The Early Days of a Better Nation

Monday, February 02, 2004


Empires and the Modern Prince

The delegates brandish their weapons.

(Note, possibly apocryphal, from the record of the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East)

Norman Geras wonders about the socialist or Marxist antiwar left:
[...] a very large segment of the political constituency I'm talking about not only opposed the Iraq war, but also opposed the intervention in Afghanistan before that, and in Kosovo before that, and so on back to the first Gulf War that evicted Saddam's armies from Kuwait. [...] America, as foremost representative of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other - those are two common poles throughout. [...] Why does this particular thematic combination lead so many to come down each time on the side they do - morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?

I'm sure the question is rhetorical, but if he does find it something of a puzzle, I'm surprised at his surprise. Most of the groups he refers to hark back to Lenin, and whether they do so via Trotsky or via Stalin, one of their most basic positions is that in any conflict between an advanced capitalist country (an imperialist country, as Lenin would have it) and a backward country (a colonial, semi-colonial, or dependent country, as Lenin would have it) they will back the backward country regardless of the nature of its regime. This position is a consequence of Lenin's theory of imperialism. If imperialism is what that theory says it is - a monstrous octopus choking more than half the life out of more than half the world - then (almost) anything that weakens it is in the interests of the working class and of progress, (almost) regardless of how reactionary or anti-working-class imperialism's opponent may be.

This was, ironically, why some on the British left supported the Afghan mujahedin - they regarded the Soviet Union as an imperialist power, and the muj as a national liberation movement. Beyond that they had few illusions about the muj. If you can - 'critically', of course - support the muj against the Russians, why not the Taliban (and some of the very same muj) against the Americans and their allies?

The fact is that most of the nationalist and anti-imperialist regimes or movements that most of the Marxist left has supported, or sided with, or at least not sided against, over the years have been denounced at the time as utterly ghastly politically: the 'murderous' Mau Mau, the 'fascist' EOKA, the 'Stalinist' NLF, the 'terrorist' ZANU, the 'Soviet-backed' MPLA, and so on and on and on. Even movements like the ANC that had a lot of liberal support used terrorist, or other terrible, tactics. Remember the Pretoria police station bombing? The tyres and the petrol? The Algerian FLN's cafe bombings in Battle of Algiers? The same goes for regimes and dictators. Few today would defend the Suez adventure, but at the time it was presented as a war of defence against Nasser, 'the new Hitler'. The Falklands War was supported by most of the Labour Party as an anti-fascist war of liberation, but the Marxist left almost in its entirety opposed it and, likewise almost in its entirety, sided with Argentina despite being accused of 'backing a fascist junta'.

I'm not concerned here with whether the support was correct or not. My point is that the position taken today by the Communist Party and the Trotskyists is for them nothing new. The precedents go back to the 1920s, if not before. The internationalists in the Second International supported the racist and religious Boers against the Brits, as did some liberals.

Lenin's Soviet Russia had cordial relations, as a state, with the anti-communist regime of Kemal, and with the Emir of Afghanistan. It also began to play off German imperialism against the other imperialisms, at Rapallo. Under Lenin's successors the list, as is known, lengthened considerably.

This seems cynical, but it's exactly the same approach as that of traditional diplomacy and foreign policy, recently exemplified by the Western ruling classes in the Cold War. They regarded Communism in much the same way as the Leninists regarded imperialism, and backed (almost) any regime or movement that weakened it (almost) regardless of how unpleasant that regime or movement might otherwise be. When a Vietnamese invasion overthrew the Khmer Rouge, did the US or UK governments waste a moment in weighing the morality of the intervention? They did not. They set about supporting the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, diplomatically and militarily, against Vietnam. The same considerations apply to the War on Terrorism. If Wherethefucksthatistan is boiling its Islamists alive, bully for Wherethefucksthatistan, and warm handshakes and handouts for His Excellency Whatevereyev, President for Life of Wherethefucksthatistan, a man we can do business with and our son of a bitch.

