Global Cannibalism
The question was asked at the Barbastro Peak Oil Conference.
If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil?
Swift’s Modest Proposal returns, with increased poignancy.
Clifford Dean Scholz comments (at Energy Bulletin):
I’m drinking a cup of coffee right now, having boiled the water with natural gas. I’m not exactly sure where the fuel I used comes from, but my guess is that natural gas from various sources gets marketed and distributed together. Therefore as I enjoy my coffee this morning, people in shale gas states now may have combustible household tap water and carcinogenic bathroom showers as a thank you for my convenience.
One of the hazards of environmental inquiry is to see horrors like this hiding behind pretty much everything I do and much of what I own, right down to the cotton socks on my feet. My question today is: How did I get to be so callous about it? And what should be done?
This is a question that has been haunting me for years — no, decades now. We can roll along in a state of “normal” consciousness for days or months, comfortable with the cultural standards, rituals, and semiotics with which we were raised. Like fish in water. But when we apply even a half-hearted (let alone rigorous) ethical curiosity to the material conditions of our lives — even well-meaning lives, full of good intentions — we find that layer upon layer of exploitation and misery underlie the apparently innocent surface of our days. In a fairly real, not entirely metaphorical sense, we are living well on the backs of slaves; we are turning human corpses into oil and burning them… not to mention the corpses of other critters, entire species. How can we live with it? How does this knowledge not drive us mad?
One of the mysteries of the human condition is this ability of ours (as a species) to switch off our empathy, to sip tea in comfort on the verandah while slaves are whipped in the back yard; to go out and wallow in cheap imports from China even though we know, on some intellectual level, that they are being produced by sweatshop labour; to buy and eat species that we know are endangered; to ask for that plastic bag at the checkout counter even though we know the ocean food chain is perverted and poisoned by accumulating plastics. I could go on, but I suspect that Gentle Readers know exactly what I mean. Business as usual is so… usual. So easy. So convincing. Everything seems as it should be.
Moreover, we have little choice about supping with the devil. As Scholz remarks, most everything we buy, do, and own comes with a price tag measured in cruelty and destruction. It seems impossible to have clean hands. We live — the vast majority of us on this planet — on land that has been taken and retaken by brute armed force. We are mostly forced to work for someone in the totalising money nexus. Seldom can we find work that can be called clean. Often the only job standing between us and homelessness is one contributing to harm: the prison, the weapons plant, the tar sands, lumbering, manufacturing, selling junk food, fixing cars… How many “jobs” are there that we could genuinely call harmless?
Is there any artifact in your home, or mine, that we can truly call innocent? Even my watercolour paints contain toxic heavy metal dyes; what do I really know about the factory where they were produced or the mines where the ores were extracted? Who and what has died to make my paints? Is there a stream somewhere that will never support life again because of the mining of cadmium that ended up in *my* tube of cadmium yellow? If so, I share the guilt for the death of that stream with many, many people. But the tiny shares add up. A tiny share of a stream here, a tiny share of the misery of Nigeria there, a tiny share of a lost species, a tiny share of the Americans’ imperial wars, a tiny share of all the crimes done by all the finance capital vultures who “manage” the funds packaged into my pension plan, a tiny share of the topsoil we’ve lost to chemical/mechanised agriculture. All those tiny shares of malfeasance and crime, they do add up. Every artifact in my home is a Marley’s ghost, trailing a long or shorter, heavier or lighter, chain of misery and crime.
Every imperial culture has a surface, like a thin layer of ice sparkling all smooth and pretty over murky depths. Nice manners, good food, witty conversation, elegant clothing, sophisticated arts of all kinds glitter on the surface. But somewhere beneath — whether far away or nearby — lurk the exploitation, armed robbery, mass murder which secure the surplus wealth to support the decorous, cosy, elegant lifestyle. The philosphers of Athens mulled over the meaning of democracy, fairness, political ethics, while indentured servants and slaves tilled their fields. The cosy cuppa that pleasant British bourgeois shared with family and friends was made from tea grown on slave-labour plantations. We marvel (and are aghast, and self-righteous) when we consider the “good Germans” who lay in their comfortable beds hearing the East-bound trains roll by at night, working hard on not knowing what (who) was in them, settling deeper into their down pillows. But how different are we? Or to put it the other way, how different were they, from any inhabitant of any imperial culture at any time in history? Surely their behaviour and their predicament were the rule rather than the exception, and our exceptionalisation of their behaviour and predicament is a kind of scapegoating, a distancing, an exorcism that excuses us from taking too long a look into (or do I mean behind) the mirror?
We mourn and agonise over the death of the biosphere and the fraying of our civilisation, while we continue to buy clothes made of plastic, food processed in factories and shipped thousands of miles to reach us. Maybe we ride in airplanes to go to serious conferences about climate destabilisation. We tell ourselves that the planes would be flying anyway, even if we personally refuse to travel on them. We stifle our conscience and go with the cultural flow. We may pick one or two aspects of the “culture of make-believe” to boycott, but in our hearts we know it’s a gesture at best. Every tool we use seems to link us to the evils we wish to eradicate.
Beneath even our “goods” is a story of “bads”. We want to revive a rail system that was built by the brutal exploitation of cheap immigrant labour, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of stifled and suffering lives; from carriages travelling on those rail lines which we want — for such good reasons — to save and restore, the nearly-last buffalo were indiscriminately shot. Even the printing press, that icon of enlightenment, spent its earliest years printing manuals for witch-hunters, abetting persecution and torture. We cannot escape the endless chain of abuse: we can scrub our hands like a legion of Lady Macbeths, and never erase the stains. We can try to repurpose tools and technologies to better use. But the system is totalising. To live within it is to be complicit. To live outside it is to be targeted for elimination or assimilation. Our own complicity sickens us, but we rightly fear the risk and difficulty of trying to step off the conveyor belt. Purity is unattainable. We despair of right livelihood.
Every imperial culture seems to struggle with an ethical consciousness — the “advanced ethical thinking” of its philosophers and theologians — that diverges so far from the culture’s actual conduct and structure, the way things really work, that its logical conclusions cannot be admitted or must be laughed out of court. The life of the “civilised” seems to pose a choice between merry sociopathy and deep cognitive dissonance. We teach our children moral lessons and prescriptions that the very machineries of their own home life violate daily: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t hit people, don’t be greedy. We teach them this as we drive them around in SUVs to and from 4,000 square foot homes financed and fuelled by… well, by cheating, lying, stealing, being greedy, killing people.
Somewhere beneath the sparkling skin of civilisation is the reality: if we really obeyed the directives of the Gospel or the Buddha, or the teachings of Confucius or the Tao or the Stoics, if we really walked our cultural talk, our culture (as we know it) would collapse. Business as usual could not continue if we truly renounced force and fraud. Our entire civilisation — the project of civilisation, the business of empire, the empire of business — is based on force and fraud. Crime is business as usual, and business as usual is crime.
When individuals insist on trying to be harmless, renouncing both force and fraud, trying to take the teachings of our ethical traditions seriously, we call them extremists or kooks, dreamers, impractical, naive, fanatical. Or saints — otherworldly “special” creations whom we could not possibly be expected to emulate. We make uneasy fun of them. Or, if they become too strident, too outspoken in their description of the food chain beneath the surface, we lock them up. If some of our compatriots become too insistent in pointing out the suffering slave in the courtyard, the hungry beggar in the market, the butcher’s bill of species, ecosystems, indigenous cultures — well then, we call them sentimental, foolish, impractical, unmanly (if male); and if all else fails we point to their own imbrication in the totalising system and deride them as hypocrites.
Global capitalism has not changed anything essential about the methods and practises of accumulation and stratification — only their scope, voracity, and velocity. Truly it might better be known as “global cannibalism.” We are willing to sacrifice human lives to augment corporate profits and to maintain our “industrial lifestyle” at whatever level we currently believe is reasonable to demand. That’s the real bottom line. We have become so heavily “invested” in our culture as it is — BAU — that we cannot even imagine any different way of relating, interacting, dealing with each other or the world. (Hence the genuine radicalism of the stubborn assertion that another world is possible — perhaps the essential truth shared by all radical traditions: it doesn’t have to be this way.)
We routinely use technologies that condemn people (sometimes ourselves) to illness and death. We routinely acquiesce to business practises that condemn people (sometimes ourselves) to servitude and unhappiness. Often our complicity is based in ignorance; but even after ignorance is dispelled by research or accidental witnessing, we have few alternatives to continued, uncomfortable, despairing complicity.
