File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0404, message 6


Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:51:17 -0700
From: David Harvey <dharvey-AT-unr.nevada.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Bulding bridges to clarity--JCP's reply


Good luck with Herzik. Alexander Berkman?
Dave

John Carson Pettey wrote:

> David,
> I couldn't through all the screed; so I skipped around.  Sounds like Emma
> Goldmann's first boyfriend, Bergmann (?), who tried to kill Frick--except
> this guy's got some truly scarred libidinal problems.
> Danke, JCP
> P.S.--I have an appointment with the Dean on Monday -AT- 10AM.  I'm bringing
> him a list of my work for both semesters (a total of 1085 pieces of grading
> in 30 weeks).
> That won't impress him, since it sounds like he wants to raise my FTE no
> matter what.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
> To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 3:56 PM
> Subject: BHA: Bulding bridges to clarity
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Apologies for cross-posting, but I think the following deserves widest
> > dissemination. I post it here in particular because it echoes some of
> > the leading motifs of the spiritual turn -- global interconnectivity and
> > responsibility in the present epoch and the primacy of
> > self-referentiality (nobody can act for us, and we have to 'leap over
> > [our] old self' in order to do it) -- and to remind ourselves that
> > spirituality isn't just about hugging and kissing babies, highly
> > important though that is.
> >
> > Mervyn
> >
> >
> >  From www.freedomroad.org :
> >
> > The Bridge â^À^Ô A Rant
> >
> > by Stan Goff
> >
> > WARNING: This commentary may cause anxiety.
> >
> > The United States government has initiated a chain reaction that it can
> > no longer control. The stalled vengeance assault on Fallujah is merely a
> > symptom. So is the uprising triggered by the US closure of a Shia
> > newspaper in Sadr City, Baghdad, followed by the gunning down of the
> > demonstrators who protested. (Ah, yes, we don't even hear about that
> > when they talk about the latest demon, Muqtada al-Sadrâ^À¦ Memory is so
> > short.)
> >
> > The chain reaction is far broader and deeper than the battlefield fiasco
> > in Iraq right now. Once brown people start to pick up guns, other brown
> > people follow suit. The myth of invincibility of the United States
> > military - called into question even before the Bush Doctrine arrived at
> > this particular Iraqi cul-de-sac - is shattered. No one is shocked. No
> > one is awed.
> >
> > Nothing left now but plain grimy brutality. Apache helicopters are
> > buzz-sawing through neighborhoods with chain guns and rockets. Bombs are
> > being released onto mosques. The hospitals and morgues are receiving a
> > rich harvest.
> >
> > I remember a sign at the entrance of Camp Mackall in North Carolina,
> > where I began Special Forces training. "Rule #1: There are no rules.
> > Rule #2: Obey the first rule."
> >
> > The post-9/11 renewal of ground wars in Southwest Asia swept me up into
> > a new role. A career soldier who is a leftist; a leftist who is a
> > retired soldier. I became a trump card that antiwar activists could play
> > against the patriot-baiting of the right, so I've been trotted out in
> > front of one audience after another, from town halls to CNN, as a
> > spokesperson against the Bush Doctrine's militarism.
> >
> > But people transform their roles. They deviate from the scripts.
> >
> > I'm a leftist who carried a gun, in a culture where what passes for the
> > left is terrified of guns. So people pay attention to me. In audience
> > after audience, I have noted that people pay attention to me. They are
> > engaged before I even speak, because they know that I can kill, and that
> > gives me an immediacyâ^À¦ not because I am different than them, but
> > because I am so very much the same. I laugh at good jokes. I rock
> > babies. I take an interest in the weather.
> >
> > This is more than morbid fascination.
> >
> > We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of
> > metropolitan modernity, even more so of post-modernity. In a consumer
> > society, where general-purpose money has eaten away every bond of
> > community, where alienation - and even narcissism - is defined as
> > normalcy, where nature is seen as something apart from and below us, the
> > very personhood of each of us is deracinated and left to drift through
> > the retail landscape like a grieving banshee. Planned obsolescence
> > applies even to our identities.
> >
> > We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of superficiality,
> > but those billions who are doing the paying - far out of our reified
> > view - are getting a clearer idea all the time.
