The Business of Emotions

How the Iraq Resistance Unmasks the American State and the Promise of Zapatismo

The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.
(Philip Abrams, "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State". Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1, March 1988) Link

It was once found that couples who survived being held hostage together have an abnormally high incidence of divorce.

The stress of being held hostage, apparently, brought out hidden and unflattering qualities in their partner, which shattered previous illusions and destroyed the marriage. One imagines hitherto stalwart and loving husbands thinking only of their own survival. 

The partner who behaved badly, had, as it were, two faces which surfaced at different times. But for the accident of the hijacking, the darker face would never have surfaced and the spouse would have been non the wiser.

The story is recounted by Zygmunt Berman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman uses the anecdote to suggest that the Holocaust was an instance of modernity’s "darker" side; always there, awaiting the right conditions in which to emerge.

Leaving the Holocaust to one side, I want to use the analogy to illuminate the effect of the Iraqi Resistance to the United States' invasion and occupation. It has been a barbaric festival of cruelty and humiliation, the function of which, I have argued elsewhere [Link], is to vent America's malice in the wake of the humiliating attacks on the epicenter of global capital on September 11, 2001.

An ugly face of the United States has emerged since 9/11, now staring at us shamelessly in Iraq. Who would have thought, before that day, that the United States would:

• Wage war against a practically defenseless country on the basis of a farrago of blatant lies.

• Slaughter close to a million people, mostly women and children, destroy an entire society and have its President say that Iraqis owe the United States a “huge debt of gratitude” for the its “sacrifice”.

• Claim the right to imprison without trial, to humiliate and to torture in what amounts to a global gulag.

And who knows what other atrocities we have yet to discover.

In truth, the United States has been doing this sort of thing for years, but with clandestine discretion. The resistance to its military occupation of Iraq has forced its modus operandi out into the open and now the entire world knows about it.

Perhaps not two faces, then, but one face and a mask. Well, thanks to the coalition of Iraq Resistance movements, the mask is now off, and, to use Abrams words, we can see American political practice for what it really is.

What Would it Take to get Americans to Riot?
It is common to blame the Iraq debacle on the Bush junta and the legislative coup which brought it to power. But there’s much more to it than that.

The really chilling aspect of the casual slaughter of Iraqis and the rape of their country, is not just the actions of the perpetrators of these atrocities—the soldiers, marines and aircrew—it is the inaction of the mass of Americans who, even if they did not actively support them, let them do it, with barely a murmur.

Given the appalling gravity of what has been done in their name, Americans have been remarkably obliging to the Bush Administration. What, one wonders, would it take to get Americans to riot?

It is not just the immoral behaviour of Americans in Iraq that is the problem, then, it is also the moral indifference of the majority of Americans back home to that immoral behaviour.

In some countries there would surely have been a spontaneous outpouring of anger towards their government had they committed similar atrocities. I’m thinking especially of Latinate countries, where the very language connects the head to the heart and where passion is still capable of mobilizing communities. English is very much a language from the shoulders up.

In Spain, for example, around 2 million took to the streets of Madrid last month to protect the government’s anti-terror policies towards Basque separatists.

In Mexico, last July, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated to support demands for a recount of the presidential election. Its electoral system is dubious, but popular resistance is in good shape in Mexico.

Significantly, the most vibrant recent demonstrations in the United States were those by Hispanics, in March 2006, protesting legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants.

True, there have been some well planned and executed, though hardly overwhelming, demonstrations against the war and military occupation by some hardy souls in the United States—but that is the point. The spontaneity, tumult and agitation of the street is missing. For that you need social emotions. Even in a crowd, Americans are individuals. Even the urban landscape works against it. Spontaneous demonstrations are difficult when it is almost impossible to walk anywhere, as is the case in most American cities.

Like rabbits mesmerized by a bunch of ferrets, the mass of Americans continues to let the Bush administration get away with murder—in their name.

Why is this?

Much has been made of the lamentable shape of American corporate news media. Fair enough, but there are other sources of information, and you don’t need "news" to know there’s something seriously wrong with America’s actions in Iraq. You just need to know the difference between right and wrong—and to be able to act on it.

The “acting on it” is the problem.

America's Emotional and Moral Malaise
The explanation of Bush’s hold on the United States developed in The Business of Emotions over the past few years, can be summarized thus:

1. Without authentic emotions, the vital connection between thinking and feeling is lost and the ability to act, morally and politically, for oneself and for others, is compromised.

Authentic emotions in the United States are being commercialized out of existence.

Americans are alienated from their feelings by the emotional labour they perform at work, in what is now a predominantly service economy.

Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.

This is hardly a problem unique to the United States, but the commercialization of emotions is most developed there.

Other countries at least have the counterweight of some historical  ballast to keep them in check. The United States, rooted in the topsoil of history, built among the graveyards of the civilization it supplanted, has no such corrective.

The more commercialized the emotions, the weaker the resistance to depravity.

2. People who lack emotional authenticity are incapable of recognizing its absence in others.

We like to think of emotions as private, psychological states, but they are primarily means of social communication.

The ability to read others’ emotions, to distinguish between sincerity and falsehood, good and bad intentions, is basic to all mammals. Their very survival, individually and collectively, depends on that ability.

Dogs and horses, for example, are shrewd judges of every human who approaches them, evaluating their intentions.

That Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Rice and the rest of the neo-conservatives are duplicitous crooks and liars, can be ascertained just by watching and listening to them.

Any discerning dog would have rumbled them and curled its lip at the threat. But not the mass of Americans. They were so taken with them, they invited them back into office.

3. People who lack authentic emotions are susceptible to the predations of emotional marketers.

“Operation Iraqi Freedom” is a brand, and it was sold to Americans using the same emotional marketing techniques that sell everything from hamburgers to cars.

The emotions manufactured were fear and anger, whipped up out of the ashes of 9/11 and aimed at Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

4. Thinking without feeling, talking without meaning

There is one more consequence of the commercialization of emotions: the connection between thinking and feeling is eroded and with it comes the ability to talk, endlessly, with little meaning. This is a common trait in U.S. television and radio, but it is particularly evident among America’s politicians and news pundits.

A Chipewyan once told me that her people regard as foolish those who talk too much. It is probably the view of most aboriginal peoples.

How right they are.

These talking heads in Washington would be doing us all a favour if they'd just shut up for a while and learn how listen.

If they stay very still, they may be able to catch the chorus of those extinguished Iraqi souls carried on the wind, the tormented wails of those from whom they were wrenched, and the clenching of fists of those of us who bore witness.

But this is a slim hope.

These emotionally challenged, morally indifferent, Americans have killed close to a million Iraqis, most of them children and women, in the most horrible way, just as surely as the actions of soldiers, marines and aircrew.

Let the rest of us not be indifferent to their moral indifference.

How the Resistance Unmasks the American State
Compare verbose America with the tacit Iraqi Resistance. So quiet is it that the American military feels obliged to tell us what it is doing, why and to what end.

The mute, but mindful, Iraq Resistance is reminiscent of the (corporeal) mime artist Baptiste, a character in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis ("The Children of Paradise").

The film is set in Paris in 1828s, but it was made in Paris between August, 1943 and January 1945, i.e., under Nazi occupation. (The Nazi’s marched into Paris, June 14, 1940).

Indeed the movie is an allegory of occupation and resistance—many of the actors were members of the Resistance.

Baptiste the mime artist symbolizes the French Resistance—perhaps all resistance movements, including that of Iraq.

He is dismissed by those who do not know him. But dismiss him at your cost. Through the gestures and movements of his body, he expresses emotions and thoughts, and, in so doing, makes visible that which is hidden in plain view.

And that is what the Iraq Resistance is doing: it makes visible that which was hidden in plain view. It is unmasking the American State, rendering visible its previously hidden qualities and revealing U.S. political practice for what it really is.

The Resistance watches, it listens, it learns, it waits and it acts. Tellingly, its main weapon is improvised.

The Resistance is a living thing, an amalgam of shifting, often conflicting, coalitions crafted out of kin, clan and tribe. It is bound together by sinuous emotional and social bonds, connecting guerrillas to each other and rooting them to the land.

This Resistance has been much maligned by American apologists for the Occupation, who, absurdly, slap the "terrorist" label on them. In international law people subjected to armed occupation of their country by a foreign power have the legal and moral right to armed resistance. Iraqis are doing what most of us would do in a similar situation.

Anyone at the mercy of the Bush cabal—and that’s a lot of people—has reason to be grateful to the men and women, the living and the dead, of the Iraq Resistance.

But for it, the neo-conservatives would be triumphant, and the Democrats would not now be in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

But for it, America would have done to Syrians, Lebanese and Iranians, what it has done to Iraqis.

But for the Resistance, Bush, and those with him, would be unstoppable.

Transforming Sectionalism into Unity
America’s politicians and media pundits now approach how to get out of Iraq in exactly the same way they approached how to get into Iraq—as if Iraqis are passive people, cartoon-like players frozen-in-time during a coach’s time-out.

Well, they are wrong.

While America fantasizes about how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the ground beneath its feet is shifting.

Iraqis are overcoming the Occupation’s attempts to divide and rule and, surely and painfully, they are coming together.

See An "Open Letter" to the Iraqi Resistance; Call for "Joint Action"

1. The relatives of close to a million Iraqis killed by the “coalition”— everyone someone’s child, brother, sister, father, mother—are coming together. Out of that sort of pain, comes fury.

2. Angry boys are growing into angry men and they are galvanizing the Mahdi Army, returning it to armed struggle. It is in response to this pressure from below that Muqtada al-Sadr has implored Iraq’s army and police to join them in defeating their common "archenemy'.

3. Having seen through and weathered attempts, over the past year, to incite civil war by those Anglo-America backed agent provocateurs (Link), elements of the Shi’ite Resistance are merging with elements of the Sunni Resistance.

4. A week ago, a million Iraqis, from all over Iraq, from different sects, Shi'ite and Sunni, thronged the road between Najaf and Kufa. Among them were large numbers of uniformed police and soldiers, (which suggests they are responding to al-Sadr’s entreaties). In another gesture of unity over sectionalism, these demonstrators carried the Iraq flag, not posters of their clerics.

5. The British are in the process of handing over responsibility for Basra to Iraqi forces and mercenaries. It is they, primarily mercenaries, who will guard the Americans all-important convoys of water, food, ammunition and fuel from Kuwait.

6. Meanwhile, Shi’ite tribes around Basra have joined the armed Resistance and the south is breaking out in open revolt against the occupying forces.

