The Tyranny of the Ego

A libertarian superman at work

The dominant American view on tyranny is that it's defined by collective submission. Truthers heap scorn on "sheeple" passively accepting what their media overlords tell them, libertarians and tea partiers denounce "big government" and "the nanny state" that coddles us only so that they may hold their guns closer to our heads, and the Wall Street Journal routinely publishes stark reminders of the horrors of the Soviet Union two decades after its collapse to remind us of what will happen if we succumb to "collectivism"- like, if we raise the minimum wage.

Such conceptions seems to have even been internalized by those on the liberal end of the spectrum. Elizabeth Warren, when articulating classical liberal and high school-level contract theory, argued that we all need to pay taxes as it sustains the system that promotes individual success. Yes, we need to give up some freedom, she seems to say, but for the greater good. Liberals have largely conceded the word "freedom," allowing their definition of the term to decay so that it may be replaced by a reactionary impostor. The libertarians have won one of the most important of the eternal political battles: they have made their definitions of crucial terms such as "liberty" and "tyranny" nearly hegemonic and commonsensical. We've reached a point where significant numbers of Americans think that the Nazi regime was actually left-wing because it was an example of "big government."

The libertarians certainly have a point. Beating populations into submission is does establish authority. Collectivization, as in the Soviet Union, can be among the most deadly forms of tyranny.

But this is at best a half-truth. The other half of authoritarianism is narcissism, egoism, and a kind of perverse, reptilian individualism. History has shown the best way to maintain long term and stable control over a population is to grant control of one group over another group, as long as that control is dependent on the ruling class. Or, in the words of the classic socialist slogan: "The ruling class can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." The kind of asocial egoism promoted by Ron Paul, Mises, and Hayek would necessarily lead to a kind of authoritarianism, probably fascism, in the very unlikely event that they could push their agenda through our liberal democratic safeguards.

It doesn't require a thorough understanding of the history of extreme American libertarianism to realize this- although Michael Lind has conducted a historical overview and has documented a consistent legacy of the key proponents of this ideology flirting or even collaborating with fascists and military dictators. A philosophical exploration of libertarian ideas with the intent of finding "echoes of fascism" isn't necessary either. The issue is practical: how could extreme libertarian ideologues dismantle the welfare state, totally abolish labor rights, and destroy all regulations on private enterprise without violently suppressing the majority of the population? They can't. Too many people have bled in the streets for those rights to be taken away quietly. The jackboot would become immediately necessary.

Recent American history has amply borne this out. Barry Goldwater was the archetypal law and order candidate, proposing police crackdowns on blacks while advocating for limited government without any apparent cognitive dissonance. Reagan, who believed the nature of the "free market" could be determined through astrology, expanded the drug war as a means of occupying poor communities with a quasi-paramilitary police force, and it was under his administration that the largest prison building program in the history of the world was implemented. On the same day Congress approved NAFTA, they also passed a massive anti-crime bill. The economy collapses due to deregulation, and the NYPD roams Zucotti Park attacking those protesting against the perpetrators.

Libertarians have presented the choice between government and no government, but the real choice, borne out in fact, is between a liberal democratic government (or its approximation) or a government wielding a militarized police force tossing poor people into jail for life after they commit their "third strike." Given the history of nostalgia for the Confederacy and promotion of dictatorships that has permeated the libertarian right- all this has by no means been incidental- it's clear that when the chips are down, its members would instantly pick the latter option. Advocating for both curbs on the authority of law enforcement and the evisceration of the social safety net and the welfare state, as the Paul-ites do, is asking to have one's cake and to eat it too.

It's only very recently that the idea that egoism would lead to tyranny has become somehow so counterintuitive. Christ and Buddha both warned of the tyrannical consequences of power worship. The connection between egoism and authority becomes obvious when one looks at certain non-state organizations. The mafia is composed from top-to-bottom of sociopathic narcissists, but it's a feudal organization. Cults promise to make supermen and heroes of their members as long as they obey every whim of the leader. Frats and sororities are populated by type-A cheerleading captains and alpha males whose compulsions to dominate make life unendurable for the weak and for outcasts. It is possible to have a viciously authoritarian society comprised not of defeated sheep, but of bullish egoists.

Speaking of cults, it makes perfect sense that the doyen of libertarian egoism, Ayn Rand, was a cult leader herself. As Johann Hari writes in a devastating portrait of Rand (seriously, it's astonishing that her legacy survives these kind of stories):

"As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as 'imbecilic' and 'anti-life' by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: 'There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy'... Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: 'I came to look on her as a killer of people.' The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me."

It's this combination- egoistic advancement within narrowly prescribed limits- that has been crucial to upholding authoritarian political structures ever since European conservatives experimented with male suffrage and limited forms of mass politics after the revolutions of 1848. In this regard, it's all too natural that Rand, a human freak by any reasonable standard, was a cult leader. Just as anyone could be a hero in her cult as long as they obeyed her, anyone could be a hero if they obeyed the demands of capitalism.