> >
> > Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as
> > disembedded as we like, but we are invariably physical - diaphragms
> > heaving incessantly, articulating gases in our guts, dissipating heat,
> > concentrating urine, sloughing off dead cells, yawing and eating and
> > scratching and sleeping and fucking and finally, dying.
> >
> > Inside-Outside.
> >
> > Inside of this whole charade, where money "grows" and media-stunned
> > young women aspire to be models for Victoria's Secret, resides liberal
> > hypocrisy. Outside of it resides imperial militarism - the last refuge
> > of capitalism as it devours its own social and material bases like a
> > vampire stranded alone on a desert island.
> >
> > Soldiers who were raised inside this cultural charade are now outside
> > it, in Southwest Asia getting blood on their hands so we can have malls
> > and road trips and household appliances and climate control. The
> > personhood of soldiers (mostly male) has become a battleground, too,
> > between masculinity and cognitive dissonance. Warfare is the practice
> > and masculinity is achieved in the practice, but they are confronted now
> > with other persons - people who are first reduced in the media, then
> > defined in training (The Enemy), then dehumanized in the word
> > (Raghead!), then commanded by the occupier as subjected persons, then -
> > if obedience is not swift - erased. This is where the soldier either
> > recognizes or denies the hypocrisy, because the fuller reality of the
> > system is right there before his eyes. Now he has a choice to make.
> >
> > I'm talking to you, soldier, and not judging you. This is an invitation
> > to take back your personhood. This is an invitation to confront every
> > fear, breach every obstacle, take every risk; to leap over your old self
> > and enter into a deeper struggle.
> >
> > Capitalism has to build bridges from its metropolitan hypocrisy to the
> > scenes of its imperial crimes, and that bridge is made with the backs of
> > soldiers. We have to build a bridge from the scene of the crime to
> > clarity.
> >
> > To do that, we can't back away from this gun-question, this whole issue
> > of violence.
> >
> > When the guerrilla picks up the gun, the imperial soldier must pay
> > attention. When an alienated teenager in Columbine picks up a gun, we
> > metropolitans pay attention. We should.
> >
> > People with guns should be taken seriously. People who have lived with
> > guns should be taken seriously, and they are. Some of us are not going
> > to be bothered with Victoria's Secret or any of that other bullshit. We
> > are looking right through those mirages, right through to our animal
> > actuality, right through to the horror vacui of a world where people can
> > and do erase other people, and no deity descends to make things right.
> > There are no decrees from on high, and you are still responsible.
> >
> > Many of my associates in the antiwar movement talk about "reaching out"
> > to the military. They want to convert them. They want to transform them
> > from robotic killing machines into Gandhians. These are the liberals.
> >
> > Soldiers don't listen to liberals, and neither do the majority of
> > people. They intuit the their detachment, their other-worldly
> > abstraction, their desire to have their cake and eat it too. When people
> > are frightened or angry, they may be confused about the source of their
> > fear and anger, but they know they want to be with someone who will
> > fight. Liberals have never learned this.
> >
> > A young woman I met recently was surprised by her own first encounter
> > with several soldiers. She is not a Nation Magazine "leftist," but a
> > revolutionary young woman who recognizes that social transformation is
> > neither painless nor bloodless, and she has no illusions about that.
> > What astonished her about these young soldiers was her own recognition
> > that they were, like her, willing to take tremendous risks - up to and
> > including the loss of their own lives - to fight for what they thought
> > was right. It was the very quality that she had been seeking from her
> > own political allies.
> >
> > She wondered aloud whether it is easier to turn a person with
> > intellectual clarity into a courageous person, or whether it was easier
> > to help a courageous person to achieve greater clarity.
> >
> > "Should we be trying to make smart people into fighters, or fighters
> > into smart people?"
> >
> > Damn good question. May have the elements of a false dichotomy, but it's
> > still a good question. She is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than
> > those who see the military as brainwashed androids in need of a
> > religious epiphany. She knows that soldiers are not robots, and she
> > doesn't want to empty them of their belligerence, which is an
> > appropriate attitude for our Umwelt. She wants to free them from the
> > bonds of their illusions. The cruelty to which these soldiers have been
> > inured has the potential to be turned against hypocrisy, then against
> > the system. Clarity is often cruel; cruelty is often clear.
