Happy New Year--2002
[9/11, like the pain of child-birth, almost immediately erased from rational memory, because the mythic (ir)rationale for the global feudalization of advanced waste Capitalism--war as its own reward.]
Happy New Year from Cirque Minime
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
31/12/2001
It’ll be seven years Jan 16, 2002, I’ve lived in Paris, so I feel a little goosey about sending out yet another wild, florid indictment of American Politics—especially with regard to foreign policy, and especially with regard to Yugoslavia. Anyway, after seven years you’re considered legally dead, and dead men should just shut the fuck up, right?
But as much as has gone down since Three-Dollar Bill shared a cigar with his choice stagiaire-of-choice while ordering-up a ‘massacre of at least 5,000 Muslims’ at Srebrenica to justify air strikes against the Bosno-Serbs, nothing really has come through my modem or jumped off the pages of The Trib or even Le Monde Diplomatique (one of the latest casualties in the information wars: it’s become so dependent on articles from American academia that there’s now more version originale stuff in its English language edition in the Weekly Guardian!), nothing that would even begin to calm my fears that the Leader of the Free World is really dragging the rest of us into the New Middle Ages—what I’ve called Feudalism with a Swoosh.
And after doing six shows a day, six days a week, at the Seattle World’s Fair, I have almost no fear of being redundant. [I just learned that Michael Parenti has a new book coming out in a couple of months called The Terrorism Trap, on City Lights (I still owe Parenti a lot more’n this cheap plug for misjudging his excellent book on Yugoslavia, To Kill A Nation, on Verso i ), but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be redundant to!] So, let’s just do it one more time in 2001:
I’ve lost a lot of friends or correspondents shooting off these kites—even before comparing Sept 11 to the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia—because they felt I came off too arrogant, or too critical, or not understanding enough of their positions or viewpoints—what they demurely refer to as their ‘opinions’—on politics or history or philosophy or whatever. You know, before you judge a man you should walk a mile in his opinions. After all, in America everyone has a God-given and Constitutionally-guaranteed right to hold any opinion, no matter how extreme or indefensible or insupportable. It’s just an American Rights thing, like calling the yearly tournament of your national pastime The World Series or turning right on a red light.
That neurotic Anticommunism is the philosophical yeast with which American political thought is brewed up is not news. Most Americans—and, strangely, this includes most Leftists—will not listen to any defense of Soviet history, or Eastern European Communist history, without getting all para-discursive on you: telling you what you REALLY mean, what they REALLY mean and what History REALLY means. I’ve even heard Chomsky, the rabbi of the anti-imperialist Left, contend that Stalin was a creation of Western military intelligence. And most Trotskyite Social Democrats or neo-Gurdieffien left-Buddhist ecologists become absolutely apoplectic and ad homenim in their frenzied denials that any good ever came of Revolutionary Socialists holding state power. They rabidly insist that, Yes, in fact, Stalin did either murder or imprison half of the Soviet Union’s population; that, No, in fact, life under Communism had nothing to do with Socialism; and that, Of Course, universal free education and health care and compulsory full employment in multicultural, multiconfessional and multinational societies [not to mention an unwavering support for a homeland for the Jews) were just clever Stalinist ruses to hide totalitarian thought control and the denial of any genuine artistic expression.
— Oh yeah, and that Fascism and Communism are really one and the same sort of totalitarian thing.
This, of course, makes it very difficult for them to appreciate how the Soviet Union, at the cost of 20 million souls, defeated Hitler’s legions and liberated Eastern Europe, with its death camps, from the scourge of Fascism; or how the USSR, without any of the Right Stuff (Wolfean code for better Nazi scientists), put the first man in space, or supported successful anti-imperialist liberation movements around the world; or, even more to my point, how Yugoslavia managed to resist co-option by both Western and Soviet territorial longings until considerably after the fall of the Berlin Wall ii—which to this day most Americans believe was erected around East Berlin to imprison the unwilling East German subjects of Soviet Communism.