The great scandal of Lenin was that he taught realpolitik to the lower classes and backward peoples. If the working class was ever to become a ruling class it had better start thinking like one, and for a ruling class there are no rules. There is only the struggle to get and keep power. This is not to say that the Leninists and the imperialists are without moral feelings. Individually they are for the most part perfectly normal. Their compassion for their enemies' victims is absolutely genuine. So is their outrage at their enemies' moral failings and blind spots. In the 1980s I found it very difficult to regard supporters of the Chinese Communists' consistently anti-Soviet international policies as anything but scoundrels and scabs; but they were merely applying the same criteria as I was, to a different analysis of the world; and their indignation at my callous calculations and selective sympathies was just as real. I had the same sort of arguments with Trotskyists who supported the muj.

'How can you ...?' 'How can you ...?'

Morality has very little to do with choosing sides. It can tell us that a given act is dreadful, but it can't tell us whether to say, 'This is dreadful, therefore ...' or 'This is dreadful, but ...' We still often believe that we oppose our enemies because of their crimes, and support our allies despite their crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if Margaret Thatcher was quite sincere in condemning ZAPU as a terrorist organization because it shot down a civilian airliner, and in supporting one of the mujahedin factions, despite the fact that it had deliberately blown up a civilian airliner. Sometimes our moral justifications can blunt our moral sense. Think of the incendiary bombings of Germany and Japan. Suppose they were a military necessity. If so, better to accept that what 'our side' is doing is wrong and do it anyway than to persuade ourselves it is right because it is in a just cause.

(The writings of a great amoralist - a de Sade, a Stirner, a Nietzsche - can inspire a handful of murders in two centuries. Over the same period, the writings of a great moral philosopher - an Aquinas, a Kant, a Bentham, a Mill - can justify, if not indeed incite, the deaths of millions in just wars and just revolutions. Morality is an immensely dangerous and destructive force, which must be restrained by the strongest human passions and sympathies if it is not to break all the bonds of society.)

Morality is real. Morality is ideology. It is the heat given off by the workings of quite different machinery. In measuring the heat while ignoring the mechanism - in making a moral case for or against a particular war, for example - the moral philosopher reasons 'consciously indeed, but with a false consciousness'. The screams of those caught in the machinery continue unabated. They cry to heaven. It is only in what Locke called the 'appeal to heaven' - the clash of arms - that anyone (apart from, of course, 'pacifists, Quakers and other bourgeois fools' as someone said, who indulge in 'pacifist-Quaker-vegetarian prattle about the sanctity of human life', as someone else said) sees a hope that some day the machinery can be made to stop, and the screams to cease. That hope itself is the machines' fuel.

8 Comments:

...there are not a better Nation...the best Nation is: no Nations never more. Are the causers of all wars. Come on everyboby...No more Wars...No more Nations...No more Frontiers...

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(1)...interstellar travel (immortality comes)... 3D Bioprinting...is the beginning...it´s here...year 2,015...still not can print an organ by circulates the blood...but with the exponential Progress³ of Science and Technology, in the Future things will come which now not can even imagine...year 2,100...already achieved Bioprinting of living tissue natural identical...year 2,200...the organ´s Bioprinting is already a reality and people living 200 years...year 2,300...the social progress has eradicated religion and monarchies and professional politicians, who lived from the Work of the People...already there are not abusive taxes to keep them, already there are not periodic economic crises artificially created and wars to prevent that People can live too much well... For what purpose have served all the wars that the World has had?: absolutely for nothing more but for enrichment of the "leaders" (see History), before the wars People lived relatively well, after the wars People in rags in long lines for a bowl of hot soup...while the causers of those wars: monarchs, politicians and of all religions pontifex in their golden palaces were eating partridges...

