(When links expire–and they certainly will in many cases–either use the full title of each item, inside quotation marks, and use that as a search term, or use the expired URL and use http://web.archive.org to do a search in its Wayback Machine.)

This report covers the period from April 1, 2013 to May 8, 2013.

This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE.

For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page.

This report’s focus is on what one can loosely call “search and distort missions”: imperial attempts to locate political, economic, intellectual and informational zones of difference and opposition, with the intent of neutralizing or erasing them. The primary cases covered in this report are: (a) the ongoing proxy war against Syria; (b) the continued unraveling of Libya; (c) the recent elections in Venezuela, and how the U.S. is backing the destabilization and delegitimizing of free and fair elections won by Nicolás Maduro; (d) how Bolivia fights back and expels the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and, an assorted range of landmark news and events concerning other features of processes of domination, as well as organized resistance against it.

SYRIA

Speaking on May 7, 2013, at the White House, Barack Obama made the following remarks on Syria, which spoke relatively clearly of the U.S. as a power that has been intervening in Syria and is determined to continue intervening, while also tactlessly waving bloodied hands to his audience by candidly taking responsibility for the egregious murder of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and for yet again gloating over the execution of Bin Laden. Emphases are added:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, Stephen, I think that we have both a moral obligation and a national security interest in, A, ending the slaughter in Syria, but, B, also ensuring that we’ve got a stable Syria that is representative of all the Syrian people, and is not creating chaos for its neighbors. And that’s why for the last two years we have been active in trying to ensure that Bashar Assad exits the stage, and that we can begin a political transition process.

That’s the reason why we’ve invested so much in humanitarian aid. That’s the reason why we are so invested in helping the opposition; why we’ve mobilized the international community to isolate Syria. That’s why we are now providing nonlethal assistance to the opposition, and that’s why we’re going to continue to do the work that we need to do.

And in terms of the costs and the benefits, I think there would be severe costs in doing nothing. That’s why we’re not doing nothing. That’s why we are actively invested in the process. If what you’re asking is, are there continuing reevaluations about what we do, what actions we take in conjunction with other international partners to optimize the day when — or to hasten the day when we can see a better situation in Syria — we’ve been doing that all along and we’ll continue to do that….

So we want to make sure that we have the best analysis possible. We want to make sure that we are acting deliberately. But I would just point out that there have been several instances during the course of my presidency where I said I was going to do something and it ended up getting done. And there were times when there were folks on the sidelines wondering why hasn’t it happened yet and what’s going on and why didn’t it go on tomorrow? But in the end, whether it’s bin Laden or Qaddafi, if we say we’re taking a position, I would think at this point the international community has a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments.

Elite Academic Imperialists: “Solidarity with Syria”?

Unsubstantiated and uncorroborated stories once again started emanating from the White House about chemical weapons in Syria. Threats of higher levels of U.S. intervention were immediately issued. At the same time, the Syrian government announced important new strategic victories against armed rebels. A few days later, Israel conducted bombing runs against Syrian targets. It was in this context that dozens of academics in the U.S., including several notable anthropologists (plus ça change…), began signing an execrable petition that calls for regime change in Syria. Originally published in late April by something calling itself the “Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution,” that in speaking about itself names no key individuals who started the campaign and says nothing about the history of the organization, it is nonetheless endorsed by “leftist luminaries such as Norman Finkelstein, Gilbert Achcar and Tariq Ali [and] academics of the stature of Frederic Jameson.” Clearly the intention is to provide legitimacy for the petition’s version of the Syrian opposition by borrowing the symbolic capital of elite academia.

Among the anthropologists who signed this petition are several Latin Americanists including Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena who are not known as specialists focusing on Syria, as well as Ghassan Hage, Talal Asad, and Sami Hermez. Also included are noteworthy/supposed “post-colonialists” such as Gustavo Esteva, Ania Loomba, and Vijay Prashad; alleged anti-imperialists such as Richard Seymour; feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty; and the one-time “radical” Bill Ayers, among other prominent names such as Etienne Balibar, Rashid Khalidi, and Manuel Castells. What is common to all of these signatories, is not just their prominent positioning in elite academic institutions and/or the media, it is also the fact that if one added the number of pages each one wrote, in which “Syria” is mentioned even in passing, one would not have enough material for a single op-ed, let alone a distinguished career of research and writing on Syria. Then what was the point of inviting these individuals to sign the document?

Quick to do what empire tells them is “politically correct,” and possibly necessary to bolster their political capital within elite institutions that breed the next generations of imperialist planners, scribes, future dependents and hirelings of the national security state and its associated industries, these signatories presumably paid little attention to what they were signing, and if they did, they apparently could sign it nonetheless with little question. Obviously I am speaking here primarily of the North American and European academic signatories, and not as much their derivatives and dependents in Middle Eastern universities.

While the petition calls for a “free” and “democratic” Syria, these heavily loaded terms go completely undefined, without even a minimal, cursory form of exegesis. If what goes without saying is what came without saying, it seems likely that the signatories are working on the assumption that these are to be understood as the liberal democratic ideals that form part of their own social training and political enculturation. Yet, is there any question about what these could mean to Syrians, and how they could possibly take root in a country overrun by thousands of violent fundamentalists backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar? No, no questions.

In addition, these signatories do not even spot the basic contradictions in the document, where on the one hand the petition speaks of active foreign intervention (and presumes to be even handed between the legitimate support offered by states allied to the established government, versus the covert and proxy warfare fought by intervening powers in violation of international law…but those liberal ideals, like all others can be quickly sacrificed), and yet also states, quite remarkably: “regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone.” Have they? Did you read this when you signed it? And if you did, you have no problem signing your name to such preposterous falsehoods? As an undergraduate student paper, I would not accept such work for a grade for having failed to do even elementary background research–and yet here these supposedly reputable academics are signing their names to this.

Did these signatories not pause at the opening paragraph that forms the very start of the petition? “We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with the millions of Syrians who have been struggling for dignity and freedom since March 2011. We call on people of the world to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the Syrian people. We demand that Bashar al-Asad leave immediately without excuses so that Syria can begin a speedy recovery towards a democratic future”–the statement is one that promotes regime change, that reduces a conflict to the fortunes of one named person, and that naively implies that his departure will mean Syria undergoes not just a “recovery” toward “democracy,” but that it will be a “speedy” one as well. Moreover, they are inserting their desires in place of all Syrians. This is basic neoliberal script, bordering on puerile trash talk, and it mimics thousands of related statements that should be familiar to anyone who has been paying any attention to the pronouncements of the U.S. State Department. In addition, given what has happened in Libya, why would these academics lend themselves to the belief that the story of the Syrian conflict will resolve itself in such a happy ending? No worries, because mention of Libya itself is smuggled into the same document, as if it were an experience to be praised and continued. Of course, anthropologists almost as a total whole have completely ignored any discussion of Libya, even when the subject matter touches their discipline directly, in terms of the basic understandings of the human condition implied by humanitarian intervention.

Perhaps what motivated these eminent scholars to sign on were such wonderfully romantic statements that postulate war in Syria as “an extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico.” Did the signatories take this seriously? We may leave aside the fact that this statement seems to wish the Syrian rebels very bad luck (the Zapatistas never achieved any of their key demands, not even 20 years later–perhaps this is the kind of combination of symbolic effects and political non-impact that resigned Western middle class liberals can tolerate). The question that it raises, however, is: since when did the Zapatistas engage in a violent grab for state power? Unlike the Syrian opposition, the Zapatistas never had, and still have no intention of ever taking hold of the state. So why lump apples and oranges together in the same basket? Not even the elites who sometimes teach about mystification are invulnerable to  the work of dominant ideas/ideas of dominance. Signing this petition, at this time, is similar to if academics had in late 2002 signed a petition denouncing Saddam Hussein and calling for his removal from Iraq: in such a context, a chorus of shared opinion can serve to shore up legitimacy for U.S. intervention. In agreement with U.S. foreign policy, these academics have conceded major territory: they have conceded that Bashar Asad should be the focal point of discussion, which is exactly how the State Department prefers to spin matters.

And now that the symbolic capital of elite Western academics has been acquired, what use has it really been? It has had zero impact on events in Syria. So what then? Such a petition, with such signatories, can serve as yet another signpost to Western academics of which way they should be pointing their noses, to dutifully keep up the nodding momentum, and to reproduce what our dominant political class wants us to repeat. This reminds me of certain anthropologists who say they research imperialism, colonialism, and the CIA, only to discover that what they mean is that their focus is on China-Tibet, and on humanizing the “humanitarian” side of the CIA. In other words, for critique to be safe it must be projected in line with or parallel to the interests of the state’s foreign policy. This petition is nothing different than that: it is criticism without critique, condemnation without reflection, and hope without honesty.

Responses to the Petition:

Fortunately, there have been a few striking criticisms published against the above petition (but not nearly enough and not by equally famous academics in the elite centres of imperial academia). Amal Saad-Ghorayeb writes with all due sarcasm and disbelief in “I want to go to there, to that Syrian revolutionary utopia“:

See, this revolutionary utopia rejects that [foreign, specifically Western] intervention although it is calling on “global civil society” i.e. Western NGOs, to do precisely that. You see, this revolution has no support in mainstream corporate or Arab media or among the completely brainwashed western and Arab publics. Its a poor little revolution that has been “left alone” by the “regional and world powers.” I really want to go to there, to that Marxist revolutionary utopia where everyone wears a Kuffieh and a Che Guevara t-shirt and looks like Will Smith; a place where those who delight in posing for the cameras while barbecuing the heads of captured helicopter pilots are but anomaly of an otherwise progressive, popular revolution which will usher in freedom, love, peace and harmony if only it would get more western support.

“Syria: The Feckless Left” is a stirring condemnation of what passes itself off as “the left” in Western imperial societies, and it begins as follows:

The geo-political analysis of the screed would not pass the muster of a child, and the empty verbiage comes straight out of a George W. Bush or Barak Obama speech — without exaggeration. In any event, don’t mislead yourself into thinking the timing was accidental in the face of the collapse of the mercenary Takfiri front. Because it wasn’t. When the empire finds its back against wall, it will not hesitate in pulling out all stops — even if it means trotting out a brigade of tired old leftists in its dirty service.

Taming Critiques of Foreign Intervention in Syria: A Case Study from Arena

The Australian magazine, Arena, published exchanges debating the nature and degree of foreign intervention in Syria–one side, represented by Jeremy Salt, who dissects the conflict in Syria as being one that has largely become a contest between regional and foreign powers, and the other, led by Firas Massouh, Yoni Molad and Stephen Pascoe, who argue that this is genuine democratic revolution against oppression. See the following:

“Tearing Syria Apart” by Jeremy Salt, Arena, April 2013–extract:

A war is being waged in and on Syria. Protecting the people from the dictator is no more than the usual pretext for attacks on Middle Eastern countries. The real target is not Bashar but Syria itself. It is Israel’s visceral enemy; it has got in the way of the West virtually since its emergence as an independent state in the 1940s; and for more than two decades it has been the central pillar in the Iran–Syria–Hizbullah ‘axis of resistance’. Unrest following the arrival of the ‘Arab spring’ was an opportunity that outside governments and their regional allies moved quickly to exploit. The United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey pooled their resources in an attempt to bring down the government in Damascus. Inside Syria their tools have been armed groups increasingly dominated by local and foreign jihadists who want to turn Syria into an Islamic emirate. They are the very people the United States and its allies were supposed to be fighting in their ‘war on terror’ yet here they are in Syria supporting them….Enough is not yet enough. The United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are determined to destroy the central pillar in the Middle East axis of resistance even at the risk of destroying Syria. Not since the end of the First World War has a Middle Eastern country been targeted for destruction in such a remorseless fashion. The means are justified by the end: as a geo-strategic triumph, the destruction of the Syrian government would eclipse the sidelining of Egypt through the 1979 treaty with Israel and perhaps surpass even the destruction of Iraq as a unitary state. The stakes could not be higher: nothing is beyond contemplation, including the assassination of Bashar if his enemies think they can get away with it. The outcome of this latest phase of the long-running struggle for Syria will determine the future of the Middle East for many decades to come.

“Putting Syria Back Together Again: A response to Jeremy Salt” by Firas Massouh, Yoni Molad and Stephen Pascoe, Arena, April 2013–extract:

Jeremy Salt’s essay on Syria published in this edition of Arena is a misguided contribution to the debate on recent events in that country. Salt’s central contention is that the Syrian Revolution is not, as we are allegedly led to believe, a genuine popular uprising, but instead something more sinister. His essay constructs a rather elaborate conspiracy theory, whose essence can be expressed as follows: that the people of Syria who have chosen the path of armed resistance are no more than the ‘tools’ of foreign powers who are hell bent on destroying the country, its secular character and its status as part of an ‘axis of resistance’ to Western imperial interests in the Middle East (and by extension, the interests of Syria’s bête noire: the State of Israel). In this response, we reject Salt’s thesis and uncover the faulty evidential base upon which it is constructed. We argue that Salt’s interpretation of events is misguided because it is anachronistic and abstract, mired in cold-war realpolitik propaganda. Salt’s argument represents a classic conspiracy theory, in the sense that it contains shards of truth, extrapolated into a metanarrative that ascribes agency to some shadowy, globally-powerful force. Inherent in Salt’s argument is an outright dismissal of any revolutionary potential in Syria. This more than a mere theoretical misinterpretation; rather, it is an intentional attempt to avoid interrogating or making explicit the very ideas and beliefs on which the structure of the Assad regime is built. In place of criticism, Salt offers a spurious distinction ‘between a system most Syrians don’t like and a president many of them do like’. Elsewhere, he has argued that although Assad ‘sits on top of the system, it is misleading to call him a dictator. The system itself is the true dictator’. In what follows, we examine the historical, political and ideological foundations of Salt’s flawed reading of the Syrian situation.

“Salt Responds,” Arena, April 2013–extract:

My critics deny that the United States, Britain, France, Saudi, Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are involved in a coordinated effort to bring down the government in Damascus, partly by funding an exiled ‘national coalition’ and partly by funding armed groups. This will surprise many readers because the facts are so completely against them. They say that the West ‘has not had an appetite for intervening directly in Syria the way it did in Libya or Mali’. I have to assume they have forgotten that the United States made strenuous efforts to secure a UN Security Council resolution that would have allowed open military intervention on the Libyan model, with consequences that would have been far worse, but were repeatedly blocked by Russia and China. Scarcely hidden covert intervention was the second best choice of the collective calling itself ‘The Friends of the Syrian People’. As I have written, the armed groups are their tools, whether my critics admit it not. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar cut off funding and the supply of arms—at least 3500 tons of which have been provided over the past year—the insurgency will begin to wither at its roots.

The Neocolonial Arab Human Rights Activist: A Case Study

Writing in Electronic Intifada (May 7, 2013), a politically bifurcated Max Blumenthal (see here and here) produces a neither surprising nor novel, but nonetheless interesting expose of the work of one Nasser Weddady (see: “Weddady’s Free Arabs, American Islamic Congress and the pro-Israel funders who helped them rise“). Put briefly, Nasser Weddady is a Mauritanian expatriate, based in Boston, who presents himself as a “human rights activist” and works for the American Islamic Congress (AIC). Many of his pronouncements in social network sites tend to parrot those of the State Department, perhaps exceeding them in zeal but not reaching even their minimal level of nuance: hence, Hugo Chávez was a “dictator,” and the Libyan “revolution” was to be praised and supported at all costs, regardless of the ethnic cleansing conducted by the “revolutionaries” and the violent, racist persecution of black Libyans and African migrants that formed a consistent theme throughout the last 15 years of anti-Gaddafi organizing. Likewise, Weddady is of course well on board with the overthrow of President Asad in Syria. Weddady, a lay figure, was called upon by the governor of Massachusetts to replace a notable religious authority in representing Muslims at an interfaith service presided by Obama.

Here are is a sample of Blumenthal’s key findings:

An investigation of the American Islamic Congress by The Electronic Intifada revealed a disturbing history that stretches back to the invasion of Iraq, with political patronage from the Bush administration building the organization from the ground up. Despite its claim to promote tolerance, the AIC has depended on substantial support from the very same elements that fought tooth and nail to sabotage the Islamic Society of Boston, and which seem determined to undermine Muslim communal organizing efforts across the country.

The organization has managed to maintain US government funding during the Obama era, serving as a faithful arm of soft American power in the Middle East while nurturing the creation of Weddady’s new “Free Arabs” website, a self-proclaimed portal to “Democracy, Secularism, [and] Fun” that eschews criticism of Western policies towards the Middle East while promoting US military intervention in Syria….

According to Internal Revenue Service 990 information filings, the AIC is funded largely by a pool of right-wing donors responsible for bankrolling key players in America’s Islamophobia industry, from Charles Jacobs to Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. These same donors have pumped millions into major pro-Israel organizations, including groups involved in settlement activity and the Friends of the IDF, which provides assistance to the Israeli army.

Among the AIC’s most reliable supporters is the Donors Capital Fund, which has provided at least $85,000 in funding since 2008. Donors Capital was among the seven foundations identified in the Center for American Progress’s 2011 report Fear Inc. as “the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America.” Another foundation singled out in the report, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, has donated $325,000 to the AIC between 2005 and 2011….

Despite having participated in a dubious mission that was widely criticized as right-wing political patronage, the AIC has maintained a steady stream of government funding since Barack Obama entered the White House. In 2009, the AIC received more than $433,000 from the State Department to conduct conflict resolution programs in Iraq, claiming to have “diffused 60 conflicts” in the country. Two years later, it reaped $1.28 million in government funding for Iraqi conflict resolution and to train “social entrepreneurs” in Tunisia; over $170,000 of the government money was earmarked for democracy promotion. Today, the AIC maintains offices in Tunis and Cairo, both apparently supported by State Department grants.

Democracy, Secularism, Fun? Imperialist script is becoming increasingly droll.

To these documented receipts of funds, the “Free Arabs” website produced a response, of sorts, that mistakenly claims this is a conspiratorial form of “guilt by association.” They were also very hurt by insults in Twitter. What thin skins serve as armour for these wannabe warriors.

Not Our War

Finally for now, to say that not everyone in the U.S. is sold on the need for another foreign military intervention is an understatement. This is true even after two solid years of having continual attempts to bash their eardrums with constant pleas for “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of freedom-loving Syrians who only want democracy, against the cruel repression of an evil dictator. Instead, as Reuters reported (not intended as an endorsement of Reuters):

Most Americans do not want the United States to intervene in Syria’s civil war even if the government there uses chemical weapons, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Wednesday, in a clear message to the White House as it considers how to respond to the worsening crisis.

Only 10 percent of those surveyed in the online poll said the United States should become involved in the fighting. Sixty-one percent opposed getting involved.

The figure favoring intervention rose to 27 percent when respondents were asked what the United States should do if President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons. Forty-four percent would be opposed….

Many Americans are still oblivious to events in Syria. The poll found that about one-third, or 36 percent, had neither heard nor read anything about the civil war there.

Only 8 percent said they had heard or read a great deal and 19 percent said they had heard or read a “fair amount.”

Ironically out of touch with the anti-war sentiments of what is either a majority, or more consistently a large minority of Americans, the so-called “liberal left” in the U.S. is largely pro-war and pro-intervention. The Nation‘s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, once remonstrated with me that the U.S. cannot afford to become “isolationist,” in her words. Lost on her is the fact that only imperialists ever speak in such terms. The only conceivable way in which non-intervention and non-aggression could constitute “isolation” is if one believes that the U.S. has a right to rule globally, that is, an idea enchanted with manifest destiny, possessed by an implicit belief in the “natural” posture of the U.S. as a world power, such that any relinquishing to others of their right to self-determination is perceived as a form of “withdrawal.” Therefore, it is not surprising that, as in the case of Libya, it is once again the libertarian right-wing that produces public statements denouncing interventionism–”America, a republic, not an empire.” This is the case, once more, of Pat Buchanan–writing on April 30, 2013, in “Their War, Not Ours:”

“The worst mistake of my presidency,” said Ronald Reagan of his decision to put Marines into the middle of Lebanon’s civil war, where 241 died in a suicide bombing of their barracks.

And if Barack Obama plunges into Syria’s civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush.

Why would Obama even consider this?

Because he blundered badly. Foolishly, he put his credibility on the line by warning that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer” with “enormous consequences.”

Not only was this ultimatum unwise, Obama had no authority to issue it. If Syria does not threaten or attack us, Obama would need congressional authorization before he could constitutionally engage in acts of war against Syria. When did he ever receive such authorization?

Moreover, there is no proof Syrian President Bashar Assad ever ordered the use of chemical weapons…

Why stay out? Because it is not our war. There is no vital U.S. interest in who rules Syria. Hafez Assad and Bashar have ruled Syria for 40 years. How has that ever threatened us?

Moreover, U.S. intervention would signal to Assad that the end is near, making his use of every weapon in his arsenal, including chemical weapons, more — not less — likely.

U.S. intervention would also make us de facto allies of Assad’s principal enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida. As The New York Times reported Sunday, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

Do we really wish to expend American blood and treasure to bring about a victory of Islamists and jihadists in Syria?

Not our war is a statement that should be echoed throughout NATO member states, as Canada’s government, once again a willing party to folly and eager to serve as “Al Qaeda’s air force,” announced it would consider providing air support for Syria’s rebels. Also repeating the pattern that occurred before the intervention in Libya, top U.S. military brass are among the very few advising caution for a change, at least in public–see “Why America’s top general is wary of US military intervention in Syria” :

[General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on military intervention in Syria]: “Whether the military effect would produce … an end to the violence, some kind of political reconciliation among the parties, and a stable Syria – that’s the reason I’ve been cautious … because it is not clear to me that it would produce that outcome.”

LIBYA

Almost exactly replicating one of the key arguments in my publications on Libya, Slouching Towards Sirte chief among them, Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch recently observed: “All civilians deserve protection, but some civilians deserve more protection than others. Or so it seems in Libya today” (see “Why have we forgotten about Libya?“). So it seems in Libya today, but so it seemed in Libya starting in February 2011, when Human Rights Watch itself discounted the number of civilians killed by opposition forces in pushing for Western intervention against the Libyan government under Gaddafi. Some of us have not forgotten about Libya, nor have we forgotten the duplicitous actors who cash in on both ends of the conflict. Yet now even Abrahams cannot escape the continuing duplicity of foreign actors, including the UN itself:

But while the U.N. Security Council and its powerful members jumped to protect Libyan civilians when Gadhafi was the enemy, they have not taken serious action against the revenge attacks that Tawerghans and other displaced communities in Libya are suffering from today – about 60,000 people in all, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In its resolution on Libya this month, the Security Council rightly expressed concern about reprisals, torture and executions, but failed to mention the plight of Tawerghans. Even the U.N. mission in Libya, watching developments up close, has not made the abuses against Tawerghans and other allegedly “pro-Gadhafi” communities a central theme.

International legal obligations suggest that they should. The violations against Tawerghans are widespread, systematic and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity. The U.N.’s commission of inquiry on Libya made this point a year ago.

The question for Abrahams then is this: when some of us were saying these things at the outset of the conflict, noting that the UN Human Rights Commission denied Libya the right to represent itself while throwing the doors open to all sorts of shadowy “human rights organizations,” and while Libya was actually denied representation at the UN as a whole in violation of its charter, why were we “wrong” then, and automatically ignored, and we are suddenly right now? Maybe Abrahams would be wise to learn lessons from critics, rather than just echoing them when it is too late.

Meanwhile, as Libya continues to fall to pieces and is ruled by thousands of armed dictators each issuing orders to “government” at gunpoint, as with the recent siege of the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a successful effort to coerce parliament to pass a wide-ranging “political isolation” law, also known as “de-Gaddafication,” the UN has had little to say about its own role in helping to create the conditions for this situation and instead seems to continue in arrogating to itself the right to speak for all Libyans. The UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) stated the following: “UNSMIL urges all Libyans to adhere to constructive dialogue to resolve their differences in accordance with the principles of democracy as the way forward to achieving the goals of the revolution.” The question apparently lost on UNSMIL here is this: if is up to the UN to “remind” Libyans what their “revolution” ought to be about, is it possible that maybe the UN never understood the conflict to begin with?

The theme of Libya falling apart post-Gaddafi is also emphasized in two recent reviews of Slouching Towards Sirte–and both draw connections with the continuing proxy war against Syria as well:

“The Fall of Libya,” by Max Ajl, Monthly Review, April 2013–extract:

Perhaps no war in recent memory has so thoroughly flummoxed the Euro-Atlantic left as the recent NATO war on Libya. Presaging what would occur as U.S. proxies carried out an assault on Syria, both a pro-war left and an anti-anti-war left started filling up socialist e-zines and broadsheets with endless explanations and tortuous justifications for why a small invasion, perhaps just a “no-fly-zone,” would be okay—so long as it didn’t grow into a larger intervention. They cracked open the door to imperialism, with the understanding that it would be watched very carefully so as to make sure that no more of it would be allowed in than was necessary to carry out its mission. The absurdity of this posture became clear when NATO immediately expanded its mandate and bombed much of Libya to smithereens, with the help of on-the-ground militia, embraced as revolutionaries by those who should have known better—and according to Maximilian Forte, could have known better, had they only looked.

Forte is an anthropologist, and what he offers us in Slouching Towards Sirte is an ethnography of U.S. culture and the way it enabled and contributed to the destruction of Libya. It is also a meticulously documented study in hypocrisy: that of the U.S. elite, of the Gulf ruling classes who have lately welded their agenda directly onto that of the United States, and of the liberal bombardiers who emerged in the crucible of the “humanitarian” wars of the 1990s only to reemerge as cheerleaders for the destruction of another Arab country in 2011. Finally, it is a study of the breakdown of the anti-war principles of leftists in the United States and Europe, so many of whom, for so long, sustained an infatuation with confused rebels whose leadership early on had their hand out to the U.S. empire, prepared to pay any cost—including Libya itself—to take out a leader under whom they no longer were prepared to live.

“How humanitarians trumped neo-cons in Libya,” by Dan Glazebrook, Asia Times, April 25, 2013–extract:

The media has gone very quiet on Libya of late; clearly, liberal imperialists don’t like to dwell on their crimes. This is not surprising. The modus operandi of the humanitarian imperialist is not one of informed reflection, but only permanent outrage against leaders of the global South; besides, in the topsy-turvy world of liberal interventionism, the “failure to act” is the only crime of which the West is capable.

As Forte puts it, their moral code holds that “If we do not act, we should be held responsible for the actions of others. When we do act, we should never be held responsible for our own actions.” With Muammar Gaddafi dead, the hunt is on for a new hate figure on whom to spew venom (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, North Korean leader Kim Jong-eun); far more satisfying than actually evaluating our own role in the creation of human misery. This is the colonial mentality of the liberal lynch mob.

AFRICOM and the New Scramble for Africa

Also relevant are at least two recent articles dealing with AFRICOM and the new scramble for Africa:

“The New Scramble for Africa,” by Hakim Adi, e-International Relations, April 15, 2013–extract:

….The new ‘scramble’ is also a consequence of the fact that Africa stands poised to break free from the economic dependency that has been one of the most enduring and damaging legacies of colonial rule and its aftermath. In the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies were in Africa. In eight of the last ten years Africa’s economic growth has been faster than that of East Asia. Africa’s population is growing too and expected to provide half of the world’s increase in population in the next forty years. It is also expected that Africa will soon have over 100m people with an income of over $3000 per annum (almost the same as India). As a consequence the World Bank has reported that the continent could be on the brink of the same kind of economic take-off as experienced by China and India in the past, even though it is still heavily reliant on external investment. Africa is becoming increasingly important not only as a supplier of raw materials but also as a location for capital investment (this has increased by 500% over the last ten years), and as a market for goods. The continent is particularly important for its oil and gas supplies in established areas such as Libya, Nigeria, Guinea, Angola, and Algeria but also in new areas such as, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia. The US gets 15% of its oil from Africa, more than from the Middle East, and this is set to rise to around 25%. However, the US and its allies often find themselves in competition with the other big powers. China, for example, now obtains a third of its imported oil from Africa. The major buyers of Sudan’s oil are China, Japan, India and Malaysia and China has also become a major purchaser of Nigeria’s oil….

“For AFRICOM, All the World’s a Stage,” by Joeva Rock, My Thoughts Were So Loud I Couldn’t Hear My Mouth, May 9, 2013–extract:

On April 25th, AFRICOM, the US central command in Africa, joined USAID in celebrating World Malaria Day by spreading awareness of the US’s counter-malaria efforts in Africa. But don’t let the humanitarian façade fool you; this was a PR campaign for AFRICOM’s military presence in West Africa.

