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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 2 years

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Anarchist Book Club Presents:

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years

Introduction

What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and virtual money: topics that are, obviously, of rather pressing concern for many at the current time.

There seems little doubt that history, widely rumored to have come to an end a few years ago, has gone into overdrive of late, and is in the process of spitting us into a new political and economic landscape whose contours no one understands. Everyone agrees something has just ended but no one is quite sure what. Neoliberalism? Postmodernism? American hegemony? The rule of finance capital? Capitalism itself (unlikely for the time being)? It’s even more difficult to predict what’s about to be thrown at us, let alone what shape the forces of resistance to it are likely to take. Some new form of green capitalism? Knowledge Keynesianism? Chinese-style industrial authoritarianism? ‘Progressive’ imperialism?

At moments of transformation, one of the few things one can say for certain is that we don’t really know how much our own actions can affect the outcome, but we would be very foolish to assume that they cannot.

Historical action tends to be narrative in form. In order to be able to make an intervention in history (arguably, in order to act decisively in any circumstances), one has to be able to cast oneself in some sort of story — though, speaking as someone who has actually had the opportunity to be in the middle of one or two world historical events, I can also attest that one in that situation is almost never quite certain what sort of drama it really is, since there are usually several alternatives battling it out, and that the question is not entirely resolved until everything is over (and never completely resolved even then). But I think there’s something that comes before even that. When one is first trying to assess a historical situation, having no real idea where one stands, trying to place oneself in a much larger stream of history so as to be able to start to think about what the problem even is, then usually it’s less a matter of placing oneself in a story than of figuring out the larger rhythmic structure, the ebb and flow of historical movements. Is what is happening around me the result of a generational political realignment, a movement of capitalism’s boom or bust cycle, the beginning or result of a new wave of struggles, the inevitable unfolding of a Kondratieff B curve? Or is it all these things? How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?

Let me briefly lay out what might be at stake here. I’ll focus here on cycles of capitalism, secondarily on war. This is because I don’t like capitalism and think that it’s rapidly destroying the planet, and that if we are going to survive as a species, we’re really going to have to come up with something else. I also don’t like war, both for all the obvious reasons, but also, because it strikes me as one of the main ways capitalism has managed to perpetuate itself. So in picking through possible theories of historical cycles, this is what I have had primarily in mind. Even here there are any number of possibilities. Here are a few:

Are we seeing an alternation between periods of peace and massive global warfare? In the late 19th century, for example, war between major industrial powers seemed to be a thing of the past, and this was accompanied by vast growth of both trade, and revolutionary internationalism (of broadly anarchist inspiration). 1914 marked a kind of reaction, a shift to 70 years mainly concerned with fighting, or planning for, world wars. The moment the Cold War ended, the pattern of the 1890s seemed to be repeating itself, and the reaction was predictable.

Or could one look at brief cycles — sub-cycles perhaps? This is particularly clear in the US, where one can see a continual alternation, since WWII, between periods of relative peace and democratic mobilisation immediately followed by a ratcheting up of international conflict: the civil rights movement followed by Vietnam, for example; the anti-nuclear movement of the ’70s followed by Reagan’s proxy wars and abandonment of détente; the global justice movement followed by the War on Terror.

Or should we be looking at financialisation? Are we dealing with Fernand Braudel or Giovanni Arrighi’s alternation between hegemonic powers (Genoa/ Venice, Holland, England, USA), which start as centers for commercial and industrial capital, later turn into centers of finance capital, and then collapse?

If so, then the question is of shifting hegemonies to East Asia, and whether (as Wallerstein for instance has recently been predicting) the US will gradually shift into the role of military enforcer for East Asian capital, provoking a realignment between Russia and the EU. Or, in fact, if all bets are off because the whole system is about to shift since, as Wallerstein also suggests, we are entering into an even more profound, 500-year cycle shift in the nature of the world-system itself?

Are we dealing with a global movement, as some autonomists (for example, the Midnight Notes collective) propose, of waves of popular struggle, as capitalism reaches a point of saturation and collapse — a crisis of inclusion as it were?

According to this version, the period from 1945 to perhaps 1975 was marked by a tacit deal with elements of the North Atlantic male working class, who were offered guaranteed good jobs and social security in exchange for political loyalty. The problem for capital was that more and more people demanded in on the deal: people in the Third World, excluded minorities in the North, and, finally, women. At this point the system broke, the oil shock and recession of the ’70s became a way of declaring that all deals were off: such groups could have political rights but these would no longer have any economic consequences.

Then, the argument goes, a new cycle began in which workers tried — or were encouraged — to buy into capitalism itself, whether in the form of micro-credit, stock options, mortgage refinancing, or 401ks. It’s this movement that seems to have hit its limit now, since, contrary to much heady rhetoric, capitalism is not and can never be a democratic system that provides equal opportunities to everyone, and the moment there’s a serious attempt to include the bulk of the population even in one country (the US) into the deal, the whole thing collapses into energy crisis and global recession all over again.

None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive but they have very different strategic implications. Much rests on which factor one happens to decide is the driving force: the internal dynamics of capitalism, the rise and fall of empires, the challenge of popular resistance? But when it comes to reading the rhythms in this way, the current moment still throws up unusual difficulties. There is a widespread sense that we are heading towards some kind of fundamental rupture, that old rhythms can no longer be counted on to repeat themselves, that we might be entering a new sort of time. Wallerstein says so much explicitly: if everything were going the way it generally has tended to go, for the last 500 years, East Asia would emerge as the new center of capitalist dominance. Problem is we may be coming to the end of a 500 year cycle and moving into a world that works on entirely different principles (subtext: capitalism itself may be coming to an end). In which case, who knows? Similarly, cycles of militarism cannot continue in the same form in a world where major military powers are capable of extinguishing all life on earth, with all-out war between them therefore impossible. Then there’s the factor of imminent ecological catastrophe.

One could make the argument, of course, that history is such that we always feel we’re at the edge of something. It’s always a crisis, there’s no particular reason to assume that this time it’s true. Historically, it has been a peculiar feature of capitalism that it seems to feel the need to constantly throw up spectres of its own demise. For most of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, most capitalists operated under the very strong suspicion that they might shortly end up hanging from trees — or, if they weren’t going to be strung up in an apocalyptic Socialist Revolution, witness some similar apocalyptic collapse into degenerate barbarism. One of the most disturbing features of capitalism, in fact, is not just that it constantly generates apocalyptic fantasies, but that it actually produces the physical means to make apocalyptic fantasies come true. For example, in the ’50s, once the destruction of capitalism from within could no longer be plausibly imagined, along came the spectre of nuclear war. In this case, the bombs were quite real. And once the prospect of anyone using those bombs (at least in such numbers as to destroy the planet) became increasingly implausible, with the end of the Cold War, we were suddenly greeted by the prospect of global warming.

It would be interesting to reflect at length on capitalism and its time horizons: what is it about this economic system that it seems to want to wipe out the prospect of its own eternity? On the one hand, capitalism being based on a logic of perpetual growth, one might argue that it is, by definition, not eternal, and can only recognise itself as such. But at other times those who embrace capitalism seem to want to think of it as having been around forever, or at least 5 thousand years, and stubbornly insist it will continue to exist 5 thousand years into the future. At yet other times it seems like a historical blip, an insanely powerful engine of accumulation that exploded around 1500, or maybe 1750, which couldn’t possibly be maintained without some sort of apocalyptic collapse. Perhaps the apparent tangle of contradictions is the result of a need to balance the short term perspectives needed by short term profit-seekers, managers, and CEOs, with the broader strategic perspectives of those actually running the system, which are of necessity more political. The result is a clash of narratives. Or maybe it’s the fact that whenever capitalism does see itself as eternal, it tends to lead to a spiraling of debt. Actually, the relations between debt bubbles and apocalypse are complicated and would be difficult (though fascinating) to disentangle, but I would suggest this much. The financialisation of capital has lead to a situation where something like 97 to 98 percent of the money in the total ‘economy’ of wealthy countries like the US or UK is debt. That is to say, it is money whose value rests not on something that actually exists in the present (bauxite, sculptures, peaches, software), but something that might exist at some point in the future. ‘Abstract’ money is not an idea, it’s a promise — a promise of something concrete that will exist at some time in the future, future profits extracted from future resources, future labour of miners, artists, fruit-pickers, web designers, not yet born. At the point where the imaginary future economy is 50 to 100 times larger than the current ‘real’ one, something has got to give. But the bursting of bubbles often leaves no future to imagine at all, except of catastrophe, because the creation of bubbles is made possible by the destruction of any ability to imagine alternative futures. It’s only once one cannot imagine that we are moving towards any sort of new future society, that the world will never be fundamentally different, that there’s nothing left to imagine but more and more future money.

It might be interesting, as I say, to try to disentangle the shifting historical relations between war, the development of ‘security’ apparatuses designed above all to strangle dreams of alternative futures, speculative bubbles, class struggle, and history of the capitalist Future, which seems to veer back and forth between utopia and cataclysm. These are not, however, precisely the questions that I’m asking here. I want, rather, to look at questions of debt from a different, and much longer term, historical perspective. Doing so provides a picture much less bleak and depressing than one might think, since the history of debt is not only a history of slavery, oppression, and bitter social struggles — which, of course, it certainly is, since debt is surely the most effective means ever created for taking relations that are founded on violence and oppression and making them seem right and moral to all concerned — but also of credit, honour, trust, and mutual commitment. Debt has been for the last 5 thousand years the fulcrum not only of forms of oppression but of popular struggle. Debt crises are periodic and become the stuff of uprisings, mobilisations and revolutions, but also, as a result, reflections on what human beings actually do owe each other, on the moral basis of human society, and on the nature of time, labour, value, creativity and violence.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years

#literature #book club #anarchist #david graeber #debt: the first 5000 years

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years

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"In a period of deep crisis, Stuart Hall argues in The Hard Road to Renewal, the capitalist class’ efforts to protect the status quo will not be simply defensive, but formative: reconfiguring political ideas and ideologies, organising new power bases and a new ‘historic bloc’, rebalancing the balance of forces. This is a creative, imaginative, contested process. ‘Every form of power not only excludes but produces something’, Hall writes. Politics, he argues, following Gramsci, is not a mirror that simply reflects the struggle between ‘already unified collective political identities’, but the terrain on which new forms of power might be constructed:

This is the production of politics – politics as production. This conception of politics is fundamentally contingent, fundamentally open-ended. There is no law of history which can predict what must inevitably be the outcome of a political struggle. Politics depends on the relations of forces at any particular moment. History is not waiting in the wings to catch up your mistakes into another ‘inevitable success.’ You lose because you lose because you lose.

What it means to pursue a hegemonising project, then, is to have the clarity to see what is actually happening in the present and to have the courage to respond not by reworking old and stale ideas to describe what is new and different, but with the ambition to struggle on many fronts and to seek to construct a new common sense, not simply advance a slew of policies – even if those policies are good, correct, and necessary.

This requires ideological contestation of the ideas already floating around in common sense: safety and security, freedom and choice, liberty and equality. The Left in the US is often uneasy engaging on these grounds. For those of us who came of age under the Bush administration and during the Global War on Terror, talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ seems to veer too close to jingoism, while directives to embrace patriotic discourses in the style of the CPUSA (‘socialism is twenty-first century Americanism’) feel at best ridiculous and at worst offensive to those who remain oppressed by the very-much-still-existing American empire.

But perhaps the abolitionist tradition within American democracy – that is, the tradition of ‘abolition democracy’, by way of Davis and WEB Du Bois – offers us a way through: a language that draws upon historical memories that occupy pride of place in American common sense, even if they are often distorted by liberal revisionism. If, as Hall put it, ‘[d]emocracy is what working people have made it: neither more or less’, the abolitionist struggle for democracy and the struggle for communism are one and the same.

The hegemonising task of abolitionism is to meet and answer the people’s real fears with a politics of care, to redefine safety according to the needs of the exploited and oppressed. The analysis contained in the abolitionist slogan ‘Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe’ reveals the law-and-order state as illegitimate not only on account of its brutality but because it fails to provide the very thing any sovereign state must: the security of its people.

Again, all of these ideas must be contested. In A Critical Theory of Police Power, Mark Neocleous argues that security is ‘the supreme concept of bourgeois society.’ The regime of private property cannot be upheld without the ideology of security. ‘Far from being a spontaneous order of the kind found in liberal mythology, civil society is the security project par excellence’, he writes. ‘The demand for security is inevitably a demand for the greater exercise of state power.’

Well, maybe so. Abolitionism, then, does not simply make demands of the state but demands a different kind of state altogether....

Any credible attempt to redress the present political and social crisis will have to proceed from a democratic re-appropriation and socialist reorientation of all those key state levers that are essential for controlling and shaping economic reality."

- Brendan O'Connor, "The Ordinary is a Horror: Abolition, Hegemony, and the State." Salvage. January 28, 2023.

#abolition #prison abolition #abolitionism #police abolition #socialism #hegemony #research quote

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xtruss · 6 months

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The Arab World Has Already Left Unipolarity and Hegemony Behind

— Ebrahim Hashem | March 21, 2024

Illustration: Chen Xia/Global Times

By launching the war of aggression against Iraq and enabling the subsequent calamitous "Arab Spring," some US policymakers and their Western peers thought that they were "present at the re-creation." They wishfully thought they were on the cusp of imposing "Sykes-Picot 2.0" on the Arab world to further divide the divided. However, they did not know that they were embarking on adventurism that would eventually backfire and dramatically erode the American and Western dominance in the Arab region and the world. Their strategically fatal mistakes of the early years of this century are now catching up with them. To say that the Western influence in the Arab region and the world is currently at its lowest point since WWI is an understatement.

The Arab world is already in the post-US and post-West era. The US will never again have the hegemonic position it once enjoyed in the region during the 1991-2013 period. Similarly, the European powers will never again have the dominant role they once had in the region during the 1914-1945 period. The two periods represent a fleeting moment and an aberration in the long Arab history.

The Arabs are transparently demonstrating their embrace of multi-alignment and actively facilitating global multipolarity. They have no qualms about joining various organizations and initiatives such as BRICS, China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The Arabs are not ideological in their decisions to join groupings and projects. They are keen on being in partnerships and associations that serve their strategic objectives. The Arabs are among the key contributors to the ongoing global power diffusion. By unlocking their potential and diversifying their strategic partnerships, the Arabs are helping accelerate the transition to a new world order.

While the Emiratis, Saudis and Egyptians were aware of the impact of their BRICS membership on regional and global politics, their primary motivation for joining the grouping was geoeconomics. The Arabs do not want to miss out on the opportunity to be part of the next wave of globalization. BRICS is increasingly seen as the emerging powerful force that will drive the new economic globalization in the remaining decades of the 21st century. The grouping is already economically and demographically larger than the G7. Even when excluding the recent expansion, BRICS accounts for 32 percent of the global GDP (PPP) and 40 percent of the world population - compared to the G7's 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively. China and India alone contribute around 50 percent to world economic growth.

The Arab world's top two trading partners are BRICS members, namely China and India. Arab trade with China and India exceeds $400 billion and $240 billion, respectively. The Arab world, as a trading bloc, is India's largest partner and one of China's most important partners. The UAE and Saudi Arabia, for example, send more than a third of their crude oil exports to China and India, while the Arab world provides around 45 percent of China's crude imports and 60 percent of India's. With so much synergy between the Arabs and the two Asian giants, trade is only going to increase between the two sides in the coming decades.

Despite the devastating Iraq war and atrocious Arab Spring events, the Arabs have recovered a lot of self-confidence in the last decade. They are deeply aware of the potential of their region. They recognize that their strength should not be measured myopically based on the current phase of their development, but more correctly and strategically, it should be assessed based on their potential. Despite regional turbulence in the last two decades, the Arab world is still doing relatively well.

The combined Arab GDP (PPP) is about $8 trillion. The size of the combined Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) alone is $4 trillion, a considerable portion of which is being wisely and progressively deployed to drive regional economic development and integration. According to a recent study, Saudi Arabia is going to be among the top 13 economies by 2050, while Egypt is expected to be one of the top seven economies by 2075. Arab land contains around 40 percent and 25 percent of the world's proven oil and gas reserves, correspondingly. The Arab population has reached more than 470 million, exceeding that of the EU, and more than 60 percent of Arab inhabitants are under the age of 30. If harnessed appropriately, the growing Arab population can be a major boon with massive demographic dividends for the region and the world.

The Arabs have made a strategic decision to deescalate tensions and address regional issues through peaceful political means. They do not want to squander their precious resources on endless and unnecessary conflicts; they want to use their abundant competitive and comparative advantages for economic and social development. Although most of the world sees profitable opportunities in the Arabs' strengthening regional and global position, some in the West mistakenly view it as a threat. They erroneously believe that to achieve global hegemony, they should subordinate Arab interests to Western ambitions for dominance - the basis of which the Carter doctrine and Reagan Corollary were created in the early 1980s. However, the Arabs refuse to engage with foreign countries based on self-proclaimed hegemonist doctrines and reductionist frameworks, especially those that ignore the interests of the Arab world.