Fighting the system can be satisfying, challenging, energising. It can absorb an entire human lifetime with relatively little result to show for it. The scholarly and courageous biologist Alexandra Morton has spent 20 years trying to draw official attention to the devastating impacts of fish CAFO in BC coastal waters. At the end of her personal and financial resources, she is about ready to give up. This is tragic news, but hardly surprising; the opposition owns the media and the politicians, has bottomless pockets to hire lawyers and spread bullshit. You can spend your life tilting at just one windmill (out of the thousands of “satanic mills” churning away at full speed all around us) and still lose.
We don’t know in advance exactly which people will be condemned to death by industrial toxicity, for example — but statistically we can be quite sure that lives will be cut short and quality of life diminished or ruined for someone, somewhere, as a result of… uranium mining, for example. Coal mining. Fracking. The fossil fuel extraction and refinement industry generally. Burning the stuff. Spraying neurotoxins on food crops. Insisting on private automobile transport. Mining vulnerable countries for raw materials. Using depleted uranium munitions. Scattering delayed-action explosives (mines) all over a conflict zone. Every time, there is a justification, an apologia, some jesuitical twist of reasoning that “proves” that (as Madeleine Allbright infamously said) “The cost is worth it.” (In her case, “the cost” was the premature deaths of about half a million Iraqi children due to US sanctions against their nation-state.) Every time, there are indirect beneficiaries of the force and fraud, whose lives are made cosy and comfortable, even elegant, at the cost of human sacrifice: legions of Mama Corleones, trying hard not to know how the bills get paid.
Sometimes we say “it’s the price of progress,” with all the arrogant certainty of Inquisitors who were sure that torturing people to death was an acceptable way of saving their souls. Glorious ends justify foul means. Sometimes we say “there is no alternative,” when we mean that the alternative might mean having to make uncomfortable adjustments in our own lifestyles. Recently, Alternet ran an article on plastics pollution entitled “Plastic May Be Horrible For the Environment, But Could We Survive Without It?” The answer seems absurdly obvious: we (humanity) survived without plastic for about 20,000 years; evidently we can survive without it. What a silly question, eh? But there is something that cannot survive without it: a level of convenience, packaging, centralisation, and corporate profiteering which is now the defining mark of our culture. We cannot imagine this changing without our culture itself disappearing, morphing into something we don’t recognise (and ourselves into people we don’t recognise) — hence we imagine this as “not surviving”.
But let us at least now and then take a direct look at the distribution of costs and benefits, at where “externalised” costs are felt and where “away” (where we throw stuff out of sight and mind) really is. People are being condemned to death and suffering every day to subsidise our luxuries — not necessities, luxuries. So long as we accept this situation as normal, so long as we cannot bear to — or refuse to — look beneath the sparkling thin ice on which the “decencies” of an affluent life precariously rest, we cannot claim any moral high ground over any other civilisation that practised routine human sacrifice or slavery.
We cannot even claim a whole lot of moral high ground over a band of cannibal pirates. Each of us perhaps consumes less than one whole human being each decade (I haven’t done the math) but even a small share of a cannibal feast still makes me a cannibal, doesn’t it?
We live in a society, a system, that has made it ridiculously difficult to abstain from our share of the cannibal feast.
But people have always eaten people!
What else is there to eat?
– Flanders and Swann, “Don’t Eat People”
The history of the world, my sweet –
(oh Mr Todd, yes Mr Todd, what does it tell?)
– is who gets eaten and who gets to eat!
(yes Mr Todd, and Mr Todd, who gets to sell!)
– Stephen Sondheim, “A Little Priest” from ‘Sweeney Todd’
This time, however, the Barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
– Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue
Perhaps I have written this depressing little screed to alleviate some part of our predicament, to acknowledge that we are governed by “barbarians” — not in the sense of “uncivilised,” because civilisation is nothing but barbarism in elegant clothing, but in the sense of the Barbaric Heart:
This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. That was Roman virtue. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to “win,” and by whatever means necessary.
We (those of us on the winning side, at the core of Empire) are prospering from violence. We have been prospering from violence all our lives, all our parents’ lives, all our grandparents’ lives and so on back far beyond living memory. “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done,” per Balzac, and the great fortunes of the industrial nations are attributed to imagined, mythologised causes while properly and thoroughly done crimes are resolutely forgotten — even those within living memory.
But the time of prosperity from violence may be running out. Laying waste to the biosphere, we lay waste to our own posterity. We are now stealing from our own children and grandchildren. There are no vast new “uninhabited” realms to invade and plunder facing little resistance (even the vastly overpowered and outgunned Iraqis can repeatedly embarrass that soi-disant “hyperpower”, the US, as the Afghanis embarrassed the Soviets). Two fairly high ranking military advisors recently authored a report that suggested:
… in an open, non-linear system, attempts to achieve security through control are futile. “Dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy,” as the authors put it.
Dominance is an attempt to establish a one-way relationship, a relationship of taking without giving, a relationship of force and fraud. We have been “doing dominance” for at least 5,000 years of civilisation. We have pursued it to its logical conclusions, attempting to dominate everything from time and distance to every phylum and genus around us. We have dominated the flora and fauna, to the point of exterminating them. We have dominated each other, to the point of repeated genocide. We have dominated everything — “ruled the world” as so many dominators of the past dreamed of doing — leveraging a source of energy slaves that is now running out. As our various interlocking predicaments illustrate, dominance is not a sustainable source of energy. The dominance/control/military/factory paradigm simply doesn’t work in any but the short term, kinda like the fossil fuel thing doesn’t work in any but the short term: the thin pretty ice of civilisation cracks in the end and the violence and poverty that enabled idleness and luxury erupt, one way or another. The oil runs out. The complex system goes into catabolic collapse, which is another word for cannibalism, autophagy, eating our young.
We are governed by barbaric hearts. They have invited us to a cannibal feast where “if you aren’t at the table you’re on the menu.” We need to stand down from the table and change the menu. We need to divorce the Don. We need to do it soon.
I have been trying to wrap up this troubling train of thought (one that has been chugging through my head for years now) and I have not found a nice resounding summary statement; my own attempts to divorce the Don have been incomplete and inadequate. I too am imbricated fully in the totalising exterminist system. My cup of tea may be fair trade certified, but nothing I can buy with dollars is, by definition, really clean. I live with this intense moral itch, poison ivy of the soul. Another world is not only possible but urgently needed — and I don’t know how to get there. I try to create a tiny piece of it right here and right now. It’s not a big enough piece, it’s not a good enough piece, but I wish that it may in some way counterbalance at least some of my little nibbles from the global cannibal feast.
Stan:
These thoughts trouble any person of goodwill anywhere I expect, if that person is aware of the many sequelae at the end of the many flows of matter and energy.
Forgive me if what I write no is only partially coherent. Lumbar sprain hit me yesterday; and I’m on a Vicodin/Flexeril cocktail (about which I could say some of the above re participation in the system).
System seems key… you know where I’ll go with this, I ‘spect.
The moral impasse you describe is a sense of individual responsibility in a world where individuals are fundamentally incapable of changing those aforementioned flows.
My own scary belief is that not even the people at the top of the cannibal food-chain have any power to change it – as individuals; which means we might be on a runaway train. More on this further along, if I don’t forget what I wrote.
So we feel responsible because we know… but at the same time, we also sit with the that itch – which may be the unacknowledgable certainty that even as we know how cannibalistic are these flows, we are incapable of survival without eating at least some of the flesh that flows past us, because so much of what is essential simply to survive is already monopolized within these established flows.
We all are forced to take a bite and a sip from the network of pipes – to torture this metaphor a bit more – because survival apart from the cannibal-grid has been foreclosed by a mindless, systemic, and totalizing enclosure (another of your words).
That’s not to say that we can’t identify, on a case by case basis, things we might be able to do without in order to be lower our participation. Even this, however, abstracts the problem, because we don’t know how to measure what we need or don’t need without resorting to ultra-reductive formulas that don’t take into account the complexity of living in this world.
For example, if a woman raising three kids on her own in X-Town USA needs a job, and her skills are limited to secretarial tasks or table-waiting, she will likely have to have a car (that is not “necessary” for life in some reductive formula, but surely is necessary when the available jobs are five, ten, fifteen miles away). But the car isn’t all she needs to get her job. She needs to present herself in a way that will pass muster with potential employers, so she will need whatever is considered presentable clothes, a presentable haircut, even enough basic makeup to be presentable in the eyes of said employer. On and on it goes…
…and all of us intuit, given our particular circumstances, what we need not just to survive, though that really a question of establishing enough security within the system, but to do this “getting along” that the woman above is doing when she applies her makeup in the morning, as she gets the kids ready for daycare.