Using their Facebook page and the hashtag #malariabuzz, AFRICOM attempted to reach the world’s audience to promote their programs in West Africa which partner with countries to share “best practices.” These programs, according to AFRICOM, serve to “enhance civilian-to-military cooperation,” a turn of phrase that hauntingly echoes of the US’ misguided promise to win the hearts of mind of Iraqis during the 2003 invasion.

Unfortunately, humanitarian-military partnerships are not unique to AFRICOM, nor is this the first time the US military has used health workers in tactical operations: health practitioners in Pakistan were unknowingly lured into aiding in the capture of Osama Bin Laden, which has resulted in job-losses, death-threats, and the mistrust and assassinations of health workers around the country.

VENEZUELA

At this stage most readers will already know that the recent presidential elections in Venezuela were won by Nicolás Maduro, by a majority, thus renewing popular faith in continuing the Bolivarian socialist revolution. As most readers should also know, once Washington has declared itself your enemy, no number of popular plebiscites, referenda, congressional, gubernatorial and presidential elections won by landslides, in the fairest electoral system in the world, will release you from the epithet of “dictator.” When the U.S. talks about “promoting democracy,” what it always means is promoting parties useful to its interests–and this is a fact that, if it needed to be established yet again, is being established yet again as a fact. The U.S. is better at paying, producing, aiding and abetting fraudulent elections, whose results it promptly recognizes–repeatedly, as in the case of Afghanistan, and previously in the case of El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic–than it is at recognizing the legitimacy of opponents’ elections.

Here are some of the more important essays to read on the current attempts by Washington to delegitimize Venezuela’s democratic elections and to promote destabilization:

“The U.S. Should Learn From Venezuela How to Hold Elections,” by Eugenio Martinez, FORBES Magazine–extract:

I’ve covered Venezuelan elections as a journalist for the past 14 years. I have published dozens of articles emphasizing why the results of Venezuela’s elections truly reflect the will of the majority. During the last eight years Venezuelan electoral authorities developed a truly reliable voting system. Technically speaking, our elections are impeccable….

“Nicolas Maduro did not Steal the Venezuelan Elections,” by Greg Palast, Vice, April 23, 2013–extract:

….Here’s how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It’s as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.

Still, the loser bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that’s why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and “Third Ring” mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.

“Q&A on Venezuela’s Electoral Stalemate,” by David Smilde, Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, April 15, 2013–extract:

Nicolas Maduro, Chávez’s political heir, won Sunday’s snap election by an unexpectedly narrow margin. With more than 99% of the votes counted, Maduro secured 50.7% of the vote, while opposition candidate Henrique Capriles of the Democratic Union coalition won 49.1% of the vote, according to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council. Roughly 230,000 votes separate the candidates. Capriles did not accept the results and is demanding that electoral authorities carryout a 100% audit….

“Venezuela Must Look Forward, Not Back,” by George Ciccariello-Maher, Fox News Latino, April 16, 2013–extract:

Nicolás Maduro has been elected to succeed Hugo Chávez as President of Venezuela. While the defeated opposition candidate Henrique Capriles contested the result and demanded a recount, one of Chávez’s most important legacies is an electoral system that is unassailable, described by Jimmy Carter as “the best in the world.” Nor was the margin of victory as narrow as some are suggesting: at latest count, Maduro has won by nearly 300,000 votes, which when proportionally understood is the equivalent of millions of votes in the United States….

….Any effort at drawing out the election, or worse, disrupting the democratic process with demonstrations in the street, will only arouse suspicions that the anti-Chavistas have not left their anti-democratic “golpismo,” or coup-mongering, in the past.

Similar advice applies to the Obama administration, which has before it the opportunity for a thaw in relations. All Obama needs to do is to promptly and unreservedly recognize the electoral result, thereby making it clear that the Venezuelans have every right to choose their own leaders. If the administration hesitates, however, and if it continues the Bush-era policy of taking sides and interfering in Venezuelan politics, any hope for reconciliation will be in vain.

“U.S. Must Recognize Venezuela’s Elections,” by Dan Kovalik, The Huffington Post, April 18, 2013–extract:

The United States is refusing to recognize the results of the Venezuelan elections, insisting that Venezuela conduct a re-count of 100 percent of the votes in light of the narrow margin of victory for Nicolas Maduro. The facts surrounding the voting process and election outcome in Venezuela, the U.S.’s own experiences with close presidential elections, and the U.S.’s recent recognition of coup governments in Latin America demonstrate that the U.S.’s position in regard to Venezuela has nothing to do with the U.S.’s alleged concerns for democracy, but rather, its complete disdain for it….

“The US Continues to Undermine Democracy in Venezuela: Obama Should Honor Results of Venezuelan Elections,” by Daniel Kovalik, CounterPunch, April 19, 2013–extract:

I just returned from Venezuela where I was one of 170 international election observers from around the world, including India, Guyana, Surinam, Colombia, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Scotland, England, the United States, Guatemala, Argentina, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Brazil, Chile, Greece, France, Panama and Mexico. These observers included two former Presidents (of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic), judges, lawyers and numerous high ranking officials of national electoral councils. What we found was an election system which was transparent, inherently reliable, well-run and thoroughly audited….

The U.S.’s position is all the more ridiculous given its quick recognition of the coup government in Paraguay after the former Bishop turned President, Fernando Lugo, was ousted in 2012, and its recognition of the 2009 elections in Honduras despite the fact that the U.S.’s previously-stated precondition for recognizing this election – the return of President Manual Zelaya to power after his forcible ouster by the military – never occurred. Of course, this even pales in comparison to the U.S.’s active involvement in violent coups against democratically-elected leaders in Latin America (e.g., against President Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, against President Allende in Chile in 1973, and against President Aristide in Haiti in 2004).

And, the U.S.’s failure to recognize the Venezuelan elections is having devastating consequences in Venezuela, for it is emboldening the Venezuelan opposition to carry out violence in Venezuela in order to destabilize that country….

“US Playing Politics Over Venezuelan Elections,” by Lee Brown, The Huffington Post, April 18, 2013–extract:

The US has held back any recognition of the outcome with Kerry demanding a recount of all 15 million votes. This mirrors precisely the demand of Venezuela’s losing Presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles.

Kerry’s post-election remarks questioning “the viability of that government” if there were “irregularities” give rise to fears that the US is not going to recognise Maduro as President. Especially as the US administration, even before the vote took place, seemed to have made up its mind up about the probity of the Venezuelan election. US Assistant Secretary of State, Roberta Jackson, claimed that it would be “difficult” to have “open, fair and transparent elections” in Venezuela.

There is of course no basis for any of these claims. The US government has no better information than the Latin American or European governments who have accepted the results. Whilst, Venezuela’s elections have regularly been declared free and fair. Jimmy Carter called its elections process “the best in the world”.

“Venezuela Survives Another Attempt at Regime Change: Pots and Pans and Uncle Sam Weren’t Enough This Time,” by Mark Weisbrot, CounterPunch, April 23, 2013–extract:

….Washington’s efforts to de-legitimize the election mark a significant escalation of U.S. efforts at “regime change” in Venezuela. Not since its involvement in the 2002 military coup has the U.S. government done this much to promote open conflict in Venezuela. When the White House first announced on Monday that a 100 percent audit of the votes was “an important, prudent and necessary step,” this was not an effort to promote a “recount.” They had to know that this was a form of hate speech – telling the government of Venezuela what was necessary to make their elections legitimate. They also had to know that it would not make such a recount more likely. And this was also their quick reply to Maduro’s efforts, according to the New York Times of April 15, to reach out to the Obama administration for better relations through former Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

But the Obama team’s effort failed miserably. On Wednesday the government of Spain, Washington’s only significant ally supporting a “100 percent audit” reversed its position and recognized Maduro’s election. Then the Secretary General of the OAS, Jose Miguel Insulza, backed off his prior alignment with the Obama administration and recognized the election result….

“South Americans back Venezuela’s Maduro, blast US ‘interference’,” by Shobhan Saxena, The Times of India, April 17, 2013–extract:

….Since Sunday, despite opposition protests in Caracas, messages of congratulations have been pouring in for Maduro from Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba and Unasur. Brazil’s foreign minister Antonio Patriota congratulated Maduro, reaffirming Brazil’s “decision to continue working closely with Caracas”….

Some other South American leaders like Bolivia’s Evo Morales have condemned the US “interference” in Venezuelan elections. Condemning Washington’s questioning of the election result, the Bolivian president said the US is preparing for a coup in Venezuela. He also rejected the White House’s “moral authority to question electoral results worldwide”, after Washington asked Caracas to hold a full vote recount. “I am certain that behind those remarks, the US is preparing a coup in Venezuela,” said Morales at a press conference.

“Media Fails to Inform Public about Shifting Opposition Demands in Post-Election Venezuela,” by Alex Main, Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 4, 2013–extract:

….What AP, USA Today, BBC and others fail to mention in their most recent articles is that Capriles accepted the CNE’s April 18th decision to proceed with the audit of the remaining voting receipt boxes, and said that the opposition would participate in the process….

Yet, soon after Capriles publicly accepted the CNE’s decision, he and others from the opposition began to shift their demands. After originally claiming that a full audit of the voting receipts would shed light on the alleged fraud that had occurred – initially claiming that their own quick count showed Capriles winning by 300,000 votes – the opposition decided to focus primarily on the election’s voting record books (cuadernos de votación). These books, present at each voting station, are where voters place their fingerprints and signatures after having voted electronically and deposited the paper receipts reflecting their voting choice in sealed boxes….

How these books could provide evidence of fraud isn’t clear. Among the many safeguards found in Venezuela’s voting system are electronic fingerprint detectors which verify a voter’s identity and prevent him or her from voting twice. Furthermore, witnesses from both the opposition and pro-government parties are present at every voting station. In these conditions, whether or not the record books are systematically filled in correctly by voters, it is extremely unlikely that anyone could get away with voting twice.

One thing is certain though. The audit of some 15 million signatures and fingerprints found in the voting record books would be a very long process indeed, probably significantly longer than the thirty-day audit of the remaining boxes of voting machine receipts that has yet to begin. Given the infinitesimally small odds that the audit of remaining voting receipt boxes will produce significant discrepancies (as we showed in this statistical calculation last week), it appears that the opposition is mainly intent on trying to maintain a climate of uncertainty and political tension for as long as possible. By failing to provide its readers with critical background information on the opposition’s actions to date, much of the major English language media may also be helping promote this climate of tension.

” ‘Number one US target’: Oliver Stone calls media coverage of Venezuela ‘shameful’,” by RT, April 14, 2013–extract:

“I would say that Venezuela is the number one target of the United States media and the State Department that exists today. The covert actions that are going on in Venezuela are very scary. I don’t want to be in Nicolas Maduro’s shoes. I’d hate to be him because he’s in a new spotlight,” the director continued.

“Obama says U.S. watching ‘crackdowns’ on Venezuela opposition,” Reuters, May 3, 2013–extract:

“I think that the entire hemisphere has been watching the violence, the protests, the crackdowns on the opposition,” Obama said in the interview with Univision News during a trip to Mexico. “I think our general view has been that it’s up to the people of Venezuela to choose their leaders in legitimate elections.”…

“Our approach to the entire hemisphere is not ideological. It’s not rooted back in the Cold War. It’s based on the notion of our basic principles of human rights and democracy and freedom of press and freedom of assembly. Are those being observed?” Obama said.

“There are reports that they have not been fully observed post-election,” he added. “I think our only interest at this point is making sure that the people of Venezuela are able to determine their own destiny free from the kinds of practices that the entire hemisphere generally has moved away from.”

“Venezuela opposition leader charged with spurring violence,” Reuters, April 29, 2013–extract:

A Venezuelan court charged retired General Antonio Rivero on Monday with inciting post-election violence in the latest political flash point in the bitterly divided nation.

“Followers of Capriles in London ask for British military invasion to Venezuela,” Embassy of Venezuela in the UK, April 21, 2013–extract:

One of the placards read like this: “Remember Falklands, Iraq, Libya… We Deserve Attention From Britain Because VENEZUELA has OIL too!!! And More.”

“U.S. Seeks to Get Rid of Left Governments in Latin America,” by Mark Weisbrot, Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), April 20, 2013–extract:

Recent events indicate that the Obama administration has stepped up its strategy of “regime change” against the left-of-center governments in Latin America, promoting conflict in ways not seen since the military coup that Washington supported in Venezuela in 2002. The most high-profile example is in Venezuela itself, during the past week. As this goes to press, Washington has grown increasingly isolated in its efforts to destabilize the newly elected government of Nicolas Maduro.

But Venezuela is not the only country to fall prey to Washington’s efforts to reverse the electoral results of the past 15 years in Latin America. It is now clear that last year’s ouster of President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay was also aided and abetted by the United States government….

“U.S. Should Disclose its Funding of Opposition Groups in Bolivia and Other Latin American Countries,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 12, 2008–extract:

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) called on the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other agencies to release information detailing whom they are funding in Bolivia — where violent right-wing opposition groups have wreaked havoc this week in a series of shootings, beatings, ransacking of offices, and sabotage of a natural gas pipeline — as well as in other Latin American countries including Venezuela. Recent events suggest there may be evidence for Bolivian president Evo Morales’ assertions that the U.S. Embassy is supporting groups promoting violence and seeking “autonomy” from Bolivia, and the Center called on USAID and other U.S. agencies to “come clean” in order to demonstrate the U.S. government’s good faith.

“Washington has decided to keep its ties to Bolivia’s opposition shrouded in secrecy, and that’s not conducive to trust between the U.S. and Bolivian governments,” said Mark Weisbrot, CEPR Co-Director. “If Washington has nothing to hide in terms of whom it is funding and working with in Bolivia, then it should reveal which groups those are.”…

This last item of course takes us straight to Bolivia:

BOLIVIA

In the past month Bolivia has elevated its opposition to U.S. political subversion and destabilization in South America–having already expelled the U.S. ambassador years ago, Bolivia had also cut ties with the DEA which it also threw out. To this Bolivia now adds the ejection of USAID. The following are some of the key reports concerning the latest act of resistance:

“Evo: América Latina nunca más será patio trasero de EEUU,” Contrainjerencia, April 18, 2013–translated extract:

Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, on Thursday rejected the recent declarations made by the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, in which he referred to Latin America as his country’s “backyard.”

“This is how governments of the U.S. think about us, as their backyard….We condemn, repudiate and will never again allow that Bolivia or any other Latin American country will be the backyard of the U.S. government, we have a lot of dignity,” he emphasized….

Morales affirmed that while it was “humiliating and offensive” to have the U.S. name Latin America as its backyard, various positive efforts have pushed forward the unity and equality of nations of Latin America.

The Andean head of state recalled when Bolivia stopped being Washington’s backyard, owing to its economic independence, the nationalization of hydrocarbon resources, and the efforts made by social movements.

“Before, the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia would decide who would be the Chief of the Armed Forces, the Police, and who could become a government minister. In those times, our former leaders had to be endorsed by the Embassy. That is now over, and yet they still think we are their backyard,” Morales concluded.

“Bolivia, angered by Kerry, says it is ejecting U.S. aid agency,” by Emily Alpert, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2013–extract:

….“Surely to think that you can still manipulate us economically, politically — those times are past,” Morales said at May Day celebrations in La Paz, according to the Bolivian national news agency.

The Bolivian leader asserted that USAID had sown divisions and destabilized the country and his government. Ejecting USAID was also a message to U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, “who says that Latin America is the backyard of the United States,” Morales said….

Expelling the aid agency is the latest in a series of steps by Morales to push out those tied to the U.S. government. The president, a former union leader for coca farmers, had sparred with the U.S. over its drug eradication strategies. Five years ago, he expelled the U.S. ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration agents, alleging they had colluded with his political opponents in Bolivia….

The aid agency has worked in Bolivia since 1964, running programs to improve health, protect biodiversity and provide sustainable sources of income for local residents, it said. USAID had a budget of more than $26 million in Bolivia in fiscal year 2011.

Morales told reporters Wednesday that Bolivia was capable of supporting the projects that USAID had funded.

USAID BOLIVIA: Statement and FAQ on its Expulsion from Bolivia, May 1, 2013–extract:

The United States government deeply regrets the Bolivian government’s decision to expel the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). We deny the baseless allegations made by the Bolivian government.

USAID’s purpose in Bolivia since 1964 has been to help the Bolivian government improve the lives of ordinary Bolivians. All USAID programs have been supportive of the Bolivian government’s National Development Plan, and have been fully coordinated with appropriate government agencies. The United States government has worked in a dedicated fashion over the past five years to establish a relationship based on mutual respect, dialogue, and cooperation with the Bolivian government. This action is further demonstration that the Bolivian government is not interested in that vision.

What is most regrettable is that those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government’s decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment.

Susan Rice and the Real Terror Behind Boston

On April 23, 2013, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, decided to launch into another contemptibly shrill outburst. She has become quite notorious for these. In addition, she has a long track record of using the forum of the UN Security Council, and her position within it, to spread demonological fantasies about those targeted for liquidation by the U.S., everything from the racist fear mongering of “African mercenaries” being flown into Libya to massacre protesters, to her obscene remarks about Viagra being distributed to Libyan troops told to rape opponents–which U.S. intelligence publicly and flatly contradicted. Having so antagonized all others, to the extent that few diplomats can stomach working with her at the UN, Susan Rice felt that she nonetheless had the authority–even the credibility–to try to publicly flog a distinguished scholar of international law and a UN rapporteur, Richard Falk. Here is what she said:

Outraged by Richard Falk’s highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.

— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) April 24, 2013

This calculated “outrage” was thrown up apparently in response to an essay by Richard Falk, so please see:

“A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” by Richard Falk, April 19, 2013–extract:

….Aside from the dangers and unacceptability of promiscuous wars, there are other serious deficiencies in how the United States sees itself in the world. We should be worried by the taboo at this moment of 24/7 self-congratulatory commentary imposed on any type of self-scrutiny by either the political leadership or the mainstream media….

The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks…

….America’s military prowess and the abiding confidence of its leaders in hard power diplomacy makes the United States a menace to the world and to itself….

….Such bipartisan support for maintaining the globe-girdling geopolitics runs deep in the body politic, and is accompanied by the refusal to admit the evidence of national decline. The signature irony is that the more American decline is met by a politics of denial, the more rapid and steep will be the decline, and the more abrupt and risky will be the necessary shrinking of the global leadership role so long played by the United States. We should be asking ourselves at this moment, “how many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?”

This is one of the very few, and very sane and candid analyses that came out by a U.S. writer in the period after what was a relatively minor attack in Boston–just a tiny little taste of what the U.S. and its allies help to deliver to the streets of Damascus on any given day of the year. As usual, the hysterical response from many was that somehow Falk was saying those who died in Boston somehow “deserved” to be killed. We have heard this rubbish enough times before, it is the familiar rote denunciation that mindlessly comes forth from the permanent infants of empire. Being American, their culture trains them to think that everything should be reduced to the individual, and to the personal qualities of the individual, assessed in terms of merit–hence, someone killed in an attack should be discussed in terms of “not having deserved” or having deserved to die, depending on the nationality and location of the victim. This same excuse for a vulgar abdication of critical and independent thought–what might better help U.S. commentators to actualize their ideals of individuality, rather than participating in the choir of state as just another soprano–is the same that was visited upon Ward Churchill several years ago, and numerous other academics, including this writer. At some point, some of these shrill screamers of imperial-sentimentalist nonsense will wake up and remember that it was the CIA itself that coined the term “blowback,” and that more sober minds are aware that there must always be at least some consequences for being the world’s leading oppressor and serial abuser. “Get used to it,” and get over yourselves already–people are watching.

A Libyan man stands on Sirte’s bombed fishing harbour. May 12, 2011.

Books | Review | Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa by Maximilian Forte

In his Ceasefire review, Dan Glazebrook examines Maximilian Forte’s withering indictment of liberal humanitarianism and its collusion in imperialist designs on Africa, as seen in NATO’s Libya campaign of 2011.

Monday, April 22, 2013

The media has gone very quiet on Libya of late; clearly, liberal imperialists don’t like to dwell on their crimes. This is not surprising. The modus operandi of the humanitarian imperialist is not one of informed reflection, but only permanent outrage against leaders of the global South; besides, in the topsy-turvy world of liberal interventionism, the ‘failure to act’ is the only crime of which the West is capable. As Forte puts it, their moral code holds that “If we do not act, we should be held responsible for the actions of others. When we do act, we should never be held responsible for our own actions.”

With Gaddafi dead, the hunt is on for a new hate figure on whom to spew venom (Assad, Jong-Un); far more satisfying than actually evaluating our own role in the creation of human misery. This is the colonial mentality of the liberal lynch mob.

For the governments that lead us into war, of course, it makes perfect sense that we do not stop to look back at the last invasion before impatiently demanding the next one – if we realised, for example, that the 1999 bombing of Serbia  (the textbook ‘humanitarian intervention’) actually facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo that it was supposedly designed to prevent, we might not be so ready to demand the same treatment for every other state that falls short of our illusory ideals.

That is why this book is so important. Thoroughly researched and impeccably referenced, it tells the story of the real aims and real consequences of the war on Libya in its historical perspective.

Its author, Maximilian Forte, is well placed to do so. A professor of social anthropology in Montreal, much of his writing and research in recent years has been dedicated to the new imperialism, and especially its ‘humanitarian’ cover. He was amongst the first to really expose violent racism within the Libyan insurrection, and its role in facilitating NATO’s goals in Africa, and has provided consistently excellent analyses of the media coverage surrounding the conflict.

One of the book’s accomplishments is its comprehensive demolition of the war’s supposed justifications. Forte shows us that there was no ‘mass rape’ committed by ‘Gaddafi forces’ – as alleged by Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Luis Ocampo and others at the time, but later refuted by Amnesty International, the UN and even the US army itself.

Despite hysterical media reports, there was no evidence of aerial bombing of protesters, as even CIA chief Robert Gates admitted. Gaddafi had no massacre planned for Benghazi, as had been loudly proclaimed by the leaders of Britain, France and the USA: the Libyan government forces had not carried out massacres against civilian populations in any of the other towns they recaptured from the rebels, and nor had Gaddafi threatened to do so in Benghazi; in a speech that was almost universally misreported in the Western media, he promised no mercy for those who had taken up arms against the government, whilst offering amnesty for those who ‘threw their weapons away’, and at no point threatening reprisals against civilians.

When the NATO invasion began, French jets actually bombed a small retreating column of Libyan armour on the outskirts of Benghazi, comprising 14 tanks, 20 armoured personnel carriers, and a few trucks and ambulances – nothing like enough to carry out a ‘genocide’ against an entire city, as had been claimed.

Indeed, the whole image of ‘peaceful protesters being massacred’ was turning reality on its head. In fact, Forte notes, rebels “torched police stations, broke into the compounds of security services, attacked government offices and torched vehicles” from the very start, to which the authorities responded with “tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets – very similar to methods frequently used in Western nations against far more peaceful protests that lacked the element of sedition”. Only once the rebels had proceeded to occupy the Benghazi army barracks, loot its weapons, and start using them against government forces did things begin to escalate.

Myth of the Dark Heart

But the most pernicious of the lies that facilitated the Libyan war was the myth of the ‘African mercenary’. Racist pogroms, Forte argues, were characteristic of the Libyan rebellion from its very inception, when 50 sub-Saharan African migrants were burnt alive in Al-Bayda on the second day of the insurgency. An Amnesty International report from September 2011 made it clear that this was no isolated incident: “When al-Bayda, Beghazi, Derna, Misrata and other cities first fell under the control of the NTC in February, anti-Gaddafi forces carried out house raids, killing and other violent attacks” against sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans, and “what we are seeing in western Libya is a very similar pattern to what we have seen in Benghazi and Misrata after those cities fell to the rebels” – arbitrary detention, torture and execution of black people.

The ‘African mercenary’ myth was thus created to justify these pogroms, as the Western media near-universally referred to their victims as ‘mercenaries’ – or ‘alleged mercenaries’ in the more circumspect and highbrow outlets – and thus as aggressors and legitimate targets. The myth was completely discredited by both Amnesty International – whose exasperated researcher told a TV interviewer that “We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence: the rebels spread these rumors everywhere [with] terrible consequences for African guest workers” – and by a UN investigation team, who drew similar conclusions – but not until both organisations had already helped perpetuate the lie themselves.

That liberal humanitarians would launch a war of aggression in order to facilitate racist massacres is not as ironic as it might at first seem. Forte writes that “if this was humanitarianism, it could only be so by disqualifying Africans as members of humanity.” But such disqualification has been a systematic practice of liberalism from the days of John Locke, through the US war of independence and into the age of nineteenth century imperialism and beyond.

Indeed, Forte argues that the barely-veiled “racial fear of mean African bogeymen swamping Libya like zombies” implicit in the ‘African mercenary’ story, was uniquely and precisely formulated to tap into a rich historical vein of European fantasies about plagues of black mobs. That the myth gained so much traction despite zero evidence, says Forte, “tells us a great deal about the role of racial prejudice and propaganda in mobilizing public opinion in the West and organizing international relations”.

Yet the racism of the rebel fighters was not only useful for mobilising European public opinion – it also played a strategic function, as far as NATO planners were concerned. By bringing to power a virulently anti-black government, the West has ensured that Libya’s trajectory as a pan-African state has been brought to a violent end, and that its oil wealth will no longer be used for African development. As Forte succinctly put it, “the goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US”.

A large part of the book is dedicated to outlining Libya’s role in the creation of the African Union, and its subsequent moves to unify Africa at the economic, political and military levels. This included the investment of billions of petrodollars in industrial development across the continent, the creation of an African communications satellite, and massive financial contributions towards the African Development Bank and the African Monetary Fund – institutions designed specifically to challenge the hegemony of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Gaddafi, Forte argues, was passionate about using Libyan oil money to help Africa industrialise and “add value” to its export materials, moving it away from its prescribed role in the global economy as a supplier of cheap raw materials.

A US-led Scramble for Africa

This was a threat to Western financial and corporate control of African economies, and combined with the rise of Chinese investment, was considered a strategic obstacle to Western domination that had to be removed. As Forte put it, “The US, France and the UK could not afford to see allies that they had cultivated, if not installed in power, being slowly pulled from their orbits by Libya, China and other powers”.

The African Oil Policy initiative Group – a high level US Committee comprising members of Congress, military officers and energy industry lobbyists – noted in 2002 the growing dependence of the US on African oil, and recommended  a “new and vigorous focus on US military cooperation in sub-Saharan Africa, to include design of a sub-unified command structure which could produce significant dividends in the protection of US investments”. They noted that “failure to address the issue of focusing and maximizing US diplomatic and military command organization…could…act as an inadvertent incentive for US rivals such as China [and] adversaries such as Libya”. In other words, with their economic grip on the continent facing serious challenge, the Western world would increasingly have to rely on aggressive militarism in order to maintain its interests.

The recommendations of the committee would be implemented in 2006 with the creation of AFRICOM – the US army’s African Command. AFRICOM was conceived as a sort of ‘School of the Americas’ for Africa, designed to train African armies for use as proxy forces for maintaining Western control, with the 2010 US National Security Strategy specifically naming the African Union as one of the regional organisations it sought to co-opt.

Libya, however, proved most uncooperative. The leaked US diplomatic cables make it very clear that Libya was viewed by the US as THE main obstacle to establishing a full muscular US military presence on the African continent, regularly highlighting its “opposition” and “obstruction” to AFRICOM. With Gaddafi still a respected voice within the AU, having served as its elected Chairman in 2009, he wielded significant influence, and used this to spearhead opposition to what he considered the neocolonial aims of the AFRICOM initiative.

Meanwhile, Chinese investment in Africa was growing rapidly, having grown from $6 billion in 1999 to $90 billion ten years later, displacing the US as the continent’s largest trading partner. The need for a US military presence to cling on to the West’s declining influence in Africa was growing ever more urgent. But Africa was not playing ball – and Gaddafi was (rightly) seen as leading the charge.

Fast forward to 2012, and US General Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM, was able to claim that “the conduct of military operations in Libya did afford now the opportunity to establish a military to military relationship with Libya, which did not previously exist”. He went on to suggest that a US base would be established in the country (Gaddafi having expelled both the US and British bases shortly after coming to power in 1969), saying that some “assistance” would probably be necessary, in the form of a “military presence”. President Obama wasted no time in announcing the deployment of soldiers to four more African countries within weeks of the fall of Tripoli, and AFRICOM announced an unprecedented 14 joint military exercises in Africa for the following year.