In the Arab region, people are mindful of the current intensifying great power rivalry. They do not want their region to become a battleground for power struggles. They view China's economic development positively. They accept and celebrate the fact that China is re-emerging not only as a major power in Asia, but as a great power in the world. They see huge economic and trade partnership opportunities in China's expanding growth and development. Therefore, some US officials' demands and expectations that the Arabs restrict relations with the Chinese are not only unrealistic and presumptuous, but also unacceptable. The region has changed, the world has changed, and therefore the old, outdated dogmas of a past era should also change.

The Arabs have already left unipolarity and hegemony behind. They are now in charge of their own destiny. They are busy building their future based on a new paradigm that focuses mainly on indigenous capacity building, diverse strategic partnerships and comprehensive regional development and integration.

Ebrahim Hashem

— 2022 AsiaGlobal Fellow, Asia Global Institute, The University of Hong Kong! Ebrahim Hashem is a China-based strategist, consultant and scholar interested in the global economy, the world order, and Arab-China relations. He was a 2022 AsiaGlobal Fellow at the Asia Global Institute of The University of Hong Kong. He has been watching China’s rise since 2011 when he managed a strategic project related to China’s 12th Five-Year-Plan for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). He has worked as a public-policy and strategy adviser to the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Office and headed the long-term strategy division of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). He advises various organizations on long-term strategies and Arab-China relations. He holds three master’s degrees in engineering science, business administration and public administration.

— The Author is Former Adviser to the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Office, an authority responsible for Abu Dhabi's long-term strategies, and Former Head of the Strategy Division of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asia Global Institute of the University of Hong Kong.

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damnesdelamer · 4 years

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A GLOSSARY OF LEFTIST DISCOURSE

Introduction and disclaimer I thought it would be useful to have a point of reference for terminology we encounter often, which may result in miscommunication or misunderstanding. This list is imperfect, but it will hopefully be useful as a starting point to explain to ourselves or others things we may not have fully understood or internalised. I do not claim to be an authority on these concepts, but I would hope that this post can be used as a tool to co-educate, rather than as an arena in which to attack or argue. Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans! Solidarity forever, comrades.

***

Ancap (noun; adjective; slang) Anarcho-capitalist. A branch of capitalist thought that advocates deregulation of the capitalist economy so much as to desire the means to privately exploit labour unencumbered by even state controls. Functionally the pursuit of corporate havens for slave labour.

Ancom (noun; adjective; slang) Anarcho-communist. A branch of communism that embraces the anarchist rejection of state authority on the grounds that statehood is inherently abusive. Characterised by devolution to grassroots organisation and decentralisation, as opposed to outright eschewal of infrastructure.

Bourgeois (noun; plural bourgeoisie; adjective, bourgeois) Traditionally, the socio-economic class who have recourse to profit from the labour of others (proletariat). Characterised by white-collar work, education, property or business ownership, some degree of upward mobility, though these qualifiers have arguably become increasingly complicated in the 21st Century with even many bourgeoisie being themselves subject to wage-slavery.

Capital (noun) The material position of wealth, privilege, political-economic influence, and the power to profit from the labour of others (those others being proletariat). Frequently expanded to refer to the actual people who occupy this role (e.g. Jeff Bezos, Boris Johnson, Ellen Degeneres), but strictly speaking refers to the position itself.

Capitalism (noun) The political-economic system which relies on the perpetual exploitation of disenfranchised classes’ (proletariat) labour in order that enfranchised classes (bourgeoisie) are able to both profit therefrom and retain monopoly on the means of production. Characterised by economic inequality, privatisation, wealth accumulation, indefinite and unsustainable growth.

Capitalist (noun, plural capitalists; adjective) The class of bourgeoisie who possess the power to employ and exploit others. Strictly speaking, this only includes those with enough control over the means of production as to actively exclude others recourse thereto and thus make them reliant on wages.

Colonialism (noun; adjective, colonial) The political-economic process of annexing foreign territory as a means of profit. Historically, this derives from feudalist military-expansionism, but was in many ways central to the advent of the modern era and the spread of capitalism globally.

Communism (noun; adjective, communist) A political ideology and system of governance in which the proletariat possess the means of production, and thus the needs of each is provided by the association of workers. Characterised by unilaterally socialised services, public ownership of all resources, total eschewal of liquid economics. Also: communist (noun, plural communists): subscriber to the above.

Cultural imperialism (noun) An exercise of systemic abuse perpetrated through popular depictions (e.g. in media) rather than material political means, whereby it is presumed that (primarily) Western/European cultural norms are superior to others.

Decentralise (verb; adjective, decentralised; noun, decentralisation) To deconstruct or cede authority from a single, primary position, resituating it at a local level, empowering regional autonomy. This devolution can take many forms, such as geographic (e.g. local councils, county authorities), cultural/ethnic (tribal bands, minority representation associations), or professional/disciplinary (workers’ councils, unions, guilds).

Decolonise (verb; noun, decolonisation; adjective, decolonial) To dismantle colonial infrastructure. This usually refers to ceding (stolen) land rights back to indigenous populations, may include forming new sovereign governments, and essentially never involves forced migration.

Direct action (noun) The active pursuit of (usually proletarian or leftist) aims through practical means, such as squatting, blockading, or guerilla gardening, rather than via bureaucracy, democracy, or appeal to state representatives which serve as a buffer between the alienated masses and our due, up to and including the forcible seizure of the means of production.

Fascism (noun; adjective, fascist) A political system of authoritarian control over populations, particularly with tiered citizenship denying basic human rights to specific (especially ethnic) groups. Characterised by forced seizure of government, subversion of democracy, suppression and criminalisation of opposition, targeted ethnic violence/extermination, policies of eugenics, usually with overtures to nationalist supremacy and military conquest.

Feudalism (noun; adjective, feudalist) The political-economic system which relies on miltary-expansionism and hierarchical control of land and resources, with a unique class system involving military service and nobility which has become largely obsolete. Generally held to be relegated to history, but directly leading to the advent of colonialism and capitalism.

Hegemony (noun; adjective, hegemonic) A social condition which becomes so pervasive and normalised that any alternative comes to be seen as impossible, generally engineered by the ruling class through simultaneous measures of force and consent in order to pacify underclasses.

Imperialism (noun; adjective, imperialist) A political process of ruling over people and especially other nations from a centralised control structure. This is often achieved through military occupation, but frequently takes the form of legislation or even corruption of local governance. ‘The highest stage of capitalism’.

Imperial-colonial (adjective; noun, imperial-colonialism) Pertaining to the form of colonialism in which a region or territory is ruled by an absentee, centralised government, usually resulting in resources being exported from colonies to the centre/metropole for the profit and privilege of the ruling class to the exclusion of indigenous populations.

Internationalist (adjective; noun, internationalism) Pertaining to policy which prioritises mutual aid and cooperation at a state level while maintaining regional autonomy. A central premise of Lenin’s Soviet strategy to unite proletariat globally.

Liberal (adjective; noun) Socio-political ideology espousing capitalism as the best means to emancipate disenfranchised classes from their evident oppression, prioritising reform of exploitative systems and defending against leftist movements to fully dismantle them.

Lumpenproletariat (noun, plural same; adjective) The lowest socio-economic class, often referring to those forced to beg or engage in criminal activity to meet needs. Marx and Engels contrasted this group with the proletariat as being impossible to mobilise via class consciousness, while Frantz Fanon and Fred Hampton viewed the lumpenproletariat as vital to anti-capitalist and especially decolonial action.

Marxism (noun) A very wide body of theory and its associated ideology, subscribing to Marx’s principles of mobilisation through class consciousness, bottom-up revolution, and active destruction of hierarchical structures, classically with an emphasis on phenomenological inevitability.

Marxism-Leninism (noun; adjective, Marxist-Leninist) The branch of Marxist theory developed by Lenin, adopted by the Soviet Union and most communist states since as official policy. Significantly espouses a ‘vanguard party’ to seize the means of production on behalf of the proletariat. Characterised by pragmatic (revolutionary) transition from capitalism, internationalist anti-imperialism, socialist democracy.

Marxist-feminist (noun; adjective) A branch of feminist theory identifying capitalism as the ultimate source of (at least contemporary) patriarchal oppression, generally emphasising intersectionality, class consciousness, and solidarity, and standing in direct contrast to liberal feminism.

The means of production (noun) The material components required to produce goods, such as tools, facilities, and raw materials. A basic premise underlying Marxist analysis is the empirical truth that proletariat are fully able to self-manage, given direct access to these components, and bourgeoisie therefore have no function but to control, exploit, and alienate.

Nationalise (verb) To legislate against private ownership of a given resource and resituate said resource in state apparatus. A central tenet of socialism and communism is certain resources being publicly/state owned or controlled, and most capitalist societies also feature state control of certain resources. Sometimes synonymous with ‘socialise’.

Nationalism (noun; adjective, nationalist) The pursuit of the interests of a specific national identity over others, usually including targeted violence, the real threat of exclusion and expulsion, propagandised rhetoric of ‘true’ members of said national identity, dangerous dogwhistles. Many minority nationalist movements (e.g. Kurdish, Basque, Iroquois) relate more to anti-colonial resistance, and Leninist internationalism supports these, but only as long as the relevant group remains oppressed.

Neo-colonial (adjective; noun, neo-colonialism) Pertaining to a more recent practice whereby an economic power annexes foreign territory without explicitly controlling or occupying it, usually through corporate monopoly or land seizure, but generally includes political engineering of local governing bodies.

Petite bourgeois (noun; adjective) Those bourgeoisie who have not got recourse to profit or significant wealth accumulation, but nevertheless rely on the labour of others (proletariat). Often small business owners or lower management, with limited (vocational) education, generally alienated from the means of production yet in a position to allocate resources to employees under them.

Praxis (noun) The synthesis of theory and practice; practical activity directly informed by and in keeping with theoretical principles.

Proletariat (noun, plural same; adjective proletarian) Traditionally, the socio-economic class whose only source of meeting needs is through (selling) labour. Characterised by blue-collar work, manual/’unskilled’ labour, lack of formal education, lack of property, alienation from the means of production (under capitalism). A large amount of leftist theory relates to the liberation of the proletariat and their claiming the means of production, and their right to self-determination.

Settler-colonial (adjective; noun, settler-colonialism) The form of colonialism in which colonisers fully occupy and establish centralised governmental infrastructure on (stolen) land. Characterised by forcibly displaced indigenous populations, erasure of indigenous people and culture, legislation around indigenous status forming a tiered system of citizenship, nationalist propaganda.

Socialism (noun; adjective, socialist) Political-economic system of publicly provided infrastructural support (of e.g. healthcare, education, housing, food). Often used interchangeably with ‘communism’, but differs in maintaining private property and potentially liquid economics. For this reason, Lenin viewed it as an interstitial condition between capitalism and full communism. Also: socialist (noun, plural socialists): subscriber to the above.

Subaltern (adjective; noun) The class most fully removed from the centralised position of privilege, without recourse to even basic infrastructural support, usually, though not exclusively, in imperial-colonial contexts. In many ways overlapping with lumpenproletariat, the term is more likely to refer to rural Indians than homeless Londoners.

Tankie (noun; adjective; slang) Traditionally, those British communists who endorsed the Soviet military suppression of the Hungarian and Czech revolutions (of 1956 and 1968, respectively), the term has come to be used for any advocates or apologists of authoritarian state communism.

Third world (noun; adjective) Traditionally, those countries or regions which were neither aligned with the capitalist West or the communist Eastern Bloc, but tertiary and therefore the more disenfranchised, the term has been resignified by global capitalist hegemony, referring to ‘developing’ nations which fall outside of exploitable markets (in part due to confusion with Mao Zedong’s ‘Three Worlds Theory’).

#original #leftism #Marxism #socialism #capitalism #communism #communist #leftist #Marxist #socialist

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asianartsblog · 3 years

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LEK BORJA RENEWS FILIPINO HISTORY THROUGH ART

BY PRECIOUS RINGOR

Asian Pasifika Arts Collective New Outlooks Blog

April 2, 2021

http://ow.ly/fEby50FlQWZ

Editor’s Note: Precious Ringor brings us a second artist profile, this time of Filipino American interdisciplinary artist and poet Lek Borja, whose work is an attempt to track the continuous colonization across time, first within the Philippines from Spain and the United States, through present day America and trying to give voice to Filipino life against a white hegemony. Precious displays how Lek crosses borders of cultural stereotypes, seeking to expand the visions placed on Filipinos by other oppressive powers, and inserting her culture in art spaces where they are new and unfamiliar, but for the community, reminders of home.

Header Image: “Heritage at the Threshold” by Timothy Singratsomboune | Digital photography collage, 5400 x 4050 px, 2021.

Getting to know someone virtually is one of the sad realities we’ve had to face because of COVID-19 regulations. It’s both a blessing and a curse—we’ve become a global village, but at the same time we’ve all had more eye and back problems from sitting around and zooming this past year.

A zoom call and an hour was all I had to get to know Lek Vercauteren Borja, a Filipino American interdisciplinary artist and poet widely known for her thought-provoking work into the Asian diaspora. Chatting with Lek didn’t feel like a job though; time flies fast when you’re having fun.

One of the things I noted was Lek’s warm and friendly nature. Most of the time, it’s uncommon for an interviewee to ask questions about the interviewer. Lek unabashedly admitted that she did a bit of ‘stalking’ before we hopped on Zoom, “I like to know about the person I’m talking with, even before the interview starts.”

Lek started in poetry. Armed with a love for Shakespeare, she pursued a dual concentration in Art and Creative Writing at Antioch University. It was there that she first fell in love with art history and sculpture. During that time, her first chapbook, Android, was published by Plan B Press. She took this as a sign to continue pursuing a career in arts.

As an artist, she admits that’s where she gets inspiration from, “I want to talk about the history of Filipinos, the invisible stories. Growing up in the Philippines and studying there, I realized there was a lot missing in our history books. It seemed as if it were written from a western perspective.” She reminded me so much of the Philippines, of home. Because of our similar upbringing, I immediately understood her search for truth.

The themes of home and longing, of memory and the present, and of giving Filipino lives new voices, carry across her work, and no more palpably than her piece Evolution of the Aswang Myth, what she calls “seed and the origin” to all her current works. Lek says “Without it, I wouldn’t be thinking about art, the way I’m making now.” This 8 x 8 feet painting explores the origins of the aswang or manananggal, a Filipino mythical creature typically depicted as a woman feared for its penchant for eating infants and unborn fetuses during the night. Interestingly, the aswang was also a word ascribed to the Filipina women who went against the forced religious conversion by Spanish friars during their colonization of the Philippines.

March 2021 marked 500 years since Spanish ships first arrived on the shores of the Philippines.

Since then, our country fought hard for liberation, first from Spain and then from the United States of America. In retrospect, it hasn’t been long since the Philippines became an independent nation. Today, we are striving to find our voice amidst the imperialistic erasure we’ve endured.

As Lek puts it, “What propelled me to tell these stories is the feeling that I had no voice. For one, I didn’t speak English well so I couldn’t really talk about what I was going through or how I felt. That’s why a lot of my work now focuses on bringing my experiences of living in the Philippines at the forefront and seeing how that’s connected to bigger conversations and narratives around us.”

Currently, Lek’s work called Anak (My Child) is being featured in the gallery at Towson University’s Asian Arts & Culture Center.

View Anak (My Child) Exhibit: https://towson.edu/anak

Besides online exhibitions and virtual galleries, Lek is also conducting several workshops in Baltimore’s upcoming Asia North Festival. These workshops are a good model for Lek’s philosophy in making art out of personal histories. Whether it’s experiences of displacement or change, she points out that everyone’s story matters and there will always be a community of people who can empathize with that.

“I think it’s really important for our stories to be brought to light in the larger narrative. They think by calling us model minority, our problems can easily be brushed aside” I lamented the steady rise of xenophobic crimes these past few months.

“I agree, it’s a really complex issue” Lek adds, “Why are we so silent? Why do we stand in the shadows? I’ll probably look for an answer my entire life. It’s hard to talk about our struggles and it’s not easy to have conversations about the past. There’s a culture of silence that’s been normalized and it’s perpetuated even in our own homes. But that’s part of the work I do, bringing everything from the past into the forefront so we can have deeper conversations about it.”

Speaking of the past, Lek’s introduction to the arts started in Tarlac, a city located north of the Philippines. Besides being known as the most multicultural province, the city is home to numerous sugar and rice plantations. “The population of our barrio was probably less than 1,000. Our family had a farm as well as a sugar-cane and rice field plantation. My inang [grandmother] also worked in the market as a butcher. It was a pretty simple country lifestyle but my childhood was amazing.”

Life in the country has been instrumental to Lek’s artistry. “The memory of the landscape and of the community is an extension of my art,” Lek explains. As a young girl, her biggest inspiration comes from her grandfather who, like herself, was also an artist. Lek would copy his drawings and eventually create drawings of her own. Recently, Lek has started to incorporate banana leaves into her work. Banana leaves are incredibly important to Filipino culture as it is used for cooking and traditional homebuilding.

“Sounds like you had to find your own path, coming here at such a young age and experiencing culture shock. America is very different from the Philippines!” I quipped.

“It was snowing where I first came here!” she exclaimed, thinking back to her initial introduction of America. “It was November when we landed in New York, it was freezing. I remember our families bundling us in huge warm winter coats before wecould even say hello. It was definitely a huge shock.”

