Empire Notes

November 23, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Sarah Palin and the Crazy Right

Sarah Palin's "auto"-biography is really boring. Having a mere twenty minutes to spare, I only got a chance to read about a quarter of it, but that was enough for me.

The exigencies of expending 400 pages on the non-events of what was until mid-2008 a non-life are not pleasant to imagine; it's quite obvious that the book was published early because, unlike most political memoirs, there was no need to sift through a mass of facts, anecdotes and musings to refine out a coherent story -- all that was need was to add in lots of junior-high prose describing the Alaskan landscape and to recapitulate well-known events from the presidential campaign.

The book is full of distortions and outright lies -- the AP put 11 fact-checkers on the story (as Markos Moulitsas pointed out, it might have been nice if they did this for the Iraq WMD story). There is also a lot of cheap score-settling, showcasing Palin's by-now legendary vindictive, backbiting personality. But the dominant thread is simply the fact that she is a non-entity, with nothing discernible behind the moose-shooting leg-showing façade.

There seem to be sharp disagreements over whether she can be safely dismissed. Frank Rich says she is here to stay as a phenomenon because she taps into something deep in the American soul, a sentiment shared by Maureen Dowd. Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, one of her greatest fans, locates her in a hallowed lineage of hard-nosed American "populism," following in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan, ending his bizarre piece with an injunction to Palin to oppose the crucifixion of America on the "cross of Goldman Sachs."

My sense, though, among the more explicitly partisan liberals, is that they are salivating at the thought of a Palin presidential campaign, expecting an easy win for the Democrats. It is true that key bloggers like Moulitsas and Matthew Yglesias do frequently express concern for the descent of the Republican Party into insanity and extremism. Some of that is schadenfreude expressed as concern, and some of it is based on the idea that the country needs a two-party system, that implosion of the Republicans because they have stopped representing Americans will in the long run be bad for the polity.

I come down on the side of concern myself, but not for the same reasons. I don't think the extremization of the Republican Party has any chance of leading to its disintegration. The institutional strength of the two-party system and the emotional resonance of the liberal-conservative divide are too great. The last real challenge to the two-party system was in the late 19th century with, in fact, William Jennings Bryan. The end of the Vietnam War and the impeachment of Richard Nixon wrecked the Republican Party; in 1975 and 1976, its demise was already being celebrated in some quarters. Yet, four years later, a Republican was elected president and an era of Republican political dominance was ushered in; it still has not ended.

My guess now is that, no matter how far the Republican Party goes, they will lose very little more of their support. You can already see Obama losing popularity, even though most of what he has done is at least partly in the interest of the lower and middle classes and even though the only prescriptions Republicans have are utter nonsense (or stalking horses for insurance companies, like the call to let them sell insurance policies across state lines, thus freeing them to pick the state with the least onerous regulatory requirements).

This analysis is, I think, especially true with a foreign black Muslim Kenyan in the White House. Although Obama's victory was indeed a victory for a certain post-racial America (which is very different from an America that has dealt with the injustice of race and racism), there is a large chunk of the country that is not ready to be dragged into the 21st century -- or the 20th.

The latest trope in this unsavory group is a bumper sticker saying "Pray for Obama -- Psalm 109:8." In the King James Bible (if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me), this reads, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." The psalm continues with imprecations against his fatherless children and his widow. The expression of these charming sentiments coincides with a huge rise in death threats against the president, which, along with an increase in related incidents, apparently threatens to overwhelm the Secret Service.

Obviously, a presidential campaign espousing this sort of hatred will get nowhere fast; just as obviously, a non-entity like Palin would be nowhere without it.

Posted at 10:54 am.

November 16, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Nidal Malik Hasan as a Rorschach Test

Like all good current events, Major Nidal Malik Hasan's recent shooting spree at Fort Hood, wherein he killed 13 people and wounded over 40, has functioned as a political Rorschach test.

For the right, the blob resolves very easily; indeed, this particular incident was unnecessary. Muslims are scary and can't be trusted. Hasan was part of a massive "terrorist" ring planning assaults on the U.S. military from within. Joe Lieberman, always one of the stalwarts of anti-Arab paranoia and fundamentalist anti-Islamism, plans to hold hearings designed to ferret out said plots.

A further obvious lesson is that the pinkos and peaceniks running the U.S. military are caught up in "political correctness;" no longer just about keeping white boys on elite college campuses from having good clean fun, now it has a body count.

Interestingly, of all the mainstream commentators, only Frank Rich had the wit to point out the bizarre contradiction at the heart of the "war on terror" for the past six years at least; the very people who jump to support our various expeditions into the Muslim world and excoriate opponents for not wanting to help Muslims and not believing that Muslims are capable of democracy themselves rabidly hate Muslims. It's apparently not polite to say, but it's quite obviously true.

For the status-quo defenders of ponderous military bureaucracy, which apparently includes all militant liberals now, the lesson is that there is no lesson. The military's expansive tolerance and respect for diversity are good things, and Major Hasan's unfortunate emotional problems have nothing to do with his religion.