She exploited Nietzsche, but the man was clear that each individual should determine their own ethics after arduous self-discovery ("You have your way. I have my way. As for the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist"). For Rand, morality was already prescribed by the imperatives of authoritarian capitalism; all that was left to do was to obey them. One of Nietzsche's many philosophical projects was to attack the idea that true ethics were embedded within the universe or society; compared to him, Rand is practically a Hegelian. Her philosophy of "egoism" is thus exposed as extreme, radical conformity to elite norms, and her conscription of Nietzsche into her philosophy is no less a ridiculous case of reactionary appropriation than the Catholic church exploiting the moral authority of Christ to justify the Pope's golden throne.

Ultimately lonely people like Rand are the rank and file of authoritarian movements. The final chapter of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism describes a blighted landscape of loneliness as the breeding ground of all authoritarian regimes. "Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all, have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities of action and power are frustrated," she writes, anticipating the savaging of the welfare state, unions, civil society, and other unifying and public organizations in general throughout the neoliberal era. Arendt also promoted Adolph Eichmann as an archetypal fascist in contrast to the stereotype of the nationalist fanatic. "The aim of totalitarian education," she says, "has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." For every Nazi berserker, there were probably ten, fifty, or even a hundred others who kept the machine running for them, all careerists who were just interested in getting ahead, or getting by.

In fact, Arendt says, "organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical arbitrary will of a single man." It is in the dissolved societies that Arendt describes in which criminal organizations, cults, fascist groups, and other organizations of the rampant Id emerge from. Lacking a real community to provide him dignity and a sense of self-worth, the individual is easy prey for the promises of these authoritarian groups. It is in these organizations that "everybody is educated to become a hero," as Umberto Eco wrote in "Eternal Fascism." Collectivism is not the opposite of egoism, but its flipside.

It's worth quoting at length Lezsek Kolakowski's comments on the "anarchist" philosopher Max Stirner, whose The Ego and His Own was The Virtues of Selfishness for nineteenth-century Germany:

“As recent studies by (Hans G.) Helms have shown, Stirner’s doctrine inspired not only anarchists but various German groups who were the immediate precursors of fascism. At first sight, Nazi totalitarianism may seem the opposite of Stirner’s radical individualism. But fascism was above all an attempt to dissolve the social ties created by history and replace them by artificial bonds among individuals who were expected to render implicit obedience to the state on grounds of absolute egoism. Fascist education combined the tenets of asocial egoism and unquestioning conformism, the latter being the means by which the individual secured his own niche in the system. Stirner’s philosophy has nothing to say against conformism, it only objects to the Ego being subordinated to any higher principle: the egoist is free to adjust to the world if it appears that he will better himself by doing so. His ‘rebellion’ may take the form of utter servility if it will further his interest; what he must not do is to be bound by ‘general’ values or myths of humanity. The totalitarian ideal of a barrack-like society from which all real, historical ties have been eliminated is perfectly consistent with Stirner’s principles: the egoist, by his very nature, must be prepared to fight under any flag that suits his convenience.”

This is probably true of every authoritarian regime. Even in the Soviet Union, the archetypal collectivist tyranny, Gogol's bloodless bureaucrat thrived in the bureaucracies inherited from Tsarism. His grasping careerism was the engine of the authoritarian regime. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the Soviet Union was not in fact totalitarian in the classical sense, but depended on a totally depoliticized- not mobilized- citizenry, and operated through a very tiny minority of careerist strivers. A system that promotes the most grotesquely self-serving members of that society to the top is the best explanation for the success of a man like Gorbachev.

One of the best ways to maintain authority is probably to have a middle-class bulwark braced against the masses, gaining their compliance through limited upward mobility (again, self-advancement within prescribed limits). If authoritarianism was solely the outcome of mass submission, than all authoritarian tendencies would flow from the besieged lower classes. But, as numerous studies have shown, the power base of fascism is the middle class, particularly the lower-middle class. Often they are self-employed and not beholden to any corporate superior. Scattered and isolated, they certainly don't resemble a "herd" in the classical sense.

So egoism and herd behavior are both symptoms of sick societies and, far from being opposites, necessitate each other. As far as solutions go, I am, as pretentious people say, a "radical moderate." One must maintain one's individuality so that one's community does not become dumb and blind, but one can only actualize individuality within a community. Or, as Arendt puts it, "what makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in it's identity only in the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals." It's a tightrope act, trying to maintain one's individuality without becoming full of one's self. But it's the only way to have true freedom and to not become either one of the "sheeple" or a Randian- even though they're both one and the same.

