Putting Facts First
Concerning Benador Associates bio on Kanan Makiya , a small detail has been left out: Mr. Makiyas' career in Trotskyist politics prior to 1981. In an interview with Democratiya in 2006 Makiya claims,
"I feel the left that I came from has almost become nationalist. This language of relativism has translated itself into, 'Well, even if the regime of Saddam Hussein is so nasty, why should we go and liberate it?' Now that is something you would have got from an American isolationist, back in the old days. You would never have got it from somebody on the left. The positive element which I carried from the Trotskyist movement, from the writings of Trotsky himself, was an internationalist spirit. It was more alive in me, I think, than in many of those who claimed Trotsky's mantle, but did not practice that internationalism. It is a very sad state of affairs. The left has turned against its own internationalist traditions and thrown away its own universal values. The older left was able to cross boundaries and think across boundaries. That was its strength and its weakness."
With the word "never", Makiya reveals that the very last thing he took away from his Trotskyist experience was "internationalism", otherwise he'd be sufficiently informed about the international experiences of Trotskyism to know that it was the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party - hardly right wing "American isolationists" - who opposed U.S. entry into World War II as an imperialist war, and that parties' leaders did so, not from the comfort of some postmodern "cultural relativist" ivory tower, but from prison throughout the duration of that war. The anti-imperialist lefts' opposition to the brutal US invasion and occupation of Iraq pales in comparison to that of the SWP during the Second World War, for as beastly as the Saddam Hussein regime was, could it have possibly compared in extent and depth to that of the cruel horror unleashed by the Nazis?
How "unconscionable" of these, the original American Trotskyists! They should have followed the "internationalist" conscience of the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party U.S.A. and done their "moral duty" in "the war against fascism"! That is, if one accepts that the United States entered the war "to fight fascism", rather than for the purposes of its own imperialist aggrandizement - this latter being far closer to the truth.
A similar judgment pertains to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but even more so as the veil of rationales is so much thinner than that deployed in WW2. And so too in the comparison, the promoters of imperialist war stand all the more condemned: in Makyias' case condemned for putting his own self-centered concern for his own subjective "conscience" above any concern for objective reality. And the objective reality of Iraq now is that of an unimaginably bloody catastrophe perpetrated by the U.S.A. exceeding even that of Darfur:
Add to this the U.N. estimate of 500,000 Iraqi children killed by the Anglo-American bombing sanctions regime imposed with merciless cruelty throughout Bill Clintons' tenure - a cruelty succinctly expressed by that most irrepressible of US "diplomats", Madeleine Albright - oh, how I miss the complacent, uncensored blurtings of the ever self-important Ms. Mad Halfwit! - when she declared this Mongol pyramid of babies' skulls "worth the price" - as did Makiya apparently when he declared the bombs of March 2003 "music to his ears".
Today we are witness to a whole rising mountain range of such Mongol pyramids. And, emphatically, this was the result intended by U.S. imperialism, and no "accident"!
How else - as the appalling scale of Bushs' carnival of blood began to dawn on even the U.S citizenry, always kept in a Soviet-style maximum ignorance of the outside world by the complex of "handlers" found inside the Beltway, in the ivory towers of the Academy, in the corporate "infotainment" media and elsewhere - how else could Mr Cheney calmly chirp in November 2006, as the warlord in chiefs' political house of cards came crashing down around him, that everything "was on course" in Iraq, that "we" need only "stay the course" and "finish the job"? Because the annihilation of Iraq - and not simply Saddam Hussein - has always been the intention of imperialist policy since the beginning of the Persian Gulf War, if not earlier. It is indeed "Mission Accomplished". The proof is very much in the pudding, the reality of Iraq today.
This is indeed the conscious intent of U.S. imperialism, not only for Iraq and its neighbors in the region such as Lebanon, Syria and Iran, but for the entire world, including for the citizens of the U.S.A. itself. This is the real difference with the U.S. involvement in WW2, where at least there were some - no doubt largely unintended - subaltern progressive outcomes that went well beyond the simple "defeat of fascism", especially in the far more important result of the collapse of the Anglo-French colonial empires, as well as in the need to "contain communism" by permitting the social-democratic development of Western Europe - while denying the same "privileges" to its own citizens as well as those of postwar Japan. Today, however, there is not a shred, not a single stitch, of anything "progressive" in the imperialist interventions of the United States of America - there cannot be, as the simple existence of this imperialism itself has become an absolute barrier to human progress worldwide, as its contemporary record clearly shows, as for example in its attitude of support for the plundering of post-Soviet Russia under the drunken rule of Boris Yeltsin. Or was this yet another "accident", a "missed opportunity"?
All are instances that record the relation of the "abstract", "economic" concept of mode of production and productive forces with that of the more "concrete", "political" concept of imperialism. A contradictory relation for the U.S.A., which has gone from possession of some 60% of the worlds' productive force organized under capitalism to an ever shriveling percentage in the low teens today, a state that is now utterly dependent on China to supply its own citizens with many of the consumables of everyday life that it can no longer produce itself, where even more tellingly, its once mighty machine tool industry has simply dropped out of the international rankings of the larger economies of the world - how is that for the "independence of politics"? These are facts that compel this state to enforce its continuing global command over the mode of production by "extra-economic" means - military aggression in the Nazi style - for predatory financial effect. All of this should be palpably clear to those who have managed to pull their heads out of their own "conscience".