Some conflicts can be resolved only by winning them. The war in Iraq is one of them.

For every living creature "shocked and awed" out of existence.

For every woman raped, widowed or made a prisoner in her home.

For the once living children of Haditha, Ishaqu and Hibhib and the tens of thousands killed in the safety of their homes, anonymously, and oh so bravely, from the sky.

For the children left behind, malnourished, crippled, traumatized, and orphaned.

For the parents driven to distraction by the murder of their children.

For those left to endure living in "the hell that is Iraq".

For every child around the world who has grown up believing this—lying and killing and calling it "freedom"—is the way "civilized" people behave.

For these reasons, and many more, it is imperative that the Iraqi Resistance soundly defeat this evil Occupying power and send it packing with a stake through its heart. It is a precondition of holding the perpetrators of the monstrous crime that is Iraq to account.

This is not quite as fanciful an idea as it might sound. Given the growing resistance in southern Iraq, it is not inconceivable that these supply lines will be broken and the Americans will be trapped, with no supplies and no way out.

Does thinking-without-feeling America have the sense to be afraid of what it has forged on that desert anvil?

The Other Occupation and the Promise of Zapatismo
The unmasking of the American State by the Iraq Resistance makes plain those illusory common interests mouthed by Bush and his kind.

The world can see the real nature of the United States—that it too is an occupied land.

Within this context, one final observation.

On the very day Iraqis were taking to the streets in their millions to protest the Occupation, as chance would have it, a tiny delegation of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was arriving at the Mexico-United States border.

Subcomandante Marcos and 10 Mayan Comandantes were in Cucapah to support indigenous fishing rights.[Link] It was one stop on the second leg of The Other Campaign, a listening tour, the aim of which is to build a national infrastructure for organizing dissent and social action in Mexico.

The Zapatistas learned to listen, and to use the weapon of silence. The Mayan peoples, their backbone, taught them.

Q How do we know the Zapatistas?

A Because they wear masks.

Q Why do they wear masks?

A To render them visible.

Before the mask, people would look through them as if they weren't there, like poor and dispossessed people everywhere.

Just like in New Orleans, but for the interlude of the hurricane's visit. Just like in every city in the United States, all the time.

Marcos urged aboriginal peoples in the United States [he would, no doubt, also urge those in Canada] to join with the Zapatistas to carry out their destiny and mission as Guardians of the Earth.

Unmasking the American State—making visible the poor and dispossessed.

This is a destiny and mission with much potential.

"For us, nothing; for everyone, everything" may yet find purchase north of the border.

Starbucks and the hell of simulation

I drove from Toronto to Alberta, through the depths of winter, a long time ago now. It took me the best part of a week.

As chance would have it, I spent each night at a Best Western motel. Because they all looked pretty much the same, the effect was to give the illusion that I wasn’t actually making any progress.

“Here” is dead; everywhere is “Now”.

The experience came to mind when I read of recent goings-on at Starbucks, for isn’t that experience also remarkably homogenous?

Starbucks' chairman and founder, Howard Schultz’s leaked memo to CEO Jim Donald on “The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience” is being poured over by brand bloggers. 

• The memo talks of decisions that "in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and what some might call the commoditization of our brand".

• It regrets the loss of “much of the romance and theatre” of the Starbucks experience and the “stripping” of “tradition and our heritage”.

• The standardization of store design has created “stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighbourhood store”.

• “Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee”. [By “partners” he means “employees”.]

• “We desperately need to look into the mirror and realize it's time to get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience.”

Howard Schultz comes across as a sincere and concerned man, but this memo makes me wonder how much he understands the brand he created.

He complains of the “commoditization of our brand”, but it was Starbucks which commodified the experience of drinking coffee and exported it around the world. A brand is a commodity.

Having obliterated the local past wherever it has imposed itself, Mr. Schultz now plans to restore the Starbucks "tradition and heritage", to “do things … that will harken back to our past”.

This is nostalgia for a non-existent tradition and past.

The "true Starbucks experience" is false—it destroys authentic social reality and then goes about simulating it. “To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard). Starbucks feigns to have authenticity, community, ... it feigns to be a real coffeehouse.

The original, in this context, is the European coffeehouse. I am old enough to remember the descendants of these places. I especially remember their aroma. They were places of character, disorder and, most importantly, serendipity. Starbucks is as much like a real coffeehouse as an American pub is like a real English pub.

Mr. Schultz wants to save the Original. But he has killed it. Starbucks reduces authentic coffee houses to rubble. Starbucks stores are copies which destroyed the original.

Mr. Schultz reminds me of Rachel, in Blade Runner, a replicant who clings to photographs to convince her that her fabricated past is true. Why would a replicant collect photos? Why would Starbucks reminisce about a non-existent tradition?

Mr. Schultz may be sincere in his "passion", but all those "partners" are not. They are simulating passion, and customers know that.

So, Mr. Schultz, authentic social reality in the United States is disappearing fast, killed by emotional branding, such as that practiced by Starbucks.

Underlying this, driving this, is the one indisputable social reality—capital itself. As Baudrillard puts it, capital has staged its own murder to avoid its actual death, but it is we who are in our death throes. Simulacra of real people.

Finally, is there any significance in the fact that Starbucks is named after the mate of the Pequod, whose captain is the monomaniacal Ahab?