On The Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, Reflections on 9/11 Truthers as Self-Worshipping Cultists

The 9/11 truth movement is a cult. Like most cults, it recruits its members through the two-pronged deployment of belittlement and flattery. With one voice, it threatens that if you disagree with them, then you’re a “retard,” “sheep,” “liar,” or “disinfo agent.” But, the second voice says, if you only believe what they say…. why, then you’re part of an elite vanguard of heroic freedom fighters enlightening the masses. (I’m not sure why it would be worth anyone’s time to enlighten a mass of people that one thinks are all cowards and frauds, but never mind.) It’s the same principle that underlies the “good cop, bad cop” routine: resist, and you face the bad cop; merely cooperate, and you are soothed by the good cop. All the truther has to do is assent, to submit- which necessitates no effort whatsoever- and he is immediately transformed from a sheep to a hero. And you can only be one or the other. The miniscule ratio of effort to reward is the chief appeal of joining the truther movement, not any “evidence” it has for a government conspiracy.

Notice that the truther doesn’t actually have to do anything. The 9/11 truth movement, besides mugging for media attention, has barely taken a single concrete step of any magnitude to advance its cause in the real world, even when its adherents once constituted roughly a third of the entire US population and a considerable percentage of the international community. It never filed a lawsuit against the government, for instance, or sued for another investigation of the 9/11 attacks. It never conducted its own investigation of the attacks, despite the supposed mass of engineers and architects within its ranks. (The closest they got was to create a campaign for other people to form "truth commissions" in various states; none of these commissions ever came to be.) It never ran its own candidate for any office anywhere in the country, or organized its own campaign for any politician like Cynthia McKinney who was skeptical of the official story. It never created a lobby. It never boycotted any companies, such as media outlets that promoted the official accounts. It never engaged in civil disobedience. It never destroyed, occupied, or commandeered property a la the activists in Seattle or the Occupy Wall Street protestors. It never rioted. It never centralized into an organized and effective political unit (9/11 Truth is a a glorified conference organizer and simply doesn't qualify), preferring instead to remain a disparate array of internet dwellers. It never attempted to build coalitions with other existing movements, such as the antiwar or civil liberties movements. It never seriously attempted to build any kind of mass political power base. It never came to any kind of consensus about political demands or goals other than calling for new and different investigations of the attacks. It never created international solidarity movements with those who shared their beliefs in other parts of the world who are bearing the brunt of America's post-9/11 foreign policy, such as the Pakistanis and Palestinians. And despite the fact that they believe they’re being governed by psychopaths who massacred their own citizens, they never attempted violent resistance or assassination. Violence would clearly be justified as an act of self-defense in this instance- so how come the FBI never busted a single truther sleeper cell in possession of several thousand dollars of laundered money, forged documents, and a cache of assault rifles?

Serious movements that actually do want to change things try to convince people of their cause through propaganda, but they simultaneously take concrete political and social action in order to cement their position on the ground. They garner support through deeds as well as words. But the 9/11 truth movement was content with disseminating propaganda alone, never leaving cyberspace or its conferences to engage the real world other than to heckle journalists and talk show hosts. Critics wrap mocking quotation marks around the word “truth” when discussing the “9/11 truth movement,” but they should firmly weld them to the term “movement” as well. There never was a 9/11 truth movement. There never will be a movement. Except for the sheer number of people who shared similar beliefs about the 9/11 attacks and a supposed “leadership” of frauds and mediocrities like Alex Jones, Dylan Avery, and David Ray Griffin (who were only an assortment of recognizable figureheads, not people who actually lead anything), there was precious little about this nebulous assortment of people that resembled a movement. The women’s suffrage movement was a movement, the civil rights movement was a movement, the abolitionist movement was a movement. Calling this horde of carnival barkers, cyber bullies, and naive hanger-ons a “movement” is an insult to those activists in actual movements, whether benign or malignant, who participated in real actions to effect real change.

The 9/11 truthers didn’t try to effect change because they’re not part of a movement. They’re part of a cult, and cults almost by definition never attempt to change anything. Their fundamental belief is that the world is too corrupt to be changed at all. They seal themselves off from everyone else, occasionally making brief skirmishes back into society solely to rub its own sins in its face. David Koresh had his compound in Waco, Texas; the truthers retreat back to the internet.

Take the Westboro Baptist Church cult, the guys who go to funerals with the “God Hates Fags” signs. When they’re actually asked about what they think they’re accomplishing by insulting mourners at funerals, their response is always the same: they’re not at these funerals to convert or save anybody, but only to tell the “truth” according to some warped Calvinist doctrine. They're not there to accomplish anything. In other words, they’re not at these funerals to improve themselves by attempting to change the world for the better; they are there to improve their own perception of themselves by making the rest of the world out to be disgusting by comparison.

The 9/11 truth movement isn’t as loathsome as the WBC (though the latter is at least honest, while Dylan Avery is as shameless and opportunistic a liar as anyone on the planet), but it owes its cohesion to the same psychological glue that binds the Baptists homophobes. We have to stand together, they believe, because the rest of the world is depraved. It's futile to try to change anything, because society is so corrupt and its inhabitants are hopelessly slavish. So why bother trying to accomplish anything at all?