We become accustomed to what we do to “get along,” because if we didn’t find some level of acceptance of our own inescapable circumstances, we’d go nuts.
For most folks this accommodation is internalized as “the way things are” (and that is actually true in a sense); and most people are protected from the bloodier realities about the way things are by simple fetishization – that marxian term for “out of sight – out of mind.”
The dilemma for those who have peered through the mystifying haze is more uncomfortable because we still feel as if once we know we are responsible… even though – and this is important – we are powerless to change the essential dynamic of the system. Moral accountability is a thing with a fuzzy edge; and knowing does not make us culpable unless there is something we can do; and I don’t mean “do” in the sense of agonizing over every single act (a recipe for complete paralysis).
We are communicating in a medium that is certainly part of the general cannibalism; but I think we also sense that given its existence, there is a way to employ a degree of bricolage with this medium that might contribute to figuring out DO-able ways to make moral choices even as we are residents of a world now monopolized by this cannibalism.
I actually use this medium for my job right now, because I need the money to do the things required to sustain a household with one man, two women, and a one-year-old girl – in Adrian MI, circa 2011, at this apartment house. Sherry put on her presentable clothes and presentable makeup this morning to go to her job, where she does her bit to provide another share of the household cash flow.
The responsibilities we have to others is another thing that lashes us to the cannibal-grid, or the cannibal-monopoly-totality.
On my earlier claim that even the people at the top of the cannibal food chain are not in charge. This is a controversial belief, in part because we see examples all the time of powerful people getting their way, and we can identify individual wills at work in the process. It is also controversial because we want there to be someone who is really in charge, because that means if “we” can somehow replace “them,” then things would get better. We pin our hopes on this idea. That’s what elections are, a ritual proclamation of hope in the liturgical calendar of our civil religion.
This is also why people are attracted to conspiracy theories… they reassure us that the system can be controlled, because even if the wrong people control it now, there is the hope that when the right people come along, they can put things right.
But our reality imo is more Weberian. Power has been bureaucratized. The CEO might be making all the right moves, and exercising his power (in predictable ways); but if he dies tomorrow, the next guy will be equally predictable, because the job exists in a bureaucratic network of jobs that is more entrenched than any single person with any single job, no matter how powerful. The same applies to a Supreme Court justice, a General, an efficiency consultant, a McDonald’s manager, or the President of the United States. There are all taking up positions at particular spigots in the cannibal pipe-network (their job descriptions). The spigots are fixed, but the person at each one is replaceable.
14 June 2011, 8:35 amRichard:
Thanks for this post, and for your response, Stan.
These things are on my mind fairly constantly, but only occasionally do they rise to the level of some urgency, where I feel the existential need to do something, but not knowing what to do, or having the time to think about how to get to the point of doing it, never mind the knowledge that it’d be just one person, or one family, making changes…. well, paralysis, or inaction, is the rule.
Just yesterday I read this horrifying, yet not-news-to-me, piece on climate change: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/11/242903/mother-nature-is-just-getting-warmed-up-june-heat-records/
And I was re-shocked, terrified anew about what my daughter (she is just three this August) and her children will have to live with, how they’ll survive.
14 June 2011, 9:27 amCurt:
Charles,
14 June 2011, 12:28 pmI do not buy your idea that the people at the top are steering a run away train for a second. Just because you can replace one CEO or one Gerneral with another General or CEO means nothing. The way I see it if someone reaches these heights it is because they have been guilty of deriliction of duty their whole life. If they are in a position to rock the boat and instead they sail for smooth sailing they deseerve a really really severe punishement. Sure on peg will replace another. The first pegs chose successors that will speak highly of them and cement their good standing in the history books. It is obvious the successors will share their predessors disdain for promoting the general welfare.
Yes we are dirty, in so many ways. Yesterday I did many dirty things. I did not sell crack. I did not have sex with a prostitute. I did not dump JP$ in to the atmosphere. I did not fly in an AWACS aircraft to assist in attacks on Libya. I did not watch porn. I did not write an advertisement for a cigarette company. I did not write an advertisment for a pharma company. But if I had perhaps I should be forgiven becasue perhaps I was unaware of of big pharma disceptions. I did not make a contract with a company to produce products that I know can only be produced at that price becasue sweatshop labor will be used. But if I had and I had been lobbying in an industry trade group to creat a system that would get competing firms not to try to undercut one another by such tactics maybe I could be forgiven for having taken a neccessary short term decision.
NO something simple has to be done. AN EXAMPLE HAS TO BE SET. ONE THAT WILL SCARE THE HELL OUT OF EVERY LIVING PERSON WHO IS NEAR THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN AND IS STILL FREE.
Simple to say, complex to do.
I am not up to the task.
How about you?
Stan:
I’m Stan, not Charles… but that’s cool.
The point is not whether individuals can make choices (and no one steers a runaway train… that is the point, it doesn’t stop and it is on a fixed course). The system as a whole is self-organized in such a way that no one person in any capacity – even those who are in positions of greater influence and power – can substantially change the system by any act of will or conscience.
14 June 2011, 12:49 pmMorocco Bama:
De, that was simply superb. Your writing resonates with me…it’s as though you’ve read my mind and heart. I can’t respond with more than that right now because this piece is still cooking my rib roast. Maybe I’ll add my insights when the cooking process is complete.
At least he didn’t call you Johnson, Ray.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoYsfbq3vMc
14 June 2011, 2:42 pmCurt:
I do not buy that. Of course not one act can make a difference. It takes a campaign by many people. The first act is to try to ally with someone to wage the campaign.
I chose to look at it this way. The chances of a campiagn that works outside of the allowed political process succeeding in doing what is actually needed to be done in the world as soon as possible is 10,000 times greater than one that would follow the allowed rules. Of course an intermediate step in that process would be a wholesale change of the top level of society.
By the way, I left out some important information.
I did watch a movie yesterday that by the standards of the 1960s would be called Pornography. The movie was called Pefume. It did not really get pornographic until the end though. By a Supream Court definition it would perhaps not apply as porn because I think that there was a very profound implied political message in the film. I am struggling to figure out what it was though. Alzheimers cause us to forget things, like our childrens names, and scenes in movies.
Sometimes minor things from the past are remembered.
Like just now I remembered that I was watching this documentary on underwater archeology when I was a kid. The narrator said, at first archeologists were trained as divers to excavate underwater Minoan sites but then it was discovered that it was easier to train divers to be archeologists.
A knot always has a weak link. Once it starts to open the knot often falls apart. But maybe I am not allowed to say that because I have never proven myself to be a good problem solver. My way of solving a problem has always been to identify the problem, explain it to my supervisor and then ask him to tell me what to do.
On the other hand despite not being a good problem solver I do think that I do not often act irresponsibly in so far as my actions are under my own control. My perception of the basic responsibility level of many middle class Americans based on my expierience living for 30 plus years in the USA leaves a lot to be desired.
America is a society in need of remedial training. Who can give it to them? Those that have the means to give it to them have a motive to with hold it?
Those that have the training and the motive, such as Charles and Gary(Prevost), to provide the USA with what it needs, do not have the means.
That is a problem that is above my pay grade.
14 June 2011, 3:27 pmThat is a problem for ex Colonels and Sergents, and detectives, and prosecuting attorneys, who are not ex patriots to solve. Collectively of course.
Curt:
Just so no one here gets confused I am now going to start writing under the name of:
14 June 2011, 3:45 pmSt. Jude as Claus.
Morocco Bama:
I am not up to the task.
How about you?
You would think all those highly trained macho studs in Special Ops would be, but in the end, they’d prefer to not take risks, and instead, like the cowards they are, kill innocent men, women and children, and train other potential thugs to do the same. Sorry, I don’t buy the notion that I am as guilty as the scum special ops guys who murdered with impunity, and aided and abetted murder, in Latin and South America, and still do. I can promise you, with 100% certainty, my daughter and son will not be joining the military, even if there is a draft. We discuss the evil nature of that institution on a fairly regular basis, and the message is clear, if you join the military you are taking part in a criminal enterprise and you are a thug, bully, and murdered, and even if you’re not the one pulling the trigger, you are directly aiding and abetting those who are.