I laugh, thinking back to when I first arrived in California ten years ago. Silly to think I was already freezing in sunny temperatures when she had to endure piles of snow. “Do you think you’ve had to change yourself in order to adjust to that culture shock?”

“For a long time I really didn’t know who I was,” Lek admits. “When I was younger, the school I went to was predominantly white. What I thought about how I should present myself came from that image. I dyed my hair blond and put on blue colored contacts to fit in. It was a lot of assimilation and cultural erasure. I started talking less Tagalog and less Ilocano. But art has really helped me find myself. It made me think more deeply about who I really was and what was important to me on an authentic level.”

Halfway through our conversation, we slowly realized just how similar we were. From migrating at the age of ten to living twenty miles apart in the same city. It was also in chatting that Lek found out I spoke Tagalog fluently, one thing she regrets losing unexpectedly. As it is my first language, Lek asked me to speak it instead. Once again, her warm nature bled through the Zoom interview; I found it refreshing since hardly anyone thinks about the interviewer’s comfort.

Unsurprisingly, community building is important to Lek. Before working, she likes to ask herself the following questions, ‘How is what I’m doing connected to my family and everyone in the Filipino community? How can I better serve my community?’ One of the main reasons she moved to L.A. is to network with other Filipino artists.

“A few years ago, I showed my art alongside a group of all Filipino artists at Avenue 50 Studio gallery for an exhibition that Nica Aquino and Anna Calubayan organized (also both Filipinas). It’s crazy because I’ve lived in and out [of L.A.] for over 10 years now and it was only in 2019 that I started to be part of that community. It’s probably the most fun I've had at an art show, I really felt at home.”

“I’d love to visit the studio’s galleries once it’s safer to go outside”

“Definitely! I’ll keep you updated on any gatherings” Lek pitched excitedly.

“And I'll bring you guys homemade ube cakes and puto pao!” I teasingly replied back.

As our call came to a close I couldn’t help but ask Lek if she had any advice to give to budding AAPI artists.

“I’ll echo what people who have supported me have said in the past: trust yourself and trust that you can make a difference. It’s hard to figure out who you want to be when [the world] has expectations and demands from you. We’re lucky to live in a time where there’s so many possibilities. Figure out what you want to do authentically and genuinely, and go for it.”

Lek continues on, “Personally, it took me a long time to find my voice. When I was in grad school, I had a lot of doubt in myself because most visiting artists and curators couldn’t understand my work. What made it all worth it were the moments that people got [my voice] right away.”

Getting to know Lek and learning about her commitment to showcasing invisible stories has been awe-inspiring; it made me proud to be a Filipino American artist. And in the wake of our hurting AAPI community, I believe it’s incredibly important, now more than ever, to highlight and support works of people like Lek. People who have had to fight for their voice in this world, who our youth could look up to and be inspired to become.

About the Author:

Precious Ringor is a Filipino-American singer/actress/writer residing in Los Angeles, CA. Ringor graduated from Cal State University, Fullerton with a degree in Human Communication Studies where her research is geared towards Asian American socio-cultural communication norms. Besides performing in various theatre shows and indie film sets, Ringor also works as a content contributor to Film Fest Magazine and Outspoken

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pocketseizure · 5 years

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The History of Light and Shadow

At the end of Twilight Princess, Ganondorf delivers one of his most memorable lines, “The history of light and shadow will be written in blood.” He is not wrong. As the player has witnessed over the course of Link’s adventure, Hyrule is haunted by ruins and ghost towns, a mere shadow of what it once was. The landscape is filled with numerous sites of past violence and empty spaces visibly marked by decay and wasted potential.

When Zelda tells Link and Midna that “these dark times are the result of our deeds,” she is referring to specific historical acts of imperialistic aggression. Hyrule established hegemony over its outlying territories by crushing the rebellions against its advances, but the kingdom has suffered from cultural stagnation as a result. Without the dynamic diversity symbolized by Ganondorf, Hyrule finds itself in economic and political decline, isolated from any contact with the world beyond its shrinking borders.

As a representative of a marginalized group of people who have been attacked and driven from their homes, Ganondorf is a tangible manifestation of the horrors of imperialism. He must be defeated, but doing so does not address the underlying problems that have resulted in Hyrule’s decline. I therefore want to argue that Twilight Princess uses Ganondorf to deliver a subtle yet poignant protest against the discourses of empire reflected by the dualistic “light and shadow” rhetoric of heroism that has resulted in tragedy and regret.

In the era immediately preceding Ocarina of Time, the kingdom of Hyrule united multiple geographically proximate groups of people at the end of a devastating civil war. Ganondorf was the leader of the Gerudo, an ethnic minority that resisted Hyrule. After several years of fighting, Ganondorf was eventually captured and imprisoned. The Sages of Hyrule were unable to execute him, so they sealed him away by casting him into the Twilight Realm, a world of shadows that exists alongside Hyrule. The events of Twilight Princess are triggered an indefinite period of time later when Ganondorf manages to persuade Zant, a prince of the Twilight Realm, to stage an uprising against Midna, its legitimate ruler.

Guided by Midna, the player takes on role of the teenage hero Link in order to defeat Zant and Ganondorf and thereby save Hyrule with the aid of its crown princess, Zelda. Many (if not the majority) of players will be influenced by the broad archetypes reproduced in this heroic narrative to understand Link as “good” and Ganondorf as “evil.” Throughout most of Twilight Princess, Ganondorf is characterized as a ruthless tribal warlord who attacked Hyrule because of his lust for power. As indicated by his monologues and gradual humanization over the course of the final battle, however, Ganondorf represents much more than simply an evil to be defeated. He is introduced to the player as a foolish man who became evil incarnate, and he does little more than scream in rage and pain when the player first sees him in a flashback. When he is allowed to speak for himself, however, he reveals himself to be highly intelligent with motivations that are not unsympathetic.

When Link finally confronts Ganondorf in the throne room of Hyrule Castle, he is sitting alone. The world he once knew is long gone, and all that remains to him is the intense emotion he has directed toward Hyrule, whose wealth and security he simultaneously covets and resents. Ganondorf has succeeded in conquering the kingdom, but his victory no longer has meaning, as his people have been killed, driven away, or assimilated.

As established in Ocarina of Time, the Gerudo historically maintained uneasy relations with the majority ethnicity of Hyrule. The views once espoused by the people in Hyrule concerning the Gerudo are reminiscent of Orientalist stylizations, in which the peoples of certain “non-Western” and therefore “uncivilized” nations are characterized as being either unintelligent animals incapable of governing themselves or decadent and weak and thus a prime target for colonization.

The villainization of Ganondorf and the Gerudo as deceitful and lawless thieves within Hyrule echoes contemporary postcolonial discourse, in which former colonial powers exhibit a longing for “the good old days” of expansive imperial hegemony. The British sociologist Paul Gilroy has termed this fabricated nostalgia “postcolonial melancholy,” a tonal atmosphere characterizing stories that are often haunted by the gothic figure of the postcolonial ghost. Ganondorf is a textbook example of a postcolonial ghost – a menacing supernatural figure who represents the frightening native traditions of the past that the supposedly enlightened colonizers attempted to “correct” but were prevented from eradicating completely.

In order for culturally odorless global capitalism to move forward, the ghosts of the colonial past must be laid to rest, regardless of whether they are symbolic narratives or actual human beings. Such narratives are not uncommon in the political discourse and popular narratives of Japan, which is still struggling to come to terms with its history of imperial violence on the Asian mainland. In essence, the demonization of Ganondorf reflects the historical and contemporary villainization of both specific and broadly defined groups in the real world, including entire nations of people who have been discursively positioned as “enemies.” As a medium, video games require challenges for the player to overcome. Story-based games such as those in the Legend of Zelda series tend to be relentless in their construction of enemies whose unequivocally evil deeds propel the hero to action. In Twilight Princess, there are two primary categories of characters with whom the player can interact: NPCs who offer material assistance and advice on how the hero can proceed through the quest, and monsters who must be attacked and generally yield tangible rewards when defeated.

In other words, the fundamental elements of gameplay reflect a worldview built on the foundation of a battle of “us” versus “them,” which is given literal expression in the dichotomy between who cannot be attacked and who must be attacked in order to advance. Many players take it for granted that a game will present a class or race or species that deserves to be destroyed, and the lack of alternative options for interaction suggests that it is still somewhat radical to suggest that perhaps the player-character is not entirely justified in the demonization of people who don’t look or think like them. Video games are adept at engendering a sense of subjectivity, meaning that one of their functions is to give the player a feeling of controlling their movement through the game while enacting their will via the actions of their character. At the end of Twilight Princess, however, Link must fight and defeat Ganondorf, no matter how much sympathy the player may feel for him. The gameplay elements of Twilight Princess therefore perform abjection, the process by which we demarcate the boundaries of the whole and wholesome “self” by setting up a contrast against a fragmented and unclean “other.” As individuals, we employ this process to construct monsters that violate the sanctity of our bodies; and, as cultures, we employ this process to construct enemies that violate our sense of belonging to a shared identity.

The dualism of “the pure” and “the abject” functions to further erase the nuances and possibilities denied by the artificial designation of the characters in Twilight Princess as either “good” or “evil.” Ganondorf’s cultural barrier-crossing, his shifting physical form, his open physical and emotional wounds, and his occupation of the liminal spaces between one world and another place him squarely in the realm of the impure and abject. Both the story of Twilight Princess and the narrative functions of its gameplay demand that the abject ghosts of the empire be purified and expelled by cleansing Hyrule of the pollution of Ganondorf’s lingering malice.

By humanizing Ganondorf but then forcing the player to fight him anyway, Twilight Princess employs various tropes relating to the figure of the postcolonial ghost not to invoke unironic postcolonial melancholy, but rather to force the player to experience the violence of these tropes in a subjective and visceral way. Twilight Princess is therefore not so much a heroic legend of triumph over “darkness” as it is an elegiac legend of regret concerning past atrocities. Link’s victory is bittersweet, and it is not presented as a triumph for him or for Hyrule. At the end of Twilight Princess, Princess Zelda barely looks at the young man who supposedly rescued her. Midna, whose people were once banished to the Twilight Realm for opposing Zelda’s ancestors, takes her leave of Link, shattering the gate between their worlds after she departs. Midna explains her decision by saying, “Light and shadow can’t mix, as we all know.”

As Link and Midna’s friendship throughout the game has demonstrated, light and shadow can indeed coexist. Midna does not explain why she would choose to destroy the Mirror of Twilight that connects the Twilight Realm to Hyrule, but it is significant that this occurs immediately after she has witnessed the fight between Link and Ganondorf. Perhaps the prolonged spectacle of Ganondorf’s death has convinced Midna that there is no room for “monsters” in Hyrule, and it may be that she fears that she and her people will always be seen as abject outsiders, just as Ganondorf and his people once were.

It’s not clear to whom the title of Twilight Princess refers, and it could easily designate Midna, who emerges from and returns to the shadowy Twilight Realm. The title could also apply to Princess Zelda, however, as the victory over the forces of evil at the end of the game does not necessarily reverse or alleviate her kingdom’s slow decline. Before the end credits roll, Zelda sends the hero back to his village and returns alone to her empty castle.

Despite the narrative arc of Link’s progressive competence as an adventurer, this element of sorrow has been present from the outset of the game. Unlike the other games in the Legend of Zelda series, Twilight Princess begins not with Link waking up in the morning, but with him returning home in the evening. The opening scene is suffused with the golden light of the setting sun, and the game’s first spoken line is delivered by Link’s mentor Rusl, who asks, “Tell me… Do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls?” The player’s first few minutes with Twilight Princess thereby establish melancholy and lament as two of the major themes of the game. The people of Hyrule are entering the twilight of their civilization under the rule of an ineffectual monarchy that has not allowed its people to be revitalized by change and diversity.

The slow apocalypse suggested by the environment of Twilight Princess, such as eroded ruins and decaying ghost towns, is not presented with an opportunity for renewal along with Ganondorf’s defeat. The potential for energetic dynamism represented by Ganondorf has been violently denied in favor of cultural purity, and the severity of this loss is reflected in the somber tone of the game’s closing scenes. If Ganondorf cannot exist in Hyrule, neither can Midna – and perhaps neither can Link himself.

When Ganondorf speaks of a history written in blood, he is referring to the history that has been lost to Hyrule along with the bodies and voices of the people who have fallen in its imperialistic conflicts. Twilight Princess thereby uses the menacing yet tragic figure of Ganondorf to suggest that, if the lifeblood of the kingdom is to remain vital, its history must be able to accommodate more than a reductive dualism between “light” and “shadow.”

#Legend of Zelda #Twilight Princess #Ganondorf #Midna #Princess Zelda #and Link too #Twilight Princess gives me feelings #witness my tears #lord help me I'm back on my bullshit #Zelda meta

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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Is This a Remake of the 1941 Hitler Stalin Great War? If we step back from the details of daily headlines around the world and try to make sense of larger patterns, the dominant dynamic defining world geopolitics in the past three years or more is the appearance of a genuine irregular conflict between the two most formidable powers on the planet—The Peoples’ Republic of China and the United States of America. Increasingly it’s beginning to look as if some very dark global networks are orchestrating what looks to be an updated rerun of their 1939-1945 World War. Only this time the stakes are total, and aim at creation a universal global totalitarian system, what David Rockefeller once called a “one world government.” The powers that be periodically use war to gain major policy shifts. On behalf of the Powers That Be (PTB), World War II was orchestrated by the circles of the City of London and of Wall Street to maneuver two great obstacles—Russia and Germany—to wage a war to the death against each other, in order that those Anglo-Saxon PTB could reorganize the world geopolitical chess board to their advantage. It largely succeeded, but for the small detail that after 1945, Wall Street and the Rockefeller brothers were determined that England play the junior partner to Washington. London and Washington then entered the period of their global domination known as the Cold War. That Anglo-American global condominium ended, by design, in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 1991. Around this time, with the onset of the Bill Clinton presidency in 1992, the next phase– financial and industrial globalization– was inaugurated. With that, began the hollowing out of the industrial base of not only the United States, but also of Germany and the EU. The cheap labor outsourcing enabled by the new WTO drove wages down and destroyed one industry after the next in the industrial West after the 1990s. It was a necessary step on the path to what G.H.W. Bush in 1990 called the New World Order. The next step would be destruction of national sovereignty everywhere. Here the USA was the major obstacle. “A little help from our friends…” For the PTB, who owe no allegiance to nations, only to their power which is across borders, the birth of the World Trade Organization and their bringing China in as a full member in 2001 was intended as the key next step. At that point the PTB facilitated in China the greatest industrial growth by any nation in history, possibly excepting Germany from 1871-1914 and USA after 1866. WTO membership allowed Western multinationals from Apple to Nike to KFC to Ford and VW to pour billions into China to make their products at dirt-cheap wage levels for re-export to the West. One of the great mysteries of that China growth is the fact that China was allowed to become the “workshop of the world” after 2001, first in lower-skill industries such as textiles or toys, later in pharmaceuticals and most recently in electronics assembly and production. The mystery clears up when we look at the idea that the PTB and their financial houses, using China, want to weaken strong industrial powers, especially the United States, to push their global agenda. Brzezinski often wrote that the nation state was to be eliminated, as did his patron, David Rockefeller. By allowing China to become a rival to Washington in economy and increasingly in technology, they created the means to destroy the superpower hegemony of the US. By the onset of the Presidency of Xi Jinping in 2012, China was an economic colossus second in weight only to the United States. Clearly this could never have happened–not under the eye of the same Anglo-American old families who launched the Opium Wars after 1840 to bring China to heel and open their economy to Western financial looting–unless the Anglo-Americans had wanted it. The same British-owned bank involved in the China opium trade, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC), founded by a Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland in 1865 in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, today is the largest non-Chinese bank in Hong Kong. HSBC has become so well-connected to China in recent years that it has since 2011 had as Board member and Deputy HSBC Chairman, Laura Cha. Cha was formerly Vice Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, being the first person outside mainland China to join the Beijing Central Government of the People’s Republic of China at vice-ministerial rank. In other words the largest bank in the UK has a board member who was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a China government official. China needed access to Western money and HSBC and other select banks such as JP MorganChase, Barclays, Goldman Sachs were clearly more than happy to assist. “Socialism with Xi Jinping Characteristics…” All told until 2012 when Xi took charge of the CCP in Beijing, China seemed to be willing to be a globalist “team player,” though with “Chinese characteristics.” However, in 2015 after little more than two years in office, Xi Jinping endorsed a comprehensive national industrial strategy, Made in China: 2025. China 2025 replaced an earlier Western globalist document that had been formulated with the World Bank and the USA, the China 2030 report under Robert Zoellick. That shift to a China strategy for global tech domination might well have triggered a decision by the globalist PTB that China could no longer be relied on to play by the rules of the globalists, but rather that the CCP under Xi were determined to make China the global leader in advanced industrial, AI and bio-technologies. A resurgent China nationalist global hegemony was not the idea of the New World Order gang. China:2025 combined with Xi’s strong advocacy of the Belt Road Initiative for global infrastructure linking China by land and sea to all Eurasia and beyond, likely suggested to the globalists that the only solution to the prospect of their losing their power to a China global hegemon would ultimately be war, a war that would destroy both nationalist powers, USA AND China. This is my conclusion and there is much to suggest this is now taking place. Tit for Tat If so, it will most likely be far different from the military contest of World War II. The USA and most of the Western industrial economies have “conveniently” imposed the worst economic depression since the 1930’s as a bizarre response to an alleged virus originating in Wuhan and spreading to the world. Despite the fact that the death toll, even with vastly inflated statistics, is at the level of a severe annual influenza, the insistence of politicians and the corrupt WHO to impose draconian lockdown and economic disruption has crippled the remaining industrial base in the US and most of the EU. The eruption of well-organized riots and vandalism under the banner of racial protests across the USA has brought America’s cities to a state in many cases of war zones resembling the cities of the 2013 Matt Damon and Jodie Foster film, Elysium. In this context, anti-Washington rhetoric from Beijing has taken on a sharp tone in their use of so-called “Wolf Diplomacy.” Now after Washington closed the China Consulate in Houston and China the US Consulate in Chengdu, both sides have stepped up rhetoric. High tech companies are being banned in the US, military displays of force from the US in the South China Sea and waters near Taiwan are increasing tensions and rhetoric on both sides. The White House accuses the WHO of being an agent of Beijing, while China accuses the US of deliberately creating a deadly virus and bringing it to Wuhan. Chinese state media supports the explosion of violent protests across America under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Step-wise events are escalating dramatically. Many of the US self-styled Marxists leading the protests across US cities have ties to Beijing such as the Maoist-origin Revolutionary Communist Party, USA of Bob Avakian. “Unrestricted Warfare” Under these conditions, what kind of escalation is likely? In 1999 two colonels in the China PLA, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a book with the PLA Press titled Unrestricted Warfare. Qiao Liang was promoted to Major General in the PLA Air Force and became deputy secretary-general of the Council for National Security Policy Studies. The two updated their work in 2016. It gives a window on high-level China military strategy. Reviewing published US military doctrine in the aftermath of the 1991 US Operation Desert Storm war against Iraq, the Chinese authors point out what they see as US over-dependence on brute military force and conventional military doctrine. They claim, “Observing, considering, and resolving problems from the point of view of technology is typical American thinking. Its advantages and disadvantages are both very apparent, just like the characters of Americans.” They add, “military threats are already often no longer the major factors affecting national security…these traditional factors are increasingly becoming more intertwined with grabbing resources, contending for markets, controlling capital, trade sanctions, and other economic factors, to the extent that they are even becoming secondary to these factors. They comprise a new pattern which threatens the political, economic and military security of a nation or nations… The two authors define the new form of warfare as, “encompassing the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air, space, and electronics spheres.” They suggest China could use hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, and conducting urban warfare among the methods proposed. Recent revelations that Chinese entities pay millions in ad revenues to the New York Times and other mainstream USA media to voice China-positive views is one example. Similarly, maneuvering a Chinese national to head the US’ largest public pension fund, CalPERS, which poured billions into risky China stocks, or persuading the New York Stock Exchange to list dozens of China companies without requiring adherence to US accounting transparency increase US financial vulnerability are others. This all suggests the form that a war between China and the US could take. It can be termed asymmetrical warfare or unrestricted war, where nothing that disrupts the enemy is off limits. Qiao has that, “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” There are no Geneva Conventions. The two Beijing authors add this irregular warfare could include assaults on the political security, economic security, cultural security, and information security of the nation. The dependence of the US economy on China supply chains for everything from basic antibiotics to militarily-vital rare earth minerals is but one domain of vulnerability. On its side, China is vulnerable to trade sanctions, financial disruption, bioterror attacks and oil embargoes to name a few. Some have suggested the recent locust plague and African Swine Fever devastation to China’s core food supplies, was not merely an act of nature. If not, then we are likely deep into an undeclared form of US-China unrestricted warfare. Could it be that the recent extreme floods along the China Yangtze River that threaten the giant Three Gorges Dam and have flooded Wuhan and other major China cities and devastated millions of acres of key cropland was not entirely seasonal? A full unrestricted war of China and the USA would be more than a tragedy. It could be the end of civilization as we know it. Is this what characters such as Bill Gates or George Soros and their superiors are trying to bring about? Do they plan to introduce their draconian dystopian “Reset” on the ashes of such a conflict?