David Wong, who wrote probably the best essay on the psychological motivations of the 9/11 truthers, pointed out that, “Most people, to feel special, have to actually do something special. But why not do what these guys do, and just make the rest of the world out to be wretched? Hell, once we’ve painted everyone else as mindless or murderous, all we have to do to feel superior to them is roll out of bed.” The disdain the truthers show online and in 3D proves this beyond a doubt. Everyone in the world is a liar or sheep except for them. The proportion of the contempt they have for everyone else relative to what they themselves actually do is astronomical.

I can’t prove this, but I always doubted that most religious people believe in God in the same sense that they believe that they have two hands, that a triangle has three sides, or that if they drop something then it will fall. If I believe that there is a chair in my way, I will walk around it. The action follows from the belief. But many religious people don’t seem to live out their beliefs through their actions. America is a fundamentalist Christian nation according to polls, yet I can name more of the Ten Commandments than most American Christians. Very few of these Christians attend church, and many of them are consumed with spite at the poor and cheer on military killings. Nietzsche claimed that the only true test of a philosophy was to assess whether or not one could live by it. If a religious person truly believes that by sinning he may damned to hell for all of eternity, then why do so many religious people sin so regularly?

Truthers resemble religious fundamentalists not only because they’re cultish, but because I doubt that they actually believe what they say. None of their actions seem to follow from their supposed beliefs. Remember, a whole third of the United States at one time at least suspected that the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or allowed them to happen. If so many people believed that 9/11 was a fascist coup d’etat, then at least some of them should've started a real movement in response. There are movements in this country to legalize marijuana, to remove certain books from public libraries, to legalize the hunting of endangered species, to allow the sale of teflon-coated bullets, and to make English the “official” language of the United States. There are movements for nearly everything in this country, however stupid or trivial. Yet a third of this nation can’t even form a movement to expose and prosecute the perpetrators of the greatest terrorist attack on American soil in the whole of its history? I certainly hope the truthers don’t believe what they preach, because otherwise the lack of any action on their part would speak of a stunning dearth of integrity on the part of millions of Americans.

The 9/11 movement did manage to expose one disturbing fact, though: how thoroughly debased and impoverished the concept of courage has become in this country. Courage in the United States is endorsing the 9/11 conspiracy theories, or voting for Ron Paul, or joining the Tea Party, or going on MSNBC and saying something mean about the Republicans, or posting populist copypasta on your Facebook wall, or just having an individual viewpoint on an issue. You know what courage is among those “barbarians” in the Arab world? Protesting dictatorship on the streets in the face of possible injury, torture, or death. Courage has somehow been defined-down in the US as occasionally doing something mildly controversial without the possibility of any real consequences befalling you. You don’t have to risk your job or even a rebuke from your boss, much less your life. As insane as it would be, if a truther pulled a Jared Lee Loughner and shot Dick Cheney in the head, he could at least legitimately claim the ludicrous amount of courage that the 9/11 truthers are alone in ascribing to themselves.

Israel Massacres Protestors; Israel And Press Blames Protestors' "New Tactics"

"Palestinians Test Tactic of Unarmed Mass Resistance"

Palestinian activists are calling it a preview of new tactics to pressure Israel and win world support for statehood: Masses of marchers, galvanized by the Arab Spring and brought together by Facebook, descending on borders and military posts — and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot.

It could prove more problematic for Israel than the suicide bombings and other deadly violence of the past — which the current Palestinian Authority leadership feels only tainted their cause.

After attempted border breaches from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza left 15 Palestinians dead Sunday, Israeli officials openly puzzled over how to handle an unfamiliar new phase.

"The Palestinians' transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

This slanderous nonsense needs to be repudiated and it needs to be repudiated now. Probably 95% of Palestinian resistance or more is non-violent, unarmed, or characterized by mostly symbolic violence such as throwing stones at tanks. If the first intifada received the attention and hosannas that it deserves as the model of Gandhian resistance that it was, then we would never have to hear about how there is "no Palestinian Gandhi" or that the Palestinians have just discovered non-violence. (The Palestinians are perpetually discovering non-violence; according to Ethan Bronner, they had just discovered non-violence some 13 months ago- only 17 years after the first Intifada.) The fact is, Israel and the US media do not want a Palestinian Gandhi. If they did, then the hundreds of Palestinian Gandhis that are doing the slow work in countless Palestinian villages or the other hundreds that are rotting in Israeli prisons (or those that have possibly been shot) would receive the same front-page attention and encouragement that Mohammed Elbaradei is receiving in Egypt. With one caveat: most of those Palestinians that are educated enough to hold the social status of Elbaradei have left the country, as Palestinian civil society has effectively been destroyed by the occupation.