A sign of things to come

Forte argues that NATO’s attack had not only destroyed a powerful force for unity and independence in Africa, and a huge obstacle to Western military penetration of the continent, but it had also created the perfect conditions to justify further invasions. The US had previously attempted to argue that its military presence was required in North Africa in order to fight against Al Qaeda; indeed, it had set up the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Programme to this end. But as Muattasim Gaddafi had explained to Hilary Clinton in Washington in 2009, the programme had been rendered redundant by the existing, and highly effective, security strategy of CEN-SAD (the Libyan-led Community of Sahel and Saharan states) and the North African Standby Force.

Like a classic protection racket, however, the British, US and French decided that if their protection wasn’t needed, then they would have to create a need for it. The destruction of Libya tore the heart out of the North African security system, flooded the region with weapons and turned Libya into an ungoverned safe haven for violent militias. Now the resulting – and entirely predictable – instability has spread to Mali, the West are using it as an excuse for another war and occupation. In a prescient warning (the book was published before France’s recent invasion of Mali), Forte wrote that “intervention begets intervention. More intervention is needed to solve the problems caused by intervention.”

The book is also very strong in exposing the ideology of the ‘human rights industry’ and its role in bringing about the Libyan war. Western liberal humanitarianism, argues Forte, “can only function by first directly or indirectly creating the suffering of others, and by then seeing every hand as an outstretched hand, pleading or welcoming”.

Forte goes on to expose the role of groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who helped perpetuate some of the worst lies about what was happening in Libya, such as the fictitious ‘African mercenaries’ and ‘mass rape’, and who in the case of Amnesty, “mere days into the uprising and well before it had a chance to ascertain, corroborate or confirm any facts on the ground…began launching public accusations against Libya, the African Union and the UNSC for failing to take action”. By calling for an assets freeze on Libya and an arms embargo (“and more actions with each passing day”), Amnesty “thus effectively made itself a party to the conflict”; it had become part of the propaganda war and mythmaking that was designed to facilitate the invasion.

This should not be surprising given Amnesty’s history. Forte helpfully recalls that their promotion of the infamous “incubator babies” myth that justified the Iraq war of 1991 was later singled out by several US Senators as having influenced their decision to vote for the attack. In the event, the Senate vote was passed by a majority of just six. The 1991 war devastated Iraq, which had barely recovered from the Iran-Iraq war, killing well over 100,000 people, as well as hundreds of thousands more from the diseases that ravaged the country following the deliberate destruction of its water and sewerage systems.

So it should be little surprise that Suzanne Nossel, a State Department official on Hilary Clinton’s team, was made Executive Director of Amnesty-USA in November 2011. In her State Department job, Nossell had played a key role drawing up the UN Human Rights Council resolution against Libya that ultimately formed the basis for Security Council Resolution 1973 that led to the aggression.

Forte also discusses the role of Bouchuiguir, the ‘human rights activist’ who emerges as the Libyan ‘Curveball’. Curveball was the Iraqi ‘source’ who came up with the lies about Saddam’s nonexistent ‘mobile chemical weapons factories’ that were used to justify the 2003 Iraq war. Likewise, Bouchuiguir’s wildly inflated casualty figures provided the raw material for the hysterical UNHRC resolutions against Libya that set the ball for war rolling. He later admitted on camera that there was no evidence for his claims – but not before 70 NGOs had signed a petition ‘demanding action’ in response to them.

Much has been written elsewhere about the ‘neo-cons’ who became (rightly) hated for their brutally idiotic conceptions of social change. But, as Forte’s book shows, the liberal humanitarians are perhaps even more contemptible; after all, at least the neo-cons never claimed to be kind, or even interested in anything other than their own self-interest. Yet the liberal humanitarians seem – or at least claim – to be driven by some kind of higher purpose, which makes their constant calls for wars of aggression even more repulsive. Forte puts this brilliantly:

“The vision of our humanity that liberal imperialists entertain is one which constructs us as shrieking sacks of emotion. This is the elites’ anthropology, one that views us as bags of nerve and muscle: throbbing with outrage, contracting with every story of ‘incubator babies’, bulging up with animus at the arrest of Gay Girl in Damascus, recoiling at the sound of Viagra-fuelled mass rape. From mass hysteria in twitter to hundreds of thousands signing an online Avaaz petition calling for bombing Libya in the name of human rights, we become nerves of mass reaction….We scream for action via ‘social media’, thumbs furiously in action on our ‘smart’ phones. ..Then again, our “action” merely consists of asking the supremely endowed military establishment to act in our name.”

This anthropology is of course “accompanied by NATO’s implicit sociology: societies can be remade through a steady course of high altitude bombings and drone strikes.”

How exactly Libya has been remade is also discussed in the book. The July 2012 elections in Libya, their very existence trumpeted in Western media as immediately vindicating every act of butchery the war brought about – regardless of whether the parliament being elected was likely to wield any actual influence over the country – saw fewer than half the eligible voting population take part. Even more intriguing were the results of a survey carried out in Libya by Oxford Research International that found that only 13% of Libyans said they wanted democracy within a year’s time, and only 25% within five years.

Meanwhile, the new authorities set about persecuting their opponents, real and imagined. The town of Tawergha was emptied of its entire population of around 20,000 black Libyans after militias from Misrata began systematically torching every home and business in the town, with the support of the central government. Former residents now reside in refugee camps where they continue to be hunted down and killed, or in arbitrary detention in makeshift prisons. Candidacy for elections is barred to: workers (a professional qualification is needed); anyone who ever worked in any level of government between 1969 and 2011 (unless they could demonstrate “early and clear” support for the insurrection); anyone with academic study involving Gaddafi’s Green book; and anyone who ever received any monetary benefit from Gaddafi.

A constitutional lawyer noted these restrictions would disqualify three quarters of the Libyan population. Other new laws banned the spreading of “news reports, rumours or propaganda” that could “cause any damage to the state”, with penalties of up to life in prison; and prison for anyone spreading information that “could weaken the citizens’ morale” or for anyone who “attacks the February 17 revolution, denigrates Islam, the authority of the state or its institutions”.

This is the new Libya for which the human rights imperialists and their allies lobbied, killed and tortured so hard. “The next time empire comes knocking in the name of human rights”, concludes Forte, “please be found standing idly by”.

Forte’s  book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in understanding the motives and consequences of the West’s onslaught against Libya and African development.

Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa
Maximilian Forte
Paperback and E-book: 352 pages
Publisher: Baraka Books (November 28, 2012)

Dan Glazebrook is a teacher and journalist, with a particular interest in the military and economic relationships between the west and the global South.

But simply because two U. S. citizens were unlawfully killed there by America drones does not make Yemen “the front and center in America’s unending war on terror”. Afghanistan is the major battlefield of this war. It is there that we find the massive round-the-clock visible and invisible presence of the aimless American military machine. The invisible part of this machine consists of squadrons of B-52s (based at the Diego Garcia Air Force Base) and remote control killers called drones—all producing the effect of terror and terrorism in the consciousness of the people of Afghanistan and the surrounding region including Pakistan. Two drones have recently been shot down in Iran. The visible instruments for producing this awareness are hundreds of American tanks, armored vehicles, fighter jets, helicopters, and surveillance blimps over major cities of Afghanistan (providing “intelligence” for American visible and invisible killers) and tens of thousands of ghoulish mass-produced bodies of American “warriors” of terror roaming through the cultural, social and physical terrain of Afghanistan terrorizing unarmed and innocent civilians. The daily kidnapping, torture and summary executions of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan by the United States armed forces constitute terrorism and crimes against humanity. A popular image of the American military operations in Afghanistan is armored soldiers “kicking in doors” to private homes terrorizing unarmed men, women and children. Variations of “Sandy Hook”,  “Aurora”, “Oklahoma City”, and “Boston Marathon” massacres are regularly imposed on the people of Afghanistan by American occupying soldiers. The perpetrators of these acts of terrorism and war crimes become “war heroes” in American media. The American media does not report these atrocities because they have become naturalized in American popular culture (see “The U. S. War of Terror in Afghanistan”).

Perhaps unintentionally, Daniel Varisco suggests that terrorism and terrorists reside and are produced only over “There” in the cultural and political spaces of the Other.  Terrorism is the infliction of violence or the threat of violence on unarmed civilians, innocent bystanders, and/or unarmed noncombatants (Hanifi, AN, September 2005). The imposition of violence produces fear, trauma, injury, and/or loss of life. As such the tragedy of 9/11 qualifies as an act of terrorism as does the August 1945 destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs by the United States—the first and only such barbaric acts in human history. The atrocities imposed by the founding populations of USA and Israel on Native Americans and Palestinians respectively qualify as acts of terrorism. The massacre of thousands of unarmed civilians by the United States armed forces in Fallujah, Iraq during November 2004 is a savage act of terrorism which has been condemned by numerous international organizations as war crimes and crimes against humanity.  (See the 2005 documentary “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre”). The 1982 massacre of thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon by Israeli sponsored militia and the slaughter of millions of unarmed civilians and resisters in Vietnam by the United States armed forces are blatant acts of terrorism.

The threat of violence, on the other hand, produces some of these effects plus the chronic mindset of “we are about to be hit” (WAH) by a terrorist agency. In the aftermath of 9/11 the ruling machinery and the “security industry” of the United States successfully installed this mindset in American society—be constantly on guard, a “terrorist attack” is perennially lurking. Several structural changes emerged from this WAH orientation in the United States including the Department of Homeland Security, National Counterterrorism Center, the National Terror Alert Response Center, and hundreds of subsidiary government bureaus and private corporations. Virtually all American state and local public safety agencies include a “counter-terrorism” section. The American occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and their media partners invariably substitute imaginary “terrorism” for the reality of resistance to their presence in the occupied lands. Currently hundreds of American universities and governmental agencies offer academic research and study programs about terrorism, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency. A number of anthropologists specializing in the Middle East and South Asia are actively involved in these programs. Forensic anthropology has become a popular specialization in several major American universities. Students with degrees in this subfield are highly in demand in law enforcement and the defense and security industries of the United States.

The WAH mindset in the United States is cradled in the institutionalized fear of Islam (“Islamophobia”) and Muslims and, occasionally, the agency of other Others—Otherphobia—“people hate us [Americans], we have to grudgingly accept that” (Tom Menino, Mayor of Boston on “Geraldo” radio talk show, April 17, 2013). Mayor Menino is correct in this sadomasochistic and narcissistic assessment. The most militarized, most despised and disrespected political cultures in the eye of the world (Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, South America, and Canada) are located in the United States and Israel—two countries fused by their Zionist “unbreakable bond”. Together, these two warfare states produce about eighty percent of weapons circulating in the global market. In both countries, weapons constitute their major export.  Mr. Menino’s sadomasochistic observation articulates the thesis that America and Americans are despised by Muslims and by other (non-Europeans).  A historical glimpse at this contemptuous view of Americans when interacting with Others is offered by Richard N. Frye, the distinguished historian (and ethnographer) of Iran and Afghanistan. During 1953 when Frye was in Tehran he saw “graffiti saying ‘Americans go home’, lit. ‘get lost’” (Richard N. Frye, Greater Iran: A 20^th-Century Odyssey, 2005, p. 140). Frye taught English in a government school in Kabul during the early 1950s. Recalling what he received about the United States from Europeans residing in Kabul, Frye writes: “Invariably, criticism of the United States as materialistic and uncultured society came from all Europeans, and it was difficult to defend American boorishness abroad” p. 40). Several international organizations in Europe have declared President George W. Bush, as a war criminal. For this reason Bush will never visit Europe for fear of being dragged to the International Court of Justice. To my knowledge, at least in modern times, no head of state except US President G. W. Bush (in Baghdad, December 14, 2008) has been treated as the target of flying dirty shoes in wide open public space by a citizen of Iraq.

Terrorists are producers, disseminators and implementors of terrorism. The agencies that designed and imposed the tragedy of 9/11 qualify as terrorists.  Whether armed resistance to the unlawful and violent American imperial presence in Afghanistan is an act of terrorism is subject to how we conceptualize terrorism. The aim of the resistance—not “insurgency”—in Afghanistan is to expel the armed Euro-American occupiers and their armed and unarmed local hosts, collaborators, facilitators, scouts, and pimps. The Afghan resistance does not target the civilian population of Afghanistan or Washington DC. The WAH effect in the consciousness of the people Afghanistan is informed by this understanding.

Varisco’s gentle advisory to the American warfare machine leads this reader to conclude that in the universe of terrorism the United States is merely an innocent victim and bystander. This is far from empirical realities. The barbaric disruption and destruction of the lives of hundreds of thousands (some estimates suggest millions) of the unarmed people of Afghanistan by the United State over the last thirty five years is a thick compendium of acts of terrorism. The use of depleted uranium in southwest Afghanistan during the early stages of the American occupation has produced thousands of deformed human newborns. This is terrorism tainted with crimes against humanity. In American discourse the 9/11 narratives are invariably punctuated with “3000” casualties. The mass slaughter of exactly “3000” imprisoned and unarmed resisters—prisoners of war—in Dasht-e Laeli, northern Afghanistan, during 2002 is a savage act of terrorism and a stark violation of international conventions of warfare. The credit for the production and sponsorship of tens of thousands of “freedom fighter” terrorists during the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan belongs to the United States. The United States is the founding father and nurse of al-Qaeda when the latter was terrorizing Afghanistan during the 1980s. The killings of armed and unarmed resisters to American imperialism in Pakistan are blatant acts of terrorism. The United States continues to test biological and chemical weapons on civilians in Afghanistan in preparation for what the American government and media, with gleeful sadism, call “population centered wars” of the future. The United States is the world’s greatest producer and a prominent receiver of terrorism. Given the easy and uncomplicated availability of the knowledge and tools for the production and circulation of destructive technologies in the global cyber system and, unless the American warfare state radically changes its policies and practices of producing and circulating terrorism, it is likely that America will become the major global consumer of terrorism as well despite President Obama’s delusional roar that “Americans refuse to be terrorized” (April 20, 2013). The agency and consequences of American produced terrorism are flip sides of the “we are about to be hit” coin—simultaneous homicide and suicide, much like the narrative of the origin of Christianity and fundamentally an exercise in cannibalism.

Over the past fourteen years, the massive visible and invisible military presence of the United States has produced a WAH effect in the consciousness of the people of Afghanistan and the surrounding region.  The terrorizing presence and operations of B-52s and drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere produces local oceans of hatred, contempt, disrespect, and every available form of violent and non-violent resistance aimed at the ideology, policies, and practices of the freaked-out American military machine and its subsidizers—the American people and “the American way of life”. These bottomless wells of resistance to American imperialism long for the day when USA will meet its industrial equal on the battle field and they believe that this will happen sooner than later. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the complacent hubris of the state apparatus and the uninformed and indifferent masses of the United States receive these oceans of resistance as “terrorism” and “insurgency”. The American ruling machinery, media and popular culture receive “terrorism” and other cultural and political problems (e. g. poverty, drug abuse, 9/11) as personal matters with individual faces. In engaging poverty they focus on one or two poor individuals or a poor family; to address drug abuse they focus on a drug user or pusher; to address the tragedy of 9/11 they focus on Osama Ben-Laden. The American political and social system appears to be incapable of processing the cultural, historical, ideological and political forces that produces terrorism and other political and social effects. The recent terrorist act in Boston is viewed as the consequence of self-inflicted radicalism or only “radical Islam” even though informed global media and enlightened locations in popular culture explicitly and convincingly locate the agency of this specific act of terrorism in the violent and unwelcome American imperial presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. For Americans to understand a modicum of response to what their armed forces are doing in Afghanistan, they need to soberly contemplate a hypothetical exercise in which an aimless and enraged industrially equipped Pashtun occupation army and Taleban operated B-52s and Predators are plodding through the landscapes and skies of a pre-industrial Texas.

M. Jamil Hanifi
Adjunct Research Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University
Independent Scholar, Anthropology and the History of Afghanistan  

The salient point of Mahmood’s essay—the rejection of the distortion of Islam and Islamic culture through the secularist filters of Western academia and politics—is  sidestepped by MM. The silent and sometimes overt collaboration of so-called “liberal” and “progressive” academia with the current Islamophobic policies and practices of the state machinery of the United States does not seem to interest MM. The passing reference by C. K. Mahmood to Michel Foucault’s support of the Islamic revolution in Iran (which he never “recanted”), especially during its early years,  triggers MM to launch into wailing about personal losses and unjustified condemnation of social and political life in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). The ideological and informational fuel in MM’s anger echoes the contents of the large corpus of anti-Islamic and anti-Iranian academic and popular writings in the United States over the past three decades. A widely circulated representative of these writings, the 2006 Foulcault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Iran by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, seems to anchor MM’s diatribe.

In attempting to understand the IRI, even with MM’s highly personalized lenses—“Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Islam….the brutality of Khomeini….what Khomeini did…Khomeini’s revolution”—and in weighing MM’s suggestion to take it easy on American-led Western imperialism, the readers of Anthropology News should consider the role of imperial United States in imposing conditions on Iran and the surrounding region in which millions of people (perhaps including relatives of MM) in virtually every Middle Eastern country lost their lives and millions of others were terrorized and dislocated. MM seems to believe that IRI is the only theocracy in the Middle East. If so, he is oblivious to the stark political and territorial realities of the region. The postcolonial cycle of Western imperialism in the Middle East started with the installation of a Zionist European theocracy on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean sea during 1948. Over the following decades the United States, the major sponsor of this process, has equipped this theocracy with every conceivable means of war and destruction including two hundred nuclear weapons according to President Jimmy Carter. The installation of this ever expanding Zionist theocracy (ZT) has caused the forceful migration and separation of millions of (Christian and Muslim) Palestinians whose homeland has been appropriated and is continuously converted to “settlements” for Zionist Euro-Americans, many of them from New York—every day several Zionist households migrate from New York to the mother colony in the Middle East. Currently ZT receivers more than six billion dollars in aid annually from American private and government sources. Ever since ZT was planted in 1948 the world has not seen one day of peace. The cradle of all tensions and conflicts in the Middle East and the agency for the increasingly hostile divide between the United States and the Muslim world is this out of place ZT implant. According to its ambassador to the United States, the ZT in the Middle East views itself as “a villa in the midst of a wild forest” (CNN, November 21, 2012). ZT and USA are the biggest producers and exporters of weapons of war in the world; in both countries weapons constitute their largest export. The various political strategies of the “holocaust industry” and the strategic invocations of the “Judeo-Christian” biblical myths have produced the ideology of the “unbreakable bond”, between ZT and USA. During his recent visit to ZT Barack Hussein Obama repeatedly broadcast this ideological and religious union. The headquarters of colonial ZT in the Middle East and its numerous global political outlets—especially in North America—masterfully manipulate the power structures of the United States and its NATO allies for producing instability and conflict throughout the Middle East—tensions and divisions between Arabs and non Arabs, between Shi’as and Sunnis—in the belief that the more unstable the Middle East and the wider the gulf between the United States and the Muslim World, the closer ZT will be to its American patron. An informed and impassioned comparison between the history, structure, policies, and behavior of IRI and ZT produces a superior bill of health and a far closer proximity to universal moral standards for IRI. The daily behavior of ZT and numerous United Nations resolutions attest to this comparative outcome.  

During the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi Iran had close economic and diplomatic relations with ZT. ZT received all its oil from Iran. MOSSAD (ZT’s intelligence services) helped organize SAVAK (Iranian intelligence agency). The United States provided massive amounts of weapons to Reza Shah’s corrupt and brutal government.  The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran changed all this. The American response to this change was the orchestration of the bloody 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq when Imam Ayatollah Khomeini, the nemesis of MM, was alive. The United States gave Iraq every tool of destruction (including biological and chemical weapons) except nuclear bombs to attack Iran and sold large quantities of weapons to Iran to use against Iraq. Consequently “[c]ountless families suffered tremendously during that time”. For what reason or on what charges did MM’s “father and uncle…spent years in the prisons of the Shah and Khomeini”? Specifically, how, when, where, and why did these relatives of MM lose “everything: their jobs, their homes, their friends and eventually their lives”?  It is quite likely that the agency for these losses is the US-supported Pahlavi government and the American produced 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war. Shortly after the inconclusive end of this war the Zionist “neocon” nest in the state apparatus of the United States undertook the destruction of the Republic of Iraq. Under the umbrellas of “Operation Desert Storm” (1991) and “Shock and Awe” (2003) Zionized Euro-America destroyed the secular state machinery of Iraq and replaced it with a theocracy—the Islamic Republic of Iraq. The origin, development, and current format and subsidy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is another paragraph in the political and moral resume’ of the United States. The theocracy that houses the Wahabi rentier regime of Saudi Arabia is the largest buyer of American made weapons—Saudi oil exchanged with massive quantities of American made fighter jets, bombers, and tanks. However, these weapons are of lower quality compared to what is gifted to ZT. Osama Ben Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. His extended family and the families of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush and other prominent American elite used to vacation together in the United States during the good old pre-9/11 days. After the disaster of 9/11 when all aircraft were grounded in the United States, only airplanes carrying the Saudis, including Ben Laden’s Kin and friends, were allowed to be airlifted from the United States. Before 1948 there were no theocracies in the Middle East. Currently, to the credit of US-led Zionized Euro-American imperialism, we have five and there are more looming on the near horizon. 

The political and social conditions in the IRI are obviously—some would say fortunately—not similar to the country which probably hosts MM. Michel Foucault (independent of his sexual politics) believed, as do many of his supporters, that Islam, especially its revitalized form in IRI, offers the last bastion of resistance to Euro-American imperialism, its delusional “democracy”, “freedom” and “liberty”; and declining social, political and economic institutions and decaying culture. By way of random examples, if MM’s host country is the United States, a critical and informed lens will not miss a situation in which women, womanhood, and femininity are brutally abused, demeaned, exploited, and vulgarized. Class, gender, ethnic and racial inequalities are rampant in USA. MM’s imperial host is the most highly policed country in the world, far more than Iran is and will ever be.  At any given moment more than a million Americans are in prison. One out of every 39 American adult males has served time in prison. American prisons have increasingly become privatized; they are havens for the expansion of capital.

There is a large corpus of academic writings that effectively refute MM’s claims about the IRI. A sample of these sources (with leads to primary sources) include: Iranian Studies, Journal of Persianate Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Anthropology of the Middle East, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures (entries for Iran). Two recent scholarly publications cogently deal with current political and social conditions in Iran: Going to Iran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms With The Islamic Republic of Iran, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, 2013; and A Separation at Iranian Universities, by Nazanin Shahrokni (Middle East Research and Information Project), October 2012.

Why is the true identity of the author of this totally subjective letter shielded with a pseudonym? Is the editor of AN deferring to MM’s claim “that I am using a pseudonym, because I do not want to scare my family and want to be able to see them in my country of birth”? Did MM inform the AN editor about how and why would his family be scared and why he cannot see his family in the “country of his birth”—wherever that is—if he used his real name?  Thousands of Iranians enter and leave Iran regularly and legally across all its borders without endangering themselves or members of their families on either side of the border. Perhaps the “extreme circumstances” for AN’s decision involve the heated personal and political nature of the accusations and assertions by MM about the IRI irrespective of their validity or plausibility. If this is the AN editor’s reading of MM’s rant, his letter should not have been published in Anthropology News. By publishing this letter AN has imposed its editorial politics on its readers. If MM’s “privacy” and “security” are the reasons for this decision, why should the editor of AN be the only person trusted with this man’s true identity? It is very likely that the AN editorial staff and their friends and/or family members know who is hiding behind the MM veil. More importantly, if the state machinery of IRI decides to find out who is hiding behind the “Mehdi Mohammadzadeh” mask it can easily and quickly penetrate it.  In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the timing for publishing this political rant of blatant distortions about the Islamic Republic of Iran in Anthropology News (for the gaze of progressive academics!) appears to be part of the propaganda for military preparations underway by the American government and its partners-in-crime in NATO and ZT for attacking the nuclear energy program of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Beyond these immediate results, many questions will need to be asked and there should be quite a few contrasting interpretations to come over how, with what was at the very least expected to be a massive Chávez sympathy vote after his March 5th death, following last October’s elections which saw a greater turnout and a Chávez victory by a 10% margin, and given all of the social and economic achievements of the working class under the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV), there could be this slide nearly toward victory by the white aristocratic elite. It will mean considerable unsteadiness for Maduro, even though he faces what one might think is the more cheerful task of building from a position of victory, and with the plenitude of state resources at his disposal, while Capriles tries to rescue himself from defeat. (Nonetheless, by U.S. standards, this could still be judged a decisive victory). That Capriles seemed absolutely convinced of his victory however, well before all votes had been finally cast, let alone counted, is also very suspicious. His behaviour resembles that of Mir Hosein Mousavi in Iran’s 2009 elections–affirmations of victory without any evidence presented, and protests of a stolen election also without the support of any evidence. The extent to which the U.S. interfered in these elections will also need to be investigated, along with any dirty tricks campaign by the Venezuelan opposition. That the U.S. may now exploit this opportunity to attempt to delegitimize Maduro’s victory is likely.

Those might be some of the initial questions, but there are longer-term questions and ones that go deeper into the Chavista movement that will also need to be seriously addressed. The head of Venezuela’s National Assembly and Vice-President of the ruling PSUV, Diosdado Cabello Rondón, was one of the first to start calling for serious self-criticism, barely moments after the results were transmitted. In one message he said, “we regret that some allowed themselves to be seduced by the perverse right-wing,” in another he emphasized that “profound self-criticism is needed…it is a contradiction that sectors of the People voted for those who have forever been their exploiters,” and yet caution, “let’s look for our faults leaving no stone unturned, but let’s never jeopardize either the fatherland or the legacy of our Commander [Chávez].”

Clearly, all of the opinion polls were wrong, nobody has any firm answers about the reasons for the close results, and an immediate struggle is underway. One of the questions that I have, in part inspired by the work of political scientist C.B. MacPherson, is the extent to which a liberal democratic structure can properly serve the aims of radical social transformation and anti-imperialist praxis, in contrast with the democratic one-party state. As we go forward, I will be looking for the insights of those experts with long-standing ties to Venezuela, with insights gained from years of research, and who are not hostile to Chavismo as such, for an understanding of whether some or any of these issues are reaching a climax: a) internal factionalism and behind-the-scenes contests for leadership; b) clashing views of the next stage of revolution, some preferring more radical socialist programs; c) the degree to which Chávez’s massive persona might have diminished Maduro by contrast; d) the perhaps unsatisfied demands of parts of the network of social movements that sustained Chávez in power, and other issues. In what were often misunderstood statements outside of Venezuela, Chávez  was wont to say that he was not a person, but a people. This may have been a very candid admission: it was the broad mass of popular discontent that was the surge behind his first rise to power in 1998, and that wiped out what were then Venezuela’s traditional political parties, and it was this mass movement that rescued Chávez from the 2002 coup. They made Chávez, but I am not sure if they feel that they equally made Maduro (although Maduro himself emerged from that very movement)–it’s a question, like much of everything else above, not an assertion. The question of symbolic power may be quite significant: the problem in trying to focus, galvanize, and cement identification with Chávez’s all too massive legacy, in order to use it as a focal motivating force for a broad and diverse array of movements, without it also serving as a reminder that, yes, Chávez really is gone. The fact that Chávez’s legacy has now become hegemonic is attested to by the fact that one of the fights in this electoral contest was over who could best serve and represent that legacy, with Capriles (however dishonestly) claiming that he would maintain the bulk of Chávez’s social programs and was better qualified to uphold Chávez than that “kid,” Maduro, who felt the need to constantly call himself “the son of Chávez.” Either way, Maduro is going to have to work very hard to do much more than sing the praises of the Commander and Bolivarian socialism, and undertake the toughest tasks of expanding the realities of social transformation. He knows that already, and I wish him the very best and add my own humble congratulations to him on his victory.

Some opening vignettes might set the right tone for properly appreciating the question of “who was right” about the so-called Arab Spring. (The notion of there having been an “Arab Spring,” a term first coined by U.S. neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer back in 2005, is one that has been subject to radically diverse interpretations, from marking in generic terms some sort of struggle for “freedom” and “democracy” [as if there is only one kind of democracy], to views of a covertly directed process of U.S. political intervention, and direct military intervention. Nonetheless, this article is aimed at those who, even now, are still enchanted with the positive aura of the Arab Spring idea.) As usual, my focus will be on Libya.

The Arab Spring: It’s a Good Thing

Rejected: Bernard-Henri Lévy. France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy, or BHL, who some claim is a “philosopher,” was one of the loudest and most active proponents of Western military intervention in Libya from the start, and served as a key adviser if not a personal motivator to then French President Nicolas Sarkozy. We “saved Benghazi,” he proclaimed. Guess who is now a persona non grata in the wonderfully new and free Libya that he proudly boasted of aiding in its liberation? Why it’s BHL. He is no longer welcome. Why? For being a Jew. BHL picked a side without even pausing to take note that his “freedom fighters” were painting Benghazi with graffiti depicting Gaddafi as being a Jew (at least in part over some rumour that his grandmother was Jewish), featuring him with the Star of David on his body. Among diplomats, international aid workers, journalists and business travelers, “save Benghazi” has now become “save yourself from Benghazi.” Who got the Arab Spring wrong?

Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights in the “New Libya.” How can we begin to describe Libya after it has been refreshed by the sweet breezes of the Arab Spring, after being liberated by a movement (or whatever) that no decent and right-minded person should ever dare to criticize? Perhaps we can refer to Libya’s religious freedom, with Egyptian Copts being detained and tortured. This followed gunmen attacking an Egyptian Coptic church in Benghazi. Or we could add some balance here, and talk about the continual attacks against Libya’s Sufi Muslims. There is even more good news, as Libyan women in schools face threats and beatings. It’s not just Libyan women who have won new respect, it is also these female British aid workers who were abducted and raped. Then there is press freedom, such a central goal for anyone claiming to seek civil liberties and freedom from dictatorship: “a large group of unidentified men stormed the headquarters of Al-Assema TV, a private news channel in Tripoli, and abducted four men, including the owner of the station Jumaa Al-Usta, the former Executive Director Nabil Al-Shibani and journalists Mohammad Al-Houni and Mahmoud Al-Sharkassi.” In the new Libya, persons displaced by war are fully respected as in the case of “serious and ongoing human rights violations against inhabitants of the town of Tawergha, who are widely viewed as having supported Muammar Gaddafi. The forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings are widespread, systematic, and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity and should be condemned by the United Nations Security Council.” The new Libya has apparently placed racist atrocity in the pantheon of “human rights.” All those who wash their mouths with terms like “genocide prevention” have apparently left the room. With a new Libya come new spelling conventions: the correct way to spell “oppression” is now liberation. What part of this Arab Spring do you support?

“No shame and no gratitude in lawless Libya.” The commentary in the Sunday Mail (2012/3/5) is especially caustic, in ways that were previously reserved for speaking about Gaddafi, but now with some remorse: “The cemetery had remained inviolate through all the long years of enmity between Britain and the Gaddafi regime. But things are different in the new Libya.” Then the paper’s editors proceeded to draw several “uncomfortable conclusions”—again, too late—such as: “Libya after the fall of Gaddafi is a lawless and ungovernable place where horrible actions can be done with impunity by those who have enough guns. The second is that there is no gratitude among many of those we have helped. The third is that those who warned that we did not know–or care enough–who we were aiding have now been vindicated in the most spectacular and gruesome way….our leaders, and our media, should cease to be so simple-mindedly enthusiastic about endorsing every revolutionary movement that appears in the Arab world. Tyrants are bad, but their opponents are not necessarily any better.” Again, who was wrong about the Arab Spring?

Selfless givers of freedom. The people on the “right side of history” (a Eurocentric trope that refuses to go away wherever ignorance is near) have been found to have engaged in humanitarian exploitation, or perhaps if you prefer commercial humanism. It turns out that the Canadian government of Stephen Harper “launched an all-out commercial offensive a full month before the 2011 war in Libya had ended to ensure ‘a return on our engagement and investment,’ newly released documents show.” You may still be undecided about who got the Arab Spring right, but there is no doubt who eyed the Arab “cha-ching!“

With just these few glimpses, one has to ask: how could it possibly be a source of anything other than proud vindication to have been on the “wrong side” of the Arab Spring? But there is a second assertion: that Hugo Chávez was not just on the wrong side of the Arab Spring, but that he also lost support and credibility because of it, and that he is resented for the positions he took.

Chávez “Lost Support” Over the Arab Spring? Arguments Against Evidence

In reply to the last issue, a wide range of news media rushed to take the opportunity of the death of Hugo Chávez to carelessly assert (or insert) that despite any (or many) of his achievements, he will always be remembered as having been wrong about the Arab Spring, thus leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of “many people” in the Middle East. Chávez’s Middle East reputation has thus been irreparably tarnished, resulting in a loss of supporters. Let’s glance at some examples:

Owen Jones, writing in Britain’s The Independent what is otherwise a strong overview of Chávez’s many achievements, adds this criticism:

“And then there is the matter of some of Chavez’s unpleasant foreign associations. Although his closest allies were his fellow democratically elected left-of-centre governments in Latin America – nearly all of whom passionately defended Chavez from foreign criticism – he also supported brutal dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria. It has certainly sullied his reputation.”

Leaving aside the simplistic resort to calling people “brutal dictators,” in the style of George W. Bush and his successor, producing the kind of meaningless pop-polisci marking the flat world depicted by the mainstream media, Jones should have answered a simple question. Chávez sullied his reputation among which crowd? Jones may speak for you, but he does not speak for me, nor does he speak for many others I know. Stating a subjective interpretation of some, as if it were a universal and objective fact, is just sloppy reasoning.

Meanwhile, France24 was completely convinced beyond any doubt that Chávez “ended up tarnishing his reputation in the region when the Arab Spring erupted in 2011,” for supporting Gaddafi and Assad. After all, they have the word of one single source, a political scientist in Paris. Journalism and evidence have apparently been through an extremely ugly divorce–they refuse to just talk to each other in public even as a mere formality.

Danny Postel, Associate Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, complains in Salon that there is not enough honesty in leftist appraisals of Chávez’s record about the way that he coddled “tyrants.” Once more, he takes his own interpretation as the sole one based in objective fact, and indeed, as synonymous with fact. With reference to Libya, try to find where we see proof that Chávez was wrong in backing Gaddafi:

he spoke out emphatically in support of Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar Assad. Chávez had been chummy with the Libyan leader before the 2011 uprising against him: in 2009 he regaled Qaddafi with a replica of Simón Bolívar’s sword and awarded him the same ‘Order of the Liberator’ medal he’d bestowed on Ahmadinejad. “What Símon Bolívar is to the Venezuelan people,” Chávez declared, “Qaddafi is to the Libyan people.” As the Libyan revolt grew and Qaddafi went on a rampage of slaughter, Chávez was one of a handful of world leaders who stood by him: “[W]e do support the government of Libya.”

All we read is that “Gaddafi went on a rampage of slaughter”–as if he was fighting harmless children with their paper airplanes. Once again, absolute silence on the issue of how those fought by Gaddafi were in many cases violent Islamic reactionaries that had many times before engaged in violence against his government, and that in even more cases the anti-Gaddafi opposition targeted and murdered scores of innocent black Libyans and African migrant workers during its so-called democratic uprising. This supposedly “critical” and “nuanced” left really needs to begin addressing its own racist blind spots, if these writers from Europe and North America expect to ever again be taken seriously in Latin America. Worse yet is when Postel advances as evidence this example of absurd hyperbole, that completely destroys any credibility he might have had–it was meant to be evidence for the thesis that Chávez’s position has been politically costly and embarrassing for his leftwing allies in governments across Latin America…and note that here too not a grain of evidence is presented to support the claim. The reason is simple: the claim is false.

However, it is not just European and North American writers who write similar accusations of Chávez. They might have been easier to ignore had they not been joined by a thin elite of Middle Eastern writers who have added a patina of “Arab legitimacy” to such denunciations.

Thus writing for Al-Monitor, Ali Hashem states at the end of his article:

“Prior to the Arab Spring, it was the pro-West liberalists who did not care for him. After the uprising, however, many of those who had chanted Chavez’s name changed their minds. His support for Gadhafi and Assad after they turned their weaponry on their people divided public opinion about him. Chavez viewed the uprisings as part of an imperialist plan to overthrow anti-American leaders in the region. Arab revolutionists accused him of ignoring the pain of those who had once admired him and invoked his name. To them, he became yet another arrogant leader who chose his interests and the tyrants’ over the people’s.”

“Many.” “Them.” “Divided public opinion.” Until the end of this paragraph, Hashem is simply casting random insinuations without indicating which people, where, and how many (and how he learns of this), really nothing about those who viewed Chávez in these now disapproving terms. Even at the end, all we have is a vague reference to “Arab revolutionists.” Given what these Arab revolutionists have wrought in Libya–which is a very far cry from any socialist, democratic, and independent republic, one has to ask: why should Chávez have even cared about their opinion? Did he ever curry favour with Washington-supported reactionaries and racists who overthrew one of the Arab World’s few secular and socialist governments? One could imagine taking seriously that Chávez offended likeminded supporters–but these were never among them to begin with.

Unsurprisingly, an article by Eman el-Shenawi in the newspaper of the Saudi monarchy, Al Arabiya, wrote with considerable yet unintended irony about Chávez’s support for Gaddafi (reducing analysis to named personalities and not issues). The same author should try writing some critical statements about how his Saudi employers are viewed in Bahrain, where the Saudis and other Gulf states actively and directly participated in the suppression of popular protests…part of an “Arab Spring” the Saudi-funded media pretend had never occurred.

Also unsurprising is that another paper published by a despotic Gulf State, GulfNews and its writer Layelle Saad, can assert that, “Many Arabs lost respect for the Venezuelan leader after he backed despots during Arab uprisings.” Saad, unlike even a pretend journalist, then concludes: “Many Arabs have grown to detest the leader who began to see his double-standards on issues of humanitarian concern. It is doubtful his death will be mourned in the Arab world today.” His double-standards…unlike those of the Gulf Cooperation Council on Bahrain. The “revolution” in Libya was an investment for the Gulf States–Chávez represented a threat to their interests in acquiring control over Libya, and they resent Chávez for that. I doubt their opinions would either surprise or concern Chávez, they were never his friends or allies.

Marking a transition toward more positive appraisals of Chávez in Middle Eastern reporting, Albawaba in “Middle East pines for ‘Arab’ hero Chavez,” drops in a line asserting: “his backing of dictatorial leaders from Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s regime of Ayatollah saw his popularity dwindling during the Arab Spring.” Yet again, no evidence, no opinion polls or other surveys, nothing except that you take this paper at its word. How does this writer know that Chávez’s popularity was dwindling? It’s a quantitative statement–so quantify it.

In the United Arab Emirates’ The National, Abdelhafid Ezzouitni compiled a digest of opinions in the newspapers of the region. Assuming that it is in any way a representative sample, the repudiation of Chávez’s support for Gaddafi and Assad and any suggestion that he lost the support of public opinion in the Middle East, is actually in the minority. Only one example offers a negative view of Chávez’s support for Gaddafi.

As for losing support among allies, Global Post instead notes that Chávez continued to receive the strong support from those whose support he cultivated, such as the government of Syria. The Daily Star of Lebanon again refers us to those in the region who actually supported Chávez to begin with–which is the logical starting point for any argument that Chávez had lost support among friends:

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were united in grief on Thursday over the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, whose untiring support for their cause saw him make blistering attacks on Israel. The 58-year-old Venezuelan president, who died on Tuesday after a nearly two-year struggle with cancer, was hugely popular with the Palestinians for his outspoken support for their plight. “This is a great loss for us,” president Mahmud Abbas said during a condolence call to the Venezuelan representative’s office in Ramallah.

NBC News reported that in Iran support for Chávez also continued past his death, and past the “Arab Spring.”

When it comes to searching for any actual evidence on which opinions are ideally based, one finds little or nothing to support the claim that Chávez “lost support” in the Middle East for his refusal to jump on the humanitarian interventionist bandwagon, spearheaded by NATO and the U.S. State Department. After all, he cannot have lost any support that he did not have to begin with.

Chávez’s Anti-Imperialist Knowledge

In anthropology, when students are trained in fieldwork methods, and what we read about doing ethnographic field research, special emphasis is placed on key informants: those with advanced and accumulated knowledge of their own culture and who can thus serve as valuable guides for outsiders seeking a deeper understanding of their culture. Typically such key informants would be elders, chiefs, shamans, and so forth.

In the Latin American context, some leaders have acquired advanced and accumulated knowledge of U.S. imperialism, both through time spent in (in)direct confrontation with it, and through personal experience. This is the case of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, who in the 1980s led the Sandinista government as it fought off CIA-funded counterrevolutionaries and had to deal with various CIA and other U.S. plots, such as the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and backing local media and opposition groups. Daniel Ortega leads Nicaragua once again, and stood firmly in support of the government of Muammar Gaddafi. Ortega knows something about how U.S. imperialism works.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro is a survivor, on many levels. Fidel survived over 600 foreign assassination attempts, including some outlandish CIA plots that had they not been confirmed would have made anyone referring to them seem like a mad conspiracy theorist. Cuba was invaded by forces backed by the U.S. under John F. Kennedy, and has endured decades of destabilization attempts. If Fidel is an expert on anything, and he is an expert on a great deal, it is U.S. imperialism and how it works. Both Ortega and Castro denounced intervention in Libya, showed no foolish enchantment with Gaddafi’s opposition, and indicated their support for the government of Libya.

Thus we come to Hugo Chávez too, long demonized by Washington, surviving a coup that was backed by the U.S., and presiding over a Venezuela that saw the U.S. Embassy actively involved in political intervention. As just one example among many, one U.S. Embassy cable detailed its plans (and actual steps taken) in U.S. covert intervention in Venezuela, including these aims: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” Some of the key U.S. agencies pursuing these aims were USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, and so-called NGOs such as Development Alternatives International (DAI), Freedom House, and CIVICUS. After witnessing what was done in Venezuela, it was only reasonable–and proven to be quite justified–for Chávez to be more than skeptical of “spontaneous” street protests that received the immediate support of Western powers who themselves threaten almost instant military intervention.

Like many other conscious Latin Americans, students of Latin America’s history since independence from Spain, Hugo Chávez was well acquainted with the nearly 200 years of U.S. intervention in the affairs of Latin American states, and is much better positioned to speak on these issues with considerably more expertise than many of his Middle Eastern counterparts, or some North American or European commentators whose main claim to fame is that they have a blog. Unfortunately, when it comes to U.S. imperialism, a great many critical Latin Americans know exactly what they are talking about, as much as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya may wish to pretend otherwise.

The point is that individuals such as Chávez were well “trained” to recognize patterns, to piece together different bits of information, to critically scrutinize events on the ground in the context of past actions and proclamations, and to place seemingly random events into a coherent picture. In the case of Libya, Chávez was correct that the U.S. sought the first opportunity to intervene militarily, and he rightly opposed that, and was consistent about it from the start. Chavez was correct even when those who ought to have known better asserted that the U.S. was not going to intervene in Libya. Chávez made his principles and objectives very clear from the start and throughout his tours of North Africa and the Middle East: that Venezuela would not stand for the continued intervention of U.S. imperialism, that it would instead stand by those targeted by it, and that it would do what it could to support the Palestinian cause, and that it would seek to build an alternative alliance of nations that stood for long-valued principles of self-determination, non-intervention in state’s internal affairs, and the quest for social and economic justice.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS SIRTE: NATO’S WAR ON LIBYA AND AFRICA

Please click the image for a flier with the table of contents.

Published by:

Baraka Books
6977, rue Lacroix
Montréal, Québec (QC)
H4E 2V4
Canada
Telephone: 514-808-8504
http://www.barakabooks.com/contact-us/

Also available from most online book vendors.

From the United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PartidoPSUV

Today is election day in Venezuela, and to help mark the event ZA is reproducing this article from Chávez’s political successor, Nicolás Maduro, as he leads the United Socialist Party of Venezuela towards victory in the presidential election. See also the articles at the bottom, following the photographs.

*****

A month ago Venezuela lost a historic leader who spearheaded the transformation of his country, and spurred a wave of change throughout Latin America. In Sunday’s election Venezuelans will choose whether to pursue the revolution initiated under Hugo Chávez – or return to the past. I worked closely with President Chávez for many years, and am now running to succeed him. Polls indicate that most Venezuelans support our peaceful revolution.

Chávez’s legacy is so profound that opposition leaders, who vilified him only months ago, now insist they will defend his achievements. But Venezuelans remember how many of these same figures supported an ill-fated coup against Chávez in 2002 and sought to reverse policies that have dramatically reduced poverty and inequality.

To grasp the scale of what has been achieved, it’s necessary to recall the state of my country when Chávez took office in 1999. In the previous 20 years Venezuela had suffered one of the sharpest economic declines in the world. As a result of neoliberal policies that favoured transnational capital at the expense of people’s basic needs, poverty soared. A draconian market-oriented agenda was imposed through massive repression, including the 1989 massacre of thousands in what is known as the Caracazo.

This disastrous trend was reversed under Chávez. Once the government was able to assert effective control over the state oil company in 2003, we began investing oil revenue in social programmes that now provide free healthcare and education throughout the country. The economic situation vastly improved. Poverty and extreme poverty have been reduced dramatically. Today Venezuela has the lowest rate of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean.

As a result our government has won almost every election or referendum since 1998 – 16 in all – in a democratic process the former US president Jimmy Carter called “the best in the world”. If you haven’t heard much about these accomplishments, it may have something to do with the influence of Washington and its allies on the international media. They have been trying to de-legitimise and get rid of our government for more than a decade, ever since they supported the 2002 coup.

We have also worked to transform the region: to unite the countries of Latin America and work together to address the causes and symptoms of poverty. Venezuela was central to the creation of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), aimed at promoting social and economic development and political co-operation.

The media myth that our political project would fall apart without Chávez was a fundamental misreading of Venezuela’s revolution. Chávez has left a solid edifice, its foundation a broad, united movement that supports the process of transformation. We’ve lost our extraordinary leader, but his project – built collectively by workers, farmers, women, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and the young – is more alive than ever.

The media often portray Venezuela as on the brink of economic collapse – but our economy is stronger than ever. We have a low debt burden and a significant trade surplus, and have accumulated close to $30bn in international reserves.

There are of course many challenges still to overcome, as Chávez himself acknowledged. Among my primary objectives is the need to intensify our efforts to curb crime and aggressively confront inefficiency and corruption in a nationwide campaign.

Internationally, we will continue to work with our neighbours to deepen regional integration and fight poverty and social injustice. It’s a vision now shared across the region, which is why my candidacy has received strong support from figures such as the former Brazilian president Lula da Silva and many Latin American social movements. We also remain committed to promoting regional peace and stability, and this is why we will continue our energetic support of the peace talks in Colombia.

Latin America today is experiencing a profound political and social renaissance – a second independence – after decades of surrendering its sovereignty and freedom to global powers and transnational interests. Under my presidency, Venezuela will continue supporting this regional transformation and building a new form of socialism for our times. With the support of progressive people from every continent, we’re confident Venezuela can give a new impetus to the struggle for a more equitable, just and peaceful world.

*****

*****

Capriles Attacks Venezuelan Electoral Council, Refuses to Sign Document

By Tamara Pearson

Merida, April 9th 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Tonight rightwing candidate Henrique Capriles said that he will not sign a National Electoral Council (CNE) document to guarantee that he would recognise the results of the 14 April presidential elections….

Opposition Runs Tired Campaign

By Correo del Orinoco International, April 12th 2013

In the context of another presidential election set for this Sunday, members of the Venezuelan opposition have again used confusing campaign tactics in their bid to retake the government. While affirming, for example, that President Nicolas Maduro is “destroying everything President Chavez did” for Venezuela, the opposition also claims the election of Chavez’s former Foreign Minister and Vice President “will represent a triumph for Fidel Castro and the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia)”. Clearly aimed at dividing the country’s pro-Chavez majority, the strategy seems to have had no impact on Maduro’s poll numbers….

Venezuela says it foiled plot to destabilize presidential vote

By Todd Benson, Friday, April 12, 2013

Venezuela’s government said on Friday it foiled a plot to destabilize Sunday’s presidential election, the latest in a flurry of claims that the opposition has derided as crude attempts to distract voters from the country’s problems….

Red Tide Sweeps Caracas as Venezuelan Presidential Campaign Ends (+images)

By Ewan Robertson

Mérida, April 12th 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuela’s presidential election campaign reached an emotional close yesterday as both candidates made last bid attempts to win over votes….

Thatcher is Dead—Long Live Chávez!

By George Ciccariello-Maher – April 12th 2013

Two deaths with diametrically opposite meanings, evident from the immediate responses they provoked. One was greeted by millions of mourners packing the streets of Caracas, waiting for days to catch a glimpse of their departed leader. The other prompted spontaneous street parties in Brixton and Glasgow and a barrage of comical send-ups about the impending privatization of hell. But while revelers gathered spontaneously to celebrate the physical death of the Iron Lady of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, voters in Venezuela are heading to the polls to drive nails into her coffin and bury her legacy by electing a revolutionary successor to Hugo Chávez….

Filed under: CHAVEZ, VENEZUELA Tagged: 14-A, Bolivarian revolution, Bolivarian socialism, CELAC, Election 2013, Hugo Chávez Frías, Nicolás Maduro, UNASUR ]]> http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/04/14/nicolas-maduro-under-my-presidency-chavezs-revolution-will-continue/feed/ 4 maduro maxforte NICOLAS MADURO http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/04/14/nicolas-maduro-under-my-presidency-chavezs-revolution-will-continue/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenAnthropology/~3/SbT9vDmPwlM/ http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/04/14/a-massacre-for-a-moral-martyr-person-versus-population-in-humanitarianized-afghanistan/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 04:15:30 +0000 Maximilian Forte http://zeroanthropology.net/?p=14699 ]]>

Massacred by “Good Intentions”?

On April 7, 2013, the BBC reported this awful story, one of a long string of such NATO airstrikes on areas with civilian populations in Afghanistan:

“Eleven children have been killed in a Nato air strike in eastern Afghanistan, officials and witnesses say. At least one woman was reportedly killed and a further six are believed to have been injured in the incident in Shigal district, Kunar province.”

What came immediately after that passage is what I also found to be very striking:

“Nato confirmed that ‘fire support’ was used in Shigal after a US civilian adviser died in a militant attack, but said it had no reports of deaths.”

If that unnamed U.S. “civilian adviser” had already been killed, as the BBC suggests, then it follows that this massacre of children and women was little more than a merciless revenge attack. Either way, the precise operational reasons do not matter, except that the death of this U.S. “civilian adviser” is directly tied to the killing of this mass of innocent victims.

“Villagers and officials told the BBC that the casualties were inside their homes when they died. Photographs apparently sent from the scene to international news agencies appeared to show the bodies of several dead young children, surrounded by Afghan villagers.”

Another Martyr Story: How to Depoliticize and Decontextualize a War, Such that War is Rendered Invisible and thus Unquestionable

Meanwhile, news within the same 24 hour period finally put a name to that “U.S. civilian adviser,” even as the names of the Afghan women and children killed remained nameless. She was Anne Smedinghoff. To its credit perhaps (without knowing its editorial decisions), Canada’s leading rightwing newspaper, the National Post, ran a story about Smedinghoff that was directly juxtaposed with the story of NATO’s murder of a dozen women and children. That news was squeezed into a tight column nonetheless, not given the same space as this one on Smedinghoff. Aside from that, within the AP story itself, we are treated to the usual sappy sentimentalism that marks American media propaganda’s usual celebration of its humanitarian heroes killed in places where they do not belong, killed as they worked to directly support their country’s military and political occupation of another nation. Let’s look at the language used by the AP, which is deliberate, selective, and therefore indicative of how a narrative is constructed to mystify reality and misdirect readers.

“Anne Smedinghoff had a quiet ambition…volunteering for missions in perilous locations worldwide.” [adventure, individual achievement]

“It was a great adventure for her … She loved it,” her father, Tom Smedinghoff, told The Associated Press. [adventure]

Her father said family members would tease her about signing up for a less dangerous location, maybe London or Paris. “She said, ‘What would I do in London or Paris? It would be so boring,’” her father recalled. In her free time, she would travel as much as possible, her father said. [Again: adventure]

“the 25-year-old suburban Chicago woman” [suburban, hence not one of those "inner city black people," but someone from a "good neighbourhood"] — “Anne Smedinghoff grew up in River Forest, Ill. – an upscale suburb about 10 miles west of Chicago” [as already alluded to, "upscale"]

“the daughter of an attorney” [came from a wealthy, white family, i.e., a "good family"]

“She attended the highly selective Fenwick High School, followed by Johns Hopkins University, where she majored in international studies and became a key organizer of the university’s annual Foreign Affairs Symposium in 2008. The event draws high-profile speakers from around the world.” [again, upper crust, "well educated" and possibly "well connected"]

“her family took solace in the fact that she died doing something she loved” [but no reaction from the family on all the Afghans murdered in an airstrike the same day, because of what she was doing]

“a positive, hard-working and dependable young woman” [it's not enough to say positive and hard-working, we must be reminded: she was a young woman, with all the cues of youth and femininity that have been taught to American consumers by commercial marketing that targets this demographic; also note, she is given personal qualities, whereas the Afghan victims are a mere number]

“Her first assignment for the foreign service was in Caracas, Venezuela, and she volunteered for the Afghanistan assignment after that.” [in other words, a career imperialist, eager to go wherever her state is seeking to destabilize or occupy another nation-state]

Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday at a news conference in Turkey that Smedinghoff was “vivacious, smart” and “capable.” [Kerry, needless to say, had nothing in the way of recognition of the personal qualities of the victims of NATO's airstike the same day]

He also described Smedinghoff as “a selfless, idealistic woman who woke up yesterday morning and set out to bring textbooks to school children, to bring them knowledge.” [a wonderful humanitarian]

“Friends remembered her Sunday for her charity work too.” [charity, giving, selfless, altruism...and serving an imperial state as a belligerent, uninvited by locals, effectively as a militant on one side of a conflict]

Smedinghoff participated in a 2009 cross-country bike ride for The 4K for Cancer – part of the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults – according to the group. [charity, volunteerism, caring]

In summary then: we have a named person, presented with a photograph, where she is staring at us and reminding us of her presence as a person. And what kind of persona is presented? One that is a caring, charitable, idealistic, humanitarian. Moreover, she was an adventurer who went out on missions. She died doing what she loved, and so that doing therefore becomes beautified and is raised above criticism. She was also a well off, privileged offspring of the American professional bourgeoisie, valued as a “better class” than those below it in the social pyramid. She cared for Afghan children, even as we, apparently, do not.

And what is missing? Just a war. More than just a war: imperialism. Thus we have a fully decontextualized and depoliticized portrayal, that seeks little more than to numb readers into mournful appreciation, and obedience.

The Person versus the Population

Located within the volume edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (New York: Zone Books, 2010), is an interesting chapter by Craig Calhoun that contextualizes and explains one of the key dynamics framing standard Western media representations such as those above. In “The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)Order” (pps. 29-58), Craig Calhoun places Foucault’s and James Scott’s work on “population thinking”–of thinking of persons as managerial problems and statistical categories–within the context of colonialism, foreign intervention, and professionalization (and this applies to anthropology as well):

“Colonial rule helped to occasion the growth of managerial professions such as public health, as well as the development of public statistics and disciplines such as anthropology. Colonial governments were also pioneers of disaster response, even while they helped to create the disasters. Disasters in the colonial era were not only nightmares for the local populations, they were managerial problems for colonial states….Humanitarian action was generally contained within the relations of single metropole to its colonial possessions….It was also productive of the kind of ‘population thinking‘ invoked by Foucault in his accounts of state formation more generally. One result was that colonial powers were typically much more systematic in collecting statistics and monitoring the effectiveness of their work than later humanitarian actors. This reflected the dominance of practical administration, rather than moral expression of their work. But modern humanitarians, too, are increasingly called on to adopt a managerial orientation.” (pp. 40-41, my emphases)

In their “Introduction: Military and Humanitarian Government in the Age of Intervention” (pps. 9-25), Fassin and Pandolfi carefully explain their conclusion, “that the politics of military intervention are now played out in the name of humanitarian morality” (p. 12). Emotion, moral obligation, compassion, charity, are all prominent and acute in establishing the need for intervention and in justifying it. However, this never means that all killing is abjured, and that “collateral damage” is not consciously factored into military calculations, as these (p. 20) and other authors in the same volume argue (a review of chapters in this volume will follow at a later date). The work of this humanitarianization of war results in the,

“naturalization–or depoliticization–of war. Indeed, the humanitarianization of intervention implies the neutralization of conflict situations. Now it is as if the only issue were aid to victims, as if the local context presented no historical peculiarities, as if military operations did not originate in the defense of the interests of the states conducting them….Humanitarian intervention is still a law of the strongest–this is what makes it possible…” (p. 13, my emphases)

The (Ir)relevance of “Good Intentions”

One may meet young and enthusiastic students, eager to quickly leap over any old cultural relativist qualms that older generations of anthropologists carefully nurtured, and thus rush to denounce this or that practice in another society as inhumane, barbaric, wrong, etc. However, one cannot end the story there. The fact is that the emotional and empathetic surge is a critical foundation for humanitarianizing a relationship, and intentions–regardless of what our young and righteous student may think–always come with practical implications once a decision is made to act on those intentions. Put into practice, intentions become implicated with all sorts of institutional agendas, quests for funding, campaigns for visibility, and even military doctrines and geopolitical strategizing. This is necessarily so, because that young student comes without her own army, without the ability to unilaterally promulgate new laws, and usually without any financial or institutional support of her own. So now she must depend on the authorities–to do the right thing by her. Good intentions may be relevant as a starting point, and end up being irrelevant to the processes that come with practical action.