15 June 2011, 7:20 amWinston Warfield:
De has articulated well the angst any thinking, empathetic person must feel with today’s predicament, trap. Very many across the planet want it to be different, as evidenced by all the mass protest, ecological counter-communities, “Buy Nothing Day” wake-up ideas, and so forth. So maybe a kind of spontaneous mass change is in the works. Today thousands of nude bicyclists in Mexico City of all places, a catholic country, protested the insane car culture which is strangling their living space. We have said a lot about the sum of the parts, i.e. about corporate bureaucracy, government power, and so forth, making it impossible for even those at the top of the power pyramid who do want to make change, to do so, that they are suffocated by careerism, inertia, etc. (Obama as a powerless fly entrapped in the web of Washington’s ruthless political culture). But what’s true at the top may be also true at the “bottom” (if you will), but in a positive way. By promulgating a culture of environmental awareness, anti-militarism, anti-consumerism, peace-making, anti-imperialism, gender respect, ONE PERSON AT A TIME, it adds up to a movement whose sum-of-parts then starts to make a difference, instead of stifling change. Of course each of us cannot be “pure”, cannot divorce ourselves from our way of life all at once. That’s impossible. Further, in order for that to happen, some measure of coercion would have to be involved, so one evil would replace another. Didn’t the Khmer Rouge commit unspeakable crimes in the name of “starting over”, with their Year Zero nonsense, their radical efforts to de-urbanize? In a coercive campaign to annihilate the urban paradigm in response to another unspeakable crime, the mass terror bombing of the Cambodian peasantry, of course. Not wanting to digress into a discussion of an historical period, but thought it useful to bring up what can happen if the voluntary nature of change ONE PERSON AT A TIME is replaced by some kind of mass coercive social experiment, however valid its underlying justifications. So, getting back to the individual change model, it’s very difficult to do. Try giving up on your car and replacing it totally by bicycling, if you’ve got a family and trips to the supermarket and so forth. But conversions are possible, nonetheless, as we have all discovered. Not a perfect new world, but changes. I’m looking at my old bicycle in the garage, and will field-strip it, re-grease the races, adjust the spokes, replace the brake pads (all skills I self-learned as a kid), buy a little trailer to carry stuff back from local shopping trips. That I can do, and feel good about leaving the van sit in the driveway. I’ve got a small sailboat (28-foot Catalina, De), and am weaning myself off using the auziliary diesel as much as possible. It’s VERY HARD to sail onto a mooring in a strong breeze, catch it, and drop sail all in one move. Your timing has to be perfect, you have to be situationally super-aware to do it and not collide with other boats nearby. Our ancestors were good at this, a necessary skill for them. But this brings up the issue of convenience, which is at the root of our imperial dilemna, no? We are all addicted to it in some measure, and must break the habit. It’s not easy, like quitting smoking. Partly because we’ve learned to view time itself as an enemy which must be defeated every day, by making use of convenience tools. It takes constant self-restraint to kick THAT habit. I have to laugh at myself at how impatient I get when weeding my own garden – there are so many goddam invasive sprouts of grass to pull, and so little TIME. But then, when I push that impatient impulse down, and start getting “into it”, it’s actually enjoyable and brings peace. Okay, so now to bring in one final thought, which has to do with depression and hopelessness (subjects with which I’ve been too personally involved over a lifetime). Doesn’t this “one person at a time”, voluntarily, give us the hope we need? Because it’s actually happening across the planet. This blog is evidence of that. I muse at times, having been a soldier, but who has rejected violence, about what good I got out of that experience (because experience is always complex and never all bad). So we were culturally inculcated with the notion of “fighting spirit” in the infantry, however twisted and nutty it was, but we peaceniks can make use of that. Maybe call it “struggling spirit”. Depression is its enemy, so then you find ways to see the glass as half-full, not half-empty, right? I coach inner-city teens in baseball, and we always tell them if they’ve struck out swinging, that at least they took a cut at it, and that adds to the positive attitude which is necessary to do well in a simple baseball game. Okay, enuf, but De’s piece is mighty profound and provocative.
15 June 2011, 7:21 amStan:
@WW Think “sheet mulching.” For the weeds, that is.
@MO As a former scum special ops guy who tried in vain to convince my own kids not to join the military, I found that once they are grown, you can’t make them do or not do anything.
15 June 2011, 7:47 amMorocco Bama:
I’m not digging the tone of this, after I’ve had time to digest it a bit more, or maybe it’s the interpretations by the various commentators and their addendums that are changing the tone, sentiment and meaning of the original piece. Yes, each and every one of us participate in this Cannibalistic Feast in order to just survive, but that’s where the comparison of all the various actors who make up this System ends. We are not all equal, and we are not all equally responsible. I believe that is what Curt is saying, and if it is, I agree with him. He mentioned it in the thread where I deposited the Kimbrell link, and I commended him on his point, and I agree with it, and that point is, once again, that we contribute in varying degrees…..meaning some are contributing to this global quagmire of destruction in very substantial and significant ways, and with full consciousness of the evil for which they are responsible. Those people should be held to account. They are responsible for their evil, and if this thing is to change, there must be Justice and a reconciling with the past, and its many injustices. You don’t just forgive and forget with sociopaths and psychopaths, and you can’t just live and let live with them. Sure, it’s the System that spawns them, but it’s them who ensure that the System that gave birth to them remains in place and perpetuates. You can’t sidestep that issue, because it’s not sidestepping you.
I don’t use the example of Nazis hypocritically, as De implied. I use it as a mirror when I bring it up, and those numb nuts who like to cry foul and say “he/she is invoking Godwin’s Law” can go screw themselves. I bring up the Nazis because they are us….on steroids, and if you look at that System, not all Germans were Nazis. All Germans survived in that System by facilitating to varying degrees, even those who opposed it openly and were eventually murdered as a result. They had to eat to live, and that bread of life came from the very machine that fueled the Beast that was Nazi Germany, but to equate Sophie Scholl and Oscar Schindler with Amon Goeth and Adolph Eichmann is a preposterous equivocation.
Stan, it’s not a matter of making them do or not do anything. In this case, I am that confident. I know with certainty that they will not join the military any more then they would literally eat the flesh of another human being. It’s a matter of taboo. If it’s presented to them as such during their formative years, it has that effect, and it has had that effect with my children. When they see a soldier, their visceral reaction is to see a murderer or a cannibal. If more people, one at a time, did the same, there would be no more soldiers, because we are social animals, and we want to be accepted and belong, and not be treated as abominable pariahs.
15 June 2011, 9:26 amStan:
Who exactly made a claim of moral equivalency between actors?
Saying that everyone is caught in the system is not the same as comparing the culpability of one actor to another. The point was not a comparison; but that the system is bigger than even its biggest actors.
And saying that if more people did X, then Y, is meaningless if people largely aren’t doing X.
Is a special operations soldier a psychopath? Are they all psychopaths? If they are, and as you say one cannot deal with them (except by force, as you imply), then does that make me a psychopath?
Or have I changed? And if I can change, then what happens to your idea that we can’t be forgiven, can’t be “dealt with”?
Things aren’t as simple as you portray them here.
15 June 2011, 10:07 amWinston Warfield:
@MO: “…with full consciousness of the evil for which they are responsible.” I agree with you that there are varying degrees of destructive contribution; my driving my van is different by orders of magnitude from BP killing off much of the Gulf of Mexico. But this notion that there is a consciousness by a person in power that they are “doing evil” is just not true, and that is the crux of our predicament. Noone consciously “does evil”. There is always a justification, and the greatest evils are by those who have power and wield it in the name of some ideal, or, like Eichmann, wield it as a functionary in the name of “professionalism”, which is another kind of ideal, I suppose.
15 June 2011, 10:24 ammichele:
Excellent post De. These thoughts run through my mind every moment. What am i doing “now” to contribute to all that is that needs to not be? A feeling of impotence is my constant companion..yet i find solace in one inescapable conclusion: our evolution proves that cooperation and altruism are our genetic heritage. It seems that our greatest dilemma is one of culture. Cultural altruism has been disarticulated. And here we are..our real “social safety net” in tatters.
Morocco, i apologize that my first acknowledgement of you is going to appear as though i wish to sanction your comments. It is not my intention..it is just that you bring up such an important point, that we cannot let it pass by without examining it further. When we focus on degrees of moral culpability, we bypass personal accountability and responsibility. When we deny our own capacity to effect misery on others and instead consider the ability of some to effect misery on masses; we unnecessarily victimize ourselves. What i am going to say is going to sound simplistic..i apologize, but it is the best analogy i can come up with at the moment. A person goes into a store and buys an item, paying the clerk and either behaves courteously to the clerk, or discourteously. Being rude, or nasty, even dismissive as though the clerk does not exist results in effect. This effect transcends the interaction, and informs the clerks interaction with the next customer. This happens a multitude of times throughout one’s day..it is like that. Responsibility at that level, a kind of vigilant responsibility, doesn’t have time for assigning blame or value related to blame. What would be the point? In the final analysis, the best one can do is to truly see one’s own participation and complicity.
