The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 10:13 am by Ken

Sheep, slaughter; slaughter, sheep

Right on schedule, the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group has sailed for the Persian Gulf. Arthur Silber and Billmon can't quite believe this means what the sources cited by Lindorff suspect: that an attack on Iran is only weeks away. Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner has argued that the summer of diplomacy (PDF) is over; the decision for war has been made. That it seems a somewhat risky and counter-productive venture is not, he insists, an objection to its likelihood: 'The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to atttack Iran.' One takes his point, and the timing to this very month - an October surprise - has been predicted for over a year, but can it really be possible that we are this close to the abyss and the market isn't screaming?

Petrol in the UK is down from 96 pence a litre to about 85 pence a litre. Oil prices are down and still falling. Oil futures are at a ten-month low. It's hard to believe this would be so if a new Middle East war was seriously expected. You'd think at least speculators would be pushing the price up. Maybe they are, and price would otherwise be even lower! Speaking of speculation, Joe Kay of the World Socialist Web site wonders whether oil companies and energy investors are deliberately keeping the price down to take the price of gasoline off the minds of American voters. Is this kind of market manipulation even possible? If it was, would it be enough to over-ride the prospect of an oil spike? I don't know, but I doubt it. So, while I think an air attack on Iran is more or less a done deal before Bush leaves office, I'm not so sure it's coming before the elections.

But that line of thinking reminds me of one of those stories that are too good to check.

The story goes that in early summer 1941, Stalin, worried about intelligence warnings of an imminent German attack, told his man in Berlin to keep an eye on the price of mutton. He reckoned that if the Germans were planning an invasion, they'd need lots of wool for winter clothing, so mutton would be dear. (Or was it sheepskin, and mutton cheap? Whatever.) The answer reassured Stalin. The mutton market was steady. Which meant that all the incoming warnings were disinformation ...

Little did Stalin guess that the Wehrmacht expected to be in Moscow that summer, so it hadn't ordered any winter woolies at all.

Posted 8:56 pm by Ken

'The Essential Thing is to See Clearly'

(From Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire.)

Via.

In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.

In other words, the essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit, once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extent to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

Pursuing my analysis, I find that hypocrisy is of recent date; that neither Cortez discovering Mexico from the top of the great teocalli, nor Pizarro before Cuzco (much less Marco Polo before Cambuluc), claims that he is the harbinger of a superior order; that they kill; that they plunder; that they have helmets, lancets, cupidities; that the slavering apologists came later; that the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes.

[...]

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated", all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind - it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.