Jean Bricmont put this another way, in his usual memorable terms:

The fundamental ambiguity of the anti-anti-war left lies in the question as to who are the “we” who are supposed to intervene and protect. One might ask the Western left, social movements or human rights organizations the same question Stalin addressed to the Vatican, “How many divisions do you have?” As a matter of fact, all the conflicts in which “we” are supposed to intervene are armed conflicts. Intervening means intervening militarily and for that, one needs the appropriate military means. It is perfectly obvious that the Western left does not possess those means. It could call on European armies to intervene, instead of the United States, but they have never done so without massive support from the United States. So in reality the actual message of the anti-anti-war left is: “Please, oh Americans, make war not love!” Better still, inasmuch as since their debacle in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Americans are leery of sending in ground troops, the message amounts to nothing other than asking the U.S. Air Force to go bomb countries where human rights violations are reported to be taking place.

On the other hand, I have little inclination to take a person’s “good intentions” at face value, especially when the person in question is a complete stranger. I am therefore arguing that good intentions are not the appropriate starting point of analysis after all, but rather it is the incredible confidence some individuals have in thinking that they have fundamentally and absolutely understood a different way of living and thinking, and that differences in beliefs and practices can be diminished or erased simply by proclaiming the “universals” that always come from one dominant geoculture. Moreover, note the frequent tendency to specify and thus isolate a particular practice–”genital mutilation,” for example–as if you can pluck this from a broader social, political and economic context. This is a recipe for ignorance and pretension, not empathy, and less so solidarity.

Having imagined themselves as above cultural difference, and qualified to pass judgment, the logical next step for such humanitarians is to begin to forcibly insert themselves into other people’s stories, writing themselves in and writing out the peoples whose history the humanitarians will now author. Is this what we teach in anthropology, or ought to be teaching? I certainly hope not.

*****

After comments on this article had closed, Jamil Hanifi asked that his comment be posted, which I am doing here:

Thank you Max for penetrating the “sappy sentimentalisms” that sidetrack the savageries of the American killing machine in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Reciprocating the killing of one American adventurer with the killing of dozens of innocent Afghan children and women mirrors the vulgar and bloody asymmetry between preindustrial Afghanistan and freaked out sadistic industrial America in its aimless pursuit of an imaginary “war on terror”. In systematically peeling through the eulogy of this pathetic delusional scout of American empire you have effectively exposed the masochistic narcissism of the American killing machine and its subordinate media and dark-minded popular culture. 

We can now see the true social odors of the “upscale” white suburban comfort zone that produced Anne Smedinghoff, a typical volunteer adventurer page-girl working on the second floor of the US State Department serving and servicing the most barbaric killing apparatus in the history of humankind. Anne drowned in her own blood in remote Wardak province where she was attempting to impose American made textbooks on the children of Afghanistan. Virtually all textbooks used in the schools of Afghanistan are produced by the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha—a major think tank (disguised as an academic program) for the American imperial presence in Afghanistan. (I have a acquired a collection of these textbooks for comparison with textbooks used during my student days in Kabul). The increasing rage and insanity of the American warfare state is inviting tens of thousands of young Americans to carve up career tracks for themselves in this expanding killing enterprise. Not only are large numbers of individuals like Anne Smedinghoff drawn to work for the American military programs, thousands of US high school dropout are “serving their country” in Afghanistan. And not surprisingly, large numbers of American soldiers in Afghanistan are convicted criminals serving their jail sentences in the killing fields of Nangarhar and Wardak provinces. We do not know whether Anne Smedinghoff had a criminal background. However, I do know what she was doing in Wardak province was aiding and abetting a barbaric military machine guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Nobody in the USA or in the UN has proposed a bill – that I am aware of – for The People to vote on the fundamental topics of our era. We need to discuss such notions as whether we want to be competitive troops in a global, top-down corporate Empire’s war, to continue to become more commoditized, depersonalized and uniform although with an exponentially expanding myriad of trivial, “creative”, commercial consumer choices; or to assert our rights to be self-determining, co-operative communities in our collective society and environment and to face hard choices and harder paths of action to scale back to a sustainable population, self-organized into locally-adapted communities using appropriate technologies, from fingers and thumbs to solar, wind and water.

Phosphorescent Fruit Loops anyone?

Maybe They think that The Peoples are not properly informed to discuss this – I can’t IMAGINE why! They need to be “educated”? Or maybe because this is an “extra-legal process”, a “private matter”, where government can control The Masses, but not the corporations, even though corporations have standing as “persons” in the USA legal system.

Nevertheless, it appears that THEY, posing as We the People, are well along the way to actualizing a dream of an automated Empire in which UHUCU (Universal Human Capital Units) are almost universal in their work capabilities within given, but changing skill strata (currently consisting of executive, clerical, technical, labor) – completely substitutable like Henry Ford’s standard parts, and have no permanent social attachments or “home” environment, having been “raised”, or brooded, in a standard, behaviorist-designed environment, including a digital, group “Skinner Box”, or “operant conditioning chamber” as Skinner called it when he was raising his infant son alone in one. Thus, it would not be misleading to say metaphorically that We the People are living in a bubble; just as was Truman Burbank in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, who says, “You accept the reality with which you are presented.”

If you have no alternative reality of your own, then you accept.

I have one (see Part I); and for better or for worse, I like mine.

The reality presented to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at Guantanamo, who also has, or once had, a reality of his own, might not be so easy to accept. And, as Stephen Colbert points out, perhaps the prisoner’s communications with his attourney being bugged by the CIA is not really so different from our own circumstance.

“I can’t believe this is happening here! The Internet’s true purpose is to bring the world’s people closer to each other. The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. It would be advisable for those of us who have consistently opposed and fought against wars of all kinds to view this “cyber war as an equally dangerous and distructive threat.”

How Long Has This Been Going On?

How old is Empire and wars of expansion and colonial domination? Not just tribal disputes in ceremonial dance form, as in Dead Birds, but mass-produced, brutal, dirty warfare conducted by Empire for territorial and material gain, including Human Capital. Empire’s warfare is a premeditated, corporate institutional activity designed for leaving chaos and desperation to be reorganized and utilized under the divine guidance of forum and basilica, the Red and the Black, the carrot and the stick.

This is not new, there was reflective planning for management, exploitation and social control of the dispossessed conquered masses among the 4,500 years-old Empire of the Pharaohs, even long earlier – as shown in Turkey’s 11,500 year old Göbekli Tepe site – in some mass societies “liberated” by Empire.

This is part of a cumulative, shared information base for all of Empire’s ruling class ever since.  The biological connection between the Royals of England, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, … etc.,  gives some hint of the extent of ruling class networking; but We the (common) People are not privy to gaze into all that, nor are we helped by schoolbook history nor mass media to understand it to be a ruling class; national security you know. If They want you to see or to believe something – true or not, the Royals put on a Prime Time show.“Essentially, the imperialists’ project remain the same”, descendant of Rome, according to Tariq Ali.

This video both shows the extension of the Royal Network to include Saudi Arabia and shows that the creation of the Wahabism movement was a product of British intelligence, an internal rift, as the Taleban was created by the US and NATO in Afghanistan.

“If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.”

But, in my opinion an equally important priority:

 “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”. [sounds like the I Ching.]

But, let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System.

Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, just widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue, then that structure dissipates; it is NOT institutionalized as a higher level above local government.

Without addressing this, we cannot counter TRADOC. And They are schooled and drilled in it.

I am here suggesting that TRADOC officers, staff and contractors – familiar with the details of the historic broad scope of ruling an empire and the specific battle strategies’ successes and failures accumulated over thousands of years – think about, discuss, debate, design and experimentally revise that now-global “bubble” from the USA’s Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – in their own bubble with virtual hot links for those globally with appropriate security ratings.

This is what families and communities used to do long ago; the parents of a community in the role now occupied by TRADOC, planning their own futures. Now it is a multiple choice presented by The Supreme Something.

TRADOC – the brains of the operation – has commandeered the rights to design the bubble in which the UHUCU will be billeted in a SHU (MilTalk: “standard housing unit”) and sustained, detained, restrained, retrained and entertained as a “public service” which will be paid for by the same consumer/workers’ taxes dedicated to the Department of Defense; garnished from their minimal wage paychecks if needed, just as the Cypriot peoples’ bank accounts will be garnished for their Austerity tax. Certainly the corporate owners will not provide them with their “entitlement”.

 The Club of Rome (ominous name, ¿qué no?), which became widely known upon its publication of The Limits to Growth – the opening shot in the War to Save the World, has presented its projection for the way the world will have developed forty years ahead, 2052. Here’s an excerpt:

… the most radical and unpredictable change will be in the mentality of the majority who will live their lives continually connected to the internet. Many of us already do, but as an acquired habit in adulthood. Growing up with the externalization of one’s cognitive capacity through permanent internet contact is another matter. It will change people’s sense of self and their emotional makeup, their basic cognitive orientation, and their coping strategies. And, he points out detailed effects in regard to Education of Children – … most parents now know that their children will live in a world profoundly different from their own.  Parents know that they are ignorant about much of the world their children will live in [emphasis my own, but, hmmm, un fait accompli, eh?]. But we can only teach children what we know. A main agenda in today’s pedagogic discourse is teaching children to take responsibility for what they need to learn and know.

Vital to NOTE: This is a point at which the system inserts itself to virtually replace the biological parents and the transmission of traditional knowledge and worldview.

My! My! I just can’t imagine from where these tabula rasa children are expected to develop criteria for “what they need to learn and know” … do you have a web address to advise them?

I mean, Matrix Revolution deja vu all over again!

Always Tracked

[and, I add, often tricked: “You can fool almost all the People all the time” under such circumstances.]

A Global Reality – a medium without borders, … a being not identified with any community nor with any specific location, which implies a profoundly different notion of self. One’s belonging to a physical place is blurred by one’s belonging to various virtual networks.

Oh well, Eric Wolf’s “local unity”, Sapir’s and my “genuine culture” has been evanescing into the cybersphere anyway. Bye bye “genuine culture”! Nuristan will be turned into an exotic Disneyland ski resort and tribal reserve for the rich to enjoy like they once enjoyed Cuba.

 And, talking about the megacity of 2052,

… an environment that is diverse and fluid, without clear borders between locations and without stable social structures and ideologies to give guidance as to how one’s life is supposed to be. It will be an environment with few stable necessities and of open-ended and undefined opportunities.

Ah, yes, “no stable frames of reference” – perfect for mind-shaping, but, the opportunities! Gold rush, prime investments, a NEW flavor candy bar; NEW and BETTER Oleomargarine, Fun Island Tours, Michelle Obama Clothes Design Line – Creator and Promoter of Extreme “Individuation”; design your own Avatar Icon and earn points toward a virtual designer wardrobe for your Avatar if you buy one of our monthly special selections.

Do I hear a distressed call for an Insurgency!

Let me slip into this phone booth.

The Real Work and Anthropology

Anthropologists’ (and here, let me be clear, I do not include most archaeologists among cultural anthropologists, but, WAC stands out as a laudable exception) real strength lies in their long-term, first-person participant experience in at least one “foreign” community and knowledge of numerous indigenous or “aboriginal” social and cultural worlds; distinct species of shared sensibilities; unique, historically developed weltanschauungen – unified frameworks for perception and cognition. If anyone is qualified to guide the move away from the present Monomaniacal path that is the Intelligent Design of society and “culture” by advisors to Pharaohs and Kings, it is … [Drumroll and Trumpets!]

 The Anthropologists!

Caution: Not all anthropologists grasp the cognitive substance of culture; for example, Jules Henry, who confused the indigenous Amazonian people – whom he is said to have lived with for a year and whose language he is said to have “mastered”; but whom he studied from a “Freudian Perspective!” – with being in the same predicament as is the engineered urban industrial society of empire; irrationally guided by their cultures.  Henry seems to have supported cultural sterilization and “rational” re-training under professional Freudian tutelage.

And, then, when the Critical Mass has Arisen, there is the need of having a conceptually, consensually-constructed alternative whole system, with many autonomous but articulating parts (local communities), and a plan for getting to there from here. Getting to some baseline state such as that called up by Small is Beautiful, or Ecotopia, and other Dreams of Uprisings Past.

Or, maybe it is wiser to leave this to Obama and to Intelligently Designed Evolutionary Intervention Processes.

Trust them!

My Own Metaphor

As I read the methodical and well-researched work of the USanthropologists working to disconnect their discipline from the military-intelligence complex, I realize that most of my own writings since 2009-2010 are a look, in the light cast by these radical anthropologists, at the impacts of my recent military experiences upon my own worldview. Being not nearly as well-read in the background literature of the current AAA-related “radical caucus” – some of whom have built careers around this investigation, and long-disconnected from the mainstream professional associations, I sometimes think that I must have been blind to what I was being subject to, being irreversibly(?) sewn into.

Somehow, I had not linked it all together until the 2009-10 military experiences led me into reading some of the writings of the “radical caucus” literature on counterinsurgency. Then the reflections and memories all had a larger framework. I am still fitting together this and the 76 years of life and observation inside this same system. I find that weaving back and forth between new information on related work in anthropology and other fields and my own memories and reflections, are a very rich and entertaining enterprise

My nightmare of the process, the enterprise that we children of Rome – the collective, tax-paying USan and NATOan society – are now starting, but could still extinguish, is, as I wrote, metaphorically, earlier:

It’s beyond Time and Space. It’s lift-off; time for the flames to lift off the marble table top where the spilled ethanol fuel has been consumed, time to hover in a blue aurora borealis of ignited fumes above the shiny alabaster cities for a moment, then flicker out. We each become our individual Avatars; mind is in the Data Cloud; body is no longer necessary, … but, not to worry, your “culture”, your heritage, will be virtually there with you – you’ll be issued a body of your choice – except in special assignments, when the Commander will choose your Avatar – at times when Management says you are needed to manipulate the tangible universe that the technosphere has not yet completely automated.

[Clearly this was composed soon after the ethanol fuel had been consumed.]

 Pick Your Favorite Brand

At this point, actualizing Jigger’s solution – Small is Beautiful – is not among the options offered for the conscious concern of US citizens by their Guiding Media. What it really seems to boil down to is “Which kind of Empire would you prefer to buy?” and the answer that The People choose … will determine the nature of the reality “with which you are presented”, as Truman Burbank put it; one designed by the People’s mind, or one that designs the mind of each individual UHUCU.  The former choice is not available in any of the leading brands of Empire.

There is the Capitalist Christian-Judeo, Democratic, Free-Enterprise Empire, for example, and we USNATOans, including Israelis, all know what it is like to be subject to this Regime.

There is a neo-Socialist Empire especially in parts of Africa, almost all of Latin America, strong political parties or social movements in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, Russia and much of Asia; but the socialism option is not as well-discussed in the USA – where it is limited to the Military and their network of contractors, individual and corporate-institutional – as is the Capitalist Empire descendant of Rome, which is falsely labeled as “democracy” (Warning!  This product might contain horse meat). Socialism is in fact painted as in cahoots with the Enemy, harboring terrorists and repressing their forcibly subjugated peoples; portrayed as “failed governments” that need an Arab Spring; a “democratic, peaceful uprising” covertly funded, armed and trained by the USNATO, as in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which documented the failed coup by the CIA against Hugo Chavez in 2002, a BBC video effectively banned in the USA.

Then there is the Islamic Empire – observably tagged as the main enemy, which is a mix of the People of the Book with a People’s Society in which the charging of interest on a loan is forbidden; positioning Islam directly in front of Judeo-Christian Capitalism’s drive to the basket (or to the bank);  …

 … but, at the last moment Jesus Christ kicks over their money baskets and the shit hits the fan! Both sides say that The Christ is their own player and the Socialist Camp steps up to point out that Jesus, El Señor, is a Socialist who did not sell his loaves and fishes to the hungry masses listening to him go on and on like Fidel in his prime (which lasted into his seventies), but, like St. Hugo The Baddy, a devout Christian saint, he shared them with his community.

It ends in a three-way tie: Free shots for all

You Say You Want a Revolution?

To set about a “revolution”, we first face a “war of liberation”, which many in the USA are taught to confuse with “revolution”.

[The TRADOC counterinsurgency folks have been changing the meanings of things; so, the war of liberation to begin a process of revolution is now thought to be the “revolution”, but has been renamed “insurgence”. You often hear USans say such things as, “Well, it’s been two years since they had their revolution, and I haven't seen any progress.” ... Or, if it is Bush the Lesser (Arundati Roy 's real-George term) talking, “Ah hain’t seen no progress!”]

Nonetheless, in order for there to occur a societal revolution, a change of paradigm, the members of society must be mentally liberated from their current sequestered condition and encouraged to self-organize. TRADOC is pushing the rugby ball down the field in the adverse direction. If there is a “We” out there, We must push it the other direction. 

Those who are paid to maintain the current condition will not simply yield and say, “Yeah, you’re right. We have been deceiving, cheating and generally oppressing you; so we’ll do everything we can to help you to design and build a sustainable, human-scale, human-paced society.

“All our collective resources are at your service.

 “AND, from now on, we will only tell the truth!”

[So, legally speaking, everything before the last phrase, following “AND”, cannot be guaranteed to be true.]

Be a Working Man’s Hero; Speak Truth to Power, Go Directly to Jail

No, the truth is, ‘one peep outta you and The Stick!’, … well, just remember what happened to Bradley Manning. As Chris Hedges reports:

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power….

Manning has done what anyone with a conscience should have done. In the courtroom he exhibited—especially given the prolonged abuse he suffered during his thousand days inside the military prison system—poise, intelligence and dignity. He appealed to the best within us. And this is why the government fears him. America still produces heroes, some in uniform. But now we lock them up.

And, as Arundati Roy said in an interview, which is good advice also for the AAA’s Radical Caucus :

“How do you [here, we address The Anthropologists as “you”] argue rationally against these people? [by now you have some hint who I believe are “these people”] We cannot have a conversation with them at this time; we must do what WE [The common People] have to do.”

Right! We will face a mortal struggle to take what’s ours, including our own work and our identity as part of family and local community and its products. It won’t be gained by diplomacy or by negotiations and compromises with TRADOC’s agents, unless someone is quietly carrying a Really Big Stick.

Do YOU have a Really Big Stick?

Compañero Fidel made it clear recently that the war of liberation in 1958 Cuba would have to be fought differently today. The “hidden” and protected headquarters camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba would be vaporized by armed drones within hours of their discovery by satellite surveillance. Now, it is a “battle of ideas”.

 “Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.” George Harrison singing Fidel’s advice.

And, Latin Americans are not only thinking, they are acting for themselves.  Latin America has refused to be another Gulag for US Extraordinary Rendition. They have collectively, cooperatively, consensually constructed an alternative framework and made it known to all in nuestra america. Largely due to the Bolivarian Movement that was stimulated and brought to power under the leadership of Hugo Chavez after being tested and incubated in Cuba, the Latin South has begun to think for their Collective self, collectively, communally turning the Monroe Doctrine on its head and excluding the Anglo north from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), just as the Anglos excluded Cuba from the Organization of American States.

 So, also, must the anthros, in consultation, construct a mantra, a mind-tool for this Battle of Ideas to win the hearts and minds of the people, to provide them with a clear processual framework for getting from here to Ecotopia; to Small is Beautiful, to begin to develop a sustainable reality, worldview, embedded within the many diverse niches of Earth’s Supreme Cybernetic System. “Now, here’s the plan!”

So, there is an enemy whom I characterize as managing our total environment as far as possible.
Know thine enemy!

So we need good information on The Management.

And, that’s where the problem begins; who’s really in charge here? and what can The People do about it?

If you think finding Usama bin Laden was difficult…

Meet TRADOC

TRADOC is the central hub for coordinating the training and indoctrination of not only military personnel, but of the entire US population, and, by extension the population of all that they hold sway over; starting in a strong “advisory” position to the Executive Branch of US Government to assure all the President’s Cabinet and policies are well-informed by the military’s perspective on national security interests. I believe this is the substance of the claim that Fort Leavenworth is ‘the intellectual center of the US Military’. TRADOC, the Heart of Darkness, is The Dark Side, the hidden heart and mind of the Pentagon.

Early in January, 2013, before Obama’s second inaugural speech, the US Military took the President into the Pentagon and examined him; his “fitness” to be President.

It’s beginning to feel alot like Egypt!

The moment of clarity is when you realize that the domain of the Training and Doctrine Command is not just the physical training and ideological informing of the USA military, but the in-forming, the in-doctrine-nation of the entire nation, and, in cooperation with the European Union, all of NATO and subordinated (“allied”) nations.

There are no boundaries, unless there is organized resistance! As the then-young Arandati Roy said in 2003: “The US says it can do whatever in Hell it wants. And that’s official!.”

At the top of the pyramid of command, not within it, is the “bubble” of the inner circle of the ruling class as described by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in a debate on Democracy Now in which the Colonel lays out the intentional duplicity of the information given to the US peoples and to the NATO peoples through the media.

Related, a friend writes:

actually, Like Ray Davis, who was arrested by the Pakistan Government, Bob – here now in Albuquerque – was US Marine acting as faux State Dept employee in covert war in Laos..

Also notice according to Wiki  TRADOC trains “foreign” international soldiers, citing TRADOC manual. (however) In searching that manual, using term foreign OR international, nothing comes up.  WHY?

Went to what I think was place wiki quotes and find

TRADOC schools conduct 2,734 courses (81 directly in support of mobilization) and 373 language courses. The 2,734 courses include 503,164 seats for 434,424 soldiers; 34,675 other-service personnel; 7,824 international soldiers; and 26,241 civilians.^[1]

now reads:

TRADOC scope and scale

TRADOC has more than 25,000 Soldiers and 11,000 civilians working daily to accomplish our mission. We have 32 schools, and we train more than 500,000 Soldiers a year. Our footprint spreads throughout the continental United States at 20 different locations, and we provide the senior commander on 13 of those installations. 

(You, John, you said that your work is) Unweaving the web of “formation of USan consciousness” well said. Mine being as function of (doing the same with the) atomic bomb rather than TRADOC. But objective same, different worker and soldier ants serving the queen. Do ants and bees have dissidents?

That was my friend, Erich. We live in the same asylum. Yes, the one about which Shel Silverstein did his cartoon, “Now Here’s the Plan”.

As an example of another reach of TRADOC’s role is in planning and reporting upon strategic military exhibitionism – also called “war-games” or “joint training exercise”, and then harvesting the Public Information spin from any tense responses it generates. The current example is the account of the US with South Korea in their annual Combined Forces War Games rehearsal, both make clearly threatening scenarios about “change of regime” in North Korea and perform actual armed exercises near North Korea, as described by a Korean American in an interview on Democracy Now.

It superficially resembles the two tribes of Dani warriors brandishing spears and shields, dancing toward each other, then back as portrayed in the Dead Birds film; but this Dance of Death is in a mega-scale, nuclear/digital era, in an entirely different class of phenomena; and the stakes on the table are global, and the choreography is not culturally shared between opposing sides, … or is it?

Here’s Looking at YOU, Kid, in an Intelligently-Designed World?

The human-constructed world in which people such as Truman Burbank will receive training and indoctrination is, itself, designed to optimize and reinforce the effects of that training, including everything from news to stop-signs and seat-belts to social security numbers and standardized “education”. The ultimate Behaviorist Industrial Psychologist’s dream: Total System Design.

We the uprooted, dispossessed of a “civil society”, wards of Empire, iPod in hand, are meekly following the orders, the temptations, the media-stimulated appetites, the warnings and the signs as we march through Satan’s temptations and dangers into the Brave New World Order under our own cognizant volition – if the state of USans’ consciousness can be called cognizant of anything not received in the media, so begging the question whether his volition is truly his/her volition…? – leaving a world without having truly seen it from a fully human perspective; the deeply collective worldview of a historically deep, geographically long-stable society, genuine culture, bye-bye!

 Just blindly following virtual orders? That’s Dumb! Marching to the shower room.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 Rage, Rage,Against the Dying of the Light.

As the Beatles finally decided to confront the Bullies in the bicycle chase in A Hard Day’s Night:

“Let’s go back and get’em!”

The first rule I learned – both during my actual military service 1956-1959 and again during my 2009-2010 HTS training, required video classes that we had to complete before going on to the next; videos about what to do when captured – The First Rule is to try to escape as early in the prisoner processing process as possible.

Well, I never was captured in Korea, but, soon after arriving back at Fort Lewis, outside Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and being marched in a line to duty in the Motor Pool, washing muddy trucks with power hoses, I stepped back and flattened myself against the wall of a warehouse as the line marched around the corner – several others stepping in with me as the line marched on; then we all lit out at a run back to the barracks, changed into civvies and headed into Seattle! Temporarily liberated.

“Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.”

What will be/was Lost; What might be/is Gained?

One of the most remarkable leaps “forward” in this respect, toward termination of sovereign aboriginal societies, local unity, and genuine cultures, has been the universal spread of social media and the applications of the Information Technology devices to manage one’s personal and “social” life, and to provide one with fast-breaking “news” and instant communications from whomever.

Thus, an ethnically self-generated taxonomic framework for reality – based on cumulative, shared, organic, individual perceptions within a local cultural frame of reference, socially evolved over thousands of years – is replaced for the uprooted, occupied and relocated populations by the information technologists’ frameworks that are designed for machines communicating with each other about Empire’s program priorities in ASCII characters.

This “reality” has no fully present smell, no color, no form, no taste,

no vibes, man!

is this alive?

or what?

Whoa! Let’s loaf awhile, just vegetate and tune in to the surroundings in alpha mode (loafing mind) and ponder this.

“Animals are not imbeciles.  There is in the life of wild things in a wild setting a multitude of interactions to which the mind of civilized man is not attuned because it is of the necessity oriented to another aspect of mental energy, namely the rational.  To understand the psychology of the Pit River people, it is necessary to visualize their extremely intimate contact with the trees, the rocks, the weather and the delicate changes in the atmosphere, with the shape of every natural object, and, of course, with the habits not only of every species of animal but of many individuals.  It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions. (de Angulo, p. 353)

And notice how this resembles Gregory Bateson’s message at the end of this essay, “Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.” I do believe, however, that the current phase of Empre’s Counterinsurgency movement has addressed that concern by focussing the new digital technology upon the cognitive colonization of the UHUCU.

The UHUCU Management Problem

In Part I, I referred to a classmate at the University of California at Davis who had been in the Military Police and later worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger – also essentially an armed policeman, who foresaw the need for a mass society management program.  

Now, fifty years later, I am moved by my recent learning about TRADOC to understand that this was all well advanced by then; universities were offering programs with scholarships and work-study jobs, jobs for graduates with societal management skills; the CIA and FBI were expanding their list of occupational skills, COINTELPRO was taking shape, career opportunities were opening up. The chain of command between all levels of government was being linked up, from local to county, to State, to Federal.

But, other than Defense, the Federal level seems to be in exploitable chaos. What’s above the Federal Government?

Reporters this morning uncovered the fact that while 40,000 or more people were outside the White House asking for his attention about Keystone XL, President Obama was playing golf with oil and pipeline executives in Florida.

There appears to be a massive coordinated apparatus that subsumes industries, communications, invincible military might, the wealth of the richest, and the elected and appointed governments.  The embedded media documents and analyses this, “as advised”. Approximately Ike’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’; now complexly desarrollado.  Perhaps the appearance of chaos is fostered as a smoke-screen to obscure this?

The “enemy” appears to have We The People, each and all, completely surrounded, subsumed.

However! Do keep in mind that, given our Truman Show situation, we have no way of knowing whether this representation of the government-corporate-military junta as omniscient and omnipotent is true or false.

And, yes, I do think that the general trend toward legalizing cannabis is part of the program for cultivating a more docile herd; but could backfire; don’t forget the origins of the word, “assassin”. Of course, if you control the hashish supply, you probably control the assassins? Leave no turn unstoned.

Hillary Clinton, in her final appearance, her resignation speech, Secretary of State, looking alot like Gabby Giffords appearing in Congress after her “recovery”, tells us the world is “a safer place”

I note that she emphasizes “The Mission” that the US elected government is carrying out. The Mission, of course, is a military term, not a religious term, in this case, …

…and this Mission Creeps hand-in-hand with the religious ones; trying to supplant local worldviews using this carrot and The Stick if necessary. [Ah, good! Another example of syntactic ambiguity: Is the word “Creeps” a noun or a verb?] The Mission Creeps.