Again, thanks for the post De.
16 June 2011, 10:14 amMorocco Bama:
michele, I have to disagree. Let’s use an example. Bullies at school. If we take your approach, and teach our children to not contribute in bullying, will it stop the bullying? The answer is no, because merely not contributing in it doesn’t stop those who will bully. If bullies know the entire group will not only not contribute to the bullying but will intervene to stop the bullying and punish the bullier if he continues then the bullying will cease. Last time I checked, Special Forces, and their Paymasters, are still bullying…..better than ever, so I find your notion that the most we can do is not contribute to be rather lacking in the face of that.
Take this guy, and his son, for example. He was the notorious torturer and murderer, state sanctioned of course, during Apartheid in South Africa. Ironically, he died of cancer a few years ago, but his son has been adopted by the very establishment that help keep Apartheid South Africa in place, and have promoted him to be one of the leading Captains of their metaphorical Industry of Rape.
http://news.scotsman.com/world/Grim-torturer-of-apartheid-era.2653888.jp
His son carries on the mission, but at a much higher level.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2008_April_28/ai_n25359206/
http://www.specchioeconomico.com/200702/img/78-Nieuwoudt-Gideon-.jpg
16 June 2011, 11:43 ammichele:
Morocco, what? lol, sorry but i was commenting on your comment that stated emphatically that you are not as at fault as the elite/military/government? i didn’t share my point of view any further than to provide you example that denying complicity is absurd. To let onesself off the proverbial hook is unacceptable. Did you benefit from actions taken in South or Latin America? Or Libya, or Iraq, or Afghanistan? Or Germany? Or Guam? Of course you did and do. You, me and every other American. Even though i do not live in America anymore, the country i live in still benefits from oppression, repression and all manner of disempowerment of indigenous populations the world over. It doesn’t matter if we were there or not. Complicity is complicity. Putting that on someone else’s plate because you do not like how it tastes isn’t going to change that. Acknowledging one’s responsibility is not the same as wallowing in guilt though. And it most certainly is not quantifying that responsibility based on qualitative analysis. Exactly what empirical evidence would provide the basis for official levels of responsibility. No..this is a far simpler thing than that. It is all of us. So, if it isn’t guilt and it isn’t passing the buck, what is it? Focusing on the only piece of humanity that has been disarticulated out of our culture intentionally and systematically: the cultural expression of genetic altruism. As i stated quite clearly, my example was simplistic. That does not mean it does not apply. Here are the comments i referred to:
“Sorry, I don’t buy the notion that I am as guilty as the scum special ops guys who murdered with impunity, and aided and abetted murder, in Latin and South America, and still do.”
“I’m not digging the tone of this, after I’ve had time to digest it a bit more, or maybe it’s the interpretations by the various commentators and their addendums that are changing the tone, sentiment and meaning of the original piece. Yes, each and every one of us participate in this Cannibalistic Feast in order to just survive, but that’s where the comparison of all the various actors who make up this System ends. We are not all equal, and we are not all equally responsible. I believe that is what Curt is saying, and if it is, I agree with him. He mentioned it in the thread where I deposited the Kimbrell link, and I commended him on his point, and I agree with it, and that point is, once again, that we contribute in varying degrees…..meaning some are contributing to this global quagmire of destruction in very substantial and significant ways, and with full consciousness of the evil for which they are responsible. Those people should be held to account. They are responsible for their evil, and if this thing is to change, there must be Justice and a reconciling with the past, and its many injustices. You don’t just forgive and forget with sociopaths and psychopaths, and you can’t just live and let live with them. Sure, it’s the System that spawns them, but it’s them who ensure that the System that gave birth to them remains in place and perpetuates. You can’t sidestep that issue, because it’s not sidestepping you.”
It is difficult to infer context/tone in digital interactions, so one must rely on word usage and try not read into comments other’s make. With that in mind, never did i say that the “most” we could do is to not participate. i gave a very simple, non-judgmental example in consideration that i was responding critically to your comments.
17 June 2011, 10:39 amAs to the issue of bullying, i taught my now grown children to confront the person doing the bullying, as well as the children i take care of now. When i say confront, i mean verbally, not physically..not that they always listened. i raised 2 sons and a daughter as a single mom for 15 years, and am now a grandparent of 2. It could be said that we have different opinions based on our parenting status: you in the thick of it, me, mostly finished..but that wouldn’t be true. i still participate as an “assistant” in child-rearing in my job as a nanny.
Ramene Vie:
Nobody knows my real name. I can go onto blogs and such and pretend I am black or white, boy or girl, old or young, native or foreign. That way I can say things from the point of view of anyone that people have to believe because as long as I hide who I really am I can pretend that I speak authentically for the experience of somebody I am not. This is how I can behave like a troll and get away with it, and push my beliefs into discussions without anyone knowing who I really am, and calling me out on whatever privileges they think I might enjoy and how those privileges might colour my opinions. The internet is cool that way.
17 June 2011, 12:21 pmMorocco Bama:
denying complicity is absurd.
I believe “complicity” per De’s analysis needs to be refined a bit further, and also in Kimbrell’s piece. Go back and read what Curt read on the other thread and try to follow along a bit closer. For starters, maybe it’s gone completely over your head, but you would be remiss to think that De’s latest post was inspired, at least in part, by the Kimbrell piece, and in the discussion of it the other thread where I deposited the link, Curt made an excellent point about varying degrees of culpability….or, the inadequate term you use, “complicity.” I didn’t argue with Curt about it, or dismiss his point, instead I stepped away from my computer and thought it over for the day, and let it sink in, and realized it was an extremely valid point, and I’m still refining it in my mind as we speak.
This is not to make excuses for anyone on the spectrum of our Systemical Disorder, but rather is meant to identify different degrees of cooperation with it. It is repugnant to me to attempt to equate someone, and I’m not necessarily saying myself here but rather a generic someone, who is doing everything they can to not only not cooperate with the System but also to hold those to account who are the most responsible for holding the System firmly in place, and preventing those who wish to actively dissolve, from doing so by murdering and torturing them.
No, the best we can hope for is not the recognition of how we contribute to this destructive System, it is merely the beginning, and don’t duck and cover from your words now, because they were your words. Do I need to quote it for you again? It’s right above for all to see. Now, if you want to provide excuses for the Death Camp Commandants and Guards as well as their Paymasters , and for the the Cowardly Murdering Commandos who’s job it is to neutralize anyone and anything who stands in the way of the Feast, or who tries to escape the Death Camp, then that’s one thing, but call it what it is, otherwise, don’t flog me for standing against it, even though I’m still catching crumbs from the banquet table in order to survive another day…..a day that may, just maybe, see the tide turn. I have respect for what these people have done and are doing, regardless of whether they mentioned the deity.
http://www.djpauledge.com/wewillnotbesilenced/index_secondmovie.html?tt=1.1
Ramene, you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, really. It’s not constructive for your morale. The fact that your comment made it through moderation is telling.
18 June 2011, 7:32 amStan:
Does an understanding or a lack of understanding have any bearing on the category “complicity?” If someone doesn’t understand how a system works, is she as guilty as someone who does? At what age should we be expected to recognize our complicity?
If a poor person knows WalMart is a bad actor, but shops there because she can’t afford the higher costs elsewhere, is she as guilty as the person who has more money and also knows WM is a bad actor and shops there anyway? If a well-off person who knows WM is a bad actor refuses to buy WM, then rebukes the poor person who shops there for bargains, is this a legitimate rebuke or an act of hypocrisy?
18 June 2011, 9:53 amMorocco Bama:
First, let’s define “complicity” for the sake of this discussion, then we can move on to your splitting hairs example, because it may render that level of specificity absurd considering the much greater and more direct abuses that are taking place. Part of that definition has to do with voluntary versus involuntary. Understanding needs to be judged according to having the opportunity to understand and willfully eschewing that understanding. If things are to change for the better, it needs to start for the right reasons, and arriving at the right reasons and charting a path to that better future, requires an understanding of the current System and each person’s place/role in it. However, claiming a lack of understanding is no excuse for the worst abusers in this System. I’m watching this documentary, currently, and all these issues are front and center:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gx9zYmuVdM&feature=related
18 June 2011, 10:28 amStan:
I reiterate my question: Who exactly made a claim of moral equivalency between actors?
It is very easy to identify the completed Nazi evil by looking back on its results. It is harder to identify the points of moral complicity for the individual German that constituted the evolution into that evil.