> >
> > The imperial soldier is constrained by the superstitions of patriotism,
> > and the soldier becomes a danger to power when he recognizes the
> > speciousness of patriotism. For now, he mimics the confident acceptance
> > of the official narratives, but he experiences the contradiction like a
> > recurrent rash. A friend of mine said that soldiers are political
> > scientists. They are embryonic political scientists at least, waiting
> > for midwives... the right questions, perhaps, or the right nightmares.
> >
> > I think soldiers need to reach out to the left as well. Maybe we
> > soldiers have a contribution to make to your clarity. Academic leftists
> > can talk to you until they are blue in the face about reification - be
> > it the reification that confuses the transient with the eternal, or that
> > substitutes the abstract for the specific. But every military leader,
> > beginning with a 19-year-old corporal, knows that before every task
> > there must be an assessment of the situation - one that takes account of
> > the mission, the enemy, the population, the terrain and weather, one's
> > own capacity in technology and personnelâ^À¦ and the time availableâ^À¦ as
> > a unified and changing whole. Dialectics, anyone?
> >
> > While metropolitan leftists will extol the virtues of the Vietnamese NLF
> > - rightly so - some of us saw them dying for their struggle. Their
> > corpses were us. And we have seen ourselves as corpses. Politics doesn't
> > happen in clean, well-lighted places. It happens in the sand and mud. It
> > happens in the rivulets of blood coursing into the edges of an Iraqi
> > hospital floor. It's happening in the head of some unnamed Marine or
> > Green Beret or tank gunner, who is looking out over the truth of the
> > imperial landscape in Sadr City or Fallujah or Kut and recognizing that
> > he has been thrust into this drama anonymously and that he now shares a
> > more intimate space with his "enemy" than he ever will with the oil
> > companies and military contractors and politicians who sent him here.
> >
> > Ani DiFranco says, "Those who call the shots are never in the line of
> > fire."
> >
> > Non-violence can be an effective tactic, but so can violence. It's only
> > liberal hypocrisy that denies the latter. For Iraq, it is the only
> > tactic. And the armed resistance in Iraq - regardless of its methods or
> > ideologies - is doing more to halt the runaway train that is global
> > capitalism than anything else in the world right now. (You want white
> > hats and heroes, go by a cinema ticket.)
> >
> > We cannot imagine the sheer joy of rediscovery being felt throughout the
> > region right now as people see these fighters striking back at the
> > source of their long humiliation - imperialism, and by extension against
> > imperialism's local attack dog, Zionism.
> >
> > Gandhi and King were important people, courageous people, people who
> > embraced non-violence as a core principle, yet that non-violence as a
> > tactic is worked for them. It worked in a specific time and context. The
> > notion that this tactic is a generalized principle, that it can work
> > now, fails to account for that context. Without the Soviet Union, warts
> > and all, there would have been no Gandhi, and there would have been no
> > King. Had the struggle for credibility in the global periphery not been
> > engaged by the US and the USSR, non-violence would have been suicidal.
> > Even that struggle was based - at the contextual end of the road - on
> > the military power of the Soviet Union that stood eye-to-eye with
> > imperialism until it collapsed from the effort.
> >
> > There is a difference between imperial thuggery and armed resistance to
> > imperialism, and in this era of exterminist imperialism, armed
> > resistance has become for more and more people the synonym of
> > self-defense. The occupying soldier fragments his personality with the
> > gun. The resistance reclaims its humanity with it.
> >
> > It was Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth,
> > who said, "The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting
> > out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he
> > rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he
> > himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we [the privileged
> > white metropolitans -SG] consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of
> > its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of the
> > rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial
> > gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be
> > feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of a
> > sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant
> > takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions
> > are one by one forgotten. The rebel's weapon is the proof of his
> > humanity."
> >
> > As a soldier, I needed this history to understand my own, and to come to
> > terms with my own, and to transform my own into this project. And as a
> > soldier, Sartre's words, and Fanon's, have special meaning for me
> > precisely because there is nothing abstract about them. I was part of
> > that history - it doesn't matter on what side; that was a pure accident.