But in this Happy New Year’s CM dispatch, I thought I’d try to change-up a little and offer some solace, some comfort, some understanding to those of my former-fellow American toilers after the pure light of that higher truth who have so recently been cast into the ever-deepening darkness of a new son-of-a Bushian captivity. Most of them didn’t vote for it, and so, theoretically anyway, they don’t really deserve it.
And despite all their ‘new patriotism’ and ‘new nationalist’ fervor for more and more death and destruction throughout the poorer world—and this, mind you, from a people who have always nauseated nationalism in others and are currently supporting the prosecution of a duly elected (certainly more duly than their own) head of state, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Yugoslavia, on the allegation that he committed just such nationalistic murders (called, in the case of Yugoslavia, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’) of just such Muslim fundamentalist fish as Geo W. Bush and his Special Ops have been gleefully shooting in that murky barrel known as Afghanistan—despite what to a lot of us might appear to be merely the ‘new infantile narcissism’: I’d like to tell all the good people of the US that their response to the ‘new terrorism’ has been completely understandable, even predictable. That is to say, their reaction to the hammer of the ‘new terrorism’ being dropped on their financial, business, and military centers has demonstrated that their reflexes are quite appropriate to the socio-economic forces in play and, in fact, completely in keeping with the way the people who ordered and executed these attacks on New York and Washington DC would have had them react.
When one considers the ‘new terrorism’, and here I am speaking specifically of the phenomenon of suicide bombers iii, in the light of the absolute hegemony of advanced, globalized waste Capitalism, it is difficult—if not impossible—to place these actions outside the logic of contemporary productive and market forces. What is taken by nearly everyone to be either an expression of craven envy and resentment for their good life or, as by many on the Left, the ultimate radical gesture against the current world order of domination, occupation, oppression, exploitation and humiliation of the many poor nations by the few rich ones—the supreme revolutionary act, what Huey Newton called ‘revolutionary suicide’ iv—when viewed in the context of the critical level of overproduction and the ginormous stock over-hang of products looking for consumers (especially in the areas of military, financial and other waste commodities) being experienced by the economies of the first world, as signaled by the recently declared ‘Recession’ and the bursting of the NASDAQ Tech blister, the disastrous performance of energy companies like Enron, the brazen criminality in The Fed’s bailouts of banks and Hedge Funds like LTCM (all reminiscent of the Bush family-run credit daisy chains that led to the S&L debacle of the 1980s—funny how that and the family involvement in the guns for drugs business never came up during the campaign! Ah, bipartisanship!—or maybe it did and I just missed it over here.)—what can only be called a rapacious looting of public wealth for the enrichment of an ever-more malignant private sphere—when viewed in the light of this economic free fall, the actions of these ‘faceless cowards’ or ‘Islamic martyrs’ and the reactions of the newly victimized first-worlders become, in fact, the advanced economies' desperate grapplings for a rip cord to open the emergency parachute of mass consumption that is the last hope of saving the pathologically bloated and decadent unto moribund socio-economic systems of the US and Israel.
The real trouble with the mass consumption of military and other waste production is that it leaves a large number of the masses too dead to consume anything else ever again. In other words, as any successful suicide bomber will attest, this kind of economic correction doesn’t bear real good long-term results. And if the NY Times is correct and Wall St before 9-11 had become addicted to promises of double digit growth, then these wars we are seeing more and more of are just the dope that that poor Wall St junkie needs to keep going. And speaking from a little experience with addiction: I know a junkie’s well-being is only as secure as his next fix. So I have a real bad feeling that from now on the US economy is only going to be as secure as its next war.