The reason that is hard is because people comply with systems in small ways (1) without understanding the wider import of what they are doing or (2) because their options are foreclosed by dependency or necessity. My questions have to do with moral responsibility… and my point is that there is no one-size-fits-all criterion for determining that. One has to look at that individual person and the individuated complexity of her situation/history.
Speaking as the murdering coward (your words for what I used to do), I have to say that there was a time when I did not understand the system in which I participated. From everything I had learned from my culture, I was the epitome of virtue.
Your words. “requires an understanding”
Then you take those words back in the very next sentence, but only for the “worst abusers.” But the worst abusers cannot do what they do without the participation of those who are in that gray area I am describing. That area where one doesn’t quite understand… and after all, you and I might understand the workings of society differently (in fact, I’d bet we do in many respects).
But there are character differences that make a difference, even when there is no clarity about the ramifications of one’s actions. Mine was something my father told me when I was young. He said, “always root for the underdog.” There was more than that obviously: I felt compassion for people who suffered, wherever that came from, and this led me to ask questions about my profession that eventually turned me against militarism, and finally against prevailing constructions of masculinity. At the end, my conscience led me to an embodied hope as my telos, or true north. The main things that led me out of my own moral wilderness – at least as far as I may have come so far – was love and forgiveness. There were people who loved me, in spite of my defects; and there were people who forgave me, giving me another chance to enter the circle of community.
This is how I approach the questions raised by De’s reflection above. Trying to adjudicate levels of complicity is a sterile exercise, because there is no standard applicable to all (a Kantian confusion). We try to be as virtuous as we can under the circumstances, based on what we understand as virtue; and live life as a set of encounters. The virtues I am trying to practice now are patience, charity, justice, hope, love and forgiveness. I do that imperfectly with the hand I’ve been dealt, under no illusion that I can somehow escape “the system.”
18 June 2011, 11:07 amMorocco Bama:
No, Stan, I used your words about “murdering cowards.” I watched a video of you on the internet and in the interview you referred to what you did, and what others like you did, as bullying. You cannot deny that Special Ops is involved in murder, and you yourself have said, on record, that you and your colleagues were/are bullies, and as we all know, bullies are cowards. So, why the back-tracking? Why the hesitation to say it now when you’re disagreeing with me, once again. Do you not now stand on your prior conviction? Are you waffling? When people are being murdered, directly, and undermined every step of the way from trying to change the System for the better, as we have witnessed, and are witnessing in Latin America and South America, I’m not going to grant a pass to the individuals carrying that out because they may not understand. If they eventually drop their guns, take off their macho mask, renounce their former self and what their colleagues have done and are doing, and ask for true forgiveness by going through a proper atonement, then they have earned my mutual respect, but not until then. Their lack of understanding does not automatically exonerate them.
And Stan, take this how you will, but no matter how hard you try, that masculinity keeps coming through. I can feel it in your words. It’s why I don’t hang with the guys, and when I put De’s words side by side with your’s, there’s a palpable difference. I will give you this, at least you’ve admitted that and are trying, but it’s very far from a complete project.
What’s interesting about De’s words, are that without knowing it, it’s very difficult to determine whether she is male or female, because she, consciously or unconsciously, doesn’t exemplify typical male female characteristics in her writing. She’s pure intellect. That’s a compliment, by the way, and something for which to strive.
18 June 2011, 11:44 amStan:
Here is a 15-minute video on how this cannibalism migrated from war into agriculture.
19 June 2011, 11:11 amDeAnander:
@Morocco, hmmmm. My own take — ever since I met Stan as a virtual presence — is that his prose is actually, sometimes eerily, similar to my own
One time we wrote an essay together, and after a while it was hard to remember who had written which paragraph or sentence. Prose analysis and perceptions of gender are ever treacherous waters. Just ask Robert Silverberg, who was utterly convinced of the “ineluctable masculinity” of James Tiptree Jr’s fiction. Turned out JT was really Alice B Sheldon… writing under a nom de plume for amusement, privacy, and to be taken seriously in a male-dominated creative field. Silverberg, to his credit, published a rather charming retraction when “Tiptree” was outed (iirc by the receipt of a prestigious award). Anyway, enough digression (a speciality of my own prose style, but as I’m reading Thackeray right now I realise that we moderns don’t even begin to grasp the art of digression).
–
I suspect that the way we stop the global cannibal feast (if it is indeed possible) is probably not by performing precise metrics on each other’s degrees of guilt, devising an orderly taxonomy and hierarchy, and placing ourselves (and each other!) firmly in our assigned slot on the complicity chart — not to mention all the quarrelling over slot assignments. The effort expended in debating just how guilty X is compared to me, and how guilty I am compared to Y, seems to me unnecessary: I think (though I can’t prove it) that each person’s attempt to reduce his/her own share of the feast lessens, by that small amount, the pressure on each other person to act out their role at the table.
Pursuing the analogy relentlessly: if enough of us refuse a second course then there are fewer victims being served up. If enough of us refuse entirely then we don’t need the butchers, cooks, carvers and servers either: their jobs evaporate.
Which is only to say the same thing again: if we had enough people determined to be good (at least to avoid doing harm) then there wouldn’t be enough people willing to do harm, to be organised in gangs to do even more efficient harm (like armies of soldiers). Every person who drops out of the money/liquidation nexus — even half way — reduces some of the collective voracity that imperils us all. Which is why the PTB do not want us to step away from the table, ridicule and/or threaten us if we try, etc.
How to step away from that table — whether our role is as guest, server, carver, cook or butcher — and how to assist the main course in escaping from that table; that’s what perplexes me of late. And the talk of tables and food is imho not just metaphor. It all starts with being dependent on an elite gang for your daily bread; once they’ve taken your land, you have no option but to serve in their army, wait on their tables, work in their factories, sell at least one daughter to their brothels to keep the family fed. Once they can prevent us from feeding the kids, they have us on a leash; what wouldn’t we do, to feed our hungry child? Enclosure is blackmail is slavery… is capitalism…
19 June 2011, 12:50 pmRoss Wolfe:
A very interesting reflection on global capitalism and the environment, a topic that interests me greatly. I certainly agree that global capitalism has increased the “scope, voracity, and velocity” of humanity’s exploitation of nature, though I would argue that this quantitative increase (both intensively and extensively) is such that it has engendered a qualitative difference in terms of its emphasis on instrumental rationality. This is, of course, the classic Marxist gesture. But of course, I would also say that while the capitalist social formation has exacerbated humanity’s alienation from nature and increased the rate of environmental destruction to an unprecedented degree, the technologies and organizational methodologies allows for emancipatory possibilities that could never have before existed. As all too often occurs, that which presently enslaves us offers us the potential to realize a better society.
With the erudition and critical acumen you display on this and other posts, Feral Scholar (I don’t know your name), I would be interested to hear what you make of an essay that I wrote on the subject about a month back. It has recently been published in the online Speculative Realist journal Thinking Nature, although its viewpoint is solidly Marxist. It includes not only an exposition of the problem of society and nature, but also a thoroughgoing critique of the contemporary “Green” environmental movement. It is entitled “Man and Nature.”
20 June 2011, 7:41 amTom:
Is that why people choose paper over plastic? I was never sure. From a surface-level analysis, it seems that plastic would be the more moral choice since getting paper requires chopping-down and cutting-up trees (which, lest we forget, are living creatures too).
3 July 2011, 4:45 pmmasa:
Hey Stan, I think I’ve suggested this before. A book called “Columbus and Other Cannibals,” by the late Jack Forbes. I feel it is a remarkable book and wonder what you think, so please let me know if you have read this, or what you think once you have.
4 July 2011, 4:05 amm
Kim Sky:
debtOcracy
Beautifully produced, comprehensive documentary about the economic enslavement of Greece and other peripheral economies. Shot for 8,000 Euros, the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty called it “the best film of Marxian economic analysis yet produced.” Check out especially the part about “odious debt” beginning around minute 34 or 35. Select your choice of subtitles by selecting CC-Subtitles at the top of the screen at the beginning. Available in German, Italian, Portuguese, English, French and Spanish as well as of course, the original Greek.
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/brilliant-greek-documentary-debtocracy/
7 July 2011, 1:13 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
Kim and Charles,
15 July 2011, 1:51 amI would appreciate your helo in connecting some dots. It has been my contention that the real behind the scenes leaders of the USA and its empire are not the President and Congress nor some secret cabal of bankers but a secret or semi secret cabal of high ranking officers in the MIC. To make this concept more pluasible I should be able to connect the dots between this phoney fear of bankruptcy that is being pedaled world wide right now and the MIC.