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crimethinc · 5 years

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Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill An Interview

Since 1997, when it ceased to be the last major colonial holding of Great Britain, Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China, while maintaining a distinct political and legal system. In February, an unpopular bill was introduced that would make it possible to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to countries that the Hong Kong government has no existing extradition agreements with—including mainland China. On June 9, over a million people took the streets in protest; on June12, protesters engaged in pitched confrontations with police; on June 16, two million people participated in one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The following interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong explores the context of this wave of unrest. Our correspondents draw on over a decade of experience in the previous social movements in an effort to come to terms with the motivations that drive the participants, and elaborate upon the new forms of organization and subjectivation that define this new sequence of struggle.

In the United States, the most recent popular struggles have cohered around resisting Donald Trump and the extreme right. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement drew anarchists, leftists, and far-right nationalists into the streets against Macron’s centrist government and each other. In Hong Kong, we see a social movement against a state governed by the authoritarian left. What challenges do opponents of capitalism and the state face in this context? How can we outflank nationalists, neoliberals, and pacifists who seek to control and exploit our movements?

As China extends its reach, competing with the United States and European Union for global hegemony, it is important to experiment with models of resistance against the political model it represents, while taking care to prevent neoliberals and reactionaries from capitalizing on popular opposition to the authoritarian left. Anarchists in Hong Kong are uniquely positioned to comment on this.

The front façade of the Hong Kong Police headquarters in Wan Chai, covered in egg yolks on the evening of June 21. Hundreds of protesters sealed the entrance, demanding the unconditional release of every person that has been arrested in relation to the struggle thus far. The banner below reads “Never Surrender.” Photo by KWBB from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

“The left” is institutionalized and ineffectual in Hong Kong. Generally, the “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers have a chokehold over the narrative whenever protests break out, especially when mainland China is involved.

In the struggle against the extradition bill, has the escalation in tactics made it difficult for those factions to represent or manage “the movement”? Has the revolt exceeded or undermined their capacity to shape the discourse? Do the events of the past month herald similar developments in the future, or has this been a common subterranean theme in popular unrest in Hong Kong already?

We think it’s important for everyone to understand that—thus far—what has happened cannot be properly understood to be “a movement.” It’s far too inchoate for that. What I mean is that, unlike the so-called “Umbrella Movement,” which escaped the control of its founding architects (the intellectuals who announced “Occupy Central With Love And Peace” a year in advance) very early on while adhering for the most part to the pacifistic, citizenist principles that they outlined, there is no real guiding narrative uniting the events that have transpired so far, no foundational credo that authorizes—or sanctifies—certain forms of action while proscribing others in order to cultivate a spectacular, exemplary façade that can be photographed and broadcast to screens around the world.

The short answer to your question, then, is… yes, thus far, nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of the movement. Everybody is scrambling to come to terms with a nascent form of subjectivity that is taking shape before us, now that the formal figureheads of the tendencies you referenced have been crushed and largely marginalized. That includes the “scholarist” fraction of the students, now known as “Demosisto,” and the right-wing “nativists,” both of which were disqualified from participating in the legislative council after being voted in.

Throughout this interview, we will attempt to describe our own intuitions about what this embryonic form of subjectivity looks like and the conditions from which it originates. But these are only tentative. Whatever is going on, we can say that it emerges from within a field from which the visible, recognized protagonists of previous sequences, including political parties, student bodies, and right-wing and populist groups, have all been vanquished or discredited. It is a field populated with shadows, haunted by shades, echoes, and murmurs. As of now, center stage remains empty.

This means that the more prevalent “default” modes of understanding are invoked to fill the gaps. Often, it appears that we are set for an unfortunate reprisal of the sequence that played itself out in the Umbrella Movement:

appalling show of police force

public outrage manifests itself in huge marches and subsequent occupations, organized and understood as sanctimonious displays of civil virtue

these occupations ossify into tense, puritanical, and paranoid encampments obsessed with policing behavior to keep it in line with the prescribed script

the movement collapses, leading to five years of disenchantment among young people who do not have the means to understand their failure to achieve universal suffrage as anything less than abject defeat.

Of course, this is just a cursory description of the Umbrella Movement of five years ago—and even then, there was a considerable amount of “excess”: novel and emancipatory practices and encounters that the official narrative could not account for. These experiences should be retrieved and recovered, though this is not the time or place for that. What we face now is another exercise in mystification, in which the protocols that come into operation every time the social fabric enters a crisis may foreclose the possibilities that are opening up. It would be premature to suggest that this is about to happen, however.

In our cursory and often extremely unpleasant perusals of Western far-left social media, we have noticed that all too often, the intelligence falls victim to our penchant to run the rule over this or that struggle. So much of what passes for “commentary” tends to fall on either side of two poles—impassioned acclamation of the power of the proletarian intelligence or cynical denunciation of its populist recuperation. None of us can bear the suspense of having to suspend our judgment on something outside our ken, and we hasten to find someone who can formalize this unwieldy mass of information into a rubric that we can comprehend and digest, in order that we can express our support or apprehension.

We have no real answers for anybody who wants to know whether they should care about what’s going on in Hong Kong as opposed to, say, France, Algeria, Sudan. But we can plead with those who are interested in understanding what’s happening to take the time to develop an understanding of this city. Though we don’t entirely share their politics and have some quibbles with the facts presented therein, we endorse any coverage of events in Hong Kong that Ultra, Nao, and Chuang have offered over the years to the English-speaking world. Ultra’s piece on the Umbrella Movement is likely the best account of the events currently available.

Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

If we understand “the left” as a political subject that situates questions of class struggle and labor at the center of its politics, it’s not entirely certain that such a thing even properly exists in Hong Kong. Of course, friends of ours run excellent blogs, and there are small grouplets and the like. Certainly, everybody talks about the wealth gap, rampant poverty, the capitalist class, the fact that we are all “打工仔” (jobbers, working folk) struggling to survive. But, as almost anywhere else, the primary form of subjectivity and identification that everyone subscribes to is the idea of citizenship in a national community. It follows that this imagined belonging is founded on negation, exclusion, and demarcation from the Mainland. You can only imagine the torture of seeing the tiresome “I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese!” t-shirts on the subway, or hearing “Hong Kongers add oil!” (essentially, “way to go!”) chanted ad nauseam for an entire afternoon during recent marches.

It should interest readers from abroad to know that the word “left” in Hong Kong has two connotations. Obviously, for the generation of our parents and their parents before them, “Left” means Communist. Which is why “Left” could refer to a businessman who is a Party member, or a pro-establishment politician who is notoriously pro-China. For younger people, the word “Left” is a stigma (often conjugated with “plastic,” a word in Cantonese that sounds like “dickhead”) attached to a previous generation of activists who were involved in a prior sequence of social struggle—including struggles to prevent the demolition of Queen’s Ferry Pier in Central, against the construction of the high-speed Railway going through the northeast of Hong Kong into China, and against the destruction of vast tracts of farmland in the North East territories, all of which ended in demoralizing defeat. These movements were often led by articulate spokespeople—artists or NGO representatives who forged tactical alliances with progressives in the pan-democratic movement. The defeat of these movements, attributed to their apprehensions about endorsing direct action and their pleas for patience and for negotiations with authority, is now blamed on that generation of activists. All the rage and frustration of the young people who came of age in that period, heeding the direction of these figureheads who commanded them to disperse as they witnessed yet another defeat, yet another exhibition of orchestrated passivity, has progressively taken a rightward turn. Even secondary and university student bodies that have traditionally been staunchly center-left and progressive have become explicitly nationalist.

One crucial tenet among this generation, emerging from a welter of disappointments and failures, is a focus on direct action, and a consequent refusal of “small group discussions,” “consensus,” and the like. This was a theme that first appeared in the umbrella movement—most prominently in the Mong Kok encampment, where the possibilities were richest, but where the right was also, unfortunately, able to establish a firm foothold. The distrust of the previous generation remains prevalent. For example, on the afternoon of June 12, in the midst of the street fights between police and protesters, several members of a longstanding social-democratic party tasked themselves with relaying information via microphone to those on the front lines, telling them where to withdraw to if they needed to escape, what holes in the fronts to fill, and similar information. Because of this distrust of parties, politicians, professional activists and their agendas, many ignored these instructions and instead relied on word of mouth information or information circulating in online messaging groups.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological “wealth” that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.

In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.

In light of this, it would be naïve to suggest that anything significant has happened yet to suggest that to escaping the “chokehold” that you describe “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers maintaining on the narrative here. Both of these factions are simply symptoms of an underlying condition, aspects of an ideology that has to be attacked and taken apart in practice. Perhaps we should approach what is happening right now as a sort of psychoanalysis in public, with the psychopathology of our city exposed in full view, and see the actions we engage in collectively as a chance to work through traumas, manias, and obsessive complexes together. While it is undoubtedly dismaying that the momentum and morale of this struggle is sustained, across the social spectrum, by a constant invocation of the “Hong Kong people,” who are incited to protect their home at all costs, and while this deeply troubling unanimity covers over many problems,1 we accept the turmoil and the calamity of our time, the need to intervene in circumstances that are never of our own choosing. However bleak things may appear, this struggle offers a chance for new encounters, for the elaboration of new grammars.

Graffiti seen in the road occupation in Admiralty near the government quarters, reading “Carry a can of paint with you, it’s a remedy for canine rabies.” Cops are popularly referred to as “dogs” here. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

What has happened to the discourse of civility in the interlude between the umbrella movement and now? Did it contract, expand, decay, transform?

That’s an interesting question to ask. Perhaps the most significant thing that we can report about the current sequence that, astonishingly, when a small fringe of protesters attempted to break into the legislative council on June 9 following a day-long march, it was not universally criticized as an act of lunacy or, worse, the work of China or police provocateurs. Bear in mind that on June 9 and 12, the two attempts to break into the legislative council building thus far, the legislative assembly was not in session; people were effectively attempting to break into an empty building.

Now, much as we have our reservations about the effectiveness of doing such a thing in the first place,2 this is extraordinary, considering the fact that the last attempt to do so, which occurred in a protest against development in the North East territories shortly before the umbrella movement, took place while deliberations were in session and was broadly condemned or ignored.3 Some might suggest that the legacy of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan remains a big inspiration for many here; others might say that the looming threat of Chinese annexation is spurring the public to endorse desperate measures that they would otherwise chastise.

On the afternoon of June 12, when tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves assaulted by riot police, scrambling to escape from barrages of plastic bullets and tear gas, nobody condemned the masked squads in the front fighting back against the advancing lines of police and putting out the tear gas canisters as they landed. A longstanding, seemingly insuperable gulf has always existed between the “peaceful” protesters (pejoratively referred to as “peaceful rational non-violent dickheads” by most of us on the other side) and the “bellicose” protesters who believe in direct action. Each side tends to view the other with contempt.

Protesters transporting materials to build barricades. The graffiti on the wall can be roughly (and liberally) translated as “Hong Kongers ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’.” Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

The online forum lihkg has functioned as a central place for young people to organize, exchange political banter, and circulate information relating to this struggle. For the first time, a whole host of threads on this site have been dedicated to healing this breach or at least cultivating respect for those who do nothing but show up for the marches every Sunday—if only because marches that number in the millions and bring parts of the city to a temporary standstill are a pretty big deal, however mind-numbingly boring they may be in actuality. The last time the marches were anywhere close to this huge, a Chief Executive stepped down and the amending of a law regarding freedom of speech was moved to the back burner. All manner of groups are attempting to invent a way to contribute to the struggle, the most notable of which is the congregation of Christians that have assembled in front of police lines at the legislative council, chanting the same hymn without reprieve for a week and a half. That hymn has become a refrain that will likely reverberate through struggles in the future, for better or worse.

Are there clear openings or lines of flight in this movement that would allow for interventions that undermine the power of the police, of the law, of the commodity, without producing a militant subject that can be identified and excised?

It is difficult to answer this question. Despite the fact that proletarians compose the vast majority of people waging this struggle—proletarians whose lives are stolen from them by soulless jobs, who are compelled to spend more and more of their wages paying rents that continue to skyrocket because of comprehensive gentrification projects undertaken by state officials and private developers (who are often one and the same)—you must remember that “free market capitalism” is taken by many to be a defining trait of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, distinguishing it from the “red” capitalism managed by the Communist Party. What currently exists in Hong Kong, for some people, is far from ideal; when one says “the rich,” it invokes images of tycoon monopolies—cartels and communist toadies who have formed a dark pact with the Party to feed on the blood of the poor.

So, just as people are ardent for a government and institutions that we can properly call “our own”—yes, including the police—they desire a capitalism that we can finally call “our own,” a capitalism free from corruption, political chicanery, and the like. It’s easy to chuckle at this, but like any community gathered around a founding myth of pioneers fleeing persecution and building a land of freedom and plenty from sacrifice and hard work… it’s easy to understand why this fixation exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination.

This is a city that fiercely defends the initiative of the entrepreneur, of private enterprise, and understands every sort of hustle as a way of making a living, a tactic in the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival. This grim sense of life as survival is omnipresent in our speech; when we speak of “working,” we use the term “搵食,” which literally means looking for our next meal. That explains why protesters have traditionally been very careful to avoid alienating the working masses by actions such as blockading a road used by busses transporting working stiffs back home.