So whether the WTC and the Pentagon were attacked by forces of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, in conjunction with Pakistan’s ISI, or by Mossad and the Israeli military, or the whole thing was pulled off by post-KGB Russian Intelligence conspiring with Serbian mafias, or it was a home-grown joint venture of the CIA, FBI, DIA, the DEA, the LAPD Ramparts Division, the Church of Scientology, the Demolay and Job’s Daughters, the Friends of Timothy McVeigh, the Jonestown Auxiliary and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: their financing came from the same big old slush funds that underwrite all economic and para-economic, all military and para-military activity; and the benefits and advantages accrued to the same dominant interests—because there are no higher interests, no interests in competition with the interests of globalized finance capital—known to Marxists as surplus value, or, when used as subvention for suicide bombers, the waste capital of globalized Big Business (aka—and indistinguishable from—Organized Crime).
[I omit George W. Bush and his gang of drug-addled thugs and religious perverts from any place in the causal chain not to absolve them of responsibility for or complicity in this thing, but because they have shown themselves to be so dangerously inept from the beginning, so incapable of even faking a defensive response to the attacks, and so completely without the slightest capacity for expressing decent, dignified human feelings, as to be irrelevant no-shows in what is developing into a grotesque race between the morally lame and intellectually halt to capture the moral ground zero in the wasteland that the ‘new terrorists’ have rendered contemporary American consciousness.]
The model of the casino is often invoked to describe modern capitalist circulation. But this has always seemed a bit naive. The bourgeois economist Paul Krugman in the NY Times described NASDAQ’s Tech tumor, with its horribly distended Price/Earnings ratios, and its glaring overproduction of mostly illusory products, as a great Ponzi scheme: That hustle where a greedy fool’s money is sucked up an investors pyramid, usually by the shabbily marketed charisma of some huckster or guru holed up in a Ramada (think Werner Erhart or Ron Hubbard or Mark Andreessen). Unlike a casino though, the lucky ones in Mr Ponzi’s world are the ones who get in and out early.
In the Western Casino economy, if luck or chance plays any part in events, it never poses any interference to the uninterrupted flow of value to the ‘house’. Despite all appearances of free and fair competition, and no matter who wins or loses or how much they win or lose, the activity ends up enriching only the owners of the operations and their broker-banker-agents. That is to say, nothing occurs outside the logic of this monolithic, totalitarian system for the accumulation and concentration of value into the well-bloodied hands of the conservators of our blighted world.
Lookit! Here’s a favorite example of how the good folks down on Main and Elm get shysted into paying for their own devastation—and then have to demonstrate their gratitude for this painful corn holing by cheer leading the destruction of the rest of the world:
When it came down to choosing between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, the last independent Socialist nation in Europe, a decent country with a decent standard of living that was working diligently to integrate itself into the neo-liberal world order and the EU, without having to become a waste dump, like Panama or Nicaragua or Iraq, for Western military and technological overproduction, or a pack of hired goons, of hyper-religio-fasciod greed heads and warthog terrorists like Croatia’s Tudjman, Bosnia’s jihadist Izetbegovic, and Kosovo’s drug-donkeys and throat-slitting mafiosi Thaci and Ceku (the funding for all of whom can be tied directly to the CIA, bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran—oh yeah, and Soros!) who guaranteed to use up all the weapons that NATO and MPRI could deliver—and when those had been used up, they promised to trade them in for new ones and call it 'disarming', embargo or no embargo—, where did the smart Western money with its smart bombs and ever-so smart Ruder & Finn-angled marketing lead the political sentiments of Mr & Ms JQ Public?
Sure. Behind the terrorists, the pissed off, suicidally unemployed, heroin-muling mujahedeen. The same sort of kamakazis that blew up the Cole, the Israeli disco and pizzeria, and the WTC and the Pentagon. And I know too few Leftists who felt at all strange high-fiving those tons-of-fun, Clinton and Albright, or Seig Heiling along with the Strangelovian Wes Clarke in celebration of the ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslav (Serbian including Kosovan) civilians, the rigging of the Yugoslav election riots, and Milosevic’s kidnapping for ransom (still unpaid!) to NATO’s kangaroo court in The Hague.