And let's repudiate the Israeli PR claim that these protests caught their security forces off guard, which the above article uncritically regurgitates. There were Palestinian Facebook campaigns promoting an uprising; there are regular non-violent Palestinian protests in which walls or fences are torn down; the Nakba is generally expected to be a time of disorder. The idea that what are likely the best intelligence agencies in the world (either Shin Bet or the Mossad) were caught off guard by all this stretches credulity. More likely, Israel simply didn't care. They just fell back on their default response, honed during the first and the beginning of the second Intifada, their invasion of Lebanon, and their massacre in Gaza: if the Arabs act up, we're going to respond with overwhelming, violent force. "The only thing the Arabs understand is force" has been the battle maxim of Israel since 1948- earlier, in fact. It's because of the press' sole focus on current events and their structural need to spot "trends" that they would think that Israel would act differently in this single, lone instance.

When you read the above headline, don't read it literally. Read it instead as "now that the Palestinian revolts are happening in the context of the Arab revolts, the Israelis are starting to realize that violent repression may be unfavorably compared to that of other regimes in the region, and that this may cause unacceptable damage to their country's public image." The press' staggering revelation that Palestinians indeed protest unarmed may be too late, but if Israel is pressed to muzzle its response to resistance to its occupation, it may not be entirely too little.

Update: Hard to believe that I just read this in The Economist.

Thoughts on the Left and Libya

I don't have a firm position on US and Western intervention in Libya. I'm leaning towards supporting it, and I endorse virtually everything coalition forces are doing and have done so far, but I can't predict the future and I'm not an expert on Libya. (An honest question: can I support was has happened in the past without in some sense supporting what will happen in the future? After all, invasion is the supreme war crime according to Nuremberg Tribunal because all other war crimes are considered to flow from it...)

So I won't pretend to have a stance at the moment. Besides the fact that I live in a congressional democracy and should take some position on the affairs of my country, I'm not a pundit and am under no obligation to offer an opinion.

That said, I've been following the debate on the left between pro-intervention and anti-intervention advocates, the former including Juan Cole and British anarchist Ian Bone and the latter including Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. One reason that I'm remain uncertain is that each of them, who I often trust to offer me guidance, have written accounts of the intervention that have left me unsatisfied (although Cole's is the best).

I'll start with Chomsky's account. While trying not to succumb to crude utilitarianism, I have to note that Chomsky never offers an opinion about whether or not the Libyan rebels, the Libyans as a whole, or the region will be better off with or without Western intervention- whether the lives of actual human beings will be saved or improved. He posits that a new Libyan government will likely be heavily dependent on Western powers, but his main issues are 1) the illegality of some of the measures taken by the allies and 2) the ulterior motives of the United States.

In regards to 1), Chomsky may be objectively right that the allies violated international law by aiding the rebels rather than simply instrumenting a no-fly zone. But it's a curious argument to make, given that he goes on to say in the same interview that categorically abiding by UN resolutions is to consider "that states are sacrosanct in the form that has been established in the modern world" and accepting that "states are assigned the status of virtually holy entities." Given that Chomsky has sharply disagreed with the UN in the past (on the establishment of a Jewish state, on the invasion of Afghanistan, and presumably on the overthrow of Aristride in Haiti), it feels pedantic even in accordance with even his own views to condemn "participation on the side of the rebels" for violating international law in the face of impending massacres and rebel defeats. Of course a no-fly zone was implemented "on the side of the rebels" (seeing as they lack an air force), and it likely was a tacit go-ahead to the powers involved to begin a more aggressive campaign.

Frankly, I don't really care what realpolitik considerations lead to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is positioning itself as a partial rival to the US, to reject UN 1973. Unless we accept that "states are sacrosanct," then we have to make decisions not solely on the basis of legal and political abstractions but on the basis on concrete realities. In this case, we have to address how our decisions affect real Libyans and the people of the region. Chomsky hardly goes into this, but the actual rebels are asking for our support and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt are threatened by a Qaddafi victory. We shouldn't become sentimental and lose sight of principles, but these are concrete realities.

As for 2), Chomsky carries out the rather simple exercise of showing that US motives are not altruistic based on his principle that states, as power centers, can only act on their self-interest. Yes, this is about oil and installing a reliable client. But states have often done good things out of their own self-interest; the USSR defeated Nazism, for example. As for the US, we gave relative autonomy to Western Europe and halted North Korean aggression. It's not impossible or inherently contradictory that we could again reconcile self-interest and positive utility. Chomsky, again, addresses the latter but not the former, leaving his account unsatisfactory.

A categorical distrust of Western power also motivates Cockburn. "As always," he writes, "many on the left yearn for an intervention they can finally support and many of them have been murmuring ecstatically, 'This is the one.' Of course the sensible position (mine) simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed purpose or not." I'm not sure that even Cockburn accepts this- I imagine he's in favor of the US intervention in Europe to help defeat Nazi Germany- and he certainly hasn't minded intervention by another "major power": the Soviet Union. As he writes in The Golden Age is in Us:

"The Soviet Union defeated Hitler and fascism. Without it, the Cuban Revolution would never have survived, nor the Vietnamese. In the postwar years it was the counterweight to US imperialism and the terminal savageries of the old European colonial powers. It gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line. Without it, just such a relatively independent country as India could instead have taken a far more rightward course. Despite Stalin's suggestion to Mao that he and his comrades settle for only have a country, the Chinese Revolution probably would not have survived either."