“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

In the fashion of that doomed ship, are we to drag a living part of heaven down with us, as we sink to the hell of simulation?

A response to Time magazine's "Why they hate each other"

"Sunnis vs. Shi'ites, Why they Hate each other. What's really driving the civil war that's tearing the Middle East apart."

So proclaims the cover of the March 5th, 2007, issue of Time magazine, U.S and Pacific editions. Presumably, they know better than to put it on the cover of the European edition.

It reminds me of the "Iraq at war with itself" cover of The Economist, May 2006, which featured the face of a bawling Iraqi man. I commented on it here.

Then it was the face of grief. Now it's the face of hate.

In both cases, Iraqis are portrayed as unfortunately emotional before the typical reader of Time, whose "person of 2006", let us recall, was You, the face of which is rationality itself, a computer.

Note the shades of "Why do they hate us?" which followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Beyond this (staged and unconvincing) image of these two hate-ful Iraqis, we find the now familiar American explanation of these 'hateful warring sects', in Behind the Sunni-Shi'ite Divide.

The lead-in from the contents page gives the gist:

The war between the two Islamic sects has left the U.S.'s hopes of building a stable Iraq in ruins. A look at the roots of the struggle —and whether anything can stop it.

This must be such a comfort to American readers. The guerrilla war against their soldiers, which is intensifying even during the present security crackdown, is not mentioned in this Time article.

Thus, in the space of a year the "narrative" has been transformed from the Iraq which America has ruined to the ruins of the "U.S.'s hopes". So it's Americans we should empathize with. If it wasn't for these over-emotional Iraqis, they'd have rebuilt the country, packed up and gone home by now.

No wonder they didn't run this cover in the European edition. They think little enough of America as it is.

Rather slap a declaration on its cover, and then presuming to clear up any lingering misunderstanding in the actual news story, Time would do better to form the words into a question: Why do they hate each other?

It's a good question, because until recently, whether Iraqis were Sunni or Shi'ite was not the defining feature of their identity.

To be sure, the common view that Sunnis, though a minority, controlled Iraq and discriminated against Shi'ites, who deeply resented their treatment, is amply supported by the historical record.

But it wasn't the doing of Saddam Hussein. It goes back to the days of the Ottoman empire (1534-1918), when Sunni Arabs from around Baghdad were placed in positions of power to ward off the threat of Iran connected Shia clerics.

The British continued this practice during the first half of the last century when they took control of the region. Integration of Sunnis and Shi'ias began as soon as the British left (although their monarch remained) and it continued under the Baathists.

More recently:

The real tension in Iraq in the latter 1980s was between the majority of the population, Sunnis as well as Shias, for whom religious belief and practice were significant values, and the secular Baathists, rather than between Sunnis and Shias. Although the Shias had been underrepresented in government posts in the period of the monarchy, they made substantial progress in the educational, business, and legal fields. Their advancement in other areas, such as the opposition parties, was such that in the years from 1952 to 1963, before the Baath Party came to power, Shias held the majority of party leadership posts. Observers believed that in the late 1980s Shias were represented at all levels of the party roughly in proportion to government estimates of their numbers in the population. For example, of the eight top Iraqi leaders who in early 1988 sat with Husayn on the Revolutionary Command Council--Iraq's highest governing body-- three were Arab Shias (of whom one had served as Minister of Interior), three were Arab Sunnis, one was an Arab Christian, and one a Kurd. On the Regional Command Council--the ruling body of the party--Shias actually predominated. During the war, a number of highly competent Shia officers have been promoted to corps commanders. The general who turned back the initial Iranian invasions of Iraq in 1982 was a Shia. [Helen Chapin Metz. ed. Iraq: A Country Study, 1988]

During the Presidency of Saddam Hussein, integration of Sunnis and Shi'ites continued. Most of his government were Shi'ia. As I recall, the majority of those "most wanted" depicted on playing cards by the U.S. Department of Defense, are Shi-ites, not Sunnis.

They married each other and lived together as Muslims and Iraqis. A little over a year ago they were fighting together side-by-side in the resistance to the occupation.[Link]

So well might we ask, Why all the sectarian killing now?

Most basically, if someone tries to kill you and yours, the emotions of anger and hate are a normal response. When there is no State justice system and given Iraqis tribal sense of honour, that those who are attacked will retaliate should surprise no one—least of all those inciting this civil war.

There is now a rat's nest of attacks and retaliation, causes and effects. But let's start with the event which seems to have transformed a united Iraqi resistance to the occupation into a civil war, the bombing of the al-Askari mosque, a little over a year ago.

My own thoughts on this at the time are in The al-Askari mosque: who were those masked gunmen?

Is it true that the mood on the street following the destruction of the dome was anti-Sunni? Not according to Sami Ramadani, writing in The Guardian: The word on the street was (and is) that this was the work of the U.S. and its allies—U.S. and Israeli flags were burned in protest—not Sunni extremists. The mood was anti-occupation, not sectarian.

So who were those masked gunmen who took around 12 hours to plant the explosives under that dome, in the then U.S. controlled Samarra?

It's a question many Iraqis are asking even now. It underlies Akram Abdulrazzaq's  Iraq's Car Bombers—Who are They? Why is it that of the thousands of car bombs, not a single owner of these cars has been identified?