Can either of you help me out and come up with some ideas of how the MIC benifits from this perception of crisis.
Why is the crisis is being served up at this time? What type of solution would the MIC want to this managed crisis? How will they benefit from the solution?
Inquiring minds want to know.
m.c.:
Is anyone here familiar with Daniel Guerin? Wikipedia has an exerpt from his famous 1936 book, Fascism and Big Business. I’m looking for a copy.
15 July 2011, 12:53 pmkim sky:
MIC – what is the MIC?
thanx, kim
15 July 2011, 3:52 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
Military Industrial Complex
15 July 2011, 4:08 pmKim Sky:
Attn St Jude and MIC.
A complex web to un-weave? I did recently stumble across this…
the largest contractors in the government market based on an analysis of government procurement data during fiscal 2010.
http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011.aspx
in this list each corporation has a link, tis something to ponder!
and an article that explains odios debt etc, from a different angle on the video from above.
Facing the Debt Crisis in Europe
http://www.counterpunch.org/millet07152011.html
good luck, eh!
Attn M.C.:
16 July 2011, 11:53 amthanx for pointing out Daniel Guerin, looks like some interesting reading! his book Negroes On the March looks interesting too.
Kim Sky:
FASCISM AND BIG BUSINESS:
wow, just began reading this…
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm
talk about some very insightful stuff! i had been beginning to believe that i would vote for sarah palin or whoever of the republican party to usher in the horribleness that we are headed for in the belief that the soon things fall apart the better.
this fellow state:
A PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS ILLUSION consists in regarding fascism, despite the horror it inspires, as a progressive political phenomenon – as a passing and even necessary, though painful, stage. Rash prophets have announced ten times, a hundred times, the imminent and inevitable crumbling of the fascist dictatorship in Italy or Germany under the blows of the victorious revolution. They have asserted that fascism, by driving class antagonisms to their highest degree of tension, is hastening the hour of the proletarian revolution, even going so far as to contend that the proletariat could conquer power only by passing through the hell of the fascist dictatorship. Today it is no longer possible to keep up such illusions. Events have demonstrated with tragic clearness that the moment the working class allows the fascist wave to sweep over it, a long period of slavery and impotence begins – a long period during which socialist, even democratic, ideas are not merely erased from the pediments of public monuments and libraries but, what is much more serious, are rooted out of human minds. Events have proved that fascism physically destroys everything opposing its dictatorship, no matter how mildly, and that it creates a vacuum around itself and leaves a vacuum behind it.
This extraordinary power to survive by annihilating everything except itself, to hold out against everything and everybody, to hold out for years in spite of internal contradictions and in spite of the misery and discontent of the masses – what is behind it?
16 July 2011, 12:11 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
I do not have a shred of evidence to support the idea that I am about to throw out. If what I am about to throw out were true in would explain everything to me. That is that the people who rake in the profits from the Federal Reserve and other national central banks around the world are not the Rothafellers or even the Rockschields or Warbucks but active and retired Generals from militaries around the world.
16 July 2011, 2:23 pmIs there even one shred of evidence that Generals are living above thier means that they have obtained from thier salaries, retiremnet pay, investments, and inherintances? Is there even one shred of evidence that the Generals ever discuss the economic policies of the central banks? Surely if such a conspiracy exsisted it would have been discovered by peopel working in the Echelon Program. Even though they are in the chain of commmand of the Generals if they had happened to overhear a General saying somethibg suspicous they would certianly be smart enouhg to undertand its sicgnificance would they not? And having stumbled upon this key information they would certianly be patriotic enough to blow the whistle about such suspicions would they not? And having decided that a General is up to no good they would certianly know who to report it to so that a proper investigation would be done on the matter correct?
It all points to the fact that my suspicions on this matter must be misplaced. As my protege once said, suspicions are one thing but proof is something else. He has me by the balls. What can I say to such a retort?
Another critisism that I have heard about my one of a kind idea is that if the Generals were the prime movers represented by prime numbers then the number of military installations would be always increasing. Well the news of almsot 600 Air Force Majors being fired at the same time that I read something on newworldeconomics.com or .org I forget now exactly made it clear to me how the military can be reduced in size over time.
You see I figure that one reason that the military needs to be much lareger than neccessary to defend a huge country with no NATRUAL enemies is that the people at the top are looking for people just like them to continue thier work, namely talents psychopaths or sociopaths. You see the pool of Colonels to choose the Generals from is quite large. By that point the many of the incompetent people have not been promoted and many of the patriotic people have left because even being the slow learners that they are over thier carreers they began to understand what Gen. Smedley said many years ago that the MIC is racket (con game). So those Colonets who get promoted to Flag officer status have to be either knowingly willing to continue the con at the expense of the nation or have to be really really politcally stupid.
So what I realized from my recent readings and I consider this pretty darned important is that the percent of the population in American society exhibiting sociopathic or psychopathic behavior is increasing year by year.
One result of that is that the percentage of siciopaths in the pool of Colonels would also be increasing year by year. Presto a small pool of applicants is required.
Furhtermore if it is Generals that control the President and the Congress and not vice versa the only people that could ever happen to challenge these Generals for control of the country would have to come from the military itself. If the only people that you have to look out for are those underneath you it would then be pretty obviuos that the military would spend more time watching its field grade officers than it would have wathching the Soviets during the cold war. It would also mean that you would not want the number of people in the military to be any larger than it had to be to insure the reproduction of the ruling body.
Since the Generals spend so much time watching their field grade officers they will no doubt be able to read this tract. They will no doubt be laughing their asses off. Hahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha.
Who will believe him. If someone does believe him they will just shrug their shoulders and say there is nothing that can be done about it anyways. If I lift my head about the proverbial parapit it will just get shot off.
So no wonder the Generals are so addicted to what they do. They are winning now. They have won in the past. They will win forever in to the future. This is nothing that a Mason City Police Patrolman can do anything about.
Amen
Praise the Gods
Drink Dud Bud’s Suds Beer for a really Rock Mountain Colorado High.
St. Jude as Claus:
I just spontaneously figured that maybe a simpler reason that the military can get samller is that the need to admit new members to the inner club gets smaller and smaller each year for any number of reasons.
16 July 2011, 2:53 pmKim Sky:
generals — not just generals, seems to be they often are the ones that are not wanting to jump into war. looking for a simplistic explaination of anything in this ultra-complex world aint easy.
though the greeks seem to have one idea: the banners, referring to the politicians”. “The ass-holes will die”
After 10 days in Syntagma
http://wlcentral.org/node/2036
i’m inclined to designate the rulers as the Global Financial Aristocracy (GFA) rather than the Military Industrial Complex (MIC)
hopefully you’ll just read the following article, below are a couple of excerpts.
The European debt crisis and the threat of dictatorship
http://wsws.org/articles/2011/jul2011/pers-j16.shtml
…The representatives of finance capital are well aware that their counterrevolutionary policy will provoke social upheavals. Their answer is the preparation of new and more repressive forms of rule.
In Germany, the discussion on the necessity for “post-democratic” forms of rule is led by the Berlin professor, Herfried Münkler. The solution to the euro-crisis, Münkler argues, is not democratization, but rather more power for the German and European elites.
16 July 2011, 4:25 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
I am not sure that there will be protests and civil disobediance in the U.S. when the gains that workers made during the 20th century rolled back. If there were it is unlikely that the police will hesitate to bash the heads of the “deadbeats” police have been doing it for the past two thousand years with only a few exceptions.
16 July 2011, 5:50 pmThere is no longer a cult of the leader but a cult of the system. The system is always right even if it is not very right, it is the most right possible under the conditions, right?
Michael Anderson:
From Fascism and Big Business;
“….the real nature of the fascist state: a military and police dictatorship in the service of big business.”
18 July 2011, 8:05 amMichael Anderson:
From Fascism and Socialism:
“Nevertheless the phenomenon is comprehensible if one remembers that fascism is not only an instrument at the service of big business, but, at the same time a mystical upheaval of the pauperized and discontented petty-bourgeoisie.”
…SWMMC…
18 July 2011, 8:26 amSt. Jude as Claus:
” A military and police dictatorship in the service of big business.” Or, an economy of easily controlable institutions in the service of military and police hintermänner.
18 July 2011, 3:33 pmMichael Anderson:
All of the above, inter-meshed…
18 July 2011, 7:14 pmKim Sky:
War on Iran in September?