So why is it that the US and the West are apparently structurally incapable of providing assistance to a force who wants it, while another superpower, who perpetrated horrors in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, was able to do so even though it was clearly acting out of its self-interest? (That the USSR "gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line" is appalling bullshit, btw- ask the Czechs or Afghans.) I have to say that this as well as his attempt, along with George Galloway, to paint the mostly working class rebels as Al Qaeda supporters (a claim discredited by Cole) suggests residual Trotskyism of the kind that infects the Anglo-Irish left as well as his inherited yet watered down Stalinism. His citation of a former CIA officer who suggests that support for the revolt would be opposed to American interests seems part and parcel of Cockburn's affiliation with libertarian isolationists. Along with Chomsky, he never makes an argument that intervention would be bad for the rebellion beyond his claim that "that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers," a categorical statement which reeks of his characteristic glibness that recently had him arguing in favor of the hate and conspiracy-mongering Glenn Beck.

Now for the pro-interventionists. Cole and Bone both compare the left's behavior in this situation unfavorably to it's support for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. As my friend Kevin put it, "the left used to fight." While Cole's comparison to the left's support for bigoted imperialist Winston Churchill during WWII is more tenable, the comparison to the left's support for the Republicans isn't entirely convincing. Their support was restricted to individually volunteering to fight under Republican leadership, not encouraging a superpower with ulterior motives and an ugly foreign policy record to invade and bomb the place from the sky. Bone's rhetoric in favor of the invasion also suggests too much of his historical hostility to pacifist leftism and not enough serious analysis.

Cole's analysis is more thorough, but it's still flawed. His argument that UN humanitarian intervention wouldn't create a negative precedent is unconvincing in light of the Iraq war (see the last paragraph of the linked article); his contention that this can't be about oil because Western companies already have access to Libyan oil fields under Qaddafi is unsophisticated and repudiated by Chomsky. His contentions that anti-intervention arguments "have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds" and that "if we just don't care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren't people of the left" is moral blackmail and reminds me of the "with us or with them" mentality of the Andrew Sullivan-types from the Bush era. One could be appalled at the treatment of Iraqi Shiites and oppose the Iraq war just as surely as one can be furious with the gunning down of protestors with aircraft while disagreeing with military force for a variety of complex reasons.

Perhaps the main reason that each of these accounts leaves me unsatisfied is that they don't satisfactorily deal with the real consequences Western intervention has for the future of the Libyan people. Cockburn denigrates them by linking many of them to Al Qaeda, Chomsky glosses over them in favor of more abstract principles and political truisms, and Bone and Cole cite concrete benefits of the intervention in the present but ignore the West's spurious record of liberation (see Cuba, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) that might give clues as to the future.

But I'm leaning towards supporting the intervention because the rebellion- a progressive and largely working class movement- has called for it. I respect their decision. We can't predict the future. Perhaps all we can do is trust the people involved and grant them the ability to direct the future as best they can.

Knowing Thy Enemy and Not Yourself: Why American History Should Be Taught Like Soviet History

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history; it just teaches you too much."- Noam Chomsky

Why don't American schools teach 20th century American history like they teach Soviet history? It's an honest question, based on two propositions: 1) We should, obviously, assess our conduct according to the same standards with which we assess our enemies, if not more harshly, and 2) There are enough similarities between the trajectories of Soviet and 20th century American history that they sometimes seem to even mirror each other (both were societies defined by social engineering projects on an unprecedented scale, both were dominant world powers presiding over the post-war period, both fought the Cold War through the maintenance of regional spheres of influence, etc.). And don't give me any of that "moral equivalency" crap. Soviet domestic conduct may have been far worse than ours, but we topped the Soviets in foreign policy horrors, if only because we had more power than them.

I’m inspired to ask this question based on my public school history education as well as two Oberlin classes, one on Russian history and the other on US foreign policy focusing largely on the Cold War. The first class was solid; the second was bullshit tantamount to indoctrination. The Russian history professor taught with affection for her subject, but she was also sober and unsentimental. The other professor, on the other hand, somehow forgot to mention things like the United States’ control over geographical spheres of influence that encompassed entire subcontinents, continents, and almost the entire Western hemisphere. We somehow avoided or barely discussed Israel, East Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti, Indonesia and Suharto, the IMF, the military-industrial complex, the fake-missile gap, etc. But we did get an entire class devoted largely to the influence of Western culture on the Eastern Europe, how East German kids went batshit for American blue jeans, etc. Otherwise, it was mostly top-down history, reverse Kremlinology, court stenography describing in tedious detail how The Best and the Brightest dueled with the Soviets amidst the fog of war.

