fungible, that is to say, interchangeable?
In A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7491.html] Eric Weitz observes that
historians tend to be “averse to large-scale generalizations.”
Historians favor, rather, the “detailed study of a particular place and
time,” seeking to “render the nuance that comes with knowledge of
language and culture.” This stance is consistent with postmodernism that
favors “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices and local
events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts.
Weitz seeks to move beyond immersion in the history of a particular
people—beyond individual cases and national frames. Promising to be
“faithful to the historian’s propensity for detail, nuance, and
contingency,” Weitz presents a comparative theory of genocide,
developing a global model to account for this phenomenon.
Weitz finds that political leaders who initiate genocidal movements
often are animated by “powerful visions of the future,” seeking to
create “utopias in the here and now.” Political violence is directed
toward races and classes of people who—for whatever reason—are conceived
as contradicting or acting to negate the utopian vision put forth by the
revolutionary leader. Races and classes of people are targeted—and
murdered—because they are perceived as impediments toward actualizing
the ideal of a pure or perfect society.
Weitz’s model is consistent with my view that political violence grows
out of the struggle to maintain “goodness” in the face of the threat of
“badness” or evil. Particular races or classes of people are imagined to
be intent upon destroying the good object: one’s own nation or people.
In order to maintain one’s nation or people—to preserve its goodness and
purity—the evil race or class of people must be eliminated or destroyed.
Weitz also finds—as I have—that political leaders who advocate
revolutionary violence often present their ideas and arguments within
the framework of organic metaphors—defining certain classes of people as
useless, destructive and expendable.
Weitz cites Abbé Sieyès, one of the French Revolution’s chief theorists
and author of the 1789 pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, the
manifesto that helped transform the Estates-General into the National
Assembly in June 1789. Sieyès inverted the ideology that defended
aristocratic privilege, endowing commoners (“the people”) with all the
noble traits, and the aristocracy with all the nefarious traits. The
nobility was depicted as a “horrible parasite eating the flesh of an
unfortunate man” and nobles as “vegetable parasites which can only live
on the sap of the plants that they impoverish and blight.” Were nobles
to be included in national life, the social body of the nation would be
completely sapped of its vitality. Asking what the appropriate place for
a privileged class was in society, Sieyès wrote, would be like “deciding
on the appropriate place in the body of a sick man for a malignant tumor
that torments him and drains his strength.” One must “neutralize” the
privileged class so that the “health and order of the organs” can be
restored.
In Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State[5],
Tricia Starks conveys the biological metaphors that defined the Soviet
revolution. Revolutionary rhetoric, Starks observes, took the form of
the binaries of pure/polluted and healthy/diseased. Seeking utopian
purity, communism framed its ideology in terms of hygienic metaphors and
the “language of purification.” In his attacks against the bourgeois,
kulaks (rich peasants) and the priesthood, Lenin compared these classes
to “diseases, parasites, or vermin.” He called for attacks on the
“parasites that suck the blood of the working people.” In a tirade
delivered in 1917, Lenin referred to the rich and the idlers as
“hopelessly decayed and atrophied limbs,” this “contagion, this plague,
this ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism.”
Lenin insisted that the people take collective action to “clean the land
of Russia of all vermin, of fleas, of bugs—the rich.” In his speech,
Starks says, he described the bourgeoisie variously as “filth”, “rot”,
“infection”, and even “crippled limbs”, connecting capitalism to disease
and degeneracy. Extending the metaphor of parasites and disease to his
political opponents in his article “The Itch” (1918), Lenin portrayed
unacceptable political thought as “scabies” (a contagious skin infection
caused by the human itch mite), and presented cleansing as the solution:
“Put yourself in a steam bath and get rid of the itch.”
