Arthur Silber

I've come across one item that merits a followup to my recent discussion of the entirely false controversy about the "Ground Zero mosque," and of the bigotry that is the source of opposition to the "mosque."

One of the themes constantly repeated by many opponents to the construction of Cordoba House is that they recognize the right for the project to be built, and their objection is only to the project's planned location. This is the formulation offered by John Boehner, for example: "The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn't necessarily make it the right thing to do. That is the essence of tolerance, peace and understanding."

I discussed the illegitimacy of the reasons for objecting to the particular site in the earlier post, and let's leave that aside for this discussion. Here, I'm focused only on the fact that opponents almost always say that they have no problem with the project being built anywhere else -- they just don't want it at or near Ground Zero. This is the obvious implication of Boehner's statement, and many other opponents have said the same. Many opponents also note that there are many mosques (some of them actual mosques!) elsewhere in New York City, perhaps as many as 100.

If they're comfortable with mosques anywhere else in New York City, just not at or very near Ground Zero, they should be completely comfortable with mosques outside the city altogether, correct? They certainly should be comfortable with mosques scattered around the United States, sometimes thousands of miles from Ground Zero.

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Chris Floyd

Henry Miller once said that the purpose of the artist is to "inoculate the world with disillusionment." We are in desperate need of disillusionment today -- disillusionment on a vast scale, disillusionment as a constant discipline. Arthur Silber is one of the greatest such artists now at work, and he has just released a remarkable piece aimed at one the deadliest illusions of our time: the myth of American Exceptionalism. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read the entire piece, but below are a few excerpts to highlight some of the salient points.

Silber writes of the poisonous effects of the all-pervasive, ever-hardening Exceptionalist myth that has such a death-grip on the American psyche. In some ways, of course, this myth is just a variant of the same kind of self-deluding trumpery that powerful nations and tribes have told themselves down through the centuries -- "We are special, we are superior, whatever we do is good and right, because we are the ones doing it, etc." You could find beliefs like this going back to Rome, to Babylon, to Sumer, probably all the way back to Çatalhöyük or the Blombos Cave.

But the longevity and universality of this pernicious mindset is in no way a mitigation of it. It does not reduce by one iota the responsibility -- the blood-guilt -- of any society that adheres to such a myth, and uses it to "justify" (indeed, celebrate) horrendous crimes. It is American Exceptionalism that we must deal with in our time. And although the belief of this particular bunch of bare, fork'd animals that they are special is nothing new, the gargantuan, ravenous military force that backs up this delusion is unprecedented in world history. It is only in its destructiveness, real and potential, that the American system is indeed exceptional.

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Arthur Silber

Introduction: A Valuable Opportunity

In one of those happy accidents occasionally encountered during the examination of complex issues over a period of years, a new article provides me a remarkable opportunity. The article offers a distilled example of certain analytic failures I've discussed a number of times. But that is only on the first and most superficial level of consideration.

Below the surface, the article reveals the operation of mechanisms of denial that I've also examined in the past. These mechanisms can be detected in the commentary offered by almost every contemporary writer, among well-known and prominent writers and also in the remarks of relatively obscure bloggers.

An extended analysis of these issues will allow me to trace the ways in which the mechanisms of denial work, and how these mechanisms result in the more obvious analytic failures. In addition to reviewing some observations I've already made and showing, in connection with a new and unusually revealing example, how they operate, I will provide additional information I've long planned to write about.

The article to which I refer may represent a surprising choice to many people, even to some regular readers here. It's by Andrew Bacevich: "Non-Believer." Bacevich is commonly regarded as a strong critic of America's aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Not surprisingly, his new piece has already been widely linked by many of those who are "antiwar," usually with enthusiastic approval for his views. I myself have linked Bacevich's writing on several past occasions. While preparing these new posts of mine, and in reviewing some of Bacevich's earlier essays (including a few I hadn't read before), I realized that I was in error in praising Bacevich to the extent I did. But then, my own understanding of these issues has increased considerably in the last several years.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Welcome to Wal-Mart! Just a reminder: this is what our ease and comfort are based on -- someone doing work like this:

From the Guardian: A worker prepares a cotton gin in Mumbai.
India is the second largest exporter of the fibre after China, the
recipient of around 60% of India’s cotton exports.