While we understand that much of our lives are preoccupied with and consumed by work, nobody dares to propose the refusal of work, to oppose the indignity of being treated as producer-consumers under the dominion of the commodity. The police are chastised for being “running dogs” of an evil totalitarian empire, rather than being what they actually are: the foot soldiers of the regime of property.

What is novel in the current situation is that many people now accept that acts of solidarity with the struggle, however minute,4 can lead to arrest, and are prepared to tread this shifting line between legality and illegality. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the appearance of a generation that is prepared for imprisonment, something that was formerly restricted to “professional activists” at the forefront of social movements. At the same time, there is no existing discussion regarding what the force of law is, how it operates, or the legitimacy of the police and prisons as institutions. People simply feel they need to employ measures that transgress the law in order the preserve the sanctity of the Law, which has been violated and dishonored by the cowboys of communist corruption.

However, it is important to note that this is the first time that proposals for strikes in various sectors and general strikes have been put forward regarding an issue that is, on the surface of it, unrelated to labor.

Our friends in the “Housewives Against Extradition” section of the march on September 9. The picture shows a group of housewives and aunties, many of whom were on the streets for the first time. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

How do barricades and occupations like the one from a few days ago reproduce themselves in the context of Hong Kong?

Barricades are simply customary now. Whenever people gather en masse and intend to occupy a certain territory to establish a front, barricades are built quickly and effectively. There is a creeping sense now that occupations are becoming routine and futile, physically taxing and ultimately inefficient. What’s interesting in this struggle is that people are really spending a lot of time thinking about what “works,” what requires the least expenditure of effort and achieves the maximum effect in paralyzing parts of the city or interrupting circulation, rather than what holds the greatest moral appeal to an imagined “public” watching everything from the safety of the living room—or even, conversely, what “feels” the most militant.

There have been many popular proposals for “non-cooperative” quotidian actions such as jamming up an entire subway train by coordinating groups of friends to pack the cars with people and luggage for a whole afternoon, or cancelling bank accounts and withdrawing savings from savings accounts in order to create inflation. Some have spread suggestions regarding how to dodge paying taxes for the rest of your life. These might not seem like much, but what’s interesting is the relentless circulation of suggestions from all manner of quarters, from people with varying kinds of expertise, about how people can act on their own initiative where they live or work and in their everyday lives, rather than imagining “the struggle” as something that is waged exclusively on the streets by masked, able-bodied youth.

Whatever criticisms anybody might have about what has happened thus far, this formidable exercise in collective intelligence is really incredibly impressive—an action can be proposed in a message group or on an anonymous message board thread, a few people organize to do it, and it’s done without any fuss or fanfare. Forms circulate and multiply as different groups try them out and modify them.

In the West, Leninists and Maoists have been screaming bloody murder about “CIA Psyop” or “Western backed color revolution.” Have hegemonic forces in Hong Kong invoked the “outside agitator” theme on the ground at a narrative level?

Actually, that is the official line of the Chief Executive, who has repeatedly said that she regards the events of the past week as riotous behavior incited by foreign interests that are interested in conducting a “color revolution” in the city. I’m not sure if she would repeat that line now that she has apologized publicly for “creating contradictions” and discord with her decisions, but all the same—it’s hilarious that tankies share the exact same opinion as our formal head of state.

It’s an open secret that various pro-democracy NGOs, parties, and thinktanks receive American funding. It’s not some kind of occult conspiracy theory that only tankies know about. But these tankies are suggesting that the platform that coordinates the marches—a broad alliance of political parties, NGOs, and the like—is also the ideological spearhead and architect of the “movement,” which is simply a colossal misunderstanding. That platform has been widely denounced, discredited, and mocked by the “direct action” tendencies that are forming all around us, and it is only recently that, as we said above, there are slightly begrudging threads on the Internet offering them indirect praise for being able to coordinate marches that actually achieve something. If only tankies would stop treating everybody like mindless neo-colonial sheep acting at the cryptic behest of Western imperialist intelligence.

That said, it would be dishonest if we failed to mention that, alongside threads on message boards discussing the niceties of direct action tactics abroad, there are also threads alerting everyone to the fact that voices in the White House have expressed their disapproval for the law. Some have even celebrated this. Also, there is a really wacky petition circulating on Facebook to get people to appeal to the White House for foreign intervention. I’m sure one would see these sorts of things in any struggle of this scale in any non-Western city. They aren’t smoking guns confirming imperialist manipulation; they are fringe phenomena that are not the driving force behind events thus far.

Have any slogans, neologisms, new slang, popular talking points, or funny phrases emerged that are unique to the situation?

Yes, lots, though we’re not sure how we would go about translating them. But the force that is generating these memes, that is inspiring all these Whatsapp and Telegram stickers and catchphrases, is actually the police force.

Between shooting people in the eye with plastic bullets, flailing their batons about, and indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at peoples’ heads and groins, they also found the time to utter some truly classic pearls that have made their way on to t-shirts. One of these bons mots is the rather unfortunate and politically incorrect “liberal cunt.” In the heat of a skirmish between police and protesters, a policeman called someone at the frontlines by that epithet. All our swear words in Cantonese revolve around male and female genitalia, unfortunately; we have quite a few words for private parts. In Cantonese, this formulation doesn’t sound as sensible as it does in English. Said together in Cantonese, “liberal” and “cunt” sounds positively hilarious.

Does this upheaval bear any connections to the fishball riots or Hong Kong autonomy from a few years ago?

A: The “fishball riots” were a demonstrative lesson in many ways, especially for people like us, who found ourselves spectators situated at some remove from the people involved. It was a paroxysmic explosion of rage against the police, a completely unexpected aftershock from the collapse of the umbrella movement. An entire party, the erstwhile darlings of right-wing youth everywhere, “Hong Kong Indigenous,” owes its whole career to this riot. They made absolutely sure that everyone knew they were attending, showing up in uniform and waving their royal blue flags at the scene. They were voted into office, disqualified, and incarcerated—one of the central members is now seeking asylum in Germany, where his views on Hong Kong independence have apparently softened considerably in the course of hanging out with German Greens. That is fresh in the memory of folks who know that invisibility is now paramount.

What effect has Joshua Wong’s release had?

A: We are not sure how surprised readers from overseas will be to discover, after perhaps watching that awful documentary about Joshua Wong on Netflix, that his release has not inspired much fanfare at all. Demosisto are now effectively the “Left Plastic” among a new batch of secondary students.

Are populist factions functioning as a real force of recuperation?

A: All that we have written above illustrates how, while the struggle currently escapes the grasp of every established group, party, and organization, its content is populist by default. The struggle has attained a sprawling scale and drawn in a wide breadth of actors; right now, it is expanding by the minute. But there is little thought given to the fact that many of those who are most obviously and immediately affected by the law will be people whose work takes place across the border—working with and providing aid to workers in Shenzhen, for instance.

Nobody is entirely sure what the actual implications of the law are. Even accounts written by professional lawyers vary quite widely, and this gives press outlets that brand themselves as “voices of the people”5 ample space to frame the entire issue as simply a matter of Hong Kong’s constitutional autonomy being compromised, with an entire city in revolt against the imposition of an all-encompassing surveillance state.

Perusing message boards and conversing with people around the government complex, you would think that the introduction of this law means that expressions of dissent online or objectionable text messages to friends on the Mainland could lead to extradition. This is far from being the case, as far as the letter of the law goes. But the events of the last few years, during which booksellers in Hong Kong have been disappeared for selling publications banned on the Mainland and activists in Hong Kong have been detained and deprived of contact upon crossing the border, offer little cause to trust a party that is already notorious for cooking up charges and contravening the letter of the law whenever convenient. Who knows what it will do once official authorization is granted.

Paranoia invariably sets in whenever the subject of China comes up. On the evening of June 12, when the clouds of tear gas were beginning to clear up, the founder of a Telegram message group with 10,000+ active members was arrested by the police, who commanded him to unlock his phone. His testimony revealed that he was told that even if he refused, they would hack his phone anyway. Later, the news reported that he was using a Xiaomi phone at the time. This news went viral, with many commenting that his choice of phone was both bold and idiotic, since urban legend has it that Xiaomi phones not only have a “backdoor” that permits Xiaomi to access the information on every one of its phones and assume control of the information therein, but that Xiaomi—by virtue of having its servers in China—uploads all information stored on its cloud to the database of party overlords. It is futile to try to suggest that users who are anxious about such things can take measures to seal backdoors, or that background information leeching can be detected by simply checking the data usage on your phone. Xiaomi is effectively regarded as an expertly engineered Communist tracking device, and arguments about it are no longer technical, but ideological to the point of superstition.

This “post-truth” dimension of this struggle, compounded with all the psychopathological factors that we enumerated above, makes everything that is happening that much more perplexing, that much more overwhelming. For so long, fantasy has been the impetus for social struggle in this city—the fantasy of a national community, urbane, free-thinking, civilized and each sharing in the negative freedoms that the law provides, the fantasy of electoral democracy… Whenever these affirmative fantasies are put at risk, they are defended and enacted in public, en masse, and the sales for “I Am Hong Konger” [sic] go through the roof.

This is what gives the proceedings a distinctly conservative, reactionary flavor, despite how radical and decentralized the new forms of action are. All we can do as a collective is seek ways to subvert this fantasy, to expose and demonstrate its vacuity in form and content.

At this time, it feels surreal that everybody around us is so certain, so clear about what they need to do—oppose this law with every means that they have available to them—while the reasons for doing so remain hopelessly obscure. It could very well be the case that this suffocating opacity is our lot for the time being, in this phase premised upon more action, less talk, on the relentless need to keep abreast of and act on the flow of information that is constantly accelerating around us.

In so many ways, what we see happening around us is a fulfillment of what we have dreamt of for years. So many bemoan the “lack of political leadership,” which they see as a noxious habit developed over years of failed movements, but the truth is that those who are accustomed to being protagonists of struggles, including ourselves as a collective, have been overtaken by events. It is no longer a matter of a tiny scene of activists concocting a set of tactics and programs and attempting to market them to the public. “The public” is taking action all around us, exchanging techniques on forums, devising ways to evade surveillance, to avoid being arrested at all costs. It is now possible to learn more about fighting the police in one afternoon than we did in a few years.

In the midst of this breathless acceleration, is it possible to introduce another rhythm, in which we can engage in a collective contemplation of what has become of us, and what we are becoming as we rush headlong into the tumult?

As ever, we stand here, fighting alongside our neighbors, ardently looking for friends.

Hand-written statements by protesters, weathered after an afternoon of heavy rain. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

In reflecting on the problems concealed by the apparent unanimity of the “Hong Kong people,” we might start by asking who that framework suggests that this city is for, who comprises this imaginary subject. We have seen Nepalese and Pakistani brothers and sisters on the streets, but they hesitate to make their presence known for fear of being accused of being thugs employed by the police. ↩

“The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.” –The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends ↩

Incidentally, that attempt was a good deal more spontaneous and successful. The police had hardly imagined that crowds of people who had sat peacefully with their heads in their hands feeling helpless while the developments were authorized would suddenly start attempting to rush the council doors by force, breaking some of the windows. ↩

On the night of June 11, young customers in a McDonald’s in Admiralty were all searched and had their identity cards recorded. On June 12, a video went viral showing a young man transporting a box of bottled water to protesters who were being brutalized by a squad of policemen with batons. ↩

To give two rather different examples, this includes the populist, xenophobic, and vehemently anti-Communist Apple Daily, and the “Hong Kong Free Press,” an independent English online rag of the “angry liberal” stripe run by expatriates that has an affinity for young localist/nativist leaders. ↩

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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In "The Accidental Superpower," Peter Zeihan treats geopolitics as the great augur of future events. Zeihan does not reference Asimov's "Foundation" series or the idea of "psychohistory," but the resemblance is striking. Geopolitics like psychohistory allows us to anticipate broad historical forces. Zeihan like Seldon advocates harnessing historical trends to change the future. And, funnily enough, Zeihan like Seldon predicts a coming age of turmoil and conflict. Zeihan believes the whole global system we've known since the end of WWII is going to change. And so, as in Asimov's "Foundation," Zeihan believes that leaders that harness geopolitics will make better decisions than leaders that don't.

Except America. America is so blessed by geography and history that we are immune to the world's troubles. We will dominate the 21st Century without even trying. We are, Zeihan says, "The Accidental Superpower". But to explain this difference between America and the world, it is necessary to first treat geopolitics.

…

For instance, two populations of equal size, one in the mountains, one in the river valleys, will develop in some predictable ways. The population in the river valley will farm fertile lands and build money on trade; the population in the mountain valley is likely to stay poor and fragment into fractious ethnic enclaves. But the river nation may be more vulnerable to invasion, the mountain people likelier to hide away and thwart foreign oppression. The same geopolitical realities can be good or bad, depending on the currents of the day.

…

"Balance of transport" is the fruit of the agricultural revolution. Sedentary people can store up wealth and accumulate resources. So a strong nation needs to be bound together by trade.

As a positive example, Zeihan cites Egypt, where geography binds the people together. The Nile forms a stable channel of trade, while the desert segregates Egypt from the outside world. In a world where the Pharaoh can inspect his entire country from river barge, it's only natural that a stable and centralized government would rule for millennia on end. But when new technologies like the chariot emerged and made the desert a highway for armies, it was only natural that Egypt would cease to be independent, and be governed by a succession of Persians and Romans and Byzantines and Arabs.

As a negative example of "balance of transport," Zeihan cites, interestingly, Canada. Although Canada is a wealthy nation, its geography actually pulls its provinces apart. Zeihan notes that the barren Canadian Shield, the high passes of the Rockies, and the great gulf of the St. Lawrence River naturally divide Canada into several distinct regions. It is thus easier for each region to trade with the United States than with each other. This explains, in some degree, why Quebec never fully integrated with the rest of Canada, and why Quebecois secession in the 90's would have effectively ended Canada's existence. In a later chapter, Zeihan speculates that Alberta could pose such a risk in the future, as its oil and mineral wealth give it a very different economy from the rest of Canada. At the same time, union with Canada is almost entirely a burden on Alberta, because it is the only province that pays more to Toronto than it receives, and it is heavily restricted by environmental policies imposed on the whole country. It might be going too far to imagine Albertan secession, as Zeihan does, but this kind of analysis might provide a wealth of insights into the future of Canadian politics.

…

America's waterways bless us with a tremendous "balance of transport". They are at the center of America's identity and history. They allow us to accumulate wealth effortlessly. Our waterways help explain the historical mystery of how 13 colonies joined in common purpose against the British: America's East is one economic unit. Our waterways help explain the historical mystery of why the American government has been so small: America is naturally so easy to traverse that government roads were never needed. (Zeihan notes that when Germany was building its railroad network in the 1840's, America's federal government had built one road, the "National" Road.) With our tremendous water network, things that would be impossible to any other country are casual accomplishments in America.

This is only the beginning of America's geopolitical blessings. The majority of the Lower 48 is in a temperate zone, a perfect climate for growing crops. We are separated from the rest of the world by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which makes us almost impervious to invasion. We dominate the North American continent, vastly overpowering the two countries we have to share it with. Of the Rocky Mountains running through the North American continent, we control most of the major passable valleys. We have so many perfect world-class deepwater ports that we aren't even using all of it. ("The United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined. [...] Chesapeake Bay alone boasts longer stretches of prime port property than the entire continental coast of Asia from Vladivostok to Lahore.") We are the only major power with access to both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, and can sell our goods in either direction. We are blessed with fertile valleys and croplands, rocky rivers for mills for industry, oil and natural gas and minerals and raw materials of every variety. Our balance of transport is effortless; industrialization came naturally; we easily maintain the greatest navy in the world; and not once but twice our economy has built the greatest military force ever known. We have, here, in America, everything we could ever want.

…

The crux of our current world order is rooted in the resolution to World War II. After the war, America had the world's only major industrial economy which had not been destroyed by that war. Russia was the world's only other power. By any historical standard, Zeihan argues, the expected next move was for America to occupy Europe, establish military hegemony, and then impose peace or war on the world and loot Europe of what remained. Instead, at the Bretton Woods conference, America laid the basis for a new world order based on free trade

…

America didn't conquer the world; it "bribed" it through its economic strength. As the Cold War progressed, more and more countries joined the free trade system America established. The "Bretton Woods" system established global near-peace and prosperity, mostly free trade the world over, almost an end to wars over access to markets and raw materials, everything we today call "capitalism" and "globalism". But all this is just a byproduct of American foreign policy, and is highly unusual

…

It is a point that cannot be understated: the whole order of global politics depends on America's international free trade system. We have changed the normal course of politics for every country that is part of that system. Germany is an industrial power today on the base of their exports, which they can only maintain because America keeps safe the flow of raw materials on which Germany relies. China is an industrial power today because America keeps safe the flow of manufactured goods from China to its customer nations. Japan and Britain have access to oil because America safeguards the global market on which the tankers travel. The global economic system is safe because America pays for it to be safe. We subsidize the wealth and prosperity of the entire world.

And this is the problem: America's free trade system benefits everyone in the world except America.

…

America pays for the global free trade system. America hardly uses the global free trade system. America bears most of the burdens of the global free trade system. America reaps few of the rewards. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, there are not even ideological motivations for us to maintain the Bretton Woods system. Thus, it is not only logical but inevitable that the free trade system the world currently enjoys will come to an end.