Starks concludes that Lenin portrayed capitalism as a “disease plaguing
the entire world” and that dread of this infection saturated Soviet
propaganda in the 1920s. Ideological deviation was medicalized as a
perversity that endangered both the individual and the entire social
body. Sick party members—if they could not be rehabilitated or
reeducated—would have to be “excised” before they endangered the party
body. The primary method used to accomplish this was the purge, or
ochistka (literally “cleansing”). Purging the party of those subject to
“illnesses” allowed the party to remain pure and inviolate.
Weitz observes that Stalin’s penchant for biological metaphors was
greater even than Lenin’s, evoking some of the “worst horrors of the
Twentieth Century.” Stalin (like Lenin) depicted kulaks as
“bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires.” As Hitler described Germany as an
organism, so Stalin described the Communist party as “a living
organism.” Cadres who did not take up the struggle against the
opposition “drive sores into the inside of the party organism,” and the
party “falls ill.” As in every organism “metabolism takes place: old,
obsolete stuff falls off; new, growing things flourish and develop.”
If obsolete parts of the organism do not die a natural death, more
drastic measures are necessary. Rather than wait for the “slow
decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism,” Lenin
advocated “quick amputation, direct removal of decomposing parts.”
Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s close confidant and trusted ally, described
the purge of the mid-1930s in terms of the necessity of “cutting into
good flesh in order to get rid of the bad,” a justification of violence
not unlike what appeared in the writings of the Paris Commune during the
French Revolution: “Thus, the clever and helpful surgeon with his cruel
and benevolent knife cuts of the gangrened limb in order to save the
body of the sick man.” And as we have previously observed, Hitler
declared that the future of Germany required that the “racial
tuberculosis” of Jewish Marxism be “annihilated,” i.e., “cut out of the
Volk body.”
The images and metaphors presented in the passages above convey a
coherent fantasy that may lie at the heart of revolutionary movements
that give rise to mass-murder. In this fantasy, the nation or people (or
party) is conceived as a living organism suffering from a disease that
could prove to be fatal. The source of this disease is a particular
class of people embedded within the national or people’s body. This
class of people is responsible for the suffering of the nation or
people.
Embedded within a good or healthy body is a second organism, e.g., a
parasite—that is acting to ruin the health of the nation or people. In
order to restore the strength and health of the nation or people, the
secondary, alien organism—attached to the body politic—must be
“removed:” excised, extirpated or destroyed. Political leaders who
perpetuate mass-murder in the name of their ideologies think of
themselves not as murderers, but as men who undertake the “necessary”
task of removing the source of the nation’s disease.
Given the recurrence of organic metaphors within revolutionary leaders’
rhetoric (I’ve presented only a minute portion of the evidence here—see
my online publications “Ideology, Perception and Genocide: How Fantasy
Generates History”[6] and “The Nation’s Disease”[7]), we now may turn to
explaining the presence of such metaphors. I am indebted to Mike
Sobocinski, who wrote to me presenting one way of understanding this
tendency of revolutionary ideologues to present their arguments within
the framework of organic metaphors.
Sobocinski says that the use of organic metaphors allows the
“redefinition” of some parts of society as an “out-group within the
in-group or dominant culture.” Labeling group members as bacteria or
parasites—the source of a disease—works to dehumanize the other, thus
justifying violence. Organic metaphors within political rhetoric
function to “solidify the in-group/out-group distinction between
persecutors and their victims,” allowing the “overcoming of individual
conscience and collective norms” that previously would have limited
actions against targeted classes of people. Metaphors of disease
function to “remove negative sanctions,” allowing for more extreme forms
of violence.
This perspective does not attempt to account for the desire to commit
acts of violence against the targeted group—and does not conceive that
the metaphors contain within themselves the reasons for violent acts.
Rather, given the (unexplained) desire to perform acts of political
violence, Sobocinski sees metaphors as facilitating the capacity and
willingness of people to perform such acts. According to this view,
political leaders who wish to initiate acts of violence “employ” these
metaphors (in a more or less conscious way) in order to facilitate the
process of scapegoating. Dehumanizing organic rhetoric is merely a
useful tool.