Now, are these good people to be blamed, to be condemned for making this Right turn on yet another Red light? Gee, I don’t think so. Any people who has been so imprisoned by the pharmaceutically-sustained delusion of their spiritual uniqueness, and malnourished into blindness by a steady diet of free-market bullshit sandwiches and the weak broth of bourgeois history and vulgar voodoo economics that has for so long passed for intellectual sustenance; any people whose moral stewardship has fallen through neglect from the palsied hands of its few genuine artists and rigorously critical public intellectuals into the malicious custody of cheap charlatans and hideous side-show freaks—like the grotesque Geo Will, with his impotent’s bow tie, proclaiming victory in the culture wars by clucking at the Hippies over the open grave of Geo Harrison—; any people who has come to accept incarceration and ritualistic murder and the easy association of sex and disease and violent death as daily bread should not be expected to respond to even the slightest insult, much less the intricately planned and executed assault on its principal cities, its most prized monuments, all leading to the gruesome deaths of thousands of its fellow citizens, in any but the most unreflective and reactionary and unreasonable and unjustifiable and, eventually, self-destructive fashion.
I’m afraid it’s all terribly understandable. The French have a saying: Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all.
Uh, yeah. Well . . . Maybe I just haven’t been in France long enough.
____________________________________
i Michael, I know it’s only a small step for this penitent, but I gave several copies of To Kill a Nation as Xmas gifts.
ii My good friend and Balkan mentor, Gilles Troude, recently described a plan the Soviets tried to hatch in 1971 to break up Yugoslavia. It was a sort of neo-Molotov/Ribbentrop pact, where Croatia (including BiH) and Slovenia would go to Germany, and Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia would go to Russia. But Tito was still around then and it didn’t come off.
iii Remember? ‘Now, I pack the C4 in my Y-fronts, the remote detonator in my back pocket, I walk into the Houses of Parliament--Right then. Where do I meet you lads after?’
iv Some one should really compile the quotations of Chairman Huey: e.g., 45 stops all jive.
Happy New Year from Cirque Minime
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
31/12/2001
It’ll be seven years Jan 16, 2002, I’ve lived in Paris, so I feel a little goosey about sending out yet another wild, florid indictment of American Politics—especially with regard to foreign policy, and especially with regard to Yugoslavia. Anyway, after seven years you’re considered legally dead, and dead men should just shut the fuck up, right?
But as much as has gone down since Three-Dollar Bill shared a cigar with his choice stagiaire-of-choice while ordering-up a ‘massacre of at least 5,000 Muslims’ at Srebrenica to justify air strikes against the Bosno-Serbs, nothing really has come through my modem or jumped off the pages of The Trib or even Le Monde Diplomatique (one of the latest casualties in the information wars: it’s become so dependent on articles from American academia that there’s now more version originale stuff in its English language edition in the Weekly Guardian!), nothing that would even begin to calm my fears that the Leader of the Free World is really dragging the rest of us into the New Middle Ages—what I’ve called Feudalism with a Swoosh.
And after doing six shows a day, six days a week, at the Seattle World’s Fair, I have almost no fear of being redundant. [I just learned that Michael Parenti has a new book coming out in a couple of months called The Terrorism Trap, on City Lights (I still owe Parenti a lot more’n this cheap plug for misjudging his excellent book on Yugoslavia, To Kill A Nation, on Verso i ), but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be redundant to!] So, let’s just do it one more time in 2001:
I’ve lost a lot of friends or correspondents shooting off these kites—even before comparing Sept 11 to the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia—because they felt I came off too arrogant, or too critical, or not understanding enough of their positions or viewpoints—what they demurely refer to as their ‘opinions’—on politics or history or philosophy or whatever. You know, before you judge a man you should walk a mile in his opinions. After all, in America everyone has a God-given and Constitutionally-guaranteed right to hold any opinion, no matter how extreme or indefensible or insupportable. It’s just an American Rights thing, like calling the yearly tournament of your national pastime The World Series or turning right on a red light.