At that point in the video narrative about the meaning of OZ National Monument, which is playing on the Big Screen in the Interpretive Center’s Theater - required education before  one enters the Castle for his tour, the little boy – his name is Bradley Manning –  walked up to the big, black curtain and pulled it completely back…  

everybody’s mobile network crashed (Jesus cheers and claps his hands in Heaven)… and a vision appeared unto him and to all present; and the Angel spoke, saying unto the small boy standing there with his slingshot:

“… and in The People, united, is hope, is the source of all budgets and political power….” and, reflecting, the little boy turned to the audience and shouted:

We ARE The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

with each Palestinian imprisoned or killed; with every “ethnic” stopped and frisked in New York, with each and every drone strike in Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Mali …, from the swelling volume of the voices and number of places from which the crescendo arises:

WE are The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

The Greenpeace Tree Huggers strapped in a tree high in the air of the Northwest Coast of North America’s Redwood forest community, trying to Save Strawberry Rock, to prevent a timber corporation’s clear-cut of a People’s forest sanctuary; Canada’s First Nations taking a stand to save the Earth; the Bolivarian Revolution as the Legacy of Hugo Chavez; linking the out-reaching hands of Julian Assange, Raul Castro, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega … and Rafael Correa:

We are The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

As Andy Goldsworth says in his video recording, Rivers and Tides of his transient earthworks as a stone construct collapses while the tide approaches, “This is my work, you know? Too many unknowns.”

He explains how the Lords of Empire who ruled Scotland, moved the people off their lands to make room for sheep; and how the land today is greatly influenced by the habits and needs of sheep that were a commercial investment of the Lords. We are those sheep; and, boy, do we have shepherds! I just tried to follow a link in Wiki to get to a page described in the William Lederer page, “Government by Misinformation“ (Excerpt from Lederer’s Nation of Sheep), but, when clicked upon leads us to what I believe to be one of the TRADOC-designed dead ends:

“Ever feel you’re in the wrong place 404 (Page Not Found) Error If you’re the site owner, one of two things happened:

1. ) You entered an incorrect URL into your browser’s address bar, or 2) You haven’t uploaded content.

If you’re a visitor and not sure what happened:

1) You entered or copied the URL incorrectly or

2) The link you used to get here is faulty.

(It’s an excellent idea to let the link owner know.)

We are Entering our Final Ascent

This boiling global swell of humanity, reaching the climax stage of its tool-based Culture, the “Neolithic”, which we inhabit here and now – not like the climax stage of Redwood forests as an ecosystem in stable balance  – attempts lift-off.

Allah Hu Akbar!

You say you want a Revolution?

This is my work, you know? Esto es lo que hago.

Too many unknowns.”

Ecological anthropology and cybernetics; An Axe is Something to Be

What we need now is not more information, but a plan for changing the direction of our own society, beginning with changing one’s own mind before Someone does it for you. This summary of Bateson’s thought might provide or stimulate a realistic model for thinking about what can be done by a union of anthropologists who want to “change the world” (better first change your mind, instead). Gregory Bateson played on both sides of the political ideology net. He was a Real Antropologist who had best intents within the reality of what he considered to be the practical limits of his influence and to be the probable trajectory of future human societal control options as human population increase came to be a tipping point for the critical global ecology-management problem. I think his writings, along with Edward Schumacher’s,  make a good beginning toward an organized resistance, re-education and reversal response to the current Empire’s efforts to enclose its UHUCUs with finality; a movement organized and occupied by anthropologists and others getting together an organized, loving, counterpunch. It was Gregory who brought attention to the un-recognized wisdom of Jaime d’Angulo’s works during the Whole Earth Catalog era.

I include this excerpt from Wikipedia’s essay on Gregory Bateson because, as Gary Snyder wrote at the end of his own poem, entitled Ax Handles, inspired by helping his son carve a new handle for an old ax-head whose handle had broken, the model was not far away:

It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D. “Essay on Literature” – in the

Preface: “In making the handle of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand.”

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an exe

And my son a handle, soon

 To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

As a mentor, Gregory Bateson, also an axe, provided us with a model for a thought-handle for the task we face:

In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson applied cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology and the concept of homeostasis.^[19] He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis^[19] and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.^[19]

Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.^[19] This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.^[19] While Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and that the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson saw consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind.^[19]

At the heart of the matter is scientific hubris. Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven.^[19] Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.^[19]

Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems.^[19] In exerting his autocratic rule man changes the environment to suit him and in doing so he unbalances the natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency. The purpose driven accumulation of knowledge ignores the supreme cybernetic system and leads to the eventual breakdown of the entire system. Bateson claims that man will never be able to control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear fashion and if man creates his own rules for the system, he opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man’s technological prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him to potential to irrevocably damage and destroy the supreme cybernetic system, instead of just disrupting the system temporally until the system can self-correct.^[19]

Bateson argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural cybernetic system instead of scientific arrogance as a solution.^[19] He believes that humility can come about by abandoning the view of operating through consciousness alone. Consciousness is only one way in which to obtain knowledge and without complete knowledge of the entire cybernetic system disaster is inevitable. The limited conscious must be combined with the unconscious in complete synthesis. Only when thought and emotion are combined in whole is man able to obtain complete knowledge. He believed that religion and art are some of the few areas in which a man is acting as a whole individual in complete consciousness. By acting with this greater wisdom of the supreme cybernetic system as a whole man can change his relationship to Mind from one of schism, in which he is endlessly tied up in constant competition, to one of complementarity. Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system.^[19]

Main Points to Take Away

Tariq Ali:

“If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.”

 “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”.

JA: 

Let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System that some call Gaia?

Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, instead ecotopian communities have widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue at hand, then that structure dissipates; does not institutionalize itself as The Above, and normal local community life continues. .

Come back to Earth, adapt! And, for a hint of what that might mean, I sent you, al capo, to Tariq Ali’s Fundamental Guidance. It’s Now or Never!.

We are virtually here to discuss with you something that I would call InTRADOCtrination: Intelligent Design for Retraining the Masses

The Mission?: We suggest that it is The Locking-In: The Prison-Industrial Complex, well-documented and contextualized by Angela Davis. In fact, she traces my essay’s central themes.

You Say You Want a Revolution? This line over here!

The authentic cultural anthropologist’s problem with the militarized US government term, “the way forward”, is in its singularity.~JA

I do think that anthropology-informed and anthropology-induced reflections upon one’s own cognitive development over substantial life-time-frames can be generally instructive, in spite of proscriptions against “armchair anthropology”; and it can be entertaining, at least to oneself. And that is what I do in this essay. As a result of my own such reflections and ruminations on second-hand (media) information about current events and my contemplations to relate them to my existing framework for what is real, including ethnographic fieldwork, and then, to find a vehicle and a style in which to carry my creation to others, I write as I do; a sort of reflective, sometimes journalistic, JamesJoycean, belles lettres, Sergeant Pepper Round Table inner dialogue style. This is not rocket science, rather this is artistic research; the Rocket Science Symposium is in room number nine.

When reading something in the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual that mentioned the Radical Caucus at the 1967 DC meetings – where I finally met Mead when she introduced herself because she thought surely I was my teacher John Adair’s son, as she stood there with her polished forked walking stick and other ethnic regalia – I was again reminded by that article, rich with revelations and references and reports and systematic explanations of the hidden factors; reminded that I am not systematically well-read in the background anti-militarization literature of the current AAA-related ‘radical caucus’; and, being long-disconnected from the professional associations other than WAC, I sometimes think that I must have been blind to what I was being subject to, because I didn’t have a full frame of reference back then; I was peeping through a keyhole down upon my knees.

Then, I think back to that 1967 AAA Annual Meetings in Washington DC, where I am documented to have stood at the microphone and said to Dr. Carpenter after his paper on primate studies and the understanding of human war:

I think that Dr. Carpenter neglected what I considered to be the main point brought up by Dr. Holloway, namely that at least “modern war” is often the result of a conscious manipulation of shared symbols by a limited group within the society, perhaps for social, political, and/or economic ends. I wonder why Dr. Carpenter did not respond to this except to say that war was extra-legal. Would he care to comment on this now and also on the implicit suggestion that there is a certain responsibility on the part of anthropologists that goes along with this knowledge?

So, I believed that I knew enough to stand at the microphone in a plenum session and get in the face of a leading anthropologist and I had an obvious opinion, an attitude and a smart-ass posture about this small effete issue in the larger frame of serious global problems, but, somehow, I had not linked it all together until the 2009-10 military experiences led me to reading some of the writings of the ‘radical caucus’ literature on Counterinsurgency and COINTELPRO. I wasn’t ready; couldn’t yet get insights from the information.

Now, the reflections and memories all have a framework that I did not have when I stood there in 1967; and the importance of that framework is the background topic of this essay.

I am still fitting together this and the 76 years of life and observation inside this same phenomenological system. I find that weaving back and forth between new information on related work in anthropology and other fields and my own memories (dreams?) and reflections, is a very rich and entertaining enterprise. That’s why Joan Didion’s “Where I was From” was so stimulating; a few years older than me and also from the Central Valley with ties to San Francisco and Southern California, she did an amazing review of the “railroading” of California by those Supreme Somebodies; very well done auto-ethnographic biography by this ‘novelist’.  

I am currently concerned with the problem of finding a pattern in the larger context of memories of what one did or saw or heard at past times, times passed in a larger context that one no longer is given by one’s elders’ oral history, rather –sometimes explicitly sometimes covertly, subliminally or implicitly – this context, this history, this reasoning is currently given by the “media” – including public “education” which now “teaches” us and our children, mostly through “smart-board” and other digital social media and mass media, about the larger context in which our memories occurred.

 So, you see, you have memories; but, the context, the meaning, will be supplied.

That’s why I resent Windows 7 reorganizing my file structure! I seem to have a need to tie it all together my own way, into the system that I “inherited” as my worldview; or however that happens. This activity exercises a complex of brain functions that Gregory Bateson believed to be necessary to cultural continuity. I realize that some “science” might contradict my way.

Where I Am Coming From

Returning to college after Korea, I recall, about 1960, a discussion with a classmate at the University of California at Davis. (Yes, the friendly, trusting, honor-system honoring, “hi aggie” campus where you could leave your bicycle unlocked or your briefcase and books laying on the grass in the Quad and find them when you returned, where you never locked your door, the place where the Campus Police were filmed spraying peaceful, seated demonstrators in 2011 with crowd-control chemicals. But, buried under that, I remember experimental beagle dogs confined to concrete “runs” enclosed, top and sides, in storm-fence. They were being exposed to varying, focussed doses of radiation, and the effects were studied through autopsy. And, I think this was just one in a chain or experiments that had been conducted since 1945, to investigate the possible uses of this new power source. It was pointed out to me the gray, narrow “scars”, a discoloration of the hair from black, brown or white to gray, like a scar, one or two inches in length, sometimes on parts of the head, sometimes in different parts of the body. I could only speculate.)

This memory, in new context, suggests to me that President Hugo Chavez’s suspicion that the improbably high frequency of cancer among socialist leaders in Latin America, especially in the pelvic area for the men, was not simply a skewed sample or some other reason for dismissal of the very idea! Who would do such a thing? And, how?

I can hardly wait for the outcome of the tests on the remains of Yassir Arafat.

Dave had been in the Military, but, whereas I had been with the Army’s medical corps, he was in the Marines’ Military Police and later worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger – also essentially an armed Federal policeman. So, given that one’s livelihood greatly forms one’s consciousness, we looked at the same phenomenon differently. He was concerned with the issue of how to protect the Park’s landscape from more visitors than the health of the environment could tolerate. He talked about law enforcement classes in which the concern was how to condition and control the general population in the USA. Seat belts were an early increment of control mindset, and its induced, fear-based compliance mindset. ‘Click it or ticket!’ says the giant signboard.

To me, my friend’s prescription seemed like livestock management, a popular interest at our State-owned, land-grant agricultural university, but quite changed from the days when they, the ‘cowboys’ and the cows – including the bulls, roamed the range together until roundup time. It only reflects a trend in the mega-agri-business. Now it is birth, life and death on a meat manufacturing feedlot assembly line.

Sidebar: There is a metaphor in this for the birth, life and death of an academician. He/she is the customer, raw material and the product of the establishment-validated educational corporation from which he/she seeks a “diploma”, a “degree”, her “entitlement” in anthropology to teach that subject at some university. 

Well, we now have the cow in the killing chamber, diploma in hand, she has paid all the tuition for her degree and is carrying a $70,000 student loan debt, and now we tell her of the prognosis for teaching jobs in anthropology. … time for tough love:

… Sorry!  but, … [then the electric prod] Say! I just heard of a great opportunity to do applied fieldwork for the Department of Defense. Way above MY salary, starts next month, all expense-paid training; hotel suite, per diem, car and gasoline provided …

Interested?

Bateson would call this a “double bind”, which he believes to cause at least some cases of schizophrenia. 

My friend, Dave, from a middle-class professional family, foresaw a future need for a combination of great control over the behavior of hundreds of millions of people, and the need of fostering the impression that the New Rules were demanded by the People -  a Mandate; and that the rules were democratic and scientific.

That is, he saw a need to “domesticate” the people, to reshape the Frontier Mentality and “educate” them into a corporate-designed, government-monitored mazeway with gates to be opened by correct performance and rewards for following instructions or for achieving assigned goals.

So, like me, the Designers have a need to “fit it all together”. But, surely you see the difference between what I am fascinated with fitting together, and that which They want to reduce to Total System Design.

I want to control my mind. They also want control of my mind. Seems un-American to me. I mean, “democracy”? Is that democracy?

I was a country boy born in a rural dirt-road Los Angeles of 1937, chickens and rabbit pens in the yard, after age 7 raised in rural Kern County in a transient farm workers’ and oil fields workers’ unpaved dusty-roaded, jerry-rigged “development” amidst the oil fields and the yet-unfenced agricultural fields and miles and miles of open alkaline rabbit brush landscape dotted with the abandoned subsistence farms from the 1920s and 30s, an isolated group of pre-hippy home-made houses, with no sewers and no streetlights. After my father died (just before my tenth birthday), I became accustomed to roaming with my dog, King, the still unsettled, semi-desert countryside carrying  my .22 rifle – earned by the other kind of “fieldwork”, picking cotton, hunting whatever moved and was edible, visiting the houses and barns and windmills of the widely scattered, always-abandoned subsistence farming attempts – already under the ownership of a few land-empires, an “investment” laying fallow until their plan was ready, private empires such as Bank of America, DiGiorgio Corporation, Gallo Corporation, and other large nodes on the network that designed the railroads to fit their enterprises as well; a twelve-year-old, with a dog and a rifle, unaware of all that, exploring where no man had ever gone before.  

These things and others are part of the background, the absolute upright, against which I can make a comparison to the things happening in the USA and globally, today; drones, i-phones and all. This is a sample of my daily life then, not while at “summer camp”. I think the reality of it might be difficult for many urban/suburban people today to believe was the reality in 1950 California, not alot like the display-window version of “American” in 1950 as presented in the Sunday “funnies”, the suburban neighborhood of Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead, a foreign world to my family’s neighborhood. Ours was rather more like the Dogpatch of Li’l Abner, or the world of Huckleberry Finn. Here’s a taste:

I could feel the mud squishing up between my toes as I carefully put my weight on the forward foot and moved the right foot forward into position, in the pitch-black darkness, feeling for a place between the narrow fringe of tules lining the bank. I could see the tear-shaped oval of pearly white glowing in the beam of the flashlight in my left hand. One more step and I was close enough and positioned with my left foot forward. I raised my right hand firmly gripping the long wooden handle of the gig, which I had adapted from a broken hoe handle and had seated and nailed the end into the socket of the 25-cent piece of metal with three barbed prongs resembling the trident of the Greek God, Poseidon – called Neptune by the Romans and Shiva by the Hindus – and brought it slowly into alignment with a spot just behind that pearly oval, lowered it down closer above and just behind the white throat of the large bull frog, frozen in the bright beam, unable to see anything around him.

We were in Yokuts Tribal Territory, but I didn’t know it then; the Yokuts people being already long-removed to a “Rancheria”. I was gigging frogs from a large branch of the Kern-Friant Dam’s irrigation network that guided water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to this dry, alkaline area of the southwest San Joaquin Valley to water the lands recently acquired using hook or crook, by the emerging corporate caudillos of California. The frogs were to take home for my mother to cook for us. I was twelve years old. The gunny sack carried by another, smaller boy waiting on the dirt bank above, was now half full, and the skyline was showing the slightest hint of a thin, deep violet silhouette above the angular peaks of the high Sierra Nevada Mountains on the eastern horizon.

After gigging this one and pulling it wriggling from the barbs of the gig, and putting it atop the squirming cargo inside the burlap, we called it a night and headed home, the legs all a’dangling down-Oh!.

By the time we had walked barefoot  the several miles back along the levee road that was the right-of-way for the vehicles of the Water Master and the ditch tender, trading off carrying the heavy sack – the sky would then be getting light and we would spend a couple hours in the backyard of my house where I lived with my mother and two brothers in one of the randomly built houses on 50’X 150’ lots in the “development” on someone’s old “homestead” of 320 acres, about ten or fifteen miles, driving on two lane country highways in a neighbor’s 1937 Ford sedan between fields of the irrigated farmland south of Bakersfield, where Tom Joad had hitch-hiked his way in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the dusty alkali fields captured in the works of the Dust Bowl WPA documentary photographer Dorothea Lange – teacher of my teacher, John Collier, Jr. – who had visited and photographed the lives of the refugees.

In our back yard, shaded from the direct heat of the now scorching sun, among the apricot and peach trees around the garden that my father had made before his death, I dispatched the bullfrogs with my hunting knife, severing them just behind the front legs with the help of a hammer to the back of the blade – because there is not enough on the small human-like hands and the front legs to trouble with – then using pliers to pull the slimy skin from the meaty back and hind legs. Finally, washing the froglegs clean in a large, enameled metal basin, I proudly carried them to my mother who was now in the kitchen making breakfast for the hunters. By lunchtime, they’d be rolled in cornmeal and flour with salt and pepper and fried crisp in bacon grease saved by mother in a tuna fish can on the stove, with a flavor and texture that, all would agree, is “better than chicken”.

Methodology

So, friends, instead of the current fad of massive digital data trawling, I find myself satisfied with foraging information here and there, a bit of this a bit of that as needed, but pleased at sitting and staring at my potted Improved Meyer Lemon tree, loafing*, and reflecting upon the relationships between things I already know, and finding the perfect fit for the new stuff, which changes everything; and observing what that change induces in my overall view of what I now understand.  It takes a lot of patience and energy to do this.

* ”loafing”, as in,

It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions.

[The Background of Religious Feeling in a Primitive Tribe". (Jaime De Angulo, 1926 , Amer. Anthrop. 28: 352-360)]

I hope that my contributions also have some other value than my own philosophical pleasure. According to the Club of Rome projections for 2052, that class of human faculty might be leaving the repertory of Homo sapiens as the mind is “externalized”, as did the typewriter become extinct when electronic printing from digital “typewriters” became The Way Forward into Teilhard’s Technosphere; and I finally gave up my Olivetti and my Nagra.

Well, that was a long preface. Now we can begin.

First I will show you the pieces. Then I will paste them together. It might seem a bit choppy at first, but then it will gain focus. You’ll get the picture.

A Point, a Ground Zero from Which to Reckon

The context, background or Absolute Upright, an Ecology of Mind, a bench mark, a mirror for man, something other than yesterday’s news stories on My Yahoo! Home Page from which to measure, as a background against which to portray the State of The USans’ current existence  for this essay’s purpose would include something like this:

This article emphasizes the basis for my current concern with multiculturalism and, moreover, with the different way that a “primitive” or aboriginal society, collectively and individually views the world and lives in it; compared to a group of individuals many generations uprooted from such societies and absorbed into the workforce and armies of Empire, people who came recently, individually or with nuclear family, to a place for a job, living together separately in an industrially planned, production- and consumption-focussed urban community, each against the others competing for a better foothold, often recently dislocated, colonized or conquered, in a rapidly increasing world population of humans that is increasingly dominated by industrial age colonialism enhanced and expedited by Information Technology.

Speaking for the consciousness of pre-industrialized humans such as I, we aboriginals living beyond the Empire, as represented by the Pit River, or Ajumawi “Indians” of the upper sources of the Sacramento River in northeast California and southeast Oregon, northwest North America, speaking of and for them was Jaime de Angulo, a physician-psychiatrist-turned-anthropologist. He was born in Paris, France in 1887 of aristocratic, expatriate Spanish parents. He graduated from John Hopkins Medical School and then spent several years travelling before settling into a career as a linguist and anthropologist at Berkeley; an “eccentric” contemporary of Edward Sapir, A.L. Kroeber and Franz Boas. He wrote in 1926:

I had always wanted to live with really primitive people, real Stone Age men, and see how they thought, and felt. I had read books on primitive psychology, some of them excellent books like Levy-Bruhl’s (who, by the way, never left Paris, or so I am told), but I wasn’t convinced. All that was too theoretical.

Really primitive people, not like the already cultured Indians of the Southwest with their sun-worship, their secret societies, their esoteric ceremonial. But real Stone Age men…Well, these had been it, until a very short time ago. Here was Jack Folsom who was a little boy when the first white men arrived. Was there anything left? How much had they changed? My God, think of it, to pass in one lifetime from the stone axe to wireless telegraphy! Indians in overalls. No, there was nothing picturesque about these Indians, no feather headdresses or beaded moccasins, nothing to delight the tourists about these “digger Indians” in their battered hats and cheap calicos, picking the offal of the whites on the garbage dumps at the edge of town. My Indians in overalls!….

The Indians had to live somehow or other — they had received a few pieces of land, here and there, from the Government, mostly rocky spots without water, useless — in the Summer’s haying time they could make a few bucks working for the white ranchers — the rest of the time, who in the hell cared?  The sons-of-bitches were no good, liars and thieves, let them all die. (Indians in Overalls, p.12) 

“Animals are not imbeciles.  There is in the life of wild things in a wild setting a multitude of interactions to which the mind of civilized man is not attuned because it is of the necessity oriented to another aspect of mental energy, namely the rational.  To understand the psychology of the Pit River people, it is necessary to visualize their extremely intimate contact with the trees, the rocks, the weather and the delicate changes in the atmosphere, with the shape of every natural object, and, of course, with the habits not only of every species of animal but of many individuals. It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this* represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions.

* “this” being the Ajumawi’s science, the cumulative shared observations through the lens of a unique species of human sensibilities, the summary equations of generations of observations and commentary refined and condensed into collective knowledge and reflections upon millenia of intimate residence in that landscape – east of the  south end of the Cascade Mountain Range in the drainage basin that feeds the Pit River and then the Sacramento River of California, beginning at the south end of Goose Lake, in Oregon; primarily high desert and juniper/pine mountain country  – as it passes through short and long cycles of repetitive and unique changes, informing the cumulative, collective pre-industrial adaptation of one human community, long living among the other living forces coevolving as a life community within the larger local landscape. As I read him, Jaime’s writings transmit/teach this viewpoint on these peoples (Jaime de Angulo, “The Background of Religious Feeling in a Primitive Tribe”).

Of course, de Angulo did practice loafing with his Indians in Overalls, and was even accused by Kroeber of “rolling in ditches with drunken shamans”, and Kroeber warned graduate students not to attend parties at Professor de Angulo’s house. Truly in the tradition of the California School of Anthropology, livin’ the dream, surfin’ out beyond the waves. 

That gnarl of gnocions, with Jaime’s observations, if thought upon, will make a good larger framework in which this article will find a meaningful benchmark from which to determine our current, shared societal trajectory and to plot our navigation, if we can take control of the rudder.

How to Think about It: Designing Mind

So, let the above, about the world of aboriginal peoples, and the world of 1950 rural San Joaquin Valley of California, act as the frame, the absolute upright, a benchmark from which we can measure our current position and trajectory. 

Let me focus the above portrayals of aboriginal, pre-enclosure worldviews on a comparison to our own current society by referring to commentary by Gregory Bateson, who called himself a biologist but who was (ac)claimed as an anthropologist – from an English aristocratic background, associates of Huxley, Darwin and all that – who became a naturalized US citizen during middle-age.

Bateson observed the US population, including the highly educated, to be long on the brain functions that have to do with creativity and innovation, but short on those that tend to transmission of traditions, rote memory, accumulated shared cosmology and shared sense of societal identity, local unity, values and worldview; in other words, those faculties that continue the cumulative transmission of a society’s culture. (Personal Conversation 1977.)

My opinion is that this gestalt of the USans’ mind, which Gregory describes, is designed by Intelligent Design.

I am not speaking of God, but of something else that is here and now and has long dogged the masses of peoples who are left in chaos and desperate, without means to survive, after conquest and dispossession. They can perceive no alternative other than to work for the Empire.  

Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Cumana
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar

It’s a fact, man, it’s a fact

Rum and Coca-Cola
Rum and Coca-Cola
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar

This includes you and me.  

This designing process, its on-going processes and experimentation in planning and execution, and the identity of the Intelligent Designers is what I will now excavate and bring into some general clarity.

Anyone who gets troubled by paranoid visionaries with Sergeant Pepper writing styles and too many collateral links should disembarque this submarine now. 

Classmates and Lessons in Leavenworth

As I sat in the Fort Leavenworth Human Terrain System (HTS) classes on various topics related to how the wars will be fought in this [note: Roman! Numerals] XXI Century after the Romans crucified an Aramaic-speaking, dissident leader of a People’s Uprising in Palestine – currently an everyday event with Israel representing the Pontius Pilate, I reflected upon my surprise at how many members of the class, both in uniform and in civilian clothes had worked in various aspects of “intelligence” (spying)  and “public information” (ideological indoctrination). Paul Ryan would have fit right in–but he already had a good job.

It began to become clear that – though it was centrally controlled and top-down – there are no institutional nor corporate boundaries to the military “intelligence collection” and indoctrination, including the related activities of active, purposive ‘mind-shaping’ (their term). The Brothers in Arms for the global militarization of “information and training” within Training and Doctrine functions included major universities – e.g.: Stanford, Chicago, Brown, Harvard, Yale, U of Nebraska – worldwide corporations like NCR, IBM and Dell, GE and RAND Corporation, McDonald-Douglas; private contracting anthropologists and we HTS cadets, relative to average workers with our qualifications, were all living ‘high off the hog’ on government funds, not just scavenging the pig’s feet thrown to us from the Lord’s Table …

… funds that were taxed from the USA Peoples for a program to develop an Iron Dome control of Human Terrain both domestic and foreign.

Like Egyptian Pharaohs’ slaves, the tax-paying citizen is paying for and constructing one’s own final enclosure, Pharaoh’s property.

Among the cadets and instructors in my cycle were a Dominican – an Army career intelligence technician, an Anglo career soldier and former reporter/editor for Stars and Stripes, a refugee Pashtun from Los Angeles with a philosophy MA degree, a native West African with an MA degree in linguistics, an Anglo female private “anthropologist” contractor who worked to promote Hollywood films with overseas investors now teaching “Ethnographic Method”, two other anthropology Ph.D. instructors with specialties in network analysis, one at RAND, the other – I think – at MacDonald-Douglas, a self-identified Zionist Jew from small town Nebraska with a masters a.b.d in History and a passion for creating battlefield strategies with toy soldiers; a Trinidadian Indian New Yorker anthro with a status Ph.D. from England with research in the urban illegal drug market society; a married woman from Mississippi with an MA in Medieval French History and a passion for dressage; a colonel in TRADOC doing his PhD thesis at Armed Forces University whom my writing suggests was an embedded provocateur; a retired general from some non-combat specialty; …

….everybody was plugging into the Department of Defense funding designed to manage the Human Terrain, globally. We were like fish in a deep-sea trawler’s net as we took the generous chum money and found ourselves caught in The Mission.

The Military Mafia

And the background is a network of Brothers in Arms who worked together to ‘clear and hold’ this niche in the United States’ Federal Budget terrain, and who also controlled the curriculum. After all, they were the only ones in the negotiations who controlled the buttons. Yes, THOSE buttons, just like in Egypt!

Administrations, Congresses and Court Judges come and go, but the military is the river of power that runs through it. Behind them stands the Supreme Something from which the appearance of power flows.

No, I’m not talking about the Supreme Cybernetic System, the label that Bateson has given to the God Function, the (largeer) Mind, the Intelligent Designer in his epistemology, his own metaphor.

To qualify for the exceptional money offered – even in the training program of the US Army’s Human Terrain System, these men and woman had worked in or advised every aspect of the government. Many had worked directly in the military branch, serving in functions ranging from Special Ops snipers to INTEL Technicians, and some had worked for the strings-attached funding for such functions in all branches of the federal and even local government – Forest Service, Park Service, Department of Interior, municipal, State and County police with embedded military interests … all having National Security functions in case of emergency, both constructing news releases and gathering intelligence globally and among the US civilian population.