He goes on:

Before Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, the country had a sophisticated car registration system, and the authorities were able to identify the owner of any wrecked vehicle in a matter of minutes.

So why not now?

Don't these cars have registrations and serial numbers? We have yet to hear of the authorities identifying the owner of a single vehicle used in a car bombing or even where it came from.

Iraqis, he argues, are not persuaded by the authorities' "naive excuses".

They need the Americans and the Iraqi authorities they support to tell them where in the world all these car bombs are coming from. How is it that they manage to sneak through so many American and Iraqi checkpoints and road blocks, especially in Baghdad?

With more than 80,000 American troops now in Baghdad, and every modern means of technology available to them, how indeed.

Amin al-Hashmee, in Hiding Iraq’s Death Squads is No Game, asks:

How can one ignore the fact that with all of their capabilities, the occupiers and the government failed to prevent a vehicle carrying hundreds of kilos of explosives from freely crossing the border, traveling the streets and passing through check point after check point? On top of that, the authorities have been unable to identify even a single car bomb or person who prepares them; and they have failed to inhibit their passage through government checkpoints on their way to park amid shops and innocent people.

Wouldn't you think that the "security services" would make a special effort at the February 12 ceremony at the Shorja market to mark the one year anniversary of the bombing of the al-Askari mosque? Two car bombs. At least 80 people killed. [Link] 

Where did these cars come from? Who owned them? How is it that the perpetrators of these car bombings are always "unknown"?

A lot of the cars used as car bombs, you may be surprised to learn, come from the United States. So argues Debbie Hamilton of Right Truth. She believes that they are supplied by "Muslim/Arab used car dealers", in support of the "terrorists", but a rather more obvious conclusion is possible.

Consider also Are the 70,000 Pentagon Mercs in Iraq killing Shias, Sunnis? published in Aljazeera, a review of Robert Pelton's book Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror:

Could some of the Pentagon’s hired Mercenaries be the real perpetrators of the daily bombings and assassinations of Sunnis and Shias in Iraq?

Is the current disaster taking place in the war-torn country part of a wider plot to provoke a U.S./Israeli planned civil war that will dismember Iraq?

Just who is accountable for this privatized war machine?

And while we're on this topic, whatever became of those two British SAS soldiers, disguised as Arabs, caught about to plant a bomb near a religious festival in Basra? John Pilger's account is here. My own is here. See also Steve Watson's Who are the Real Terrorists in Iraq?

Why isn't Time magazine asking questions such as these? Americans (and the British, come to that) have such an exaggerated opinion of themselves that they don't believe "they" could have a hand in inciting this civil war.

If the recent BBC World Service poll, which evaluates the USA alongside Iran, Israel and North Korea, is any guide, the rest of the world appears not to have this problem.

Links
Ali Al-Hamdani, An "Open Letter" to the Iraqi Resistance; Call for "Joint Action"

Fred Halliday, Sunni, Shi'a and the "Trotskyists of Islam" Open Democracy, 9-2-2007

Jessica Long Analyzing the pandemic of global American hatred.

Jan Morris Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated.

World View of US Role Goes From Bad to Worse. World Public Opinion. March 10, 2007

Salman Rushdie on the right to be offended

Here is a brief article by Salman Rushdie, Defend the right to be offended, in Open Democracy (7/2/2005).

Rushdie writes in opposition to the Blair government's Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill, and the intent to ban the “incitement to hatred on religious grounds”. His arguments are of universal application.

Here is the gist of his position:

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other’s positions. (But they don’t shoot.)

Opposition to this 'anti-hate' provision of the bill led to the provision being dropped. However, it reappeared in the form of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.

As the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie knows a thing or two about offending people. His thoughts here about the right to be offended are worth noting, especially when considering measures to proscribe 'hate'.

Britain's pride—America's fall?

Tony Blair believes that the British, whom, to their undoubted displeasure, he embraces as ‘we’,

should be immensely proud of the work we are doing to help Iraq get on its feet and be the country it wants to be.

He said this a week ago, last Thursday (February 22, 2008), the day after he announced to the House of Commons that British troops would be withdrawing from Basra, during an interview by John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4’s Today program.

The questioning was rigorous. It reminded me of a particularly tough Ph.D viva, with Blair defending his thesis. [Although Humphreys never asked him how Iraq came to be knocked off its feet.] If only Bush were subject to this sort of questioning.

The complete interview (34:12) can be heard here. [The reference to pride occurs around the two minute mark.]

I am interested in what Blair said, but also how he said it.

Barrister Blair
Before Blair was a politician, he was a barrister. This helps explain his tenacity in adhering to a position which has been refuted in the eyes of most independent observers.

Like any barrister, he is an advocate for a "brief":

A summary of the facts of a case, with reference to the points of law supposed to be applicable to them, drawn up for the instruction of counsel conducting the case in court (Oxford English Dictionary).

Regarding Iraq, here are the key elements of this brief, as set out in this radio interview:

• 9/11 changed the world by dividing it into forces for “progress” and forces of “reaction”, between good and evil, light and darkness.

• 9/11 also made clear the interdependence of countries and dissolved the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. He sees a responsibility to ‘go out after this threat’.

• The violence in Iraq is the responsibility of those who are the immediate cause of it—"terrorists"—external extremists who team up with internal extremists: "We are trying to support Iraq against the terrorists", who are trying, through their violence, "to stop democracy functioning".