…

The second global crisis will be growing competition over oil. Global oil supplies are not unlimited, and industrial economies will be competing more for natural resources in order to maintain their standards of living. This is not a new struggle, and the competition in oil has been mediated in large part by America's leadership. But now America has shale. With the development of shale, America has gone from being an oil importer to an oil exporter. We are no longer dependent on the Middle East for our needs, and are only involved for the sake of our allies. So it's only natural that our interest in oil will wane at the exact moment that the rest of the world's interest grows. (And what do our allies do for us, anyways?) So Zeihan predicts that American mediation will fall apart. Conflicts over oil will escalate to wars, and whole nations will have to act very quickly if they don't want the lights to go out.

The third major crisis is a global demographic shift. The world's major economies are all ageing. The baby boomer phenomenon was not contained to America; all over the world the elderly are going to retire en masse. The next generation will be much smaller. This implies, of course, crises over pensions and other social security systems. But it implies something much greater about the availability of capital. Workingmen are generally net producers, as they save money in anticipation of retirement. Retirees are net consumers -- they make little income and draw from their savings. So as the global baby boomer generation retires, there will be a massive withdrawal from savings accounts the world over. People who have been investing money will start saving money. And overnight the supply global capital will dry up. There will no longer be as much money to invest in roads, new businesses, hospitals in Afghanistan, factories in Bangladesh. A lot of the "progress" we have come to expect in world affairs will suddenly come to a stop.

…

So this is "The Coming International Disorder". America, through its blessings and God's "special providence," is powerful without even trying. We are "The Accidental Superpower". We built a new world order based on global capitalism and free trade, one that suspended the normal everyday conflicts over markets and materials. That suspension of global conflicts is coming to an end. America is going to retreat from the affairs of the world, and will exercise such dominance that the 21st Century will be the American Century. The rest of the world will come to blows.

…

• China. China is geographically unstable. Its mountains and river valleys have always worked to congregate its wealth and capital on the coasts, away from the core of the country. This will cause great internal divisions as China seeks to navigate the 21st Century. Because China's wealth is totally dependent on the Bretton Woods system America has so graciously provided. China would still be a poor country today if America had not subsidized China's industrialization and shipping all over the world. Without Bretton Woods and with the coming demographic crisis, China will no longer have the capital it has used to develop and pacify its population. And if China wants to break out, it is surrounded at sea by hostile island nations, and on land by hostile conquered minority peoples. Zeihan predicts that China poses no threat to America whatsoever, we could win a trade war with two hands tied behind our backs. If China poses a threat for anyone it's more likely Japan over oil.

• Russia. Russia faces one of the worst demographic crises of any major power. Its birthrates collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union and have never really recovered. This is especially concerning because Russia is so geographically unstable that it needs a healthy population to guard its borders. Russia has no real frontier, there are no natural barriers like a great mountain range or desert that protect it from other nations. This is why it has usually protected itself by expanding and invading other nations. But today Russia cannot maintain its current borders if its population is going to shrink. So its only logical that Russia will act now, before the demographic crisis, to push forward into Europe where its borders will be smaller. (Russia's moves in Crimea and Ukraine fit this pattern.) Zeihan predicts, though, that the odds against Russia are probably too great, and it is not unlikely that Russia may collapse entirely as a country before the century is out. (And still the main threat Russia poses it to our allies, not America itself.)

• Mexico. Mexico may be America's real rival and threat. Mexico is troubled in every way that America is blessed. But proximity to America means that, for all its troubles, Mexico's markets will always be safe. Even as a drug war rages over a country practically consumed by anarchy, Mexico is one of the world's 20 largest economies. So Mexico can only go up from here. Its relationship with the US will then become more contentious. The key issue is the border -- the US-Mexican border is a vast stretch of desert and mountain, it exists only on a map. It is a perfect hideout for cartels, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The same geography that brought Americans into Mexico in the 1840's will now work in reverse (has already worked in reverse), at America's expense. Conflict will only grow. It is a deep irony that the country that really portends the greatest trouble for America going forward may not be Russia or China but Mexico.

…

If I had to criticize Zeihan's model, I would say that history does not always move in aggregates. Geopolitics can predict large events, but not small ones. This is something Asimov discusses at length in his treatment of "psychohistory" in the Foundation series. There, for thousands of years, events unfold exactly as psychohistorian Hari Seldon predicted them. And then, without forewarning, one man leaps off the pages of history, gathers together a new empire, and thwarts all expectations of history. That man, "The Mule," makes an ass of all our assumptions. Psychohistory can predict broad trends but not small variances.

So I would level this criticism at the lens of geopolitics. It considers nations, not individuals, not how single leaders or real people diverge from expected trends.

Zeihan, for instance, considers immigration only in positive terms, noting how it renews America's demographic pyramid. But it's clear that immigration causes great conflict within America, conflict that does not appear in traditional geopolitical models. Likewise, it is not obvious to me that America remaining powerful on the world stage means America staying stable at home. America and Americans often have different interests. I can certainly think of one global power which, in the Third Century, turned to violence and civil war, even as it continued to dominate the world around it.

#reddit #book review #geopolitics #peter zeihan #read the whole thing

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queernuck · 5 years

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Ignorant Americans: On Irony and the Aesthetics of the US Women’s National Team

Megan Rapinoe has displayed two threads throughout the Women’s World Cup: that of the Proud American, and that of the Neoliberal Individual, in a fashion that makes her recent discussion of American celebrations against teams such as the outmatched Thailand or the nearly-too-even French and English teams. The latter has, for some time, been outspoken about the brashness of the USWNT, known for showy celebrations to an even greater extent than usual during this past tournament.

When the United States scored against England, taking the lead back after an equalizer, a tea-sipping celebration spread around social media, a bit of mockery at Britishness, Englishness, the concept of properness as a part of sporting and football culture and how these all relate. However, that the mockery in question is by an American team is rather vital. This is the same American team that celebrated goals in a 13-0 drubbing of Thailand, to the consternation of Canadian (and English) commentators. A team that has not been unafraid to celebrate, one whose self-chosen spokeswoman even rejoices in a certain fashion in this role. Within the World Cup, the American team has taken on the role of the heel, the character to be rooted against, and the transition has been vital to realizing what exactly is so compelling about the USWNT, the role of America as the heel, and American imperialism as part of the character of American sporting culture.

Two of the best-known NTs in American history were the 1980 Miracle on Ice team, a team that captures the height of Cold War American Exceptionalism (and as a result, filtered through the medium of hockey, a certain white supremacist anticommunist libido) and the Dream Team, perhaps the best basketball team ever assembled and a fitting response to the way in which the post-socialist West looked toward Yugoslavia, the Balkans, and its own role in Balkanization as a process, as a kind of discursive space of potentiality as well as a political process. Given the status of several Balkan states as looking toward allegiance with NATO and the growing influence of NATO powers on the aesthetics and doctrines of military deployment (even within Russia itself) a look at what exactly the former Yugoslavia’s role in the sport of basketball (as well as in hockey) is vital to eventually turning toward the USWNT properly. Each of these teams has their own character, their own mythological place in American sports, and while there are marked differences the similarities in looking toward American anticommunist, imperialist fantasies must be noted.

The 1980 “Miracle on Ice” is one of the best known hockey stories around, and is in part possible due to settler-colonialism. This is, of course, true of all American institutions, but the emphasis on college hockey in the mythology of the 1980 team is vital. American colleges are built on settler land, institutions for settlers, institutions which codify the bourgeoisie and its ideology (as seen in the creation of the Chicago Boys, another famous team of American origin) along with representing it. American colleges widely generated their wealth through slavery, and the institutions themselves keep their wealth through investments in private prisons, companies that manufacture weapons systems for the American war machine, and the export of various intellectual products for the consumption of the petit-bourgeoisie in various other colonial assemblages. The importance of American colleges in retaining the cultural hegemony of a relatively united bourgeoisie ideology even across lines of national division is itself part of what makes the college system productive, part of what makes it possible. Institutions that are as apparently-hegemonic as Yale and ones that seem to go against it (Reed, Bard, and Oberlin being great examples) are just as much a part of different, neoliberal articulations of the same hegemonic ideals. Hegemony is simply a description of a state of affairs, the maintenance of a proletarian hegemony, dictatorship, whatever language one wishes to use to describe it, is simply a means of looking at which ideological turn dominates at a given time, in a given situation. Laclau and Mouffe describing hegemony do a phenomenal job of discussing how the turn toward post-socialist society, evoked by the 1980 Miracle, the idealization of it as a turning point in the Cold War, involves a turn from hegemony and counter-hegemony in the warring powers to a single neoliberal hegemony which involves the dissolution of the welfare state, the weakening and neoliberalization of Unions, and the dominance of American ideology means that states criticized for being too conservative were, in fact, now being defended for the few ways in which they had upheld even a vague sense of New Left reforms. That a bunch of “college kids” took on the Red Army hockey team, faced it down and won, before the actual act of winning the medal, in what was effectively the second-to-last in a series of semiotic victories before the eventual gold medal is symbolic of the exact kind of neoliberal victories that are most important to contemporary neoliberal order. It is a team that has been built up through mythology, rather than their own play. Their myth is bigger than them.

Meanwhile, nothing is bigger than the 1992 Dream Team, the first Olympic basketball team from the US to feature professionals. The Dream Team hangs as a kind of imaginary Real, a hyperreal assemblage that almost stands as a what-if specifically because neither before nor since has any squad assembled matched the vibrancy, the sheer talent of the team at hand. Some of the best players of all time, best at their own position, a squad uncompromised in effectively every way, the Dream Team represents a kind of new 90s Americanism that involved the extension of its cultural hegemony on a global scale due to new technologies of ideological dominance, the way in which a kind of hyperreal space is implied by the extension of the Dream Team into the “Real” of the Olympics, a space of national and international competition predicated on the sharing of a certain concept of national identity (noting, of course, that the Americans happily attended Nazi-held Olympics while boycotting over the Soviets) which, by the 1996 Olympics, had specifically been constructed and maintained through the interruption of Yugoslavia, the way in which America contrasted itself against the fall of the Soviet Union as well as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting process of Balkanization. Yugoslavia was one of the few nations with basketball traditions that matched that of the US, and most European players in the NBA come from Balkan nations specifically because of this looming influence. The way in which Balkanization impacted basketball during the 90s is enormous specifically because of how liberalization lead both to the proliferation of East European Big Men throughout the NBA, and the beakup of the one power that could really contend with the US on the big stage. Meanwhile, to emphasize a difference within neoliberal shows of force, the sort that the USWNT are now making, the growth of basketball in Yugoslavia had still not reached that of the United States. The 1992 Olympics had been an enormous influence on basketball culture in Yugoslavia as well as other former Soviet states, as shown by the efforts of the Lithuanian basketball team, themselves a bit of a story of Western influence in relation to neoliberal processes of development. The way in which the Dream Team remains as a dominant power, averaging 40-point margins in victories on their way to a Gold medal, showed how America saw itself moving forward.

Now that there has been an establishment of the previous grounds for the ideology of American sport in international play, the politics and ideology of the USWNT can be discussed. Previously, the USWNT has been a kind of forgotten counterpart of sorts until Olympic or World Cup competition comes up: the USMNT is an underwhelming-at-best squad most years, and was kept out of the 2018 World Cup by Panama, who themselves went winless in the World Cup. The Women’s team, comparatively, are defending World Cup champs, have visited the finals multiple times, and boast multiple gold medals as well. The Women are a squad embroiled in American workplace politics, of course: the women are forced to deal with less promotion, lower pay, and fewer resources than the American Men, despite the Men’s team being a far less successful squad. The American Men are playing for the Gold Cup on the same day as the Women are playing for the World Cup, and that CONCAF is an order of magnitude below FIFA in prestige is not to be ignored, despite attempts at equal billing by networks like FS1 in order to raise the brand stock of the USMNT during the go-around before the next World Cup. While the USMNT has enjoyed great success in the past, its current status is one of depletion, of attempting to identify itself in relation to failures at a vital level, while even through challenge involved in being a genuinely viable National Team, a symbol of a soccer culture that exists in strange pockets and idiosyncratic expressions in America. Meanwhile, everyone loves a winner, and ironically enough for such a misogynist nation, the Women are the ones carrying the mantle at the moment.

There is a great deal of irony surrounding the USWNT, the way in which their status as not only best in the world, but best in their nation has lead to an emphasis on their secondary status comparatively, and how some victories in gaining equal recognition have lead to their current status tending toward one of being recognized for what they are, for who they are. And of course, the irony involved requires the completion of the Ironic Return, the rabattement to use the French (to defeat them by a kind of American, Anglicized theft of their term into the American philosophical jargon). Rapinoe has been a relatively outspoken prominent athlete, kneeling during the Anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick's protests against police brutality and antiblackness as well as drawing from her own experience as a lesbian. A sense of unity beyond lines of identity, of a greater identification, would be a catalyst for class consciousness. However, sublimated by the neoliberal individualism of our contemporary age, she instead becomes the Ignorant American, the one who accepts the way in which she lives as a settler in a nation that literally creates so much waste that it must pollute entirely different countries to stay livable, a country tied up with acts of identification through consumption like Nike's expert advertising with Colin Kaepernick involved. The deepest irony is when the psychopolitical transfiguration of the cop in your head has become your own vision of yourself, not the cop in your head but the brand. And the USWNT is a phenomenal brand, I must admit. I wear it proudly myself during this tournament!

So, is there a genuine irony to the homophobic, nationalist brand of the USWNT being lead by Rapinoe in-herself, as a kind of stand-in for certain becomings, identities, acts of identification and so on? Well, of course, there's a great deal of irony in it: that the team is lead by an incredibly visible lesbian, one who has been relatively politically active in the past and still discusses these matters, one who as I mentioned, I genuinely admire. It is a team of WOMEN representing the interests of American Empire here, and the foremost voice amongst them gay woman no less! The team that most categorically represents the true American libido post-9/11 is one like this, which allows for Americans to flaunt their own neoliberal sensibilities, while still holding hateful views, ideologies, so on. Americans will talk about homophobia and misogyny without reference to colonialism and colonial structures of violence, and that itself is part of the discourse around Rapinoe. My own joyful commentary on Rapinoe’s two goals against England on Deadspin, where I used the admittedly mauladin phrase "gay little heart", received numerous responses were about "straight little hearts" that I myself had no interest in hearing about much more than the site’s quick preview of the remark, but it certainly encapsulated part of what American ideology, American becomings mean in a hegemonic sense. Americans want the becoming-woman, becoming-gay, becoming-lesbian (three intertwined yet not identical becomings) without the full becoming, a kind of mirrored dominance over them.

Only in America, as Rapinoe might believe to some degree, can these becomings be fully realized, is there then that hegemonic freedom to be as one wishes, only in the imperial center can that be achieved. And, for many, this is specifically true due to the way in which colonial violence makes certain becomings first colonial ones, first ones that are dominated by colonial experience, that are supported by American acts of violence, American in character or influence, American by virtue of America as colonial power or American by virtue of previous colonial regimes becoming-American by the implementation of American advisors within neocolonial regimes. French, English, Portuguese, Spanish colonizers have all been replaced by American counterparts, either outright or in community with Americans. The way that the Israeli intelligence community specifically blackmails gay Palestinians comes to mind, but the way in which allies of America create asylum systems that reject gay refugees, that specifically operate by creating or rejecting specific bodies as insufficiently queer by Western standards, operating in a kind of space of strange, alienated affinity with those oppressed specifically for the ends of American colonialism, the creation of the USWNT is inextricably tied to the violence of American colonialism.

The irony of the Americans playing the Heel, doing so in such a strange way, with such new and divergent aesthetics of doing as much, is not to be lost specifically because it involves a kind of awareness of their role that Americans are supposed to be incapable of. The Ignorant American sees itself, becomes itself, exceeds itself. This is what is most compelling about the USWNT: they are awful, they are ignorant, they are reprehensible, and they represent exactly what American identity is at this postmodern moment.

#USWNT #fifa wwc

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xtruss · 3 years

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Recounting 'Seven Sins' of the US' Alliance System

— Bu Wuwen | June 4, 2021 | Global Times

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Alliance is the evil weapon of hegemony. This is a common consensus reached among most countries, and one of the founding missions of the United States of America.

George Washington, the founding father of the United States of America, had repeatedly warned the American people to prevent the country from copying its European allies' pursuit of hegemony. In his farewell address in September 1796, Washington reinforced the idea that it was their 'true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

The US, driven by its irresistible greed for power, is now ironically what its founding father forewarned of and the world abominates. American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that the supremacy of the US in the world is supported by a fine system of alliances that covers the whole world.

The US is now desperate to find its few remaining nickles, being the over-spender it is, after being struck by financial crises and the COVID-19 pandemic. As an incurable addict of hegemony, the US cast its eyes on its allies. The US has created a gang out of the alliance system, whose trail is full of partisanship and fratricide.

We shall now recount the seven sins of this gang. '7 sins' of the US' Alliance System Infographic: Wu Tiantong — Global Times

1. Concealment

Those who chase profits are often entangled together — Old Chinese saying

Japan has recently declared that it would directly discharge the radioactive wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean, which has raised worldwide concern. Surprisingly, the US, a self-proclaimed shining beacon of environmental protection, human rights, and justice, betrayed Asian-Pacific countries and the Earth, and expressed "appreciation" in response to Japan's decision, exposing its hypocrisy.