So, if Mr. Makiya is having trouble writing his last book on Iraq - and it will be his last, not because he has decided so, but because Iraq will likely cease to exist - may a course of inquiry be suggested? Perhaps Mr. Makiya could investigate into the details of how the U.S. planned and carried out the destruction of Iraq. He could begin immediately on a most poignant note: the obviously deliberately "permitted" plundering of Iraqs' historical and archaeological treasures by Donald "Shit Happens" Rumsfeld, as so painfully recounted by Chalmers Johnson in his recently published "Nemesis", as it should grieve anyone with an "internationalist" conscience to witness what is more than the Iraq "national heritage" - though it is that as well - but the origins of the collective civilized heritage of all humanity, simply go up in smoke or disappear into the void of some capitalists' "private" collection. Truly another milestone of "Mongolian" proportions!
From there Mr. Makiya could go on to document how the U.S. has worked to deliberately promote the sectarian division of and subsequent civil war in Iraq. This is U.S. policy and not an "accident", as in the constant "collateral" slaughter of innocent civilians perpetrated by the U.S. around the world, nor is it some "incompetence" in the implementation of the "well-intentioned" plan. That is exactly what Cheney meant in 2006: It is all going to "plan", and hopefully this wonderful success can be extended to Iran.
Such is the reality of United States imperialism in the world today. One could perform a great service to humanity and describe that reality in concrete detail. That would be the first "duty of conscience" of a real internationalist: to give us a critical description of the greatest international barrier to global human progress today. Or one could continue as the neoconservative "useful idiot" (NYT, may be stale), a truly tragic and dismal prospect, blaming it all on "Arab depravity", ignoring the fact that the favored therapy, imperialist intervention and occupation under the optimal conditions of total control of Iraq, has manifestly "failed" in its therapeutic results, because, our dear dupe, it was never intended to "succeed" in this in the first place.
The fateful choice is Mr. Makiyas' still. In the spirit also of revolutionary optimism, it is never too late.
Concerning Benador Associates bio on Kanan Makiya , a small detail has been left out: Mr. Makiyas' career in Trotskyist politics prior to 1981. In an interview with Democratiya in 2006 Makiya claims,
"I feel the left that I came from has almost become nationalist. This language of relativism has translated itself into, 'Well, even if the regime of Saddam Hussein is so nasty, why should we go and liberate it?' Now that is something you would have got from an American isolationist, back in the old days. You would never have got it from somebody on the left. The positive element which I carried from the Trotskyist movement, from the writings of Trotsky himself, was an internationalist spirit. It was more alive in me, I think, than in many of those who claimed Trotsky's mantle, but did not practice that internationalism. It is a very sad state of affairs. The left has turned against its own internationalist traditions and thrown away its own universal values. The older left was able to cross boundaries and think across boundaries. That was its strength and its weakness."
With the word "never", Makiya reveals that the very last thing he took away from his Trotskyist experience was "internationalism", otherwise he'd be sufficiently informed about the international experiences of Trotskyism to know that it was the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party - hardly right wing "American isolationists" - who opposed U.S. entry into World War II as an imperialist war, and that parties' leaders did so, not from the comfort of some postmodern "cultural relativist" ivory tower, but from prison throughout the duration of that war. The anti-imperialist lefts' opposition to the brutal US invasion and occupation of Iraq pales in comparison to that of the SWP during the Second World War, for as beastly as the Saddam Hussein regime was, could it have possibly compared in extent and depth to that of the cruel horror unleashed by the Nazis?
How "unconscionable" of these, the original American Trotskyists! They should have followed the "internationalist" conscience of the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party U.S.A. and done their "moral duty" in "the war against fascism"! That is, if one accepts that the United States entered the war "to fight fascism", rather than for the purposes of its own imperialist aggrandizement - this latter being far closer to the truth.
A similar judgment pertains to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but even more so as the veil of rationales is so much thinner than that deployed in WW2. And so too in the comparison, the promoters of imperialist war stand all the more condemned: in Makyias' case condemned for putting his own self-centered concern for his own subjective "conscience" above any concern for objective reality. And the objective reality of Iraq now is that of an unimaginably bloody catastrophe perpetrated by the U.S.A. exceeding even that of Darfur:
- Hundreds of thousands dead, according to the well known, Lancet survey, studiously ignored by "people of conscience", now finally accepted as "not rubbishable" (though surely they tried!) by the UK's Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific advisor, and Tony Blairs' own Foreign Office.
- Surely uncounted millions injured, for it is a predictable rule of war that for ever death there are upwards 10 wounded.
- Millions - over 4 million at present count - made refugees of war both within and outside Iraq.
- And finally, an infrastructure largely destroyed and never repaired, four years after the invasion.