Is this all there is to it? Or is a deeper dynamic at play? Please tell
me what you think by writing to me at rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net. I’d
like to hear from you.
With regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
[1] [http://home.earthlink.net/~libraryofsocialscience/gi.htm]
[2]
[http://books.google.com/books?id=tWfrtSHG-eoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hitler%27s+ideology#v=onepage&q=&f=false]
[2] [http://nationshavetherighttokill.com/bookshelf/hitlers_ideology.html]
[3] [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/index.htm]
[4]
[http://books.google.com/books?id=Lu34HS9NLWUC&pg=PP4&dq=the+nation+richard+koenigsberg+information+page#v=onepage&q=&f=false]
[4] [http://nationshavetherighttokill.com/bookshelf/the_nation.html]
[5]
[http://books.google.com/books?id=1lTGjdj2uScC&dq=Body+Soviet:+Propaganda,+Hygiene,+and+the+Revolutionary+State,&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=oncthGnnod&sig=mfrGiaWHiIJoj9yGiVknL9tqW_E&hl=en&ei=XLf1SsT5M86e8AbzmMjzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false]
[6] [http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/rak-docs/rk_ipg.htm]
[7] [http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-ndisease.html]
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(Boer) Tom:
Does this argument rely to some strong degree on alienation from nature and the purity/taint problem? Take compost, where biodiversity is very important – compost tea can cure plant disease – but if one points that out, one can hope at best for blank stares – except from people who’ve worked with compost…
9 November 2009, 2:07 pmCurt Kastens:
So does this mean that we really truly have to talk all the people who make up the military industrial complex in to handcuffing themselves and marching themselves in to prison?
9 November 2009, 4:56 pmKim Sky:
Is a deeper dynamic at play? Yes/No.
A quick look at modernism — Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes.
“Modernity” the myth.
Notions of TRUTH changed. They went from an idea of truth as deference: harmony, proportion, hierarchy, and proper place — to the idea where TRUTH and utility are the same, that theory and science must focus on the purely practical alone.
By the 19th century, after a few revolutions, the joining of state with scientific method (the pursuit of truth) was in place. The bureaucratic organization of seeking power through science was well developed, where science was promoted by and subjected to the state. The next step was to treat politics as they treated nature (nature takes orders from man) — practically, profitably, and ruthlessly.
With science policy as the underlying methodology for moderns to evaluate their known universe, the formula for genocide can be found.
The objective: a good/efficient/stable society.
The problem: a scapegoat defined using scientific metaphors.
The solution: large groups of people must be sacrificed.
My solution: the practice of theory and science must be set free, must include the non-applicable, the non-practical.
9 November 2009, 6:02 pmcabdriver:
Similar points to that essay have been brought up by the General Semantics people, beginning with Alfred Korzybski, the founder of that linguistic discipline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
http://korzybskifiles.blogspot.com/2009/04/science-and-sanity-haiku-1.html
I maintain that it’s imperative to develop what might be termed an immune system in order to deal with language effectively, so that one can catch the noise in the system, and the tricks being played on ones own mind, sometimes quite intentionally by others to serve their own ends.
To bring the idea back around to historic events like the demonizations of “the Jews” or “the kulaks”- once the existence of a person or human community or collective category has been characterized as “parasitic”, “verminous”, a “plague” or a “bacillus”- eradication becomes the “only logical solution”…and once something has been defined as the only logical solution, justification is implicit.
10 November 2009, 2:49 amStan Moore:
I don’t know about others, but I think the word “genocide” is tossed around much too lightly these days, just like the terms “epidemic” and “pandemic”.
And “hate crime”.
But listening to the aftermath of the Fort Hood murders causes me to think of an aspect of current warfare that I have not seen discussed, even in the alternate media. I am talking about the use of drones to kill “enemy” personnel off the battlefield.