None of this comes as a surprise. The US was always known for its double standards, where fairness and justice are nothing more than arbitrary fig leaves.

In Sharpeville of South Africa, during the apartheid era, the government opened fire on black demonstrators, killing 69 of them in the Sharpeville Massacre. In order to contain the former Soviet Union's influence in the Third World, the US could not accept losing an anti-communist ally. In the end, the "leader of the free world" cravenly defended the all-white government in South Africa without hesitation.

In fact, the standard criteria for the US' decision-making process are ideological confrontation and geopolitical interests. To serve its purpose, it stages nasty Faustian deals at any cost; it sells its soul to the devil in exchange for its gains.

2. Lying

We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. - Michael Pompeo

In the past two decades alone, the US-led Multinational Coalition and Coalition of the Willing caused countless tragedies by fabricating lies.

Using a tube of detergent as evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the US launched the Iraq War that killed 250,000 civilians in the Gulf country. Jessica Lynch, a female private in the US Army was injured in the war and saved by Iraqi medics. CNN, however, falsified the story and said that Lynch was tortured as a prisoner in Iraq, and was a witness for human rights abuses. In 2007, Lynch testified in a congressional hearing that the US Army made false claims about her capture.

A decade later, the US replicated the Iraq lie. It fabricated footages of Syria using chemical weapons on civilians, which was a convenient excuse for the US to launch air raids on another country. From 2016 to 2019, the recorded number of civilian deaths in Syria was 33,584. Half of the 3,833 victims killed by bombs dropped by the US-led coalition were women and children.

Fortunately, the truth is beginning to reveal itself. Recently Vice President Kamala Harris blurted out: "You know for years and generations wars have been fought over oil." This matches the American magazine Foreign Policy's comment that "safeguarding human rights" isn't the driving force for US' external warfare, but a means to seek interests.

Hegemony monopolizes absolute power and dehumanizes the US into moral bankruptcy. The historically flaunted promised land of progression and idealism has now fallen. All is lost.

— Wu Tiantong | June 4, 2021

3. Violence

The Americans of the United States have achieved this double result with a marvelous ease, calmly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. You cannot destroy men while better respecting the laws of humanity. - Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville

Hegemony is by nature coldblooded. Throughout its 245 years of history, the Americans enjoyed as few as 16 years without war. From the end of WWII to 2001, the world had seen 248 armed conflicts in 153 regions, and 201 of them were started by the US.

In 1989, the US invaded Panama to depose the de facto Panamanian leader. In 1999, the US-led NATO forces, without authorization from the United Nations Security Council, bombarded the former Yugoslavia and "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese journalists. Since 2001, the US has started wars or military actions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving more than 800,000 dead and tens of millions of refugees.

The US military dragged its allies to wars that caused unprecedented refugee crises. Statistically, the number of refugees reached 11 million in Afghanistan, 380,000 in Pakistan, 3.25 million in Iraq and 12.59 million in Syria. About 1.3 million Afghans went to Pakistan and 900,000 to Iran. Of the Iraqi and Syrian refugees, about 3.5 million fled to Turkey and 1 million to Iran.

The US military always hit the headlines for its ruthless prisoner abuses. In addition, Australia proved to be a reliable lackey, allowing its soldiers to slaughter civilians in Afghanistan.

4. Plunder

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do. - Samuel P. Huntington

In the US' alliance system, war is the most immediate way to plunder. The US, the world's top war machine, writes the word "plunder" on every page of its history of more than 200 years.

Dwight D. Eisenhower concluded his presidential term by warning the US about the increasing power of the military-industry complex. Michael Brenes, professor of history at Yale University, in his To Defeat the Radical Right, End American Empire pointed out that the American military has long been fertile ground for the far right and they together built the warfare state.

After unpegging the US dollar from gold in 1971, the US shaped a USA-US military-US dollar trinity to support its hegemony. In collaboration with its allies, the US grabbed control over the oil resources in the Middle East to prevent its dollar hegemony from falling apart, and also opened the door to plunder the region's wealth.

The US profits from every global crisis, such as from the crises in Russia and Eastern Europe when the former Soviet Union collapsed; from the Balkan Peninsula when the former Yugoslavia broke up; from the Four Asian Tigers and Southeast Asia during the Asian Financial Crisis. During the 2008 financial crisis, the whole world had to pay the American debt. Now, the US has brought out a $1.9 trillion stimulus package which, in fact, means massive amounts of banknotes will be issued to tamp down the exchange rates of foreign currencies, and consequently take advantage of the rest of the world.

Relying on its financial hegemony, the US has robbed tens of trillions of dollars from other countries. The victims, though filled with anger, are so afraid of the American military alliance which is armed to the teeth, that most of them choose to keep silent.

5. Infringement

The judicial system leaves you no room to have faith in it. It's like peeling layers and layers of onion skin. Every layer that you peel, your eyes get more teary to the point where you can't peel anymore because your eyes are so watery. You're literally weeping, and the Bible talks about this, until you have no more strength to weep. - Emmett G. Price III, host of WGBH, a public radio station located in Boston

The American alliance system expertly manipulates international rules. Power trumps justice in the pursuit of self-interest. The US chooses which international laws to enforce based solely on its convenience. In recent years, the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Treaty on Open Skies, and the INF Treaty, revoked the signing of the Arms Trade Treaty, and handled the renewal of the New START Treaty passively. It is addicted to breaching treaties.

Moreover, it feels glorified instead of being ashamed, and starts to advocate the "rules-based international order" in which the "rules" refer to its alliance's own rules and unequal terms.

The US and its allies challenged the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with the Freedom of Navigation. They attempted to prevent the International Criminal Court (ICC) from investigating its crimes committed in the Afghan War at all costs, which included threatening the ICC investigation staff that they would be subject to retribution.

In the information sphere, the US is a hackers' empire. Early in the Cold War, it organized the notorious Five Eyes alliance to monitor electronic communications worldwide. The US blames others for information theft and cyber-attacks while it covertly obstructs cyber security.

In 2013, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee Edward Snowden brought to light the PRISM program operated by the US, which was a surveillance program targeting both citizens and political figures on a global scale. Also in 2013, Der Spiegel disclosed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had installed spyware or modified hardware in the computers before they were delivered for foreign diplomats' use.

In 2017, WikiLeaks released thousands of confidential documents that exposed how the CIA was hacking the world. In 2020, it was revealed that since the end of WWII, the CIA has been controlling a Swiss encryption company to intercept top secrets of many countries, including its allies.

6. Destruction

Moral depravity defines US politics. The United States is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace. - Noam Chomsky, US philosopher

The US and its allies have long been the fallen angel that wreck foreign regimes and regional peace.

According to Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War by Assistant Professor Lindsey O'Rourke at Boston College, in the 42 years between 1947 and 1989, the US had 64 covert subversions and six open operations. The US seems to show more excitement and enthusiasm for overthrowing foreign regimes than it does for celebrating Christmas.

After the Cold War, the US has turned into an even more unscrupulous interventionist. Its frequent attempts to export the Color Revolution brought the Arab Spring. Unfortunately, it only brought an Arab Winter and an Arab Disaster.

In his On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, Noam Chomsky sorrowfully wrote, "This relatively short period has arguably seen the greatest number of massacres in human history. Most of them were performed in the name of lofty slogans such as freedom and democracy."

The US boasts its grandiose offshore balance strategy with its soft power and smart power when in reality, it is merely thick black theory full of schemes. In contrast to the Eastern tradition of valuing harmony and peace, the Anglo-Saxon world (the US and the UK) believes that disagreements and conflicts equals opportunity.

The US manipulated NATO to squeeze Russia's geo-space, and undermined the EU-Russia reconciliation and oil pipeline program. It supported Brexit to cripple the EU and reinforce US' control over Europe. It sowed discord in the Middle East in order to control the oil resources and made Iran an enemy of the region.

When it comes to China, the US spares no effort. The US rocked the boat in the South China Sea and made provocations, which led to turbulence in regional stability. It casts controllable tension on the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits to hinder peace progresses. At the China-India border, it fanned the flames of conflicts and mediated in favor of India. It also used the Quad to lure India into confronting China, intending to cause a lose-lose fight between the two developing giants.

Recently, the US obstructed the passing of a joint statement on ceasefire and cessation of violence and the protection of civilians at the Security Council despite the ongoing escalation of the Palestine-Israel situation and the overwhelming majority of UNSC members' call for an immediate ceasefire. Rather than taking proactive measures to promote peace, the US stands ready to fuel tension.

Time and time again, history has proven that the US and its allies always bring with them trouble and turmoil.

7. Disunion

In a war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times. - Winston Churchill

Forty years ago, the US forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord to secure its economic supremacy. The Japanese hi-tech industry was dismantled and the Japanese economy crippled for decades. Today, it turns to South Korea and Chinese Taiwan, threatening to relocate their semiconductor industries back to the US.

From 2009 to 2017, the US imposed its long-arm jurisdiction on Europe, whereby it collected US$190 billion in penalties, monopolized massive quantities of personal information, and forcefully took over European enterprises that were sanctioned. In an attempt to reap profits, the Wall Street recently tried to overturn the century-old European football world by forming an independent European Super League, which was widely resisted and disgracefully aborted.

The COVID-19 outbreak put the US in the spotlight. The egomaniac that it is, the US selfishly fed itself even at the cost of its allies. The mask war between the US and its allies is indeed an abomination.

Ever since they have developed the COVID-19 vaccines, the US has ranked its allies. It is generous to Anglo-Saxon purebreds like the UK and Australia, lukewarm to Europe and other common allies, but haggles over ounces with Japan and South Korea.

Japan, challenged by the upcoming Olympics and the worsening pandemic, received no vaccines from the US. The Japanese Prime Minister had to beg American vaccine companies. The vaccination rate is 1 percent in Japan, which is only one fiftieth of the US. The South Korean foreign minister also begged the US for help but heard a resolute no.

At the early stage of the pandemic, India offered the Trump administration large quantities of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Now that India is in the midst of a severe pandemic, it has received neither the vaccine raw materials that the US promised, nor any American oxygen or inhalators.

The US is an octopus and its allies are its tentacles. It uses them to try and rule the world but stay alert to prevent them from growing too strong. Once its interests are threatened, the octopus won't hesitate to cut off one or more of the tentacles or even feed on them.

So how could such an egoist and a corrupted alliance system take on global governance? How could they shamelessly claim to represent the international community?

After the Vietnam War, former Senator J. William Fulbright expressed his deep concern about the aggrandizement of the Arrogance of Power that would incur immeasurable destruction, and excessive expansion that would result in the nation's decline.

Recently, renowned American scholar Joseph Nye rang the alarm again: more and more countries are beyond the control of the US. It is extremely dangerous to believe the US is invincible.

What goes around comes around, and where vice is, vengeance follows. There will be severe penalties for the seven sins committed by the US. Justice may be served later, but it will never be absent.

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gha-zal · 5 years

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The defenders of the European patent on modernity are accustomed to appeal to the cultural history of the ancient Greco-Roman world and to the world of the Mediterranean prior to the colonization of America in order to legitimize their claim on the exclusivity of its patent. What is curious about this argument is, first, that it obscures the fact that the truly advanced part of the Mediterranean world was Islamo-Judaic. Second, it was that world that maintained the Greco-Roman cultural heritage, cities, commerce, agricultural trade, mining, textile industry, philosophy, and history, while the futureWestern Europe was being dominated by feudalism and cultural obscurantism. Third, very probably , the commodification of the labor force—the capital-wage relation—emerged precisely in that area, and its development expanded north toward the future Europe. Fourth, starting only with the defeat of Islam and the later displacement by America of Islam’s hegemony over the world market north to Europe did the center of cultural activity also begin to be displaced to that new region. Because of this, the new geographic perspective of history and culture, elaborated and imposed as globally hegemonic, implies a new geography of power. The idea of Occident-Orient itself is belated and starts with British hegemony. Or is it still necessary to recall that the prime meridian crosses London and not Seville or Venice?

Anibal Quijano, The Coloniality of Power

#SHOTS FIRED #this is my favorite paragraph of a text I have read this year #anibal quijano #coloniality of power #philosophy

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eagle-eyez · 3 years

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When it comes to speeches, Joe Biden is no Barack Obama, but he is no Donald Trump either. With his rather limited vocabulary, Trump somehow manages to get his message across. Biden is not an orator. He frequently mumbles up words and sometimes forgets what he was about to say, but still loves to speak with a flourish, frequently searching for punchlines and idiomatic expressions. One of Biden’s favourite phrases is: “the United States will again lead not just by the example of our power but the power of our example.”

Let’s just say the punchline didn’t age well.

As the world stays witness to unprecedented, dreadful scenes from Kabul where the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis still remains unfathomable, “power of America’s example” is ironically raising serious questions of Washington’s credibility and competence, not to speak of doubt among its allies and partners over its reliability. The way the cookie has crumbled in Afghanistan, it appears to confirm the notion that the US is an unreliable ally. Conversely, the developments have made it vulnerable to rhetorical attacks from adversaries, who have wasted no time in driving home the advantage.

When Biden speaks of the “power of our example”, he refers to American hegemony and influence in ensuring the state of relative peace that has existed since the Second World War when the US pulled its weight as the chief security guarantor of the global order. That image of a competent hegemon ready to defend the order it has installed through a complex network of allies, partners and institutions now lie in tatters.

It isn’t just the decision to pull out of Afghanistan and leave the beleaguered central Asian state to its violent, theocratic fate after two decades of machinations, it isn’t just the desperate exit deal cut with a terrorist outfit to fashion the final scuttle, it isn’t just the footage of chaos and dysfunction beamed from Kabul that stripped away the aura of US competence, and it isn’t just the lame excuses that a finger-pointing Biden laid out during his address when he blamed everyone else and yet claimed martyrdom for the debacle.

A combination of all these factors leads to the central message — hammered home for a decade by successive Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden administrations — that the US has grown tired of its beat as the globocop and wants to return home. This sense of resignation found its fullest expression in the denouement in Afghanistan and the speech that Biden delivered where he attempted to spin the chaos into some sort of a grand strategy.

In 2002, as chairman of the senate foreign relations committee after the 9/11 attacks, Biden had exhorted the then US president George W Bush to open American purse strings towards building institutions and promoting centralized democracy in Afghanistan. In a speech in February 2002, Biden had said: “History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we are fearful of the phrase ‘nation-building.’”

On Monday, trying to defend the debacle in Afghanistan, Biden claimed, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.”

The distance that Biden has travelled from 2002 to 2021 mirrors the time is has taken for the US to reorient its focus. It is this that shows Pax Americana, whose epitaph has been written many times before, may finally be dead.

As professor Brahma Chellaney writes in Project Syndicate, “This is a watershed moment that will be remembered for formalizing the end of the long-fraying Pax Americana and bringing down the curtain on the West’s long ascendancy. At a time when its global preeminence was already being severely challenged by China, the United States may never recover from the blow this strategic and humanitarian disaster delivers to its international credibility and standing.”

Much as the White House has tried to furiously spin the narrative — with Biden doing a clever bit of deception during his speech — the intelligence and policy failures by successive US administrations that led to the shambolic exit plan, and the clusterfuck of an execution strategy after being caught on the wrong foot by The Taliban’s rapid advance, have contributed to massive reputational damage for the United States. And it has come at an ill-timed moment when it is locked in an intense strategic competition with a presumptive superpower.

The decision to withdraw unilaterally from Afghanistan (undermining the authority of the civilian government, its ally) can still be rationally explained, given the increasing domestic antagonism towards ‘forever wars’. No leader in a democracy may remain immune to public sentiment. It is difficult to see why anyone may hold a grudge against the US for ending a 20-year military engagement in a corner of the world that is no longer central to its security concerns. In the long term, it makes the US appear less trustworthy, but it is a debate worth having.

What cannot be debated, however, is how helpless and clueless the world’s most powerful nation seemed — given all its resources — when the Taliban walked into the presidential palace and took charge of Kabul. The answer to questions over the botched-up pullout cannot be “but we cannot stay there forever”, as Biden tried to do.

The scenes of utter chaos with some Afghan nationals clinging on to a moving US Air Force jet in a desperate bid to flee the country have become the “defining image” of American failure in its longest war. It doesn’t speak highly of US diplomatic clout when triggering memories of Saigon, 1975, American diplomatic staff has to be evacuated off the roof, when the US has to plead with the Taliban not to attack its embassy and when the US defense secretary Lloyd Austin admits that the “US military does not have the capacity at this point to extend security forces beyond the perimeter of the Kabul airport in order to get more civilians safely evacuated out of Afghanistan.”

It is a staggering admission, one that accurately reflects the unravelling of US power.

Beyond the immediacy of the tragedy, the US faces some tough questions over its strategic reorientation. Biden has been trying to make a case that withdrawal of troops and military resources from Afghanistan is necessary for the US to concentrate on the strategic challenge it is facing from China and Russia. And yet the message that was underlined throughout the tragedy in Kabul is not that ‘America is back’, but ‘America is going back’.

Biden has identified China as America’s greatest competitor, and one of the key foreign policy tenets of his administration, as he had described in a speech in February 2021, is that “we’ll… take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China… We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home, working with our allies and partners, renewing our role in international institutions, and reclaiming our credibility and moral authority, much of which has been lost.”