The Reverend Blair
When Blair became Prime Minister, in 1997, the satirical magazine Private Eye cast him as the earnest and trendy young vicar of St Albion (the archaic name for Great Britain) , the "Rev ARP Blair, MA (Oxon)".

In every issue there appears the Saint Albion Parish News, penned by this Reverend Blair; a spoof of the parish magazines typically published by Churches up and down the country.

It nicely captures Blair’s sanctimony, his show of sanctity or piety. But given Blair’s training as a barrister, we’re never quite sure if he really means it.

Barristers are professional arguers. To that end, they are also professional actors. They often use theatrical metaphors to describe their work. They put on a "performance" for different audiences.

Since it is believed that emotions sully the rational mind, barristers are trained to cultivate techniques to suppress their own emotions.

What they feel "back-stage", however, may be very different to their public performances.

Bush's Emotional Blackmail of Blair?
Who does Blair "hold a brief" for? Who gave the information and instructions embodied in the brief?

Presumably, the United States. Blair’s position is essentially that of  Bush and Cheney et al. They share "talking points". Iraq is subsumed within the "war on terror", and who is not against terror?

Blair holds a brief for the Bush administration.

But why?

Blair is not a stupid man. He must know the weight of evidence against his position. The weightier the evidence, the more tenaciously he defends his brief.

Nor is Blair an evil man, although much evil has been done in Iraq, enabled by his support of Bush.

There is always the possibility that Blair genuinely shares Bush's morality, toothed and fanged in Iraq, but, if so, it’s a very un-English sort of Christian alliance.

One wonders, therefore, if Blair is being blackmailed by the Bush cabal into defending a position which is contrary to his interests and contrary to the will of most Britons.

The type of blackmail that seems the likeliest contender is the emotional kind.

Most of us have experienced emotional blackmail to some degree. Someone close to us threatens to punish us if we don’t do what they want. They threaten to end the relationship unless we give in. They shower us with approval when we give into them and take it away when we do not.

This sounds like the modus operandi of the Bush administration. It is diplomacy as war by other means.

What evidence is there for this interpretation of Blair’s relationship with Bush?

Well, consider Bush's salutation "Yo, Blair!", revealed by an open microphone, at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, last July.

Blair, with the body language of a waiter, humiliated himself, and those he represents, by essentially seeking Bush's permission to intervene in the crisis in Lebanon.

Bush lacked even the common courtesy not to speak with his mouth full.

This behaviour, of the British Prime Minister before the U.S. President, breathed new life into that dusty verb “court”: "To pay court to, pay courteous attention to; to try to win favour with."

Bush’s salutation, "Yo, Blair!", said it all.

As Alan Attward puts it: “What are the odds that Bush greets his dogs in much the same manner?"

Still not convinced? Then read William Rees-Mogg’s explanation of ‘How the US fired Jack Straw’.

What does the U.S. have over Blair? It controls Britain's supposedly independent nuclear deterrent, Trident. Blair's support for the U.S. in Iraq may be the political price for U.S. support for Trident. [On this see Dan Plesch's The Future of Britain's WMD.]

Britain’s "Pride", America’s Fall?
Let’s return to Blair’s claim that "we" "should be immensely proud of the work we are doing to help Iraq get on its feet and be the country it wants to be". 

“Proud”:

from Late OE prut, prud, meaning brave, gallant. Valiant in combat. A poetic or rhetorical epithet.

More recently, "Pride":

Having or cherishing a high or lofty opinion of oneself; valuing oneself highly on account of one’s position, rank, attainments, possessions, etc.; Usually in a bad sense: Disposed to take an attitude of superiority to and contempt for others; arrogant, haughty, overweening, supercilious [OED].

Isn’t pride a sin?

Yes it is, because pride is self-worship. It entails giving yourself credit for God’s work. If not ‘God’ then forces greater than oneself.

Pride motivated the once-righteous Lucifer to rebel against God, who cast him out of heaven as the wicked Satan.

Pride, then, is self-delusion. It is also self-destructive. One over-estimates oneself and underestimates others. For this reason:

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18 RSV).

Over-estimating one's own power and under-estimating the power of others well describes the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq.

Let us now contemplate the destruction and fall associated with this pride.

British troops are "withdrawing" from Basra, not because things are going well, but because of anger back home over their presence in Iraq and pressure from military commanders who realise that it's a quagmire they need to escape from, fast.

This is extremely bad news for Bush, the regime they installed in the Green Zone,  and especially for the more than 100,000 American troops stuck in the middle of Iraq, for two reasons:

1. supply lines to U.S. troops run from Kuwait, through the Basra area, up to Baghdad and beyond.

2. Basra guards Umm Qasr, a port crucial to the continued survival of the current regime.

Those British troops, of whom Blair is proud, were defending these supply lines and this port. As they withdraw, the power vacuum they leave will likely be filled by forces with strong allegiances to—Iran.

Olbermann on Rice on Hitler

Olbermann, an ex-sports reporter, gives Secretary of State Rice a history lesson.

The video, courtesy of Truthout, is here.

"Now is the winter of our discontent": Peter Sellers as Laurence Olivier as Richard III

Here Peter Sellers gives a Shakespearean reading of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, in the manner of the "Winter of our discontent" speech from Richard III.