BIOPRINTING: Have to say very clearly to the religious, once and for all, that we are NOT interested in their religious stories for ignorant, nor their "ethical debates" about anything (they would have to debate whether is it ethical that children perish of hunger in the Third World deliberately maintained, because without poor and ignorant there is not religion, while pontifices living in golden palaces eating partridges, they would have to debate whether is it ethical that all global media are secretly under the tight religious (Inquisition) control to continue "forever and ever" buying-fooling-terrorizing the World on behalf of their sanguinary false gods). We do not want more religion stories nevermore. What we do want with the BIOPRINTING techniques is to get THE IMMORTALITY, period. Humanism (wheat)...religion (darnel).

...3D Bioprinting-Immortality...((sugar cotton fibers produced by centrifuge machines are even finer...capillaries are between 2 tenth and 1 hundredth of a millimeter in diameter...perhaps... Could be used these machines adaptes as "biocentrifuges" to make capillary micro-tubes with a biodegradable and binder yarn of sugar inside coated with endothelial cells?))... Network capillary-skeleton, porosity among adjacent cells, A FINE MESH OF FIBROUS CONNECTIVE TISSUE fastening the cells: collagen?...fibrin? a blood´s protein in salty water insoluble who forms the cell´s-subjection-mesh of blood-coagula... SUITABLE POROSITY: both capillary networks (blood and lymphatic) could have a natural unequal aleatory distribution (Better or Worse Equidistance in each organism, better or worse equal feeding to ALL tissue´s cells) of MESH´S HOLES (in blood capillaries: exit for plasma with O2, nutrients, leukocytes...or entrance for CO2. In lymphatic capillaries: entrance for surplus lymph with cellular refuses lactic acid, etc...who cause muscular fatigue). Maybe the better or worse equidistant porosity of skeleton-mesh cell´s-subjection in each capillary tube; besides of genetics: ...size and quantity of mitochondria per cell (only are inherited the mother´s mitochondria...), distance of insertion´s point the tendon of a muscle from the articulation to a bone (lever law), etc...; a natural cause for to win or not to win a medal in Olympic Games

(1)...interstellar travel (to the third world)... we come in our ship from faraway...are reaching finally, that star they call Sun...our destiny that third planet is distinguished from the others aridly and barrens with its luminescent blue against the dark background of the Universe...now we are under its spell...they call the Earth...we pick up its broadcastings TV...we are hearing the stories that they tell...they speak strangely but we understand... We see at its inhabitants, the human beings very similar to us, outside... We have been studying them in their lifestyles, some in developed places with high level, and others in those other places to that they call...The Third World...suffering, hunger, malnutrition, war, calamities and horror against the feeble... There´s no limit to what we feel... Are we dreaming or is it all real?...is it true?... We see at their leaders to they call religious...(Torquemadas who were "executioners" against the Human Beings in the Middle Age with their Inquisition on behalf of their sanguinary gods...and still have the arrogance to put their secrets and sectarian religious symbols (channel TV Discovery Max, "secret societies") in popular bank note 1 dollar, if anyone doubts who governs in the shadow the World...well fattened in their golden palaces... while children perish converted into skeletons with some skin and eyes full of flies, in the arms of their horrified mothers who do not have even a glass of clean water to drink them... religious and political leaders who are purposely keeping the horror because WITHOUT POOR AND IGNORANT THERE IS NOT RELIGION... Have to separate between the worthy concept, strictly personal, believing in a Goddess or a God (wheat) and Humankind´s anxiety of Eternity;...from the manipulation and interested ancient Lie that is religion (darnel)... religions only are a Malign Tale for social control to serve at pontifices, monarchies and politicians...who hypocritically first created the poor..."the poor are always with us"...and after give them an alms... religion gods only are in Earth´s "culture"... IT´S TRUTH THAT RELIGION IS LIE

Meanwhile the World looks to elsewhere... Giant HORNETS...are threatening to all Humankind...it is necessary that the human beings, instead of destroy among them, destroy to those dangerous insects of huge exponential growing...seriously beginning already, at present.

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