A Worker Writes

Roy Mayall spotlights the ever-growing inequalities in our best of all possible worlds -- disparities that will only grow vastly greater as the world's elites stoke bogus deficit panics to "justify" their shredding of the last remaining tiny mitigations against their brute power. From the London Review of Books:

Adam Crozier, the retiring chief executive [of Royal Mail], received more than £2.4m in the year 2009-10. With bonuses and pensions that figure rises to £3.5 million. ... I earn £8.98 an hour. I work a 20-hour week. I’d like to work more but there are no full-time jobs available. My basic pay is £177.28 a week, before deductions. That’s about £9200 a year. That means that I would have to work for nearly 380 years to earn as much as Adam Crozier earned last year.

Fair enough. Adam Crozier obviously has 380 times my needs. He must have a house that is 380 times the size of mine. He is 380 times taller. Maybe he has 380 stomachs to fill. Perhaps his dick is 380 times bigger than mine and he needs 380 partners to service it. He must have 380 times the intellectual capacity as his brain is clearly 380 times more developed than mine. His value to the world is 380 times greater.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that our elites really do think like this. They really believe their value to the world is immeasurably greater than any memeber of the common rabble -- or indeed, the common rabble as a whole. (And this case only deals with an executive in the UK; the disparities in the United States are much greater.) That's why they find it so very easy to kill vast numbers of people and grind others into the dirt. The rabble is just a herd, whose individual lives have no value, except as they can be exploited by those who really matter.

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Arthur Silber

Our Monstrous Culture, and the Monsters Who Rule You (I): What the Monster Said

I remember seeing about half an hour of the original Night of the Living Dead several decades ago. For most of the 1970s, I lived in the middle of Manhattan. I had been flicking through television channels late at night, and I stumbled across the film, which had been released theatrically in 1968. The film caused some controversy because of the nature and level of violence it portrayed. Since I'd now come across it, I was curious to see what the furor was about.

So I watched for a little while. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Limbs torn from bodies, zombies munching on human legs and arms, blood everywhere. I kept watching -- for a little while -- because I found that I was unable to make real to myself the kind of mind that would create this kind of mayhem. It wasn't simply that the images -- and, as I recall, the sounds, oh God, the sounds -- were horrifying. Of equal and probably greater significance to me was the fact that (in part, remembering some of what I'd read about George Romero, the director of the film) the creation of a movie about people who were terrorized and then eaten, all of which was presented in loving, careful detail, was clearly intended to be entertainment. This was fun! It appeared that a sizable audience agreed with this assessment.

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Chris Floyd

The fact that the Obama Administration is operating a secret prison in Afghanistan in which captives rounded up on the usual little or no evidence are being tortured even as we speak -- and even as the president was making his funny-haha jokes about predator drones -- does not come as any surprise. The horror of this reality is by now so routine that it almost defies comment. Or as Arthur Silber puts it in a powerful new essay:

The concept of "depravity" has been rendered close to meaningless. When so much of what happens every day, here and abroad, is so unfathomably depraved, what does it signify to state that another 40 murders of innocent human beings represent still one more monstrous act, or that the torture of another dozen or three dozen or a hundred innocent human beings is unforgivably evil, or that the rape of another 10 or 30 or 50 girls and women constitutes a crime so immense in its magnitude that it makes all commentary completely beside the point, and even itself obscene?

None of it is fully real. Most of it is never even noticed. None of it appears to matter, not in ways which cause a critical number of people to resist in ways which might momentarily slow down the machinery of cruelty and death.

So today I am not going to go through blood-soaked chapter and shit-smeared verse on this latest continuous atrocity, nor dissect the howling, puke-evoking hypocrisy of the Comedian-in-Chief of the War Machine. Instead, I just want to note one comment I ran across in reading about the story. It's from a leading progressive voice, Digby, who does, to her credit, go through chapter-and-verse on the gulag hell-hole.

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Chris Floyd

Dante Alighieri, "THE VISION OF HELL", CANTO XXXII. (G. Doré)

"Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer...." ~ Brother Bob

Illness and other aggravations have hindered the blogivating of late, so below are some choice items from other quarters that are well worth your attention.