I could not help but notice that both the generals and the president took note of the fact that soldiers like to feel safe in their barracks, especially stateside. American soldiers feel the stress of invading and occupying foreign countries, and feel entitled to go home and unwind and feel secure in their home areas. But the American way of warfare does not allow that luxury to men of military age in Afghanistan or Pakistan. If you are carrying an automatic rifle and you are spotted by a drone, you can be on your way to a wedding or maybe even to surrender or volunteeer with the Afghan Army and you may be blasted into smithereens by a Hellfire missile fired by a soldier whose skills were perfected on Gameboy and who cares not a whit that you were not on the battlefield when he attacked you. Nor does he care if your female three-year old cousin was also killed, because you were a valid target and he was fighting low risk warfare, the new American way.
There seems little doubt that this warfare will ultimately provoke some form of unprecedented blowback. When the Nazis bombed London, the Allies Bombed Dresden. Tit for tat. And eye for an eye. There is no long term impunity in this sort of fighting. And the memories of our chosen, provoked enemies will likely be very, very long. And that may very well be the goal — making enemies leads to profitable war, and the cost in cannon fodder is bearable, especially when the generals and the president seem very willing to pay those costs. I am reminded of that scene in the old Jimmy Stewart movie “Shenendoah”, where he lost his son to unwilling participation in the Civil War, and the Jimmy Stewart character talked about war, how the politicians saw the need for it, and the generals saw the glory in it, but the soldiers just wanted to go home.
Yet, now our society is manipulated cynically by economic unfairness that drives young men to the military often because other career options are out of reach. So, they become cannon fodder for the old generals and the presidents and end up with their boots lined up while Taps is played and everyone feels genuinely sorrowful until the next day and the next mission.
Maybe that is why Jesus said, “Blessed are the peaceful…” — the blessing that is self-endowed and self-sustaining.
Stan Moore
11 November 2009, 8:28 amaskod:
Is not a possibly deeper structure the clean/unclean partition that seems so important in most (all?) cultures?
If my rudimentary knowledge in anthropology serves, the taboos surrounding what is unclean are strong and gives strong feelings of disgust when transgressed. By drawing the lines so that certain persons becomes unclean it is easy to dehumanise them.
11 November 2009, 4:05 pmStan:
Something to that, I think. The background for the New Testament is that Jesus was challenging purity codes that served to put others outside the human family until a gatekeeper (a priest) allowed them back in. By touching lepers (not Hansen’s Disease), menstruating women, corpses, non-Judeans… eating with ne’er do wells, these were scandalous contacts. That takes us back 2 millenia. These kinds of divisions go back further still, and scarcity – unintentional or created – exacerbated the divisions between peoples, as did expansion (like the Romans’) that sought exploitable peripheries to sustain stability in the urbanized cores.
De has often referred to “taint,” that indefinable mark one wears when one has whatever kind of cooties.
Back to mimesis. One behaves as if one is disgusted until the affective response to one’s own actions develops. First we imitate it, then we actually internalize and “feel” it. We learn these things very young. We love those who teach us (as our caregivers), then we transfer that self-evident sense of belonging to the things we learn from those beloved caretakers (or not, in the case of abusive caretakers… another topic). Disgust at the smell of feces, for example, is learned, not innate. (Note that other animals, not far from us on the E-scale, sniff it with great relish and curosity.) This is all very preliterate, and therefore immunized against rational critique.
Where taboos come from – probably some practical adaptatoin in the beginning – is whole nuther topic… an interesting one.
11 November 2009, 6:16 pmStan:
“God has shown me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean.” (Acts 10:28)
21 November 2009, 7:24 amCurt Kastens:
See this shows how easy it is for a conspiracy to get out of hand in any organization in which information is compartmentalized and people have access only to information that someone above decides that they need to know. When secrets are kept for legitmate reasons of national defense that that is a proper use of secrets. When secrets get used to wage a policy of imperialism it becomes automatically a constipating criminal conspiracy. Since there is no over sight except among a very limited number of very like minded indivudals there is actually no over sight what so ever. Even if there were oversight someone who is not personally doing the oversight can never really know if there is any oversight.