Here is that which Sellers is parodying, Laurence Olivier as Richard III. Is this a parody of the real Richard III?:

Peter Sellers illustrates the familiar meaning of "parody" the noun: imitation for comic effect.

But there is second meaning: "a poor or feeble imitation of something", a caricature, something ridiculous: a travesty.

Real people can be poor of feeble imitations of human beings, unintentional parodies of themselves. There can be parodies of justice, pious frauds, and there can certainly be a parody of a President.

There is nothing comic about this kind of parody; like Richard III, it is terribly tragic.

If Baudrillard is correct that people are becoming simulacra of authentic human beings, might this go some way to explaining the whiff of sadness about the current age?

Information and war corporatism infographics

Two info-graphical movies for you.

The first is on the "war corporatism" of the Project for the New American Century, by Simon Robson and Barry McNamara.

The second is on the "Google Master Plan", by Ozan Halici and Jürgen Mayer. [Link]

Information Aesthetics notes the visual similarities between them. You may also note some substantive similarities.

Consider, for example, Google's decision in January to stop indexing as a news source the highly-rated, and very independent, source of information about what is happening in Iraq, Uruknet.info. More here. For the latest on this censorship, visit Uruknet.info.

BBC's "Hard Talk" with George Galloway, on Iraq

First broadcast today, this interview can be seen and heard here (23.13).

Host: You described the US and British as attacking Iraq like wolves?

G.G. Who would dispute it?...it was unfair to the noble wolf to compare him to Bush and Blair. These two men have caused the death...of almost three quarters of a million people. That is a very very big Poole of blood. That is a very very big mass grave...He [Blair] is a mass murderer...he is responsible with Mr. Bush for everything that happened in Abu Ghraib, for everything that happened on the killing fields of Iraq and beyond. Because against the law, illegally and on a pack of lies he launched aggressive war which Nuremberg described as the ultimate war crime...If you think that you've encountered someone here who thinks this is all just a kind of  normal policy mistake, you are wrong. I believe Mr.Blair is a criminal. Mr. Blair IS a criminal...I think he should be on trial in the Hague...

Discuss

[Steve Bell, The Guardian, February 23, 2007]

Straw promises inquiry but Blair 'proud' of war, Guardian Unlimited, February 23, 2007.

British leaving Basra to the Mahdi Militia. Speigel Online International, February 23, 2007

The passion for finding out: a note on Auden

Auden, the renowned poet, was born a hundred years ago this week, in York, England.

The British never forgave him for clearing off to the States (to New York) for the duration of the Second World War and viewed his poems with suspicion ever since.

Auden is dead, but the poems he created are alive and kicking still.

If you saw Four Weddings and a Funeral you've heard one of his poems. This one:



It was read by "Mathew" (John Hannah) at the funeral of his partner "Gareth" (Simon Callow), but it's surely applicable to the death of any thing or person one loves.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is about as close as most people get to Auden. It's an occupational hazard of the dead poet. In Auden's case, his movingly authentic words about grief were hijacked by a screenplay about an inauthentic England, the beloved of America.

In the movie, of course, it is the English Hugh Grant who is smitten by the American Andie MacDowell, who treats him shabbily, although he does deserve it.

Does this England/United States relationship sound familiar?

From the passion of grief to the passion for finding out: although science presents itself as the very opposite of emotion, as reason itself, it is, arguably the dominant emotion of our time.

Listen to Auden reading After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics. The last two stanzas are especially interesting. Compare his voice to today's voices.

The moral: no amount of why questions can tell us how to live.

Links
W.H. Auden, Wikipedia. This is a fine entry. Towards the end you will find many helpful links. A sample of his poems is here. They repay reading.

"You" and "We": The fear that isn't felt

The Green Zone at the heart of Baghdad is a metaphor for the relationship between the United States and the rest of us.

A heavily fortified walled enclave, the Green Zone is a little America in Iraq and life outside it might as well be another country. In that country, Iraq, electricity and water supplies stutter and start, but within this colossal gated community your every need is catered to.

The United States itself is becoming a gigantic gated community (although "gate" misleads). In the name of the "war on terror", it is militarizing its borders, fortifying them; and in doing so it is using techniques it has perfected by imprisoning Iraqis.

Let us turn from Iraq and to the remote southern tip of Texas where, ringed by barbed wire, we find a futuristic tent city rising from the Rio Grande Valley.

It is the largest camp in the U.S. federal system’s archipelago of immigration detention, quietly deployed last summer between a federal prison and a county jail where, as we are told by the Washington Post, “illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones.” [Source]

Subtopia talks of "flexible urbanism of immediate captivities". It and the other detention centres throughout the United States constitute the new military urbanism; and each inmate will experience the nebulous detention which is typified by Guantánamo Bay Detention Centre.

Speaking of which the U.S. Department of Defense is building a new migrant detention centre at Guantánamo to house the expected waves of Cubans who will, we are told, attempt to migrate to Florida when Fidel Castro dies. Or, as a U.S. official put it, it is being built "to shelter interdicted migrants." [Source]

Such centres are the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security. Illegal immigrants are only one of its concerns. The "war on terror" is another. That the two have been fused is one reason borders have been militarized.

"Unlawful enemy combatants", such as those in Guantánamo, will also experience the hospitality of these regimes—and the definition of such "combatants" is wide enough to include dissenting Americans (and Canadians, as Maher Arar will testify). [Link]

No one ever expects that such a thing could happen to them. This is the fear that isn't felt.