> >
> > And so I started helping build this bridge.
> >
> > Soldier, I am saying, here is the cause, here is the side of history
> > your grandchildren will want to see you were on. Soldier, study this
> > history and this movement, so your courage and your blood aren't sent
> > into space like those idiotic capsules full of snapshots and mementoes
> > for some alien life form to discover.
> >
> > And to my comrades now, I have grim news from those places where
> > soldiers go.
> >
> > You will not win with non-profits. You will not win with non-violence.
> > You will not win with non-committal. To win you must become effective,
> > and when you do, you will be attacked. Then you will fight or you will
> > be exterminated. You may even fight and still be exterminated. No
> > guarantees. We are responsible.
> >
> > You will never make a revolution behind the bourgeoisie's back, because
> > the bourgeoisie has eyes in the back of its panopticon head. You will
> > never make a revolution while the ruling class sleeps, because it never
> > sleeps. You will not sneak up on necessity, and no one can evade it.
> >
> > Soldiers have seen it.
> >
> > That's why they don't listen to liberal platitudes about morality in the
> > abstract. They know about the power from the barrel of the gun. It ends
> > debates. It forces people to pay attention.
> >
> > People listen to me, and I see them peering at me, trying to imagine
> > what I am the way people sometimes try to imagine others having sex. I
> > am arguing against imperialism, and I can talk about commodity fetishism
> > with the best of them - because I applied myself to it with the same
> > rigor and intensity that I did to trauma protocols as a Special Forces
> > medic or marksmanship fundamentals as a sniper. Yet these audiences can
> > hear about imperialism from a host of others.
> >
> > But there in front of them is someone who has been willing to take life
> > or to give it away. And they are paying attention.
> >
> > Only it's not me. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that. I'm just a
> > circumstance. What they are really paying attention to is themselves, to
> > the questions they haven't confronted, to the doubts that plague them
> > about their politics, to the incessant whisper of mortality.
> >
> > And I'm paying attention to them. I study Rosa Luxemburg, Alf Hornborg,
> > Robert Connell, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mao Zedongâ^À¦ and I study
> > the academic research and the social theory and science and philosophy.
> > Because simply understanding the final argument of the gun is not
> > enough. We soldiers need to understand before and after the gun, and we
> > need to understand - as much as we can - where our personhood is rooted
> > in social constructions and where society is rooted in the biosphere and
> > how there is no clear line of demarcation between biology and symbols.
> > We need the context.
> >
> > So as a leftist I build this bridge toward my brothers and sisters under
> > arms. I don't judgeâ^À¦ I can't.
> >
> > The ultimate liberal hypocrisy is the one that shuns the soldier as if
> > the soldier lives in a parallel system, not recognizing that militarism
> > doesn't float over history any more than the make and model of your
> > automobile. If you turn on your lights with a wall switch and drink
> > clean water from your tap, if you walk in the park, if you wear a stitch
> > of manufactured clothing, if you've shopped on a vacation overseas, if
> > you so much as breathe in the United States of America, you are as much
> > a part of the body of actually-existing imperialism as any nervous,
> > trigger-happy Marine killing a family at a Baghdad roadblock.
> >
> > Different rooms, same house.
> >
> > Deforested Haiti cooks on charcoal so you can cook with electricity. A
> > child in Botswana dies of AIDS so I can work on this computer. And
> > personal ethics will not transform this.
> >
> > It's a system, an expression of an immensely complex and dynamic web of
> > relationships and realities, and it will default to its basic program -
> > capital accumulation - again and again and again, until it is destroyed.
> >
> > And it will go down like a raving beast, if the reader will forgive this
> > metaphorical shift.
> >
> > We need this bridge between the left and the military, because when the
> > time comes, when the hypocrisy fails at last and confronts us with the
> > painful reality of transformation, when the gun is all that is left and
> > the choice is to seize or diminish our humanity, the soldier will need
> > to become a revolutionary, and the revolutionary will have to become a
> > soldier.
> >
> > The time will come when we are all participants. Most of the world
> > already is.
> >
> > Soldier, leftistâ^À¦ "abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham
> > existence or conquer your birthright of unity."
> >
> > Fallujah lives!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> >
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



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