Biden was ostensibly taking a swipe at the outgoing Trump administration, but it is difficult to defend American moral authority when the world notices how it has abandoned the Afghan nationals to their fate who had risked their lives to assist the US. This is a nation that is struggling to evacuate the thousands of American citizens still hiding in different parts of Afghanistan who cannot even make it to the airport. The fate of around 80,000 visa applications for Afghans who worked with the US government is even more uncertain.

For all his faults, and there were many, Trump wasn’t a hypocrite. He didn’t care what would happen to America’s ally, the civilian government in Afghanistan, and had no moral pretensions on defending the safety and rights of Afghan women and minorities. His mission was clear — to get the military to end its engagement in Afghanistan and he cut a deal with the Taliban bypassing Ashraf Ghani. It robbed the Afghanistan government of the semblance of authority and empowered the Taliban. Not that it caused Trump any bother.

The trouble with Biden is that on one hand he talks about restoring America’s ‘moral authority’, claims that ‘America is back’, vows to work with allies and partners and then doubles down on a deal that was cut by throwing Afghanistan’s civilian government under the bus. Some critics have pointed out that Taliban’s ascendance and the collapse of the civilian government and its military was caused by America’s abandonment of its ally.

This betrayal happened at two levels. Policy and strategy. Putting the cart of military withdrawal before the horse of a political settlement faced with a deadly fighting force weakened America’s hands and consequently sucked the morale out of the Afghan forces (many of whom were poorly paid and lacked motivation). And the rapid withdrawal of the troops, tech and support bulwark (including US contractors who kept Afghan fighter jets airworthy) was the coup de grace. In the final few days, many members of Afghan security forces and warlords battling the Taliban simply cut side deals and ran away.

As HR McMaster and Bradley Bowman write in Wall Street Journal, “Negotiators from Washington pursued diplomatic engagement with a brutal and determined enemy without complementary military action and after announcing our intention to withdraw. The late George Shultz’s observation holds true: ‘Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table’.”

In the final reckoning, these events not only damage confidence in US capacity for judgment and competence but also erode America’s credibility as an ally. To quote Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador to the US, in The Hill, “In their eagerness to withdraw from Afghanistan, two successive presidents refused to respect the views of America’s ally, the government of Afghanistan. That does not send a great signal to America’s allies around the world. American allies will now have to worry that the US can abandon them at short notice for domestic political reasons — not a good reputation to have while preparing for peer competition with China.”

US actions, in turn, have strengthened the notion that its power is in terminal decline. It is difficult to argue otherwise when the US president makes an impassioned plea about why it is not America’s job any more to remain invested in battles in faraway lands — forgetting that it is precisely these commitments that had made US hegemony possible.

And China has jumped in. Afghanistan has presented China with the perfect opportunity to drive home the message that the US is a declining power, increasingly lacks the ability to fashion outcomes favourable to itself, and consequently is in no position to uphold its elaborate commitments and security guarantees.

In a series of articles and editorials, the Chinese state media has “exulted in the US withdrawal, with official outlets slamming Washington for its ‘messy failure’, ‘humiliation’, and ‘impotence’.”

Of particular interest to Beijing is the Taiwan question. The nationalistic Global Times has warned Taiwan that it cannot repose faith in the US and that the debacle in Afghanistan is a “lesson for the DPP”. To reinforce its message, the Chinese military on Tuesday carried out “assault drills near Taiwan, with warships and fighter jets exercising off the southwest and southeast of the island.”

“America is now widely seen as a superpower in rapid decline”, announced an op-ed in Global Times. “A pale shadow of what it once was. Its defeat in Afghanistan will have major implications across the world; It brings into question the competence of its political and military leadership, its willingness to engage in further military entanglements, and its reliability and commitment as an ally. If it can make such a huge miscalculation and suffer such a catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, then who is going to trust its judgement in East Asia, or the South China Sea.”

American allies and partners are taking note. Taiwan, an ‘unofficial’ American ally that lies at the crossroads of US-China competition and great-power muscle flexing has reacted with worry and dismay over whether the US may be relied upon during an emergency.

Its president Tsai Ing-wen in a Facebook post admitted on Wednesday that “recent changes in the situation in Afghanistan have led to much discussion in Taiwan,” and added that “I want to tell everyone that Taiwan’s only option is to make ourselves stronger, more united and more resolute in our determination to protect ourselves.”

The US has been forced to come out with a statement that its commitment to Taiwan “remains as strong as it’s ever been” and that Taiwan is a “fundamentally different question in a different context.” It is evident, however, that China feels more emboldened at US weakness on display in Afghanistan and it is likely to increase its bullying of Taiwan. It is evident that Afghanistan will cast a long shadow over US security partnerships in Asia.

It is not a surprise, therefore, to note that Japan, that has tied own security with the defence stability of Taiwan, express growing concern over the realignment in balance of power in Asia. Japan’s defence minister Nobuo Kishi, according to Sydney Morning Herald, has said “the shifting power balance between the US and China ‘has become very conspicuous’ while a military battle over Taiwan had ‘skewed greatly in favour of China��.”

Consequently, Japan has announced that it will spend more in defence, tipping the defence spending in next fiscal over the long-standing cap of 1 percent of gross domestic product for the very first time.

The increasing lack of faith among its allies and partners on US security guarantee and worry over China’s growing hegemony in Asia further reinforce the narrative of US decline. It may fuel further Xi Jinping’s expansionist designs.

An interesting aspect to consider is whether the developments in Afghanistan will impact India-US ties, or affect the growing strategic partnership?

Walter Russell Mead raises the question in the Wall Street Journal in arguing: “For more than 70 years India, whose massive population and economy make it a linchpin of any American strategy in Asia, has seen the world through the lens of its competition with Pakistan. Now, as Islamabad cements its ties with Beijing, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan hands Pakistan a strategic victory and strengthens the most radical anti-Indian and anti-Western forces in its government. Few in New Delhi will perceive this catastrophe as a sign of Washington’s competence or reliability.”

Questions over US reliability in the present context are inevitable, but, as scholar Tanvi Madan points out in Twitter, such questions are not new to India and are “almost baked into calculations regarding the US.”

I’ve been asked a lot about the impact of devps in Afghanistan on India’s rel w US. Been hesitating to get into it rn cuz: -not what matters at the moment -still an evolving dynamic -too soon to tell -it depends on a few factors 1/

— Tanvi Madan (@tanvi_madan) August 17, 2021

Unlike Japan or even Taiwan, India doesn’t rely on a US security guarantee and its strategic closeness with Washington has been necessitated and fuelled by China’s growing heft and expansionism in the region. This has found expression in the framing of a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, that is not an Asian NATO. Therefore, questions on US competence and reliability are likely to remain peripheral to the India-US equation and should continue as long as China continues with its belligerent ways. That said, the spillover effect from Afghanistan may affect the pace of the strategic alignment, that may further depend on the change in US-Pakistan dynamics post Taliban’s ascension.

The larger point, however, remains that the Afghanistan debacle has dealt possibly a fatal blow to US power, prestige and influence. It spells the end of the American unipolar moment in history.

from Firstpost World Latest News https://ift.tt/3y54IAy

#World

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andrewuttaro · 3 years

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30 Years on: What is America?

I am not of the belief patriotism is a disappearing attribute in this country. I think those who say such a thing tend to struggle with the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I digress, I already wrote that article. I’ll let you do your own research on that. To the degree patriotism is in flux at the moment regardless of anyone’s relative love for America I think it’s because we are at something of a national crossroads.

We’re collectively looking critically at our own history again for the first time in a long time. In the aftermath of a global pandemic the craving for normalcy belies an unsettling question about what that normalcy actually is and if its worth going back to: What is America? No really, what is the lived vision of America in 2021 CE? To the extent you read overzealous nuts on social media drooling over the prospect of Civil War or national partition there is in fact some hard soul searching about the what of America that has potential to lead to real political sectarianism.

I’ll check my privilege at the door and say yes: I, as a straight, white male, has never had a lot to lose in any past incarnation of the American identity. Part of the struggle here is a truly inclusive answer to Who is America? I write this under the assumption literally anyone can be American, and we should build systems that reflect that. Nonetheless, we do have to look to the past for fear of repeating it.

What is America? Well it’s a country for one: more than two hundred years old with a congressional democratic republic form of government. It’s had 46 Presidents and counting. It is composed of 50 States for now. America was founded on a couple core principles it defined around “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Anyone who seriously studies American History will tell you the promises of America’s founding documents were not all fulfilled in the beginning. America’s domestic history is defined by Civil Rights movements, reactions against said movements and a Civil War largely about who would receive the full promise of what America is. Indeed Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President who led America through that Civil conflict, spoke of this nation as the “American Experiment” that would not perish from the earth as long as the Union won. The Gettysburg Address Lincoln delivered about this vision of America was delivered on a battlefield where that nation was invaded by what can properly be called a different imagining of what the U.S. should be. Those invaders were former countryman, looking to make a different formulation of the experiment. America is an experiment, a work in progress, a project.

Nation-States as projects is not a new concept. Even before the United States of America’s War of Independence new nation-states were being founded across the world out of the milieu of Enlightenment Philosophy meeting political realities. In many places the nation-state was a more democratic, self-determining incarnation of what kingdoms and empires had been for millennia prior: the collective force of a like-minded ethnic, tribal, or familial group or otherwise aligned interested parties. The innovation of the American experiment, among other things, was perhaps that it was a nation-state for everyone seeking liberty and personal autonomy. Even though the founders envisioned the enfranchisement of a very specific kind of citizen, this American nation-state had potential from the beginning to be something that had never been attempted before.

Fast forward 128 years on from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The U.S. has not only survived its Civil War, but it has also exploded onto the global stage after two world wars catapulted it to an international superpower. Still believing itself to be the project of liberty and self-determination America had stood opposed to a distinctly oppressive superpower in the Soviet Union and won. In the process the American experiment had been exported anywhere the Soviets couldn’t stop it and now the whole world was familiar with its tenets if not copying its institutions. A Cold War that held all of humanity in suspense at the precipice of nuclear annihilation has yielded to a new reality where America found itself the dominant political force in the world unopposed. 1991, thirty years ago now, was a rare inflection point in history where suddenly massive forces of power were upended at once and there was no clear guiding philosophy for the global political order going forward… except the United States of America. What would America be now? The Post-Cold War reality was ours to lose.

Canada, America’s most intimate international partner and closest neighbor, similarly finds itself at a philosophical turning point. The Canadian author and commentator Will Ferguson points to three core guiding themes, however misled they were, for the Canadian project upon its modern founding in 1867: 1. Keep the Americans out, 2. Keep the French in, 3. Somehow make the indigenous disappear. In Canada’s 150-year history these three ideas color its every decision and define its character. All of these founding directives are now either reversed because they were outright morally wrong (See number 3) or have been killed by a thousand cuts. The nation-state to America’s north is also set to reexamine what it’s all about. In that reexamination of national identity there is great opportunity and great danger. As if an international support group, Canada’s stereotypical niceness reaches out to tell us, we’re not alone in this self-discovery process.

The answer to the Post-Cold War world for the American Experiment in 1991 was doubling down on Americana and exporting our cultural and economic mores around the world. Though this process had already begun in earnest after World War Two, now the whole world was its oyster. From aggressive, no-prisoners capitalism to unapologetic, imperial democracy, you can now find few places on the planet that are not familiar with some facet of the United States’ self-perception. America globalized who it was and not everyone liked it. Indeed many Americans began to increasingly look in the mirror this cultural hegemony provided with a critical eye. Then September 11th happened.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the United States cast its enemies in an axis of evil dualism in the War on Terror that provided an endless horizon of conflict for a military apparatus unseen in human history. The polar opposite, the truly evil enemy the Fall of the Soviet Union deprived America of, would now be replaced with a complex networks of dictators and non-state entities who recorded death threats in caves. While America doesn’t exist today like a traditional empire, its reach is unparalleled, and it can strike almost anywhere on earth in a matter of minutes. With no sufficient counterbalance it would seem its military industrial complex doesn’t know what to do with itself. That menacing, widespread inhuman enemy doesn’t actually exist much in the real world if it even did during the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War decades.

Domestically the thirty years of the Post-Cold War American Experiment has seen the two branches of our government that were supposed to be lesser to the legislative, balloon in importance. In a nation where every philosophical difference is magnified into a culture war the ultimate arbiter of those borderline violent disputes is a Court system that is supposed to be an afterthought and a Presidency that has become outright imperial in spite of the founders explicit anti-monarchical sentiments. When Supreme Court justices die or retire it really seems to be on par with a Pope’s death for political partisans stateside. All good and evil in the land of liberty seems to run through a council of black-robed appointees. All 5 Presidents of Post-Cold War America were cast as lightning rods for their bases and chastised by their opposition with every scandal that would stick (to varying degrees of success). The fourth of such Presidents, Donald Trump, openly rejected the idea of America as a pluralistic nation-state with any international responsibility at all to the contrary of the image that defines Post-Cold War America, in favor of a Pre-World War II image of an isolationist, explicitly white Christian nation. Yes, the current identity crisis played out in sharp contrast in the 2016 election cycle. Many Americans consider that election the perfect storm of two intractably terrible major party choices.

Perhaps we need to face the fact we did it to ourselves. We elect no-compromise fighters whenever we vote only to be shocked when Congress turns into a toxic mess that gets nothing done. It’s always easy to criticize a one-term President but the re-evaluation of what the American experiment will be is not limited to those of a more right-wing conservative bent. The left wing in this country increasingly discusses myriad reforms to everything from our election and representation systems to our healthcare and welfare systems. No matter what your future vision of America is you probably agree, perhaps for vastly different reasons than your neighbor, that America is not the somehow uniquely exceptional nation-state it’s insisted it is, not anymore at least. The Post-Cold War era saw the concept of “American Exceptionalism” become a punchline for Americans of both and every political affiliation. For numerous reasons America’s international and domestic vitality has diminished.

The current President, historically more of a traditionally moderate, establishment democrat, has even engaged in this revisionism aggressively seeking to revive Americans faith in their very form of government with stimulus, infrastructure and voting reform in the most evenly split congress in decades. More progressive types of the left-wing beckon in every election cycle now just as the former President refuses to go away, trying to weaponize the grievance of his increasingly right-wing base in the reimagining of the American experiment he set forth as a more authoritarian leader. We have to make an honest, good faith accounting of this effort toward a new definition of ourselves if any shared consensus as a nation will ever be possible again. There is of course great danger in redefining the purpose of a national project.

However America redefines herself going forward, finding these new definitions is not an optional project. With the U.S. shaken down from its international pedestal by trade war, an ascendant China, and a stubbornly plutocratic Russia, even America’s closest allies are reconsidering how they will persist with an unstable American self-image still able to exert its hard power anywhere on earth. As some Americans pursue a more equitable society at home for historical outgroups still struggling with society’s aged mores, those efforts have been met with open racism and a kind of selfish nationalism that has not been seen this ferociously in three generations. Unless a new lasting, inclusive, American self-image is agreed upon we may be at only the beginning of a long period of internal strife and discord. Increasing numbers of ideologs of both left wing and right-wing persuasions fantasize about cutting off whole sections of the nation whom they rarely agree with. American Statehouses are dominated by right-wing majorities more often than not who have actually initiated voter suppression efforts which positions America in a dangerous place for the next close enough national election. This is not to mention the way gerrymandering steals the power of congressional representation from the very people it was supposed to empower. This whole discussion doesn’t even touch on the increasing threat of environmental catastrophe rarely addressed in the halls of power.

The current American Identity Crisis leaves many issues unaddressed as a matter of fact. An opioid epidemic that is erasing broad swaths of the population, a wealth gap unseen since the gilded age, a skyrocketing suicide rate, a gun violence epidemic, natural resource exhaustion unrelated to climate change, police violence, the fourth rebirth of white supremacist organizations, DC and Puerto Rico Statehood, the Student Debt Crisis, an increasingly intractable housing market putting home ownership out of reach for many young Americans, and numerous other problems sit on the backburner without any signs of meaningful progress. On some level it seems we’ve all given up the project of governing for earning the most points in culture wars that now express themselves on as big a scale as a national election and all the way down to dinner tables and date nights.

What is American? How might we be optimistic about such a rapidly changing country on this Independence Day thirty years on from the end of the Cold War? Among people my age it would seem pessimism if not an outright nihilism about these sorts of things is the common response where activism seems to only make minor gains. Among the general population still rebounding from the COVID19 pandemic it would seem a certain empathy fatigue has set in. Where meaningful answers to these big, generational national identity questions are being formulated it is yet to be seen if a new American consensus can be found.

Perhaps our friend Canada would tell us: these days the most patriotic thing you can do is push for your country to do better. Reckoning with the past and present treatment of minorities and atrocities abroad is not optional if we are to have an honest, effective, united future. For now, if nothing else can move us to truly feel proud of our nation, then maybe this independence day we can recognize our internal interdependence on each other, however different we maybe. If anything the most patriotic way we can be this holiday and every day going forward as Americans is honest and patient about who we were, what we are and what we could possibly be if we commit ourselves to progress once again.

#Independence #4thofjuly #America #Soviet Union #Cold War #Canada #united states

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