From interview on KPFK, program Background Briefing: [Baer] appeared on KPFK Los Angeles, warning that Israeli PM Netanyahu is “likely to ignite a war with Iran in the very near future.” It gets worse: “Masters asked Baer why the US military is not mobilising to stop this war from happening. Baer responded that the military is opposed, as is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who used his influence to thwart an Israeli attack during the Bush and Obama administrations. But he’s gone now and “there is a warning order inside the Pentagon” to prepare for war.” The punchline: “There is almost “near certainty” that Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict“, Baer explained.”
Why am I so taken in by this possibility? Stan I remember when you predicted that no such war would take place. Does you still predict that no such war will take place?
20 July 2011, 11:47 amMichael Anderson:
The ante has been upped—-here at home, where it’s just another day in the global battlespace:
Enclosure, anyone?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45208498
Oil Executive: Military-Style ‘Psy Ops’ Experience Applied
Last week’s oil industry conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston was supposed to be an industry confab just like any other — a series of panel discussions, light refreshments and an exchange of ideas.
It was a gathering of professionals to discuss “media and stakeholder relations” in the hydraulic fracturing industry — companies using the often-controversial oil and gas extraction technique known as “fracking.”
But things took an unexpected twist.
CNBC has obtained audiotapes of the event, on which one presenter can be heard recommending that his colleagues download a copy of the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. (Click below to hear the audio.) That’s because, he said, the opposition facing the industry is an “insurgency.”
Another told attendees that his company has several former military psychological operations, or “psy ops” specialists on staff, applying their skills in Pennsylvania. (Click below to hear.)
The comments were recorded by an environmental activist, who passed along audio files to CNBC. The activist, Sharon Wilson, is the director of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project for the nonprofit environmental group Earthworks. She said she paid full price to attend the two day event, and wore a nametag identifying her organization as she recorded the conference.
In a session entitled “Designing a Media Relations Strategy To Overcome Concerns Surrounding Hydraulic Fracturing,” Range Resources communications director Matt Pitzarella spoke about “overcoming stakeholder concerns” about the fracking process.
“We have several former psy ops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” Pitzarella said. “Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of psy ops in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”
At another session, Matt Carmichael, the manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum [APC 83.95 1.40 (+1.7%) ], spoke on the topic of “Understanding How Unconventional Oil & Gas Operators are Developing a Comprehensive Media Relations Strategy to Engage Stakeholders and Educate the Public.”
He said he had several recommendations for the oil industry media professionals at the event, one of which, he said, involved the military.
“Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency,” Carmichael said. “There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”
Reached by CNBC to provide context to his remarks about psychological operations, Range Resources’ Matt Pitzarella explained that he was referring to one employee of the firm, whose military background makes him particularly good at handling emotional meetings with local representatives.
“Range employs dozens of veterans and active service men and women,” Pitzarella said. “One employee who works with municipal governments in Pennsylvania has a background in psychological operations in the Army. Since the majority of his work is spent in local hearings and developing local regulations for drilling, we’ve found that his service in the Middle East is a real asset.”
Pitzarella explained that Range operates transparently with local communities, and pointed out that it was the first company in the United States to fully disclose all the fracking fluids that it uses. He also took issue with Carmichael’s comments about using Marine Corps tactics on opponents in an “insurgency.”
“That’s not something I think that we would do,” Pitzarella said. “You’re not dealing with insurgents, you’re dealing with regular people who live in towns and want to know what you’re doing.”
Carmichael emailed a comment to CNBC, explaining his remarks. “The comment was simply suggesting industry embracing a broader move toward more active community engagement and increased transparency, as it’s very important to build fact-based knowledge to maintain public trust amidst special interests that often use misinformation to create fear,” he said.
Wilson, who recorded the remarks, said the comments reveal what the fracking industry thinks about people in the communities that are impacted by the industry.
“What’s clear to me is that are having to use some very extreme measures in out neighborhoods,” she said. “And it seems like they view it as an occupation.”
She said she was surprised such military-style techniques would be discussed in an open forum.
“This was crossing a line — they considered it was on the American people, sort of like they are going in and occupying our land — which is what they are doing,” Wilson said.
But another attendee saw the remarks differently.
Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, said Carmichael’s comments about facing an “insurgency,” were simply meant as a joke.
“There are no black helicopters here,” Tucker said. “No one’s rappelling down from a helicopter at three a.m. looking through people’s trash. We go to township meetings, and we hear what people have to say.”
8 November 2011, 5:07 pmCurt:
Is it really true as it is being reported on Yahoo that the Russians spill 5 million tons of oil per year?
19 December 2011, 9:50 amMichael Anderson:
A piece of history that needs to be remembered, before it is revised (again). Another “beginning” for neo-liberal-conservative-ism (many names, same M.O.). The article has its faults, but this paragraph stood out for me, as yet another bell-weather of economic intent.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/22/marshall-plan-europe-krugman-aust-imulus
“In addition, we then launched the ambitious Marshall plan which not only rebuilt our former adversaries but also created international markets for US producers. One of the conditions for nations to receive Marshall plan funding was giving preferred access to American exporters. The Marshall plan years from 1948 to 1952 saw one of the fastest periods of growth in European history, and American businesses profited greatly from their privileged position in these fast emerging markets. Any huge stimulus plan today would not benefit from those advantages.”
23 January 2012, 9:30 amMichael Anderson:
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/exportordie02252012/
This is a link to an article talking about LNG, exports, and keeping the price up to make a profit. Good article, generally, but the frightening part is the first 4 paragraphs:
Skepticism Surrounds Gas Industry’s Export-or-Die Narrative
“Ten or so years ago, I was having a seemingly innocuous conversation about the state of “the economy” with a co-worker. The discussion took an unusual turn, though, when she went off the deep end. “I don’t care if we have to cut down all the trees and pave over all the land, as long as it creates jobs,” she asserted. “Concerns about the environment or animals should never get in the way of economic progress.”
The details of the conversation have stuck in my mind because of the starkness of her words. This person’s worldview was diametrically opposed to my own. Understanding that she was a lost cause, I decided not to waste my time with her. I simply responded, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” And then I walked away.
That conversation took place in a workplace environment. Neither of us were policymakers, lawmakers or regulators. Our discussion had no direct impact on whether or not acres of forest would be cut down to build a new natural gas pipeline or farmland would be paved over to build a road to a natural gas compressor station.
Unfortunately, my co-worker’s views on the environment, outrageous as they may sound, are not rare. Even more troubling is the fact that her views are the prevailing opinion among the nation’s ruling elite whose primary concern is that the system we call “the economy” keeps humming along without interruption.”
25 February 2012, 3:23 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.ogfj.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-3/features/majors-and-foreign-oil.html
It would seem that, now, the U.S. is indeed the Third World, as global oil capital (indeed, any kind of capital) loots the earth under our feet. It practices a much more brutal version of “neoliberalism”.
“A key trend in the Eagle and several other North American shale plays is the arrival of major integrated oil companies and foreign-owned oil companies, most of which have formed joint venture agreements with large- to mid-sized independents to share in the high cost of field development. This is a win-win for companies such as Anadarko Petroleum and Chesapeake Energy because their cash-rich partners, many of which are state owned, pay most of the development costs for the first few years. The benefit for the foreign companies is that they gain access to North American energy resources and also acquire expertise in shale drilling and completion techniques, which they can apply in their own countries and elsewhere.”
Our “socialist” neighbors in Europe and elsewhere are really Fascists at heart. Perhaps Germany DID win the war, in a certain way.
20 March 2012, 7:43 amHenry:
Erdogan’s Janissaries
Turks, Cease Fire!
by ISRAEL SHAMIR
“The people of Turkey do not want war with Syria; even Turkish generals are not keen to unleash the dogs of war. Only pro-NATO Westernisers within Turkish leadership desire to overturn the legitimate government in Damascus. Other Turks remember that doing Western bidding never led Turkey – or Russia – to any good result.”
The Rest:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/12/turks-cease-fire/
12 October 2012, 4:04 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Kim sky, Fascism and big business, Guerin:
Read first link, will look at others, and hopefully find the book. The right stuff, completely in line with the present reality and discussion. Communism has its own set of corpses and skeletons in the closet, but Marxist analysis is one of the best for systems analysis. A bit late, but—-Thank you.
Re-reading DeAnander’s post and comments this morning first thing out of bed, the first thought that popped into my head was from an old horror B-movie, “It’s Alive”, about a killer mutant infant born somewhere in L.A. After wreaking havoc on innocent, mostly middle-class people (?), in its search for food and blind wounded-animal aggression to threats, the beleaguered police finally kill it. The last scene in the movie is one of the cops taking a call from headquarters, and saying to his partner, “another one’s been born in Seattle.”
2 April 2013, 12:17 pm