The Children's Crusade
Andy Worthington tells the truly horrendous story of Omar Khadr, who was taken captive as a child by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and has now spent eight years in the lower depths of the American gulag. He is now being "tried" in the kangaroo "tribunals" of the Bush-Obama Continuum, under arbitrarily concocted, illogical "laws" whose cruel absurdity would shame a Stalinist show trial, including this arbitary ruling by the Department of Defense: “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.” You must read the whole piece to see the abysmal depravity that now reigns supreme throughout the highest, most respectable reaches of the bipartisan American estabishment.

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Chris Floyd

Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac.

As always with Silber, you must read the whole piece (and follow the links) to get the full force of the argument, which is nuanced, multifarious and deeply considered, but here is just the briefest excerpt to send you on your way:

I repeat a few words I first wrote at the beginning of 2009...:

>

For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required ... More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I repeat the fundamental point to make certain there is no misunderstanding as to where I stand on this question: as a political entity, the United States is an endlessly destructive monstrosity. The overwhelming majority of people -- including, I regret to say, even many of those who are severely critical of the United States government -- fail to understand this point in anything close to the thorough and consistent manner required. This failure is the result of an earlier one: an inability to grasp fully what it means to revere the sacred value of a single human life.

There is more, much more in the original post -- "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"; excerpting it actually does it an injustice. So go there now and read it.

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Chris Floyd

Charles Davis (via Jon Schwarz) has an incisive take on the high fluttery flail induced in our imperial courtiers by the latest Tea Party tantrums. Davis demolishes a piece in The Nation by progressive paladin Maria Harris-Lacewell, in which she waxes lyrical -- not to nonsensical -- about the great threat to "the legitimacy of the state" posed by Tea Partiers disrespecting our elected officials. These acts -- spitting, swearing, insulting, shouting, etc. -- which might have been considered legitimate expressions of citizen anger (or at least good clean fun) if directed at, say, George Dubya or Dick Nixon, are now to be regarded as -- I kid you not -- "an act of sedition" when aimed at the ruling party.

It's this kind of thing that gives insipid sycophancy a bad name. But Davis is on the case:

Now, considering that U.S. government imprisons more of its own citizens than any other in the history, with 25 percent of the world's prisoners; that it has more military bases in more countries than any previous empire in history, and has killed millions of people from Iraq to Vietnam; and that its current head, Barack Obama, is openly targeting for extrajudicial killing Americans and foreigners alike, one might ask: why is a liberal magazine so concerned about this state's legitimacy?

Or as Thoreau put it (in a quote that is pretty much the slogan for this blog): "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

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Chris Floyd

(UPDATED BELOW)

Dear New York Times,
OK, OK, we get the picture: you want the United States to attack Iran. Why don't you go ahead and put a permanent banner across the top of the front page with the Cato-like adjuration: "Iran Must Be Destroyed!" Or maybe you could just tack it on to every single story: "Yankees Trade to Bolster Outfield; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Mixed Results for Apple I-Pad; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "Markets Anxious Over Health Care Vote; Iran Must Be Destroyed." "New Bistro Revels in Bohemian Ambience; Iran Must Be Destroyed."

After all, hardly a week goes by now without some big juicy piece of Times scaremongery about Iran's nuclear program, usually with the same image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a lab coat looking blankly at metal tubes. The thrust of these stories is always the same: Iran is galloping toward nuclear weaponhood -- a "global threat" that "cannot be allowed to stand." Last week, it was Bill Broad, goosing the rubes with this little number, a supposed "science" piece: For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier.

For a moment, let's put aside the fact of Iran's persistent denials of a desire for nuclear weapons -- including the explicit, repeated statements of the theocracy's supreme religious and political leader that such weapons are anathema. And let's put aside the fact that despite the most extensive and intrusive inspection regime in the history of atomic energy development, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran is not doing exactly what it says it is doing: developing non-weaponized nuclear power for peaceful purposes. These are just facts, after all -- and facts, as the sainted Ronald Reagan once told us, are stupid things.

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