And of course many had worked for, subcontracted from or are still on the payroll of private corporations such as RAND, IBM, GE, NCR, etc. who get their lion’s share of DoD-funded contracts, with wink-and-smile competition between the myriad of US military veteran-owned corporations who are assured of a cut – like my sub-contractor, CLI, or the prime contractor BAE, from which CLI had been opportunistically spun off during an ethics violation that caused BAE’s temporary disbarment – they were all connected by the safety net of the Brothers in Arms, Inc. 

We see among them those buying editing power over the media; not only the Conservative media, but also the “Progressive” media – even backhand funding of Hollywood films such as Zero Dark Thirty – and the common acknowledgment among these men and woman that “If you control the media and you say it is true, it is true.”; and the acceptance of the government’s claim that this is the nature of the War on Terror, we have to work extraordinary renditions to The Dark Side while keeping US citizens fat, happy, resigned to the call for Austerity, living in the spun net of delusion and in full support of taxes to pay the immediate and future monetary costs of the Global War on Terror; The Long War.

And, now, TRADOC is contacting high school hackers to recruit them into the Yankees team. 

But, just to be sure all the USans are happy and not resisting nor dissenting, from Kansas to Hollywood, We are Watching You! 

And, we USans have our secret methods of marking unidentified men as drone targets! So?  Everyone makes a mistake now and then; one can’t be too careful, you know.

 It’s all there, … er … I mean HERE, in the USA, which includes, or is included in Israel – proteksia – fruits which we, the “flotsam and jetsam”* of professional anthropology were greedy to harvest – coercion and threat of violence, the Stockholm Syndrome and massive “detention facilities”, if needed.

Sidebar: The Flotsam and Jetsam of a Discipline in the Throes of Death and Rebirth

*I rather liked how a commenter on Zero Anthropology’s recent HTS article used this phrase to describe me and my anthropologist compañeros HTS Cadets; brothers, arm-in-arm with the military, pigging out on the outstanding compensation. His description of us as “flotsam and jetsam” matched my own biographical sketch for ZA, where I begin by saying I had washed up here on the coast of California in a big storm. The big storm was my Year with the Military (the Fort Irwin Whistle Blowing Caper and the Leavenworth Double Agent Caper) and a few personal-life developments that washed me out to sea.

Washed-up, flotsam and jetsam of the anthropology market place where universities offer the degree and cut the faculty; like you, we flotsam are! Trying to stay afloat in the capitalist economy where the decline in the utilization of anthropologist UHUCUs in the emerging global, capitalist socio-economic system will move us all into the waste basket of Teilhard’s Technosphere is now near the ‘bottom of the barrel’.

This while a new “anthropology” is being born from the behaviorist-designed New World Order University (NEWOU) and into its own “operant conditioning chamber”, or Skinner Box. Just a little reprogramming of the younger but old-viewpoint anthropologists, such as in the HTS cadet training at Leavenworth, all mixed in with groups of battle-hardened troops, and the old-fashioned anthropologists are stripped of their notion of The Mission, and are given The True Mission, the American Mission, …

…and their anthropology will be revolutionized! (weaponized, trivialized).

… and if they complete their retraining, then they are qualified to sit on a throne in the Virtual UHUCO Super Market “Anthropologist” Shelf until a budget space on a project, or “mission” is liberated.

Of course; they will have a Right to Work in the mean while – for example, flipping burgers, or driving cab – in fact, it’s either sink or swim for food, shelter and medical care there on the shelf. Whatever you can do to support our troops in the Mean While.  

Sorry, only applied anthropology work, embedded with the troops or working in the data processing labs in crisis situations; no more teaching jobs. The TRADOC advisors have found that anthropologists are vulnerable to enemy combatants’ brain washing and they begin to teach subversive thought to students. 

Teaching the New Anthropology will be the responsibility of TRADOC and will be conducted via approved video segments like any other training except actual combat, which mandate kinetic training of the physical body.

This new anthropologist, in addition to being able to chart social networks, make colorful charts and graphs, mastering the fine art of five-minute PowerPoint presentations and making guesses about Key Leaders look like certain, scientific proof, also will be well equipped to do marketing research! more jobs!

Yep, anyone todavia working at a university as an “anthropologist” is the last of them apples.

Is that OK – to say that?  I mean, if they cut the The Blue Angels aerial acrobatics jet fighter show from the DoD Budget, this is real!

What’s “real”? asked the Velveteen Rabbit. Will anthropology “die”?

There, there, now. There is nothing to fear!

The Corporate-Academic Mafia

And, the whole proprietary nature of “data” emerges from the same source of the capitalist societally-cultured emphasis on competition over cooperation as foils most attempts at creating collectives in the USA. So, the ethnographer’s field research notes – the “data” if you want to play “scientist” – becomes a highly protected commodity that aids him/her in The Struggle (his/her personal struggle for personal success) and must be kept from others until he/she/they have taken ownership by copyright publications.  

One of my first shocks in being a specialist in the Hindu Kush area, where there were, in 1970, only about five living, established (meaning ‘establishment’ and not indigenous) anthropologists with fieldwork there, mostly northern Europeans. When I wrote to ask about the findings of one of these, he drew a clear boundary that made the above very clear to me. This is MINE! You cannot see it, which caused me to remember my daughter during the Terrible Twos, after being socialized at a “day care center” for a few days, taking a toy from her little friend, Sam, and saying for the first time in her life, “No Sam! Mine!”

You see, it is not that he and I are doing this task of building knowledge together. We are competing to be the one who is recognized and compensated for manufacturing a copyright, commoditized product from it.

What a loss of potential! Private ownership drives the ship of state. Unchar(i)table Greed.

If you think you can escape, try to change mobile phone corporations and use YOUR OWN PHONE in a different service provider. Are you ready for prison?…and, yes, I am aware that the feds suddenly reversed fields when there emerged strong resistance from high and massively from below. But, the very idea that it had been put into place. The very idea!

And, if you still believe that this is really Free Enterprise country, try to start your own local community internet service provider to avoid the commercialization, government spying and the control of the major corporations. Community self-designed internet is being blocked. The profits of great corporations, too big to fail, are soaring while the workers fall further behind the increased costs. 

However, things are looking up in Detroit, but only for the rich. The citizens are now under the iron fist of a manager chosen by the 1%, and he is kicking ass, the worker’s ass. The People’s ass: business leaders here said they had been well aware of the government’s misery — and defiantly moving on in the face of it — for years.

It is being demonstrated at this moment in Cyprus, Greece, and soon might be in Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy … (but, it can’t happen here!), that our “bank accounts” are not reall ours, they belong to the Coalition Forces of Empire.

“Everything has sort of been operating on separate tracks,” said Kurt Metzger, director of Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit organization that tracks demographic, economic and housing trends in the region.

“The business and philanthropic communities had basically just decided to go ahead in spite of government.”

So, now we know who wears the pants in THIS house!

Meanwhile Federally-funded private contractors are building massive “detention facilities” to contain any dissident citizens detected or suspected to be involved in suspicious activities.  These citizens are immediately classed as agents of Al Quaeda and “terrorists”, “Islamists” or “enemy combatants” – “commies” have apparently lost status as a security threat and reason for incarceration and defamation.

The contractors are allowed to factor into their costs – which YOU pay, citizen – a certain generous profit margin. Well! I mean, this AIN’T SOCIALISM here. Ya hear? Here, it’s called Brotherhood, Family. If you are with us, I’ve got your back. If not, … best sprout eyes in the back of your head! Then we can aim between the eyes from either side

The Prison-Industrial Complex fits very well with Capitalism lessons. San Quentin inmates are eager to start their own high-tech companies, with abundant human resources to employ, cheap! The prisoners are being taught Entrepreneurship 101.

I betcha they would be eager to get a degree in anthropology. They could do their first fieldwork gathering key leader information among their colleague inmates. A captive student body. Yes Sir!

The Military-Media Mafia Hybrid

Meet Barbara Gall, who wrote an article in the NY Times, declaring,

Villagers Take on the Taleban in their Heartland.

Suspicious, I read her bio, and, voila, she is quite in bed with the military–”embedded’, we say:

Carlotta Gall is a reporter covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The New York Times; she has been based in Afghanistan since November 2001. From 1999 to 2001 Ms. Gall worked in the Balkans, also for The New York Times, covering the wars in Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia and developments in Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia.

She began her newspaper career at The Moscow Times, in Moscow in 1994, and covered the first war in Chechnya intensively for the paper, among other stories all over the former Soviet Union. During that time, she also freelanced for the British papers The Independent, The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as The New York Times, USA Today and Newsweek. In 1998 Ms. Gall moved to the Financial Times and The Economist where she reported on the Caucasus and Central Asia from Baku, Azerbaijan.

She is the co-author with Thomas de Waal, of “Chechnya: A Small Victorious War” …, also published as “Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus” Ms. Gall was educated in England and read Russian and French at Newnham College, Cambridge. She received a Master’s degree from City University, London in International Relations and Journalism. She speaks three languages.

As hurricanes and snowstorms are described in the mass media as “historic” and there emerges a general agreement between major media corporations on the nature of the “real world” –  …as a kind of diversion from work that is called “news, weather and entertainment”; an agreement upon the weaving of reality in stories that presents only what TRADOC buys, we face both a growing finacial gap between the upper class and the rest of us, and ….

A communication gap between generations – caused by the use of people as UHUCU rather than as people who own their labor and embedded in extended family and local community – is exploited by the “media” inserting a non-localized, one-on-one communication medium and spreading the word that any child without an iPod is an abused child, a child left behind. [See Rule Number 1 (in Part II) for captured revolutionary forces.]

I begin to sense that something else is going on here, in our “media”; something all-encompassing, which Rachael Maddow documents here just how common is the government’s use of prepared “News” on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria; and also the suppressing competitive news that contradicts the fictions.

The Wisdom of the Elders

[Photo, about 1930, seven years before me, outside our home in rural Los Angeles.]

Meet my father – trade-mark home-made corncob pipe in mouth, a “half-breed” (French-Shawnee), born near Joplin Missouri, 1870, a long-time hobo, a Wobblies’ (IWW) steel workers’ union organizer in Southern California from about WWI to the late 1930s, veteran of billy-club and rifle-butt attacks by police and National Guard. He had prepared me well with words to describe it when I finally had the eyes to see it:

“Jigger” – his nickname for me, “don’t believe anything you hear; and only half of what you see.” he said; and that was before TV and oleomargarine* and before the internet and before iPad and iPod and all the super social media devices we are so blessed with in this free country of ours today.

*Yes, I even remember before Oleomargarine, which was another lie, with its little capsule of imitation food color to make it look just like butter as you knead the orange dye from the popped gel capsule through the soft, white, high-cholesterol palm nut grease sealed in the plastic sack until uniform, chill it, and spread it on bread, and … what a disappointment!  

But, now I know about palm nut plantations from Indonesia to West Africa that earn $billions for the mega-corporate owners and processors/advertisers/distributors; so it all makes more sense?

My father refused to eat it. Pass the butter, please.

(Yes, there was a time – long before texting, before TV in every room – when the family ate meals together and communicated without machines, and said, “Please pass the butter”.

Read Dagwood and Blondie if you don’t believe me. The “Bumstead” family is shown below.)

The Come-Uppance, The Turning of the Prey

So, now that NATO is retreating from the tireless, insistent, fiercely bold attacks of the Afghan resistance, the embedded journalists tell us:

As Marines Exit Afghan Province, a Feeling That a Campaign Was Worth It “I think history has proved it was the right thing to do,” General Amos said of the 2009 decision to increase the Marine presence in Helmand.

“It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t turn overnight. But I don’t think it’s going to turn.”

Yes, Sir!  No Sir!

Sir! It’s gonna turn! It’s gonna turn all right, Sir.

Sir! It HAS TURNED.

It has finally turned on you; … Sir!

… and so you are leaving, just like the English left twice; like the Russians left.

That’s the truth of what’s happening. YOU now must also go!

As Bob Dylan sang about another retreat when another war in another land led to disaster on so many levels:

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out! the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

Saying Goodbye to the Occupier, the Afghan Peoples are yet civil to invited guests, just as they were after driving out the British twice, after driving out the USSR; retaining dignity; they say,.

Khodahafez!

Photo, John Allison, 1969, Maimana, Faryab Province, Afghanistan: A Descendant of the Prophet telling The Truth, providing The Fundamental Principles in Poetic Orations.

Our colleague. Dr. Jamil Hanifi, provides us some insights into this image shell:

The rituals of battle-ax tabarzin (from the Persian tabar, ax) and verse eulogists (Persian/Arabic maddahan; sing. Maddah from the Arabic maddha, praise). Please carefully note that tabarzin and maddahan are features of Shi’a communities. There are elaborate and rich banks of narratives for these eulogies. Thus, there is a great deal of room for rhetorical creativity and interpretation. The presence of this ritual performance in the Sunni environment of Maimana is very unusual. Also, note that tabarzin/maddahi rituals among Sunni communities, especially Pashtuns, would be out of place. Complicated regional links with tasawuf should also be explored—especially involving the roaming kashkuli mendicants, darwishes, and malangs.

Photo, John Allison, 1969: Gate to the Inner Garden, Faryab Province, Afghanistan.

Havana. February 25, 2013

We do not struggle for glory or honors, we struggle for ideas we consider just.

DEAR compañeros,

I deeply appreciate the noble gesture of the people electing me as a deputy to Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power.

The time I take for my comments today will not be long, nor will the period in which I occupy this honorable seat as a deputy be long, and not because of a lack of will, but rather as an imperative of nature.

I never thought my existence would be so prolonged, or that the enemy would be so inept in its hateful task of eliminating adversaries committed to the struggle.

In this unequal struggle, our people have demonstrated their amazing capacity to persevere and win. Yes, because every year of resistance between 1959 and 2013 has been a victory which our small country has the right to proclaim!

We do not struggle for glory or honors; we struggle for ideas we consider just, those to which millions of Cubans have dedicated their youth and their lives, as heirs to a long list of exemplary individuals. One figure expresses everything: the number of Cubans who have completed self-sacrificing internationalist missions is close to 800,000. Considering that at the time of the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 we didn’t have seven million inhabitants, one can appreciate the significance of such efforts.

However, this does not express it all. In October of 1962, the nation was at the point of becoming a nuclear battlefield. A year and a half before, a mercenary expedition trained and escorted by the United States Navy, came ashore at the Bay of Pigs and was at the point of provoking a bloody war which would have cost the U.S. invaders hundreds of thousands of lives – I say so without exaggeration – and our country, truly incalculable destruction and human losses.

We had, at the time, around 400,000 weapons and we knew how to use them. In less than 72 hours, the powerful revolutionary counterattack prevented that tragedy, both for Cuba and for the people of the United States.

We were victims of a “dirty war” for a long time, and 25 years after the October Crisis, internationalist troops defended Angola from the racist South African invaders, equipped in this period with several nuclear weapons based on technology and parts supplied by Israel with U.S. approval. On that occasion, the victory at Cuito Cuanavale and the subsequent resolute and audacious advance of the Cuban-Angolan forces, equipped with aircraft, antiaircraft weapons and adequate organization to liberate territory still occupied by the invaders, convinced South Africa that it had no choice but to abandon its nuclear ambitions and sit down at the negotiating table. The existence of the hateful racist system was ended.

With the efforts of all, we have undertaken the work of a profound Revolution, which, starting from zero, our people were able to carry out. Others joined the first revolutionary cells. We were united by the desire to struggle and the pain caused by the country’s tragic situation following the brutal coup. While some had hope in a future they saw as still far removed, others of us were already thinking of the need to make a historical leap.

Between the March 10, 1952 coup and January 1, 1959, only six years and 296 days transpired; for the first time in our homeland, power was totally in the hands of the people.

The battle then began against political ignorance and the anti-socialist ideas which the empire and bourgeoisie had sown in our country. The class struggle unleashed just a few miles from the empire was the most efficient political school any country has ever had. I’m talking about a school which opened its doors more than 50 years ago. Men and women, from pioneros to much older persons, we have been students within this school.

Nevertheless, according to what Raúl was telling me a few days ago, the great battle which is imposing itself is the need for an energetic and relentless struggle against the bad habits and errors which many citizens, and even Party members, commit in the most diverse sectors, on a daily basis.

Humanity has entered a unique stage in its history. The last decades have no relation to the thousands of centuries which preceded them.

In 2011, the world’s population reached seven billion inhabitants, an alarming figure. In only two centuries, the world’s population has grown seven times over, requiring a basic level of food supplies which science, technology and the planet’s natural resources are far from being able to provide.

You can do dozens of estimates, talk about Malthus or Noah’s Ark, but it is enough to know what a gram is, and what amount of any food can be produced on one hectare of land, to draw your own conclusions.

Perhaps the British Prime Minister or President Obama know the answer that could prolong human life a few days more, the multiplication of a few fish and loaves, the magic words to persuade Africans, the inhabitants of India, Latin America and all countries of the Third World, not to have children.

Two days ago, an international agency recalled that one U.S. multi-millionaire, Dennis Tito, had spent 20 million dollars on his a trip to the International Space Station, where he stayed several days in 2001.

Now Tito, who appears to be a veritable fanatic about space exploration, was discussing the details of an expedition to Mars. The journey would take 501 days. This, yes, is enjoying surplus value! Meanwhile, the polar caps are rapidly melting, sea levels are rising as a result of global warming, flooding large areas in only a few decades – all that assuming that there are no wars and that the sophisticated weapons being produced at an accelerating rate are never used. Who can understand them?

I will conclude to fulfil my promise of being brief in my words greeting our National Assembly.

On the 118th anniversary of the Grito de Baire and the 160th of the birth of our national hero, it pleases me to honour the revolutionary, the anti-imperialist, the Bolivarian who planted the first seeds of duty in our youth.

Thank you very much!

This report’s focus is on Hugo Chávez Frías, featuring appreciations and understandings of his political work, the accomplishments achieved during his time in government, archival documents and archived speeches and writings by President Chávez, videos, and news reports. Emphasis is placed here on items that are freely available on the Internet, rather than books and journal articles.

(When links expire–and they certainly will in many cases–either use the full title of each item, inside quotation marks, and use that as a search term, or use the expired URL and use http://archive.org/web/web.php to do a search in its Wayback Machine.)

This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE.

For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page.

I will set the tone for this report with the following statement which I posted to Mensaje a Chávez:

El regalo revolucionario de Venezuela para todo el Mundo (Venezuela’s Gift to the World)

Hugo Chávez Frías has been the recognizable face of the global anti-imperialist movement, inspiring revolution when the elites said history had ended. Venezuela and Comandante Chávez instead made new history, in the face of neoliberal exploiters and interventionists, showing the rest of us outside Venezuela how much more we can and should do, besides resigning ourselves to occasional protests. Chávez’s anti-imperialism was consistent, coherent, and a powerful body of thought and practice that resisted intimidation and appropriation. Where the left has been vanquished, tamed, or misdirected in so many parts of the global North, Chávez was a reminder that we can draw fresh ideas from the answers provided by the South. I will always love Hugo Chávez, I will always miss him, he will never be forgotten. Thank you beloved Venezuela for your great gift to the world!

Hugo Chávez Frías ha sido la cara más reconocible del movimiento global antiimperialista, inspirando a la revolución cuando las élites dijo que la historia había terminado, y mostrándonos que una mejor globalización era posible. Venezuela y Comandante Chávez en vez hicieron historia nueva, en la cara de los explotadores neoliberales y los intervencionistas, que muestra a todos nosotros fuera de Venezuela cuánto más podemos y debemos hacer, además de resignarnos a las protestas ocasionales. Chávez era consistente contra el imperialismo, ofreciéndonos un coherente y un poderoso cuerpo de pensamiento y práctica que se resistió a la intimidación y la apropiación. Cuando la izquierda ha sido derrotada, domesticada, o mal dirigidas en tantas partes del Norte global, Chávez fue un recordatorio de que podemos sacar nuevas ideas a partir de las respuestas ofrecidas por el Sur. Siempre amaré a Hugo Chávez, siempre me hará falta, nunca será olvidado. Gracias querida Venezuela por su gran don para el mundo!

“We do not need to look for the bronze or marble, because Chavez, the statesman and military figure who roars, laughs, sings and smiles, is sculpted in living flesh into the skins of all colors, in the hair of all textures, and in the bones of all the Venezuelans that he liberated“–Roy Chaderton, Ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the OAS

VIDEOS

Tributes to Hugo Chávez in International Organizations:

United Nations General Assembly, 67th plenary meeting, March 13, 2013 – The General Assembly pays tribute to the memory of His Excellency Hugo Chávez Frías, late President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Following a minute of silence, there were special tributes by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and representatives of the African group of nations, the Americas, the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement, and others.

Organization of American States Permanent Council Pays Posthumous Tribute to President Hugo Chávez, March 15, 2013 - From the press release: “The Secretary General of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, highlighted ‘the enormous demonstration of unity and solidarity that has been presented today at the organization to convey our condolences to the people and government of Venezuela on the death of their President, Hugo Chávez.’ Insulza, who attended the funeral of Chávez in Caracas last week, said it was ‘stirring to see the pain, sadness and strength of the Venezuelan people, shown in such a moving way in their farewell to their leader.’ The OAS leader recalled that he was present when Chávez first took office in 1999. ‘How can I forget when he said, looking at Congress: Gentlemen I am not the cause, I am the consequence. President Chávez thought he was there because of the failure of a system and a government that had administered the enormous wealth of a country for the benefit of a few, and he thought that wealth should be administered for the benefit of many. And no one denies that he did’.”

Electoral Campaign Videos:

The Evolution of Electoral Campaign Videos from the Presidential Elections won by Hugo Chávez (1998, 2006, 2012).

…and this rousing music video from the last campaign:

“Yo Soy Chávez” / I am Chávez

Recommended Documentaries:

Inside the Revolution: A Journey into the Heart of Venezuela
(Director Pablo Navarrete, 65mins, Alborada Films, 2009)
http://www.alborada.net/itr.film

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised–Chávez: Inside the Coup, is a 2003 documentary focusing on events in Venezuela leading up to and during the US backed April 2002 coup d’état attempt, which saw President Hugo Chávez removed from office for two days.

South of the Border (Oliver Stone, 2009): There’s a revolution underway in South America, but most of the world doesn’t know it. Oliver Stone sets out on a road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media’s misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents. In casual conversations with Presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), as well as her husband and ex-President Nėstor Kirchner, Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Raúl Castro (Cuba), Stone gains unprecedented access and sheds new light upon the exciting transformations in the region (official website).

Hugo Chávez (Ligia Blanco, 2005)–excellent interviews with the key historical actors, and unique and striking footage. (Nonetheless, the narrative contains some inexplicably bizarre assertions, such as Venezuela having “little history,” or the country lacking a “political culture.”)

In addition, an Australian television documentary from 2002 provides some very interesting footage of encounters between the President and both his followers and opponents in the streets, at home and abroad–and that is about the sum total of its value. The narrative is simple, often predictable from a Western mainstream liberal perspective that tilted against Chávez, but thankfully it is also minimal. This version has subtitles, so English viewers will not be deprived of valuable information and statements that previous reviewers complained about. The documentary in question is No Ordinary President, in English or with English subtitles, and it runs for 35 minutes.

PHOTOS

En fotos: por octavo día consecutivo, venezolanos desfilan frente al féretro de Hugo Chávez (In photos: for the eighth consecutive day, Venezuelans file past the casket of Hugo Chávez), Noticias24, March 13, 2013.

En fotos: objetos de todo tipo adornados con la imagen de Chávez son vendidos en las calles de Caracas (In photos: objects of all kinds, adorned with the image of Chávez, are sold in the streets of Caracas), Noticias 24, March 13, 2013.

ARCHIVES

Hugo Chávez Speaks:

The Complete Collection of Articles and Speeches by Hugo Chávez Frías (From CubaDebate and Correo del Orinoco)–in Spanish, 946 pages, pdf, 10.9 mb

The Red Book (document of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV):

Libro Rojo: El Primer Congreso Extraordinario del Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), culminó el 24 de abril de 2010 con la aprobación de los documentos que dan formal nacimiento al partido socialista: La Declaración de Principios, Los Estatutos y Las Bases Programáticas del Partido. Este histórico acontecimiento ocurre en el marco del desarrollo de un proceso revolucionario que tiene como protagonista al pueblo, con el Comandante Presidente Hugo Chávez a la cabeza, y que tiene como fin darle continuidad a la gesta emancipadora iniciada hace 200 años por nuestros Libertadores. Hoy como ayer todo militante socialista, todo venezolano y venezolana que ame esta Patria, tiene la obligación de combatir por la Libertad, la Soberanía, la Independencia y la Justicia social para el bienestar de nuestros pueblos. A 200 años del inicio de un proceso de emancipación todavía sin culminar, estamos obligados a reivindicar las luchas desarrolladas por nuestros Libertadores y Libertadoras, por tantos hombres y mujeres de nuestros pueblos que derramaron su sangre y entregaron sus vidas por la Patria. Ayer nuestros pueblos se enfrentaron al imperio español, hoy estamos enfrentados al imperio norteamericano con el mismo objetivo: la Libertad, la Independencia, la Soberanía y la Justicia Social.

Special Commemorative Documents:

Chávez por siempre–Commemorative package of articles produced by the Correo del Orinoco, spanning Chavez’s entire life and especially focused on his career in government and the achievements during his time in office. (pdf, 4.6 mb)

Special Websites Dedicated to the Memory of Hugo Chávez:

Frases de Hugo Chávez (Telesur: interactive presentation of some of the more memorable lines spoken or written by Chávez)

CHÁVEZ: 1954-2013 (Telesur: interactive presentation on the life, politics, and achievements in government of Chávez)

ÉI, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (Telesur: interactive presentation of many different facets of the history of Chávez)

Hugo Chávez: Elected President, 2013-2019 (Telesur: prepared after Chávez’s electoral win, not knowing he would pass on a few months after)

Venezuela: Chávez es un pueblo (Telesur)

El primer paso al cambio: 4-F de 1992 (Telesur: special presentation on Chávez’s first attempt at power)

27-F: A 23 años del Caracazo (Telesur: historical presentation on the infamous repression of the Caracas ant-austerity riots of 27 February 1989)

Bolivarian Government Archives:

The Achievements of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela (2000-2013)–From the official website of the Ministry of Popular Power (Ministerio del Poder Popular del Despacho de la Presidencia y Seguimiento de la Gestión de Gobierno), Bolivarian Government of Venezuela–in Spanish, 29 pages, pdf, 333 kb

Plan for Government, 2013-2019 (Hugo Chávez’s plans for the 2013-2019 period)

Recommended Reports:

The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators. By Mark Weisbrot, Rebecca Ray and Luis Sandoval, Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2009. (pdf, 371 kb)

Logros y avances del Gobierno Bolivariano: Memoria y Cuenta del Presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela Hugo Chávez Frías. Government of Venezuela, 2011. (Report produced for an address to the National Assembly, pdf, 3.3 mb)

“Fact Sheet: Twelve Years, Twelve Advances.” By the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the U.S. May, 2011. (pdf, 165 kb)

“Facts about Venezuela – Twelve Years, Twelve Advancements.” Venezuela Solidarity.

“50 Truths about Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution,” by Salim Lamrani, Venezuela Analysis, March 9, 2013.

2011 HDR composite indices–Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela– HDI values and rank changes in the 2011 Human Development Report. (pdf, 40 kb)

“Reconoció la Organización de Naciones Unidas (ONU): Venezuela es el segundo país que más creció en Índice de Desarrollo Humano” [UNDP Recognizes Venezuela as having the second fastest rise in the Human Development Index],” ANTV, 2013-3-16.

Of relevance also: Obama’s Latin America Policy: Continuity Without Change. By Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2011. (pdf, 207 kb)

“Venezuela’s Electoral System: Gearing Up for the 2012 Presidential Elections.” Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the U.S., October 2011. (pdf, 32 kb)

Venezuela’s Economic Recovery: Is it Sustainable? By Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston, Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2012. (pdf, 946 kb)

“Venezuelan Economic and Social Performance Under Hugo Chávez, in Graphs,” by Jake Johnston and Sara Kozameh, Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 7, 2013.

“The World’s 15 Happiest Countries: No. 5, Venezuela,” The Washington Post, based on a 2010 global Gallup poll.