For some fervent opponents of the war, I suppose, the incident is a lesson that some incipient groundswell of Muslims is out there, ready to kill our soldiers and drown our empire in blood, and that we should cease to occupy Muslim countries or we will be destroyed.

There are other lessons one might just as easily choose to learn. Instead of the danger of Muslims in the military, one might consider the danger of the casual abuse and prejudice within the military; perhaps the all-too-common practice of soldiers cheerfully referring to people like Hasan as "ragheads" and "hajis" is actually not such a good idea.

Or one might consider how this incident manifests the severe problems with the provision of psychiatric care within the military; how was it that a man who was clearly in serious need of it himself ended up being charged with providing it to others?

One might even choose to learn the lesson that Hasan himself suggested, at the end of a rambling and semi-coherent PowerPoint presentation with 50 slides that he delivered in 2007 to a mystified group of Army doctors expecting a medical presentation -- a presentation that, by the way, was a cry for help that only a complete blockhead could have failed to notice. The last slide contained a single recommendation: allow Muslim soldiers to become conscientious objectors and/or leave the military if they felt too much conflict with the idea of fighting against fellow Muslims. In retrospect, at least, it is hard to argue with this one.

Personally, the main lesson I see, which is, I suppose, partly in line with that of the military brass, is that it's actually quite amazing how little of a problem Muslim soldiers have been. There have been two incidents of fratricide, that of Hasan Akbar near the beginning of the Iraq war, and this one, and only a handful of cases of conscientious objection or noncooperation.

While the military bureaucracy obviously failed miserably in dealing with Major Hasan, the complacency of the brass is well justified. Muslim soldiers and intelligence agents are a major asset in the prosecution of the "war on terror;" incidents like these are acceptable losses for a militarily sound program. It is quite obvious that these incidents are no more disconnected from the religion and/or ethnicity of the two men in question than membership in AIPAC or the NAACP is, but still they only add up to a minor cost; 13 American soldiers is the number being killed in a week in Afghanistan.

American Muslims, furthermore, have essentially posed no threat, either of terrorist attacks, or even of significant political resistance to the war on terror. They are not only less cohesive than Muslim communities in many European countries, they are apparently much more apolitical. Although there is a great deal of simmering resentment at the reflexive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice of much of the country, it doesn't seem to translate into any kind of action.

Naturally, of course, the right wing wants to take one of the few things that America does right and fix it.

Posted at 11:02 am.

November 9, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Reflections on the Fall

The Bengalis, my mother's people, have a saying: "Anyone who isn't a Communist at twenty has no heart. Anyone who still is a Communist at forty has no brain." Unpleasantly redolent of the complacency of age, of the status quo, and of capitalism as it is, it is still worth considering.

I was twenty when the Berlin Wall fell.

I was in the middle of a brief flirtation with anarchism at the time, brought on by my first reading of Chomsky. Like many young leftists, I found it liberating. "Actually existing" communism had produced societies that were nightmares of stultification; the Warsaw Pact countries had no trace of romance or revolution to leaven the image of dull gray lives led by dull gray people, made that way by a dull gray system.

At the time, we were mystified by the anger and despair of the older generation; to us, it betokened a kind of totemic identification with societies and systems because of past connections and reflexive verbal associations with terms like "socialism" and "collective."

Surely, these countries had no more to do with "real" socialism than Stalin did with "real" Bolshevism -- or the Holocaust and the Inquisition with "real" Christianity? The dethroning of Erich Honecker or Todor Zhivkov didn't change the inherent evils of capitalism and imperialism or the importance of a real alternative.

No sooner were such thoughts formulated, of course, than they were drowned in a welter of Western triumphalism. In some ways, perhaps the older generation was wiser; they saw that, rather than a blow for human freedom, the fall of communism would be a loss for one side and a victory for the other. Many of them even realized that the dissociation of "actual" socialism from "real" socialism -- that Platonic ideal form -- was a little too facile.

We have now lived through twenty years -- my entire adult life -- of a world with, as Margaret Thatcher correctly pointed out, no alternatives. We have seen the results. The monstrous tragedies of communism that billions lived through became for the United States nothing more than retrospective justification for its own crimes and follies and cheap fodder for a new global offensive, this one unchecked by the existence of another pole, ideological, political, or military.

Perhaps we have gained enough distance to evaluate the brief interlude that was the history of communism. It is true we still have China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea with us, and a lot of noise from Hugo Chavez, but the term of communism as a living idea in the world began in 1871 with the Paris Commune and ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

What can we say about it? It is true, of course, that the history of communism was one continually thwarted by imperialist reaction and bloodshed, by the machinations of unscrupulous, power-hungry intellectuals, and by the rise of a bloodless bureaucratic elite, who played no part in the revolutions but took for themselves the best of what their societies produced.

There are deeper truths, though. Michael Albert connects the evils of actually existing communism to the rise of what he calls "coordinatorism," the ideology of a new class defined ideologically by their role in dictating to society what it should do rather than economically by their role in production.