When Time Magazine declared the Person of 2006 to be You, they really meant "Us", Americans, those on the safe side of these fortified zones. These are potential wearers of the Hug Shirt, which, let us recall from the previous post, Time nominated as one of the Inventions of 2006. The Person and the Invention are a perfect match.

Perhaps Time will acknowledge this next December and declare the Person of 2007 to be "Us".

What has been obvious for those on the outside for several years is only now creeping into the collective conscience of these "Yous": "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us". 

Colonel W. Patrick Lang Jr. puts it thus:

We, the American people—not the Bush administration, nor the hapless Iraqis, nor the meddlesome Iranians (the new scapegoat)—are the root of the problem. [Source]

Yes indeed. Read his article for an explanation.

The embrace of simulation—the "hug shirt"

"The Hug Shirt is a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance! Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one". [Source]

The idea is that two people, each wearing a Hug Shirt, can send virtual hugs to each other by touching the sensors within the shirt. It works via Bluetooth and mobile phones.

Why do we need this thing?

An increasing mobility of humans throughout the globe, due to business or study reasons, has brought family members to spend most of their time apart from each other. Humans need physical contact with each other. Technology should allow for a pleasant Human-Human Interaction. [Source] (my emphasis)

Healthy emotional connections among people are essential for bodily well-being. Of that there is no doubt, but some comments:

1. Let note that not all humans are increasingly mobile. Plenty of them are stuck in refugee camps or on the wrong side of immigration controls. What about their emotions?

2. If "humans need physical contact with each other", why is it that these mobile family members "spend most of their time apart from each other"? If a person is important to you, stay close to them.

3. There is much more to emotional contact between two people than pressure on skin and warmth. Smells, sounds, warmth, words, and so on. The only emotion likely to be transmitted between wearers of Hug Shirts is sadness at the emptiness of it all.

4. A delicate question which simply must be asked: can wearers be absolutely certain that the "hugs" being transmitted by the cell phone-Bluetooth connection come from who they think they do? What of the risk of virtual gropes?

The Hug Shirt was nominated as one of the best inventions of 2006 by Time Magazine—which should send a chill down the spine of every right thinking (and feeling) person (sans Hug Shirt).

The Hug Shirt, then, is not for me.

Not wanting to be unduly negative, however, might I suggest a Republican Turtle-neck Hug Shirt.

Let's let them know how we really feel about them.

"I will follow you into the dark" - Death Cab for Cutie

"I Will Follow You Into The Dark"

Love of mine
Someday you will die
But I'll be close behind
I'll follow you into the dark
No blinding light
Or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
And illuminate the "no"s
On their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

In catholic school
As vicious as roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised
By a lady in black
And I held my tongue
As she told me "Son,
Fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
And illuminate the "no"s
On their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

You and me
Have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes
Are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
But it's nothing to cry about
'Cause we'll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
And illuminate the "no"s
On their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark
Then I'll follow you into the dark

Death Cab for Cutie Wikipedia entry

"Emotion" on Visuwords graphical dictionary

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node.

Enter "emotion" and see what meanings and associations come up. Try moving the networks around. Double-click on the nodes to explore that meaning. There is much to discover here.

The solution to e-mail spying ...

... sealing wax.

That's right. And a fountain pen, writing paper and an envelope. And a postage stamp.

You sit down at a desk or table and command your arm, hand and fingers to move your writing instrument in finely calibrated figures and so craft your words upon these slivers of trees.

This is by no means as easy as it sounds.

With any luck, your words may be indecipherable to the uninitiated.

Sign your letter, this guarantees to the reader that it comes from you.

"And then?"

Then fold the paper, so that the words are on the inside, and slip it inside the envelope and seal it.

Light a match and with its flame heat the wax until it begins to melt. Direct the ensuing drips on to the seal or flap of the envelope. This is quite a skill. Try to  create a roundish shape.

Before the wax has hardened, impress upon it some design unique to you (your "seal"). Your fingerprint would do.

The wax seal does double duty: it guarantees the authenticity of the letter, thereby guarding against forgery; it ensures that the contents of the envelope cannot be violated without visible damage to the seal, thereby guarding against tampering.

So as not to draw attention to the seal, I would feel inclined to place the sealed envelope inside another, larger envelope. Address that, put a stamp in the top right hand corner and deposit in the nearest mail box ("pillar box" in the UK).

A letter will reach most places within your own country within a few days. To get to the other side of the planet, these days, a week is a good estimate.

I've tried this method myself, more than once, and it works a treat.

The problem of e-mail spying was aired this evening in the form of For Your Eyes Only?, a PBS documentary. It alleges that millions of e-mails in the United States are intercepted every day by a secret government program, all in the name of terrorist surveillance.

Surely this is old news? And why the question mark? So much information in that country is "classified", but the e-mail of its citizens is not. Only the State in the United States is allowed to have secrets.

And in most other countries too.

Only an idiot would confide private, let alone secret, thoughts in e-mail. It's not a private medium. It's not to be trusted. "Mail" is a misnomer.

Where does it say that we had to stop writing letters when e-mail came along?

Confidences are best exchanged in hand-written letters, delivered in envelopes sealed with embossed wax—and patience.