22 November 2009, 6:00 amSuch a person can only make guesses based on indirect information. This applies not only to me but even to people who have high level positions in the government.
Now I am 99.99% sure that there is no devious reason Stan placed such a cryptic statement above. It just seems crptic to me because I am not aware of the hole story. But even if Stan told me the whole story I can not be sure that it is not just a cover story. After cover stories are not only plausible they seem probable.
When one adds in the evidence that only a minority of any population have the psychological profil to be a whistleblower. When ones adds the historical recored that whistleblowers often suffer tremendously for whistleblowing, despite “official” protection. When one adds to the historical record that governments have been successfully conspiring to wage wars of agression for thousands of years, should it come as a surprise to anyone that there is a conspiracy with large numbers of people involved at the top levels of American society to conduct an imperialistic foriegn policy? I imagine that some people would be hesitant to call such a thing a criminal conspiracy because prior to the end of the first world war that was considered the whole point of Western Society. The moral of the story is that there are many people who should be called unclean, even much much much much much much much worse. Those of us at the bottom of society may not know exactly who they are. WE can not deny that they are there. They are the reptiles among us who have cloned human skin and learned to mimic human behavior. They only interested in the destruction of mammilean life forms. That is no Hollywood script.
Steve:
“medicalized pest-metaphor”
Like the way that radical greens refer to homo sapiens as a “cancer” or “plague”? Why is this acceptable when we are talking about the entire species but not acceptable when we are talking about an ethnic/racial segment of it?
28 November 2009, 8:37 pmaskod:
Steve,
2 December 2009, 6:49 amI would guess that the speakers by including themselves in the disease takes the edge of it.
Stan:
Those who suggest that humans are a plague are as abstract as they get. They represent the absurd endpoint of abstraction, from a moral standpoint that has no ground (and has no recognition where the morality of care comes from… that is, they are ahistorical). Fortunatley, very few people listen to this, since it is inherently self-marginalizing… language reaches out only to other members of the pathogenic species. It is liberalism gone slightly mad. This kind of talk is enemizing just as surely as the other pest-metaphors. The imaginary here includes the fantasy that proponents will be the last survivors of some vague apocalypse, wherein they will be the reintegrated bands of hunter-gatherers.
Misanthropy is an evasion, albeit a tempting one for far too many who begin by caring “too much,” but also for a dangerous brand of very male narcissism. Nero once said that he wished humanity had one throat so that he could cut it. Unmasking the hidden premises of misanthropy may be one of our most important critical projects.
2 December 2009, 2:33 pmRichard:
This is probably not strictly speaking relevant to this thread, except insofar as the normalization of porn is tied in with attitudes towards women. Researches couldn’t find a single male who hadn’t viewed pornography:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All-men-watch-porn-scientists-find.html
From the end of the article:
‘Prof Lajeunesse said pornography did not have a negative effect on men’s sexuality.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional.” ‘
No apparent reflection on what “conventional” has come to mean when porn is so normal a part of experience.
2 December 2009, 8:43 pmRichard:
But, more obviously relevant to the thread, has anyone read James C. Scott? I just read his Seeing Like a State, a book I highly recommend. Scott’s investigation of the “authoritarian high modernist” ideology shared by everyone from Lenin to Le Corbusier to World Bank officials and so on, is very damning (massive factories, streamlined cities, huge farming collectives, etc). And he makes it clear that, for example, the ideas imposed in the Soviet collectivization scheme and elsewhere were “thoroughly Western”–indeed many American advisers to the Soviet plan were envious of the opportunity afforded by the plan for wholesale implementation of their ideas. It stands to reason that anyone standing in the way of such ambitions, or indeed of progress itself, is seen as not just primitive, but often less than human, and thus easily expendable.