That neurotic Anticommunism is the philosophical yeast with which American political thought is brewed up is not news. Most Americans—and, strangely, this includes most Leftists—will not listen to any defense of Soviet history, or Eastern European Communist history, without getting all para-discursive on you: telling you what you REALLY mean, what they REALLY mean and what History REALLY means. I’ve even heard Chomsky, the rabbi of the anti-imperialist Left, contend that Stalin was a creation of Western military intelligence. And most Trotskyite Social Democrats or neo-Gurdieffien left-Buddhist ecologists become absolutely apoplectic and ad homenim in their frenzied denials that any good ever came of Revolutionary Socialists holding state power. They rabidly insist that, Yes, in fact, Stalin did either murder or imprison half of the Soviet Union’s population; that, No, in fact, life under Communism had nothing to do with Socialism; and that, Of Course, universal free education and health care and compulsory full employment in multicultural, multiconfessional and multinational societies [not to mention an unwavering support for a homeland for the Jews) were just clever Stalinist ruses to hide totalitarian thought control and the denial of any genuine artistic expression.
— Oh yeah, and that Fascism and Communism are really one and the same sort of totalitarian thing.
This, of course, makes it very difficult for them to appreciate how the Soviet Union, at the cost of 20 million souls, defeated Hitler’s legions and liberated Eastern Europe, with its death camps, from the scourge of Fascism; or how the USSR, without any of the Right Stuff (Wolfean code for better Nazi scientists), put the first man in space, or supported successful anti-imperialist liberation movements around the world; or, even more to my point, how Yugoslavia managed to resist co-option by both Western and Soviet territorial longings until considerably after the fall of the Berlin Wall ii—which to this day most Americans believe was erected around East Berlin to imprison the unwilling East German subjects of Soviet Communism.
But in this Happy New Year’s CM dispatch, I thought I’d try to change-up a little and offer some solace, some comfort, some understanding to those of my former-fellow American toilers after the pure light of that higher truth who have so recently been cast into the ever-deepening darkness of a new son-of-a Bushian captivity. Most of them didn’t vote for it, and so, theoretically anyway, they don’t really deserve it.
And despite all their ‘new patriotism’ and ‘new nationalist’ fervor for more and more death and destruction throughout the poorer world—and this, mind you, from a people who have always nauseated nationalism in others and are currently supporting the prosecution of a duly elected (certainly more duly than their own) head of state, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Yugoslavia, on the allegation that he committed just such nationalistic murders (called, in the case of Yugoslavia, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’) of just such Muslim fundamentalist fish as Geo W. Bush and his Special Ops have been gleefully shooting in that murky barrel known as Afghanistan—despite what to a lot of us might appear to be merely the ‘new infantile narcissism’: I’d like to tell all the good people of the US that their response to the ‘new terrorism’ has been completely understandable, even predictable. That is to say, their reaction to the hammer of the ‘new terrorism’ being dropped on their financial, business, and military centers has demonstrated that their reflexes are quite appropriate to the socio-economic forces in play and, in fact, completely in keeping with the way the people who ordered and executed these attacks on New York and Washington DC would have had them react.