I don't think this goes deep enough. It has long been a staple of the conservative critique of communism that the very existence of a utopian ideology of social transformation itself inevitably leads to catastrophe. The mass killings of the 20th century lend a great deal of credence to this notion. It is not just Nazism and Communism; the postwar creators of the American empire, who evolved an ideological worldview that James Peck has termed "visionary globalism," shared the same problem in lesser degree.

The other critique, that communism removed self-interest and thus initiative, certainly did not apply to the builders of the system. Those revolutionaries, dictators, apparatchiks, and political entrepreneurs were engaged in a tremendous act of will. They shook the pillars of Heaven and tried to force the pace of history, all the while proclaiming that they were in the service of historical inevitability.

They weren't all, or even mostly, evil or purely self-serving. What united them, though -- the ones that survived or succeeded -- was a shared belief that they must use whatever degree of ruthlessness was required to achieve the dictates of history.

There is a new left in the world, that wishes to disavow any connection with that history of heroism, sacrifice, folly, and destruction, that wishes not to impose a cost on anyone -- and much of which also doesn't wish to bear any.

How will it avoid the mistakes of the past and also avoid the comfort and moral safety of powerlessness? How will it unite the head and the heart -- without forgetting the hand?

Posted at 11:06 am.

November 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Uncomprehending Sanctimony and the War on Terror

I'm beginning to think maybe Condoleezza Rice wasn't such a bad secretary of state. Those who thought that the Bush administration had a monopoly on uncomprehending sanctimony, meaningless and condescending expressions of concern, and blaming others for one's own faults in foreign relations need only look at what the media has been labeling Hillary Clinton's recent "charm offensive;" well, the term is half right.

She hectors Pakistanis about the prevalence of poverty and the lack of development. How does a country that consistently ranks in the bottom 20% of rich nations in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP have the face to talk about development? How much more so in Pakistan, whose pattern of massive inequality, feudal social relations, corruption, and autocracy owes so much to consistent reflexive U.S. support for a string of military dictatorships going back almost to the beginning of the Cold War?

Even worse, she hectors Pakistanis about their lack of enthusiasm for America's war. In a meeting with newspaper editors, she said, “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002…I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” Remarkably, she made these comments while admitting that she doesn't really know what the situation is. She then followed this up while talking to students at Government College University in Lahore by extending the accusation to the entire population of Pakistan; why exactly a poor peasant in the tribal areas would want to become a footsoldier in her war is apparently not something she considers worth thinking about.

Although the English-language Pakistani press at least treated her with restraint, it's hard to imagine too many Pakistanis who didn't feel the insult. After all, the war in Pakistan, which has claimed several thousands lives, is entirely the fallout from America's war in Afghanistan. In 2001, militant groups in Pakistan concentrated their actions on Kashmir, and Islamist parties were as significant in elections as the Green Party in the United States. All of that changed when the United States decided first to prosecute the war, and then to let everyone they were pursuing cross the border into Pakistan while they hared off to Iraq.

Those who wish to justify this by saying that it was Pakistan's policies, like support of the Taliban, that led to 9/11 are simply cutting the timeline at an arbitrary but convenient point. Draw it further back to U.S. support for the virulent dictatorship of Ziaul Haq and its callous support of the Afghan mujaheddin purely for the purpose of bleeding the Soviet Union, with no concern for the effects on Afghanistan and the region, and the point stands.

The same American incomprehension that anyone else could have valid concerns shines through most clearly in an exchange Clinton had with a woman who condemned the CIA drone strikes as extrajudicial executions and then asked whether they did not constitute terrorism just as surely as the car bombings that have taken such a big toll on Pakistan lately. Apparently, Clinton was as well-prepared to answer that as Madeleine Albright was to answer Lesley Stahl's question about the deaths of Iraqi children due to the sanctions, and presumably for the same reason -- such things are not allowed to trouble the beautiful minds of imperial elite when making their imperial dispositions.

The pace of drone strikes has considerably increased under Obama; in the past 10 months, there have been already 30% more than last year. According to a recent study by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation, since 2006 drone strikes have killed 750 to 1000 people, of whom they estimate two-thirds were militants and one-third civilians. An initial tally by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir estimated much higher civilian casualties, but his method seemed to be to assume that anyone who was not a named "high-value target" was a civilian. Of those deaths, half of them have come in 2009.

Had Clinton been better prepared, she would have known the conventional U.S. answer -- civilians killed in drone bombings are "collateral damage;" the U.S. is attacking valid military targets. Of course, the same could be said of many of the suicide car bombings carried out by the Tehrik-i-Taliban

The latest Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan has created 250,000 refugees and set off a series of retaliatory bombings in Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Lahore, and across the country that have killed over 300 people. Just from the timing of recent suicide bombings, it's clear that they are happening because of Pakistani military offensives; most of them would likely not happen otherwise.

Unlike George Bush, Barack Obama is capable of understanding these things if he wants to. He just seems to perceive little need to do so.

Posted at 10:36 am.

February 2, 2006

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