Here are a few excerpts:”The transformation of peripheral nonstate spaces into state spaces by the modern, developmentalist nation-state is ubiquitous and, for the inhabitants of such spaces, frequently traumatic.” (p.187)
“The concentration of population in planned settlements may not create what state planners had in mind, but it has almost always disrupted or destroyed prior communities whose cohesion derived mostly from non-state sources. The communities thus superseded–however objectionable they may have been on normative grounds–were likely to have had their own unique histories, social ties, mythology, and capacity for joint action. Virtually by definition, the state-designated settlement must start from the beginning to build its own sources of cohesion and joint action. A new community is thus, also by definition, a community demobilized, and hence a community more amenable to control from above and outside.” (p.191)
“High-modernist ideologies embody a doctrinal preference for certain social arrangements. Authoritarian high-modernist states, on the other hand, take the next step. They attempt, and often succeed, in imposing those preferences on their population. Most of the preferences can be deduced from the criteria of legibility, appropriation, and centralization of control. To the degree that the institutional arrangements can be readily monitored and directed from the center and can be easily taxed (in the broadest sense of taxation), then they are likely to be promoted. The implicit goals behind these comparisons are not unlike the goals of pre-modern statecraft. Legibility, after all, is a prerequisite of appropriation as well as of authoritarian transformation. The difference, and it is a crucial one, lies in the wholly new scale of ambition and intervention entertained by high modernism.” (p.219)
2 December 2009, 8:52 pmStan Moore:
I strenuously disagree with Stan Goff’s comments above, which I feel are flawed through inappropriate reductionism.
As an example, the late Professor Joe Hickey was a peregrine falcon expert and conservationist. Dr. Hickey organized the 1965 conference in Madison, Wisconsin, which brought together biologists, government agency personnel, falconers and interested parties to discuss why peregrine falcons were no longer being seen in their familiar haunts and what could/should be done about it. Joe Hickey referred to peregrine falcons as a “weed species”. Did that mean he did not like them? Did it mean that he wanted to poison them into oblivion? No! He loved peregrines and he worked his rear end off to protect and conserve them. He noted that they flourished in appropriate habitats, even in close proximity to humans if given half a chance and if they were NOT poisoned.
Reductionist thinking routinely leads to flawed analysis. I can recall during the Bill Clinton presidency criticizing Bill Clinton for not being able to keep his pecker in his pants. Leftists thought I must be a Republican because I criticized the Democrat President. their reduction/deduction was false.
When I criticized George W. Bush for being many awful things, I was accused by some of being a Democrat. Not true, either! I am fiercely independent and view the two major political parties as opposite wings of the same bird, a big turkey.
I am a “radical Green” and I do think humans, especially western consumers are pollution. Does that make me a misanthrope, a hater of humanity? I don’t think so. I love my friends, but I think all of us are pollution and the world would be better off without us, including me. But I am not self-hating or suicidal, either, and I am not volunteering to make the world a better place by exiting prematurely at my own hand. Recognizing the badness and flaws of oneself and ones’s culture and civilization and species to me is a sign of engagement with reality, not the opposite.
And speaking of genoicide, what catches my attention is that I am unaware of any cases where potential genocides were prevented by forethought and action by persons of conscience who could see a genocide coming and acted strongly and successfully to prevent it.
It is common for social critics to complain about genocides after the fact, lamenting the losses of life and grieving over the victims.
But who on the Left is telling Obama that if he does not act as Leader of the Free World and most powerful man in the world that he will be facilitating a genocide (or several) if he allows climate change to worsen without his own forceful, unilateral action in Copenhagen (and afterwards)? Why is Obama being let off the hook for a predictable result of his own action/inactions as they unfold before our very eyes? Ditto the Premier of China or any other world leader we choose to focus on.
It seems to me that we ought to be focused on preventing future genocides moreso than focusing rearward to play on past ones for political leverage.