When one considers the ‘new terrorism’, and here I am speaking specifically of the phenomenon of suicide bombers iii, in the light of the absolute hegemony of advanced, globalized waste Capitalism, it is difficult—if not impossible—to place these actions outside the logic of contemporary productive and market forces. What is taken by nearly everyone to be either an expression of craven envy and resentment for their good life or, as by many on the Left, the ultimate radical gesture against the current world order of domination, occupation, oppression, exploitation and humiliation of the many poor nations by the few rich ones—the supreme revolutionary act, what Huey Newton called ‘revolutionary suicide’ iv—when viewed in the context of the critical level of overproduction and the ginormous stock over-hang of products looking for consumers (especially in the areas of military, financial and other waste commodities) being experienced by the economies of the first world, as signaled by the recently declared ‘Recession’ and the bursting of the NASDAQ Tech blister, the disastrous performance of energy companies like Enron, the brazen criminality in The Fed’s bailouts of banks and Hedge Funds like LTCM (all reminiscent of the Bush family-run credit daisy chains that led to the S&L debacle of the 1980s—funny how that and the family involvement in the guns for drugs business never came up during the campaign! Ah, bipartisanship!—or maybe it did and I just missed it over here.)—what can only be called a rapacious looting of public wealth for the enrichment of an ever-more malignant private sphere—when viewed in the light of this economic free fall, the actions of these ‘faceless cowards’ or ‘Islamic martyrs’ and the reactions of the newly victimized first-worlders become, in fact, the advanced economies' desperate grapplings for a rip cord to open the emergency parachute of mass consumption that is the last hope of saving the pathologically bloated and decadent unto moribund socio-economic systems of the US and Israel.
The real trouble with the mass consumption of military and other waste production is that it leaves a large number of the masses too dead to consume anything else ever again. In other words, as any successful suicide bomber will attest, this kind of economic correction doesn’t bear real good long-term results. And if the NY Times is correct and Wall St before 9-11 had become addicted to promises of double digit growth, then these wars we are seeing more and more of are just the dope that that poor Wall St junkie needs to keep going. And speaking from a little experience with addiction: I know a junkie’s well-being is only as secure as his next fix. So I have a real bad feeling that from now on the US economy is only going to be as secure as its next war.
So whether the WTC and the Pentagon were attacked by forces of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, in conjunction with Pakistan’s ISI, or by Mossad and the Israeli military, or the whole thing was pulled off by post-KGB Russian Intelligence conspiring with Serbian mafias, or it was a home-grown joint venture of the CIA, FBI, DIA, the DEA, the LAPD Ramparts Division, the Church of Scientology, the Demolay and Job’s Daughters, the Friends of Timothy McVeigh, the Jonestown Auxiliary and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: their financing came from the same big old slush funds that underwrite all economic and para-economic, all military and para-military activity; and the benefits and advantages accrued to the same dominant interests—because there are no higher interests, no interests in competition with the interests of globalized finance capital—known to Marxists as surplus value, or, when used as subvention for suicide bombers, the waste capital of globalized Big Business (aka—and indistinguishable from—Organized Crime).
[I omit George W. Bush and his gang of drug-addled thugs and religious perverts from any place in the causal chain not to absolve them of responsibility for or complicity in this thing, but because they have shown themselves to be so dangerously inept from the beginning, so incapable of even faking a defensive response to the attacks, and so completely without the slightest capacity for expressing decent, dignified human feelings, as to be irrelevant no-shows in what is developing into a grotesque race between the morally lame and intellectually halt to capture the moral ground zero in the wasteland that the ‘new terrorists’ have rendered contemporary American consciousness.]
The model of the casino is often invoked to describe modern capitalist circulation. But this has always seemed a bit naive. The bourgeois economist Paul Krugman in the NY Times described NASDAQ’s Tech tumor, with its horribly distended Price/Earnings ratios, and its glaring overproduction of mostly illusory products, as a great Ponzi scheme: That hustle where a greedy fool’s money is sucked up an investors pyramid, usually by the shabbily marketed charisma of some huckster or guru holed up in a Ramada (think Werner Erhart or Ron Hubbard or Mark Andreessen). Unlike a casino though, the lucky ones in Mr Ponzi’s world are the ones who get in and out early.
In the Western Casino economy, if luck or chance plays any part in events, it never poses any interference to the uninterrupted flow of value to the ‘house’. Despite all appearances of free and fair competition, and no matter who wins or loses or how much they win or lose, the activity ends up enriching only the owners of the operations and their broker-banker-agents. That is to say, nothing occurs outside the logic of this monolithic, totalitarian system for the accumulation and concentration of value into the well-bloodied hands of the conservators of our blighted world.