Add to this the U.N. estimate of 500,000 Iraqi children killed by the Anglo-American bombing sanctions regime imposed with merciless cruelty throughout Bill Clintons' tenure - a cruelty succinctly expressed by that most irrepressible of US "diplomats", Madeleine Albright - oh, how I miss the complacent, uncensored blurtings of the ever self-important Ms. Mad Halfwit! - when she declared this Mongol pyramid of babies' skulls "worth the price" - as did Makiya apparently when he declared the bombs of March 2003 "music to his ears".
Today we are witness to a whole rising mountain range of such Mongol pyramids. And, emphatically, this was the result intended by U.S. imperialism, and no "accident"!
How else - as the appalling scale of Bushs' carnival of blood began to dawn on even the U.S citizenry, always kept in a Soviet-style maximum ignorance of the outside world by the complex of "handlers" found inside the Beltway, in the ivory towers of the Academy, in the corporate "infotainment" media and elsewhere - how else could Mr Cheney calmly chirp in November 2006, as the warlord in chiefs' political house of cards came crashing down around him, that everything "was on course" in Iraq, that "we" need only "stay the course" and "finish the job"? Because the annihilation of Iraq - and not simply Saddam Hussein - has always been the intention of imperialist policy since the beginning of the Persian Gulf War, if not earlier. It is indeed "Mission Accomplished". The proof is very much in the pudding, the reality of Iraq today.
This is indeed the conscious intent of U.S. imperialism, not only for Iraq and its neighbors in the region such as Lebanon, Syria and Iran, but for the entire world, including for the citizens of the U.S.A. itself. This is the real difference with the U.S. involvement in WW2, where at least there were some - no doubt largely unintended - subaltern progressive outcomes that went well beyond the simple "defeat of fascism", especially in the far more important result of the collapse of the Anglo-French colonial empires, as well as in the need to "contain communism" by permitting the social-democratic development of Western Europe - while denying the same "privileges" to its own citizens as well as those of postwar Japan. Today, however, there is not a shred, not a single stitch, of anything "progressive" in the imperialist interventions of the United States of America - there cannot be, as the simple existence of this imperialism itself has become an absolute barrier to human progress worldwide, as its contemporary record clearly shows, as for example in its attitude of support for the plundering of post-Soviet Russia under the drunken rule of Boris Yeltsin. Or was this yet another "accident", a "missed opportunity"?
All are instances that record the relation of the "abstract", "economic" concept of mode of production and productive forces with that of the more "concrete", "political" concept of imperialism. A contradictory relation for the U.S.A., which has gone from possession of some 60% of the worlds' productive force organized under capitalism to an ever shriveling percentage in the low teens today, a state that is now utterly dependent on China to supply its own citizens with many of the consumables of everyday life that it can no longer produce itself, where even more tellingly, its once mighty machine tool industry has simply dropped out of the international rankings of the larger economies of the world - how is that for the "independence of politics"? These are facts that compel this state to enforce its continuing global command over the mode of production by "extra-economic" means - military aggression in the Nazi style - for predatory financial effect. All of this should be palpably clear to those who have managed to pull their heads out of their own "conscience".
So, if Mr. Makiya is having trouble writing his last book on Iraq - and it will be his last, not because he has decided so, but because Iraq will likely cease to exist - may a course of inquiry be suggested? Perhaps Mr. Makiya could investigate into the details of how the U.S. planned and carried out the destruction of Iraq. He could begin immediately on a most poignant note: the obviously deliberately "permitted" plundering of Iraqs' historical and archaeological treasures by Donald "Shit Happens" Rumsfeld, as so painfully recounted by Chalmers Johnson in his recently published "Nemesis", as it should grieve anyone with an "internationalist" conscience to witness what is more than the Iraq "national heritage" - though it is that as well - but the origins of the collective civilized heritage of all humanity, simply go up in smoke or disappear into the void of some capitalists' "private" collection. Truly another milestone of "Mongolian" proportions!
From there Mr. Makiya could go on to document how the U.S. has worked to deliberately promote the sectarian division of and subsequent civil war in Iraq. This is U.S. policy and not an "accident", as in the constant "collateral" slaughter of innocent civilians perpetrated by the U.S. around the world, nor is it some "incompetence" in the implementation of the "well-intentioned" plan. That is exactly what Cheney meant in 2006: It is all going to "plan", and hopefully this wonderful success can be extended to Iran.
Such is the reality of United States imperialism in the world today. One could perform a great service to humanity and describe that reality in concrete detail. That would be the first "duty of conscience" of a real internationalist: to give us a critical description of the greatest international barrier to global human progress today. Or one could continue as the neoconservative "useful idiot" (NYT, may be stale), a truly tragic and dismal prospect, blaming it all on "Arab depravity", ignoring the fact that the favored therapy, imperialist intervention and occupation under the optimal conditions of total control of Iraq, has manifestly "failed" in its therapeutic results, because, our dear dupe, it was never intended to "succeed" in this in the first place.
The fateful choice is Mr. Makiyas' still. In the spirit also of revolutionary optimism, it is never too late.
Labels: Putting Facts First
posted by keitai at 1:52 PM
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