Moreover, what about ecocide? Why are most radical greens failing to take Obama to task for acting just like George W. Bush (actually even worse) in refusing to list any number of backlisted candidate endangered species under the Federal Endangered Species Act? Why is Obama immune from his Leftist supporters from criticism over his inaction on ecocide, from global warming to listing the Delta Smelt? Sometimes I think we are too busy classifying, labeling, and comparing people and their past actions that we have too little time to do good in the here and now. We are not stopping new and ongoing wars. We are not stopping global warming. We are not making the world better. We are not throttling the Zionists. We are still fretting over Bush/Cheney, Rwanda, Cambodia and Vietnam.
I say we need to stop the next genocide and we ought to be able to see it coming. The president of the Maldives and the Inuit people and the polar bears are pointing out their own pending survival risks.
We had better get proactive before it is too late.
Stan Moore
2 December 2009, 11:57 pmRichard Koenigsberg:
My central point (I’m the author of the above piece–Orion Anderson is my company’s webmaster), is that certain political leaders actually EXPERIENCE certain groups or classes of people as bacteria, viruses, etc. Their experience of the “other” is that of an alien presence embodied within the self.
So the reaction goes beyond “disgust:” People who use this kind of language fear dissolution or disintegration based on the idea of an alien other that is experienced psychosomatically–as embedded within the self. So the fundamental question is: What are the PSYCHIC SOURCES of such an experience? What is the “other” experienced as a threat to one’s (bodily) existence.
Regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
3 December 2009, 10:23 amStan:
Stan M, I think you are inappropriatly employing the term reductionism – “an attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set” – since no one here is suggesting that biophobic metaphors are solely responsible for genocide. This site has often explored other aspects of state terrorism and racial terrorism from class and gender perspectives, for example. Nor do I think anyone suggested either that every instance of this metaphor by environmental activists can be linked with the idea that California should be reduced to a populaiton of 20,000 hunters and gatherers… but that following the line of faulty reasoning that stubbornly behaves as if the metaphor were not a metaphor, but an empirically demonstrable reality, is inevitably absurd.
As to whether actual genocides were prevented by whatever, if they happened, then by definition they are the ones that were not prevented, and the ones that were prevented did not happen. It’s an impossible association to make, even though we can speculate retrogressively. We simply can’t know.
What we can do with history, however, is identify to varying degrees the roots of the trends – social, political, environmental, cultural – that we are living through right now; and no amount of outrage or impatience, however disagreeable our situation, can conjure a leap over these conditions. Defining the issues is important, but equally important is understanding the extents and limits of various kinds of human agency, and where these kinds of agency push up against secular macro-trends of society, politics, environment, and culture.
Moreover, without a marginally rigorous and dispassionate account of the complexity of the world, what we do choose to do could as easily make things worse as improve them. “Don’t just sit there, do something” can be good advice, but it can also be the worst possible advice. There’s doing and there’s doing. The road to Hell. Intentions. Etc.
Global systems that are relatively stable, as ours is now, are invulnerable until internal contradictions lead to disruptions. Activists can play a limited catalytic role in these changes, and a more substantial role in post-break outcomes when bifircations become manifest. In the latter case, prescience and discernemnt are key. During periods of relative stability, as we are in now though perhaps not for much longer… we can’t know, those who wish to exercise some form of agency need to deepen their discernment as a way of getting out in front of likely future developments.
The point of posting this piece was to follow up on a regular theme here of biophobia, a Pasteurian infection metaphor that has played a clear historical role in modern exterminist projects by mobilizing disgust against target populations (Jews were “vermin,” Tutsi’s were “cockroaches.”), which you have herein reiterated without the target (or by generalizing the target – ALL humans – as a way of ostensibly neutralizing it). What is problematic, we are saying, is the notion of “infection” itself. It does not begin as ethnic cleansing, it begins with the obsessive fear of germs in our kitchens and bathrooms, until it is integrated into the practice of our daily lives. The most potent ideas, as good lefties will tell you, generally reflect our daily lived experience… like how money moves things around and germ-killing becomes the basis of our sense of safety and our definition of who we think we are.
Richard’s remarks about “alien presence” and fear of disintegration are insightful here.
5 December 2009, 1:42 pm