Lookit! Here’s a favorite example of how the good folks down on Main and Elm get shysted into paying for their own devastation—and then have to demonstrate their gratitude for this painful corn holing by cheer leading the destruction of the rest of the world:
When it came down to choosing between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, the last independent Socialist nation in Europe, a decent country with a decent standard of living that was working diligently to integrate itself into the neo-liberal world order and the EU, without having to become a waste dump, like Panama or Nicaragua or Iraq, for Western military and technological overproduction, or a pack of hired goons, of hyper-religio-fasciod greed heads and warthog terrorists like Croatia’s Tudjman, Bosnia’s jihadist Izetbegovic, and Kosovo’s drug-donkeys and throat-slitting mafiosi Thaci and Ceku (the funding for all of whom can be tied directly to the CIA, bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran—oh yeah, and Soros!) who guaranteed to use up all the weapons that NATO and MPRI could deliver—and when those had been used up, they promised to trade them in for new ones and call it 'disarming', embargo or no embargo—, where did the smart Western money with its smart bombs and ever-so smart Ruder & Finn-angled marketing lead the political sentiments of Mr & Ms JQ Public?
Sure. Behind the terrorists, the pissed off, suicidally unemployed, heroin-muling mujahedeen. The same sort of kamakazis that blew up the Cole, the Israeli disco and pizzeria, and the WTC and the Pentagon. And I know too few Leftists who felt at all strange high-fiving those tons-of-fun, Clinton and Albright, or Seig Heiling along with the Strangelovian Wes Clarke in celebration of the ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Yugoslav (Serbian including Kosovan) civilians, the rigging of the Yugoslav election riots, and Milosevic’s kidnapping for ransom (still unpaid!) to NATO’s kangaroo court in The Hague.
Now, are these good people to be blamed, to be condemned for making this Right turn on yet another Red light? Gee, I don’t think so. Any people who has been so imprisoned by the pharmaceutically-sustained delusion of their spiritual uniqueness, and malnourished into blindness by a steady diet of free-market bullshit sandwiches and the weak broth of bourgeois history and vulgar voodoo economics that has for so long passed for intellectual sustenance; any people whose moral stewardship has fallen through neglect from the palsied hands of its few genuine artists and rigorously critical public intellectuals into the malicious custody of cheap charlatans and hideous side-show freaks—like the grotesque Geo Will, with his impotent’s bow tie, proclaiming victory in the culture wars by clucking at the Hippies over the open grave of Geo Harrison—; any people who has come to accept incarceration and ritualistic murder and the easy association of sex and disease and violent death as daily bread should not be expected to respond to even the slightest insult, much less the intricately planned and executed assault on its principal cities, its most prized monuments, all leading to the gruesome deaths of thousands of its fellow citizens, in any but the most unreflective and reactionary and unreasonable and unjustifiable and, eventually, self-destructive fashion.
I’m afraid it’s all terribly understandable. The French have a saying: Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all.
Uh, yeah. Well . . . Maybe I just haven’t been in France long enough.
____________________________________
i Michael, I know it’s only a small step for this penitent, but I gave several copies of To Kill a Nation as Xmas gifts.
ii My good friend and Balkan mentor, Gilles Troude, recently described a plan the Soviets tried to hatch in 1971 to break up Yugoslavia. It was a sort of neo-Molotov/Ribbentrop pact, where Croatia (including BiH) and Slovenia would go to Germany, and Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia would go to Russia. But Tito was still around then and it didn’t come off.
iii Remember? ‘Now, I pack the C4 in my Y-fronts, the remote detonator in my back pocket, I walk into the Houses of Parliament--Right then. Where do I meet you lads after?’
iv Some one should really compile the quotations of Chairman Huey: e.g., 45 stops all jive.
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 6:59 PM
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