I'll tell a revealing anecdote: during a class discussion comparing Soviet and American conduct during the Cold War, I said that I saw no substantial moral difference in the way that Americans treated their clients (Guatemala) and the way that the Soviet Union treated theirs (North Korea). To which the professor responded as a challenge: would I rather live in Western or Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Unprepared, I fumbled my answer and embarrassed myself, but the retort should have been immediate and obvious: would I rather live in Eastern Europe or Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, etc.? The idea that Our policies were comparable to Theirs was just not even entertained by him. And as Norman Finkelstein pointed out, when history is not subject to comparison, it becomes a totem to be worshipped at rather than understood.

If we taught American history like we teach Soviet history- that is, if we gave similar weight to issues in American history that we do to similar issues in Soviet history - we would actually confront major issues such as the termination of Arab nationalism, the destruction of Indochina (our class only discussed Vietnam and possibly Cambodia, amazingly, even though those invasions were only part of a war on the entirety of Southeast Asia), and general attempts by the US to prevent third world countries across the world from fully realizing the decolonization granted to them by World War II.

And that's just foreign policy. Below are other issues common to both Soviet history and 20th century American history. We discuss these issues as a matter of course when studying Soviet history, but we don't even know that these are issues in American history. The following list is almost certainly incomplete:

Soviet propaganda vs. American propaganda: American corporate and state propaganda was much more prevalent than Soviet propaganda and the propaganda of any other nation, as Alex Carey discusses. (This is partly a credit to the United States; it was a free enough country that the government could not use force to control people except under more extreme circumstances and had to resort to propaganda instead.) This includes corporate propaganda against unions and big society programs, war propaganda, Democrat and Republican campaign management by public relations firms, media propaganda produced in accordance with Chomsky's "propaganda model," and advertising- the latter openly referred to before World War II as propaganda.

Yet while Soviet propaganda is reflexively and correctly described as such, American propaganda is euphemistically referred to as advertising, campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, or is simply normalized and thus dismissed as being a natural part of politics. A Soviet-approach to American history would've exposed Obama's "Hope" and "Change" slogans as propaganda and would allow us to be more critical of the commercial advertising that permeates our society- initially designed quite consciously to control mass behavior (see Adam Curtis's excellent documentary The Century of the Self).

The Soviet Gulag vs. The Golden Gulag: The Soviet gulags might beat out American prisons in terms of horror and brutality (despite consistent rape and torture in American prisons), but America wins this contest in terms of scale. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes in Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, the prison construction program America embarked on in the 80s was the largest of its kind in history, built not for existing criminals, but in anticipation of the criminals that would emerge as a predictable byproduct of draconian drug laws and Reagan’s neoliberal order. None of my history classes taught this. They never told us that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But we were assigned Solzhenitsyn in a high school English class and read about their prisons. I suppose that was supposed to be more edifying then learning about our own.

The KGB vs. the FBI and COINTELPRO: No contest here: the KGB was, of course, worse than the FBI. Nevertheless, while it's household knowledge that the KGB disappeared innumerable Russians, operations like COINTELPRO, an FBI program of surveillance and disruption that included political assassination, is virtually unheard of in this country. As Chomsky points out in this interview, we were all made well aware of Watergate but not of COINTELPRO, in spite of the fact that the latter was overwhelmingly more significant for having actual consequences (sometimes fatal) for those who were under surveillance. We're also unaware of the FBI's use of RICO against groups like the Black Panthers, as described by Christian Parenti. We know that the KGB was the USSR's political police; we don't even know that we have a political police, or that it waged a covert campaign against members of its own population.

Students can’t be taught this. They would be confronted with the demoralizing rapidity and totality with which rebellions, even minor ones such as the Black Panther revolts, are crushed in American history; they would suspect that even American political power ultimately rests on violence; and they would define the 60s not by the patronizing version of Martin Luther King that’s spoon-fed to them but by the milieu of communist, black nationalist, militant, and radical student groups that represented an almost wholesale revolt against society as it was.

Soviet social engineering projects vs. American social engineering projects: Besides their foreign policies, this is the most significant similarity between the US and the USSR. Their social engineering projects include the dissemination of propaganda and the mass building of prisons described above. For America, they also include projects such as the National Highway Act (far and away the largest social engineering project in human history), suburbanization, the G.I. bill, military infiltration into American higher education, the New Deal and the Great Society (which are discussed, but not as social engineering projects), NAFTA, etc. Not to mention Pentagon spending, which, as Alexander Cockburn described it, is "the fundamental ballast" to the American economy. (I also doubt that American economics courses teach this.) Many of these programs are larger in scale than anything in Stalin's Five Year Plan- yet we don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country, much less their details.

As I wrote earlier: "Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is." But imagine if we were taught about these things: we would see that our common destiny does not unfold according to deterministic market logic that exists over and above human control as something holy, but is to a great extent shaped by an identifiable elite who can be targeted and then challenged. And- this might be the best part- knowledge of how much of America's progress is due to social engineering (including slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans) would hopefully dispel that obnoxious trope that "free market capitalism is what made this country great" and other Tea Party bullshit.