The Indigenous Peoples of Venezuela and Bolivarian Socialism under Hugo Chávez:

“Nohelí Pocaterra: Chávez visibilizó a los pueblos indígenas y defendió sus derechos,” Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, March 18, 2013:

- The symbolic remains Cacique Guicaipuro were moved to the National Pantheon.: “He who led the resistance against the invading empire”.
– Hugo Chávez felt the name of the national holiday, “Día de la Raza” (Day of the Race), was denigrating and derogatory, and he changed to Indigenous Resistance Day
– Indigenous Peoples of Venezuela were granted their own identity card which simultaneously identifies them as Venezuelan citizens and as original peoples
– He also created the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples, with an Indigenous representative as the spokesperson for the nation’s Indigenous Peoples
- The launch of Misión Guicaipuro (see here also).

“A New Reality for Venezuela’s Indigenous Peoples,” by Domingo Sánchez P., Director, Venezuelan National Foundation for Indigenous Studies (FUNDESIN), published in Issues in Caribbean Amerindian Studies, Vol. IV, No. 2, Feb 2002 – Feb 2003–also in Spanish, “UNA NUEVA REALIDAD PARA LOS INDÍGENAS DE VENEZUELA“:

“With the adoption of the new Constitution of 1999, justice has been established, having been systematically violated not just since the ‘discovery’ and the aftermath of the dominant society’s subsequent conquest, but also since the country obtained independence from the Spanish colonial yoke in its establishment as a Republic. With the violation of the first Constitution of 1811 by the new owners of the Republic, who ruled it in order to appropriate all available arable land, the rights of Venezuela’s aboriginal peoples were totally dismissed. Their rights to live in their own lands, to maintain their cultures and customs, were completely violated and unrecognized.

“With the new Constitution of 1999, the inalienable rights of the indigenous peoples of the country have been recognized, as well as establishing the bases for an equitable development of the surviving ethnic groups in order to save their customs, culture, cosmology and medicine, and grants then the right to access the cultural goods of the wider creole society. Indigenous peoples’ habitats and knowledge are to be respected, whilst putting a stop to the depredation of their places which, for thousands of years, have been the basis for their development as human beings.”

Some called 2001, “The Year of Indigenous Venezuelans”. Andrés Cañizález of the InterPress Service (IPS), wrote: “The year 2001 is turning out to be the year of Venezuela’s indigenous peoples with the launching of a number of new laws and development projects that vindicate the rights and cultures of 28 native communities, which represent 1.3 percent of the national population of 22.3 million people. Last December, Congress ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, and expedited the Law on Demarcation and Guarantee of Habitat of Indigenous Peoples, while this month debate on the Bilingual Inter-Cultural Education Law began, indigenous congressman Guillermo Guevara told Tierramérica. All of this legislative action will reach its high point in November, when the bill on the Organic Law of Indigenous Peoples is slated for presentation before the National Assembly (Congress). In addition, several official entities have announced the implementation of development plans that respect the unique qualities of Venezuela’s native communities while confronting the poverty and exclusion of the country’s 315,000 indigenous peoples….”

A press release of 24 March, 1999, from the Indigenous Federation of Bolivar State (FIEB),  “Indigenous Peoples from 28 Tribes Hold Special Congress To Form Their Proposals for Venezuela’s New Constitution,” reported that more than 400 Indigenous delegates representing the 28 different Indigenous ethnic groups that exist in Venezuela held an extraordinary congress in March 1999 to elaborate their unified proposal for the new Venezuelan Constitution. Venezuela’s Indigenous peoples elected three representatives to participate in the Constituent Assembly. In addition to electing their representatives, Venezuela’s Indigenous peoples also met to formulate their position on a number of key issues, most notably Indigenous peoples’ rights to their traditional lands and natural resources.

For more relevant resources covering the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Venezuela won since 1999, see The CAC Review.

See also the 2007 International Congress of the Anti-Imperialist Indigenous People of Latin America, which involved delegates from Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, El Salvador, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Guyana, Suriname, Paraguay, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Brazil, Honduras, the United States, Uruguay, Panama, Venezuela, and other countries. The Indigenous Parliament of America also held session soon after.

ARTICLES

All of these articles should be read in full, as the extracts below may not be sufficiently representative:

“Chávez’s Legacy,” by Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 5, 2013:

…Hugo Chávez Frias…was probably more demonized than any democratically elected president in world history. But he was repeatedly re-elected by wide margins, and will be mourned not only by Venezuelans but by many Latin Americans who appreciate what he did for the region.

Chávez survived a military coup backed by Washington and oil strikes that crippled the economy but once he got control of the oil industry, his government reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 percent. Millions of people also got access to health care for the first time, and access to education also increased sharply, with college enrollment doubling and free tuition for many. Eligibility for public pensions tripled. He kept his campaign promise to share the country’s oil wealth with Venezuela’s majority, and that will be part of his legacy.

So, too will be the second independence of Latin America, and especially South America….

“President Hugo Chavez: A 21st Century Renaissance Man,” by James Petras, Global Research, March 15, 2013:

…Above all Chavez speeches, drawing as much from Bolivar as from Karl Marx, created a deep, generous sense of patriotism and nationalism and a profound rejection of a prostrate elite groveling before their Washington overlord, Wall Street bankers and oil company executives. Chavez’ anti-imperial speeches resonated because he spoke in the language of the people and expanded their national consciousness to identification with Latin America, especially Cuba ’s fight against imperial interventions and wars….

…The Chavez Doctrine emphasized south-south trade and investments and diplomatic over military resolution of disputes. He upheld the Geneva Accords against colonial and imperial aggression while rejecting the imperial doctrine of ‘the war on terror’, defining western state terrorism as a pernicious equivalent to Al Qaeda terrorism….

One of the most profound and influential aspects of Chavez’ legacy is his original synthesis of three grand strands of political thought: popular Christianity, Bolivarian nationalist and regional integration and Marxist political, social and economic thought….

…In the midst of crisis, he retained all the social programs, rejected mass firings and increased social spending. The Venezuelan economy rode out of the worldwide crisis and recovered with a healthy 5.8% growth rate in 2012. In other words, Chavez demonstrated that mass impoverishment was a product of the specific capitalist ‘formula’ for recovery. He showed another, positive alternative approach to economic crisis, which taxed the rich, promoted public investments and maintained social expenditures.

…Chavez deep commitment to anti-imperialism stands in marked contrast to the capitulation of Western self-styled ‘Marxist’ intellectuals who mouthed crude justifications for their support of NATO bombing Yugoslavia and Libya, the French invasion of Mali and the Saudi-French (‘Monarcho-Socialist’) funding and arming of Islamist mercenaries against Syria. These same London, New York and Paris-based ‘intellectuals’ who patronized Chavez as a mere ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’ and claimed he should have listened to their lectures and read their books, had crassly capitulated under the pressure of the capitalist state and mass media into supporting ‘humanitarian interventions’ (aka NATO bombing)… and justified their opportunism in the language of obscure leftists sects. Chavez confronted NATO pressures and threats, as well as the destabilizing subversion of his domestic opponents and courageously articulated the most profound and significant principles of 20th and 21st Marxism: the inviolate right to self-determination of oppressed nations and unconditional opposition to imperial wars. While Chavez spoke and acted in defense of anti-imperialist principles, many in the European and US left acquiesced in imperial wars: There were virtually no mass protests, the ‘anti-war’ movements were co-opted or moribund, the British ‘Socialist’ Workers Party defended the massive NATO bombing of Libya, the French ‘Socialists’ invaded Mali- with the support of the ‘Anti-Capitalist’ Party. Meanwhile, the ‘populist’ Chavez had articulated a far more profound and principled understanding of Marxist practice, certainly than his self-appointed overseas Marxist ‘tutors’….

No other democratic-socialist president had successfully resisted imperial destabilization campaigns – neither Jagan in Guyana , Manley in Jamaica , nor Allende in Chile . From the very outset Chavez saw the importance of creating a solid legal-political framework to facilitate executive leadership, promote popular civil society organizations and end US penetration of the state apparatus (military and police). Chavez implemented radical social impact programs that ensured the loyalty and active allegiance of popular majorities and weakened the economic levers of political power long held by the capitalist class. As a result Venezuela ’s political leaders, soldiers and officers loyal to its constitution and the popular masses crushed a bloody rightwing coup, a crippling bosses’ lockout and a US-financed referendum and proceeded to implement further radical socio-economic reforms in a prolonged process of cumulative socialization.

“Chávez’s Chief Legacy: Building, with People, an Alternative Society to Capitalism,” by Marta Harnecker, MRzine, March 6, 2013:

Chávez conceived of socialism as a new collective life in which equality, freedom, and real and deep democracy reign, and in which the people plays the role of protagonist; an economic system centered on human beings, not on profits; a pluralistic, anti-consumerist culture in which the act of living takes precedence over the act of owning.

Chávez thought, like Mariátegui, that 21st-century socialism cannot be a “carbon copy” and must be a “heroic creation,” which is why he spoke of Bolivarian, Christian, Robinsonian, Amerindian socialism.

The necessity of common people’s protagonism is a recurring theme in the late Venezuelan president’s speeches and an element that distinguishes his from other proposals for democratic socialism. Participation, as protagonists, in all spheres is what allows human beings to grow and achieve self-confidence, that is to say, to develop themselves as human beings.

“The World-Historical Importance of Hugo Chávez,” by Jay Moore, MRzine, March 6, 2013:

The masses make history, but particular charismatic men and women can play a pivotal role, especially when they believe in the people and mobilize the masses to take action on their own behalf. Hugo Chávez was one of those rare revolutionary leaders. He was especially important for Latin America and the Third World for taking the baton from Fidel Castro in Cuba of being a loud, fearless, and vocal opponent of Yankee imperialism. He was the extreme left of the “pink tide” in South America of new democratic governments that began to dot the continent in the early 2000s. Without his presence, most of those other leaders would certainly have moved even more to the center-left. Under him, Venezuela empowered workers and the poor in ways that no other government was doing, while most governments were gleefully beholden to the 1%ers. That’s why they — and the mainstream media who are their lapdogs — hated him.

On a world-historical scale, Chávez was of enormous significance because he and his Bolivarian Movement put revolutionary socialism back onto the global agenda….

“Farewell Comrade Chávez,” by Fred Magdoff, MRzine, March 6, 2013:

But perhaps the greatest achievement was the constant effort to devolve power to people at the local level….

Those unfamiliar with Venezuela will be surprised by that last sentence because there were many aspects of a top-down way of operating. But the creation of community councils throughout the country empowered people to make decisions about the needs of their communities and they were then provided with the resources needed to improve their lives. Through these thirty thousand community councils and the literally thousands of worker cooperatives formed, a lot has been happening through local initiative and an energized population.

“Hugo Chavez and Me: Challenging the Washington Consensus,” by Tariq Ali, CounterPunch, March 7, 2013:

The Bolívarians, as Chávez’s supporters were known, offered a political programme that challenged the Washington consensus: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. This was the prime reason for the vilification of Chávez that is sure to continue long after his death.

Politicians like him had become unacceptable. What he loathed most was the contemptuous indifference of mainstream politicians in South America towards their own people. The Venezuelan elite is notoriously racist. They regarded the elected president of their country as uncouth and uncivilised, a zambo of mixed African and indigenous blood who could not be trusted. His supporters were portrayed on private TV networks as monkeys. Colin Powell had to publicly reprimand the US embassy in Caracas for hosting a party where Chávez was portrayed as a gorilla….

The image of Chávez most popular in the west was that of an oppressive caudillo. Had this been true I would wish for more of them. The Bolívarian constitution, opposed by the Venezuelan opposition, its newspapers and TV channels and the local CNN, plus western supporters, was approved by a large majority of the population. It is the only constitution in the world that affords the possibility of removing an elected president from office via a referendum based on collecting sufficient signatures. Consistent only in their hatred for Chávez, the opposition tried to use this mechanism in 2004 to remove him. Regardless of the fact that many of the signatures were those of dead people, the Venezuelan government decided to accept the challenge.

“Ah, Chavez No Se Va! Anti-imperialist, Socialist and Immortal Latino-American,” by Charles Muntaner, Joan Benach, Maria Paez Victor, CounterPunch, March 7, 2013:

Economically, Chavez managed to increase the minimum wage, pensions and remunerate domestic work, among other policies, all of which resulted in a significant reduction in poverty and income inequality. In contrast to promoting consumerism among the middle classes (for example, in the aspiration of a car for everyone), Chavez promoted socialist alternatives that went well beyond European social democracy. For example, non-capitalist areas were developed, with “social production companies”, co-management and co-operatives, and various nationalizations.

Politically, Chavez managed to bring together nationalist and socialist groups in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and maintain a balance of power that brought him more than 10 electoral victories. Social programs, the famous “Missiones”, brought primary care to the hills of Caracas and the majority of people in Venezuela. The Mission Mercal allowed the working classes to access food of higher quality, despite occasional shortages. The most exploited social classes had access to education, among which were programs that reversed the social origin of the “medical establishment” to make it more responsive to the needs of the majority population. The communal councils allowed affected communities to have direct control over the management of social services, including public health services, water, property, education, sport, prevention and housing, among others….

Culturally, Chavez dared to break the barriers that University classism is imposing increasingly in the North….His ability to communicate with his people, the working classes of Venezuela, and by extension of Latin America and the world, has no match. He could talk about Meszaros, Marx and Chomsky with the same lack of pretension, simplicity and clarity with which he spoke about baseball or sang a ranchera song by Ali Primera. Making no effort, he was able to break the barriers of elitism that make culture a commodified good available to the few who have high degrees. There was not in him an iota of neocolonial inferiority complex, admiration for Anglo-Saxon culture, or identification with his historical oppressors. Chavez did not care what the imperialist North thought of him. That was one reason why the media attacked him with a frenetic fervor.

“The Chavez Legacy: The Revolution Within the Revolution Will Continue,” by Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers, CounterPunch, March 6, 2013:

They call it the “revolution within the revolution.” Venezuelan democracy and economic transformation are bigger than Chávez. Chávez opened a door to achieve the people’s goals: literacy programs in the barrios, more people attending college, universal access to health care, as well as worker-owned businesses and community councils where people make decisions for themselves. Change came through decades of struggle leading to the election of Chávez in 1998, a new constitution and ongoing work to make that constitution a reality….

The struggle for democracy brought an understanding by the people that change only comes if they create it. The pre- Chávez era is seen as a pseudo Democracy, managed for the benefit of the oligarchs. The people viewed Chávez as a door that was opened for them to create transformational change. He was able to pass laws that aided them in their work for real democracy and better conditions. And Chávez knew that if the people did not stand with him, the oligarchs could remove him from power as they did for two days in 2002.

With this new understanding and the constitution as a tool, Chávez and the people have continued to progress in the work to rebuild Venezuela based on participatory democracy and freedom from US interference. Chávez refers to the new system as “21st century socialism.” It is very much an incomplete work in progress, but already there is a measurable difference….

“Chávez Election Not So Different from the Rest of South America,” by Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, October 9, 2012:

Here is Lula last month: “A victory for Chávez (in the upcoming election) is not just a victory for the people of Venezuela but also a victory for all the people of Latin America . . . this victory will strike another blow against imperialism.” The other left presidents have the same views of Chávez.

The Bush administration pursued a strategy of trying to isolate Venezuela from its neighbors, and ended up isolating itself. President Obama promised in the 2009 Summit of the Americas to pursue a different course; but he didn’t, and at the 2012 Summit he was as isolated as his predecessor.

Although the media has been dominated by stories of Venezuela’s impending economic collapse for more than a decade, it hasn’t happened and is not likely to happen. After recovering from a recession that began in 2009, during the world economic crisis, the Venezuelan economy has been growing for two-and-a-half years now and inflation has fallen sharply while growth has accelerated. The country has a sizeable trade surplus. Its public debt is relatively low and so is its debt service burden. It has plenty of room to borrow foreign currency (it has borrowed $36 billion from China, mostly at very low interest rates), and can borrow domestically as well at low or negative real interest rates. So even if oil prices were to crash temporarily (as in 2008-2009), there would be no need for austerity or recession. And hardly anyone is predicting a long-term collapse of oil prices.

“U.S. and Canada Isolated as Latin American Leaders Acknowledge Chávez’s Regional Leadership,” by Sara Kozameh, Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 6, 2013:

Unsurprisingly, Obama differed in tone from his peers to the south, offering no condolences and focusing instead on ushering in a “new chapter in [Venezuelan] history” and pushing the hackneyed talking point that “the United States remains committed to policies that promote the democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights” as if there were a significant deficit of any of these things in Venezuela. It is conspicuous that unlike other world leaders, Obama did not express condolences. This will almost certainly not go unnoticed in Venezuela or Latin America, more widely….

…But these statements from the hemispheric north do not represent the general regional attitude towards Chávez’s death. The heartfelt acknowledgement of Hugo Chávez’s regional integration agenda and leadership qualities expressed by the overwhelming majority of the leaders in the Americas, and not only by its left-leaning leaders, make clear the impact that Chávez has had on the region. Yesterday, Latin America voiced a clear affirmation that, even in the absence of Chávez, it would continue to work together to forge ahead with the ideals of Latin American unity and independence that have already become a reality.

“Hugo Chavez’ legacy in Haiti and Latin America,” by Kim Ives, Haiti Liberté, March 17, 2013:

Tens of thousands of Haitians spontaneously poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince on the morning of Mar. 12, 2007. President Hugo Chavez had just arrived in Haiti all but unannounced, and a multitude, shrieking and singing with glee, joined him in jogging alongside the motorcade of Haiti’s then President René Préval on its way to the National Palace (later destroyed in the 2010 earthquake).

There, Chavez announced that Venezuela would help Haiti by building power stations, expanding electricity networks, improving airports, supplying garbage trucks, and supporting widely-deployed Cuban medical teams. But the centerpiece of the gifts Chavez brought Haiti was 14,000 barrels of oil a day, a Godsend in a country that has been plagued by blackouts and power shortages for decades.

“Statement From Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on the Death of Hugo Chavez,” The Carter Center, March 5, 2013:

President Chávez will be remembered for his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments and for his formidable communication skills and personal connection with supporters in his country and abroad to whom he gave hope and empowerment. During his 14-year tenure, Chávez joined other leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean to create new forms of integration. Venezuelan poverty rates were cut in half, and millions received identification documents for the first time allowing them to participate more effectively in their country’s economic and political life.

“Por qué no entendemos a Chávez,” Pascual Serrano, Público, 2012-10-6:

Trans: As for Venezuela, today it is the number two Latin American country to receive youths from Spain, who go there in search of employment. Last year, the Venezuela government delivered 146,022 homes to the poorest sectors of the society. Employment and housing, two of the primary problems which surveys signal as the top priorities for Spaniards….The economic crisis [in Spain], in the same way as it put the lie to our false narrative of having a buoyant economy, has lifted the veil on Venezuela and the government of Hugo Chávez. Thus it now appears that when we were being told of Venezuelan exiles fleeing for Miami, our youths were fleeing to Venezuela in search of employment.

En cuanto a Venezuela, es hoy el segundo país latinoamericano en recibir jóvenes españoles que encuentran allí trabajo y su gobierno entregó el pasado año 146.022 viviendas a los sectores más humildes. Trabajo y vivienda, dos de los principales problemas que las encuestas señalan como prioritarios para los españoles, resulta que se están afrontando mejor en el país que nuestra banca -tan necesitada de rescate- decía que presentaba riesgos en su situación económica.

La crisis económica, del mismo modo que ha mostrado la falsedad del discurso de nuestra boyante economía, ha permitido correr el velo de gran parte de las mentiras en torno a Venezuela y el gobierno de Hugo Chávez. Por eso ahora resulta que mientras nos anunciaban exiliados venezolanos que decían que huían a Miami, nuestros jóvenes deben buscar empleo en Venezuela.

See also:

• “Chavez: Hated for His Virtues“

• “The Convictions of Hugo Chavez“

• “Adios, Presidente!: Hated by the Rich, Adored by the People“

• “Chavez’s Triumph: Long Live Revolution…Damn It!“

Filed under: CHAVEZ, ENCIRCLING EMPIRE, LATIN AMERICA, VENEZUELA Tagged: Bolivarian socialism, Hugo Chavez, Hugo Chávez Frías, PSUV, Venezuela ]]> http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/03/22/encircling-empire-report-20-the-chavez-years/feed/ 1 chavez-por-siempre maxforte encirclingempire2013b Libro-Rojo http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/03/22/encircling-empire-report-20-the-chavez-years/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenAnthropology/~3/e0V1SHtk5LU/ http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/03/19/march-19-the-festival-of-minerva-a-festival-of-forgetting/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:49:37 +0000 Maximilian Forte http://zeroanthropology.net/?p=14538 ]]>

Worshipping Minerva

Today, March 19, marks the start of what for the Romans was the Festival of Minerva, based on a cult of worship of a goddess of “wisdom” and “war.” It is also the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war against the people of Iraq, and, as many will forget, the 2nd anniversary of the start of aerial bombardment of Libya by the U.S. and its NATO allies. Interesting coincidences, that two of the most atrocious imperial wars of the new millennium should start on a date once reserved for venerating Minerva. Appropriate too, with Minerva being a female figure, that this date also marks the very first International Women’s Day in 1911, worth reflecting upon in light of the many ways that U.S. imperialism has manipulated and appropriated “feminism” as a tool of war, deployed in counterinsurgency and through various State Department-funded programs to stick a U.S. crowbar into other societies in the name of “universal human rights” and “democracy.”

Imperialism, War, Knowledge

However, the anniversaries of these two wars should bring Western academics back to recognition of the very roots of their social theories as being imperialist ones. Modern social theory is imperialist, an imperial knowledge system that is entirely unreflexive about the conditions of its making. Useful for dominant European self-conceptions of their progress or evolutionary achievement, were a whole series of theories that ironically established war as the province of primitive societies, thus producing one of a series of dominant Western myths of war.

Here I consulted some of the work of Stephen P. Reyna, anthropologist (and look, there is the medallion of Minerva herself as the emblem for the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, associated with the Minerva Stiftung, but separate from that other Minerva program we already know about in the U.S. social sciences–the circle just continues). This is what Reyna says on page 1 of his “Introduction: Deadly Developments and Phantasmagoric Representations” (in S.P. Reyna and R.E. Downs, [Eds.], Deadly Developments: Capitalism, States, and War [pp. 1-21]. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997):

“Classical nineteenth century social theory arose as an attempt to understand the emergence of modernity. Theorists thought that modern society was ‘civilized,’ and that this quality was related to economic developments. So thinkers proceeded by formulating economic dichotomies that distinguished the uncivilized from the civilized. Saint-Simon made the main dichotomy one between feudal and industrial economies; Comte and Spencer distinguished military and industrial societies; Marx emphasized the transition from precapitalist to capitalist modes of production; and Durkheim believed that segmental societies integrated by mechanical solidarity, evolved into industrial ones, integrated by organic solidarity. Not only Comte and Spencer, but Marx and Durkheim as well believed that war dominated the earlier societies and that it would become infrequent, or die out entirely, in states with industrial capitalism. Classical social theory, then, to a considerable degree, represented modern social order to be one of pacific, capitalist states developing out of some warring uncivilized Other.”

In light of my comments preceding Reyna’s passage above, we could rewrite some of the key initial sentences as follows:

Classical nineteenth century social theory emerged from imperial Europe, as an attempt to understand a modernity that was fashioned and imagined as a historical stage different from that of Europe’s colonized populations, part of a larger discourse of self-justification for ruling others. Theorists thought that modern, i.e. European, society was ‘civilized,’ and that this quality was related to economic developments, the most advanced of these being grounded in imperialist extraction of the labour and resources of Europe’s colonies….Classical social theory, to a considerable degree, represented modern social order to be one of pacific capitalist states developing out of some warring uncivilized Other, like the ‘uncivilized Others’ against whom European states waged wars of conquest and occupation.

The ideas of European capitalist progress and civilization, preposterous as they are, have unfortunately not expired. George W. Bush liked to publicly characterize the U.S. as the leader of the “civilized world,” fighting against evil others. Meanwhile, in an unimaginative rehashing of nineteenth century ideas, Steven Pinker argues that the “artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction,” with the result not only that “violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,” but also that “we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” Read his article introducing his thesis, and Iraq is not mentioned even once. Great theory.

Civilization through Torture

As if to further “prove” our civilization, and the benefits of our civilizing mission, we now have more evidence of the nature and degree of U.S. atrocities committed in Iraq under General David Petraeus. In case you missed any of these, here is a listing of special reports:

From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s man behind brutal police squads
In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America’s dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage

Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

Nonetheless, as Americans continue to “stand idly by” in the face of their own atrocities and massacres, the “humanitarians” among them will continue to preach the discourse of civilization in the form of the “duty” to “protect” the victims of barbaric Others. Enjoy your day of being told by U.S. media that Iraqis are “probably better off,” and that the real losses to mourn are those of U.S. troops, and the many accumulating costs of war, as if you should never have to pay for what you do to others, as if the world should always be a source of ceaseless rewards and acclaim for you.

My previous article has attracted intense disagreement, for many good reasons (and sometimes not). Apparently I was too careless in conveying the impression that the new pope would be some kind of revolutionary, when really my special interest was in the strategic nature of the choice of a Latin American pope, and I could almost entirely dispense with commentary on the personal characteristics of this new pope. Thus two distinct narratives opened up at the start of debate: one that unsuccessfully tried to situate the choice of the new pope within the changing historical and geopolitical context of Latin America, seeing signs of a potential, pragmatic rapprochement; and, a different narrative, that instead focuses on allegations that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is guilty of aiding or even committing human rights abuses during the tenure of the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s. (I am not disputing those allegations, but I am not endorsing them with absolute certainty either.) Only lately has there been an attempt to bridge the two narratives into what is a kind of sinister hypothesis: Bergoglio’s past under the military junta (ignore the history that came after though) predetermines that he will be an active agent of reactionary counter-revolution in Latin America. Certainly, I would never say, “let your guard down,” but I would not advocate untenable analyses either, which can weaken all of us just as much as being naively optimistic, which, if I encouraged the latter, I would withdraw.

What follows is simply a response to an overly heated set of exchanges that have unfolded elsewhere. It first began with this strong objection, then it was later followed by my response as to what was it that we were analyzing, and how were we analyzing it, to the continuing arguments here. While it may not be obvious, the response below should be read primarily as a series of open questions and hypotheses, not certainties, and not a finished research project. I have long been interested in the Catholic Church, having studied it directly and indirectly, ethnographically and historically, and having had the experience of Catholic schooling. In university, I took courses in religion and politics, and one exclusively devoted to Liberation Theology–so of course, all of these things together have left their mark. What I did not predict was that I would be setting a “trap” for myself: falling back into a fascination that will likely continue to distract me from other areas of research. For now, the debate seems to be one that provoked lots of thought and has been worth having if anything for that alone.

Pope Hercules?

Pope Francis, remember, not Pope Hercules. The Pope, the Vatican, the institutional core of the RC Church have very limited means for conducting any sort of counter-revolution in Latin America that merits the name. The U.S. couldn’t do it, and the pope is a an almost laughable substitute by contrast, if he were intent on toppling governments. He could undermine them of course, but there are costs and consequences to that too. A counter-revolution then? By the pope and which army? I think that if one takes a more careful look at the objective constraints working on the RC Church, one might come to more sober conclusions. This is a church that is badly weakened worldwide, facing immense competition, financial disarray, scandals, the inability to staff many parish churches worldwide, and a loss of faith among followers. Room for manoeuvre is severely limited. This not the same RC Church of past decades and centuries in Latin America, and the political context has shifted decisively. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, supportive of the Vatican’s preferred narrative, continue to loudly proclaim that this pope is committed to the poor, to social justice, and to countering the inequities of globalization. The alignment with the new Latin American political landscape will be difficult to avoid. Where the RC Church gets to conserve some semblance of doctrinal continuity, however, is not in the area of political economy, but personal morality: here too Latin America is still relatively propitious for maintaining this sense of Catholic resilience, in continuing to reject female priests, abortion, and gay marriage, and finding a relatively safe environment for doing so. The real competition the RC Church faces is from other churches that have a demonstrated track record of aiding the poor and providing social services. If anything, by grafting itself onto state programs and state institutions that aim to provide these services (as it has done with education), the RC Church faces better prospects of survival by being, in the end, more aligned with the new socialist governments than by being against them, and against their very many followers. Opposing popular gains, while speaking the language of social justice, does not sound like a winning strategy.

Latin America is critical to the survival of the RC Church, it moves toward it to better ensure its own earthly salvation, and it recognizes the global importance of Latin America. Where in the past talking about “law and order” was dominant, today the Church has to speak about social justice. It would then be joining a conversation already in progress. Now, all of this can be true, regardless of whether the new pope is a good man or a bad man…it does not matter which in this argument, he just needs to be a pragmatist. In all the writing that hails him as an excellent “administrator,” and in denunciations that have him sucking up to power, it would seem that we could be justified in concluding that