Afghanistan vs. Vietnam: Both conflicts are discussed- Americans did die in Vietnam, making it worthy of attention in American history classes in the way that East Timor is not- but they’re discussed differently. The Russian history professor never once took seriously the official Soviet claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken to defend the Afghan people from “agents of western reaction.” Rather, our primary text dealing with Afghanistan and the USSR’s resulting collapse was written by a New Republic liberal who spoke in the refreshing language of realpolitik (as we always do when discussing enemy nations): the Soviets invaded to crush an uprising and thereby send a warning to its other constitutive territories not to attempt secession and disintegrate the union.

Official propaganda, on the other hand, was taken at face value in our discussions of Vietnam: we invaded- sorry, we intervened- in South Vietnam to contain communist expansion and win the Cold War. Never mind that the NLF was a purely nationalist group at it’s outset and only became Stalinist and aligned with the Soviet Union when western forces made such an alliance necessary for self-defense. But the official explanation justifies what I think most students intuitively understand was an evil as a defense against a greater evil. Teaching that American policy by its nature always acts in accordance with some objective moral standard is a form of religious initiation, not education.

My Russian and American history courses did share flaws: many American academics seem too hesitant to intimately examine societal dynamics and the power bases of dominant groups- to approach education as sociology, as Theodor Adorno put it- out of fear that such analysis would be pigeonholed as “Marxist.” For example, we didn’t assess class in either course beyond discussion of the Kulaks and Russian peasants. But when scholars of Russia note a major event or overarching historical theme in their studies, they actually talk about it with their students, if sometimes superficially. Given that so many of the major events and overarching themes in American history are so similar to those of Soviet history (and should be much more important, give that we’re Americans), the only plausible explanation for the unique academic silence concerning them must be ideological. Underneath all the academic prestige, this is ultimately nothing more complicated than rooting for the team.

About That Lull...

I know that I don't have a lot of readers, but I'd figure I'd explain to you all why I haven't posted in so long.

In a nutshell, I've been doing a bit of rethinking, and a lot of my opinions, especially those about Oberlin and the higher education system in general, no longer seen entirely tenable. I still think that there are a lot of truth in my posts dealing with those issues, but they ignore or minimize what should be central facts: that colleges like Oberlin are some of the few places in the US where there is a real civil society- that is to say, a society in people spontaneously and constructively interact with each other more or less as equals - and that I'm very privileged to have attended one of them on my parents' dime rather then being forced to get a crappy job like most people in the world. I wrote these posts when I was in a bad state, and I think that some amount of projection was involved in writing them. Not to mention that the "We Are Oberlin" piece was self-pitying, humorless, and lacked self-reflection- a deadly combination. Again, there are certainly real cultural and structural problems with Oberlin and higher education, but they have to be balanced against the real benefits they provide.

I'm reconsidering all this due primarily to a recent post-graduation visit to Oberlin to see my girlfriend. I stayed in her dorm, called Harkness, which works as a sort of hippie-ish commune: the people there live, eat, cook, and clean together. It was the best argument for socialism or communism that I've encountered, better that any of the learned but abstract arguments I've read from Chomsky. It existed within a capitalist framework (although as I've noted earlier, colleges have pre-capitalist roots that survive despite their corporatization), but it worked communistically. It functioned. And quite unlike most capitalist institutions, it not only functioned but functioned joyously. The times that I fulfilled my obligation to help cook and clean were one of the few times that I actually felt like doing any work in my life. And the Hark hippies (to the extent that I can broadly label them as such) weren't the complacent hippies that the punks rebelled against, but were often active in a number of causes, like resisting mountaintop removal. They're not just lifestyle socialists. Not to mention that they were fun, intelligent, and interesting people. They weren't humorless leftie cliches.

I'm gushing with this point in mind: that Oberlin allows this place and other similar places to exist. The above qualities are not confined to Harkness: Oberlin allows students to explore different identities, lifestyles, and ideas (though it doesn't necessarily allow them to fully act on their implications) before the pressure of the working world smothers their creativity. Harkness was idyllic to me. Forget that it exists due to the patronage of a capitalist society which is it's backdrop, that it functions in a somewhat carceral manner like all college dorms and colleges as a whole, and that it's occasional tweeness and preciousness implicates it in the general insularity and decadence of the greater liberal class. Forget the context that Harkness exists in, in other words, just for a minute, and you can deeply appreciate it for the intimate, loving community that it is.

I have to thank Harkness first and foremost for the great time that I had, but I also have to thank Oberlin for allowing Harkness to exist, even if too much of Oberlin is embarrassed and resentful of it. My shift in this particular opinion has made me uncertain of others; hence I've been hesitant to commit any viewpoints for publication.

So, that's out of the way. This isn't a complete renunciation of past views, but some credit was due. Back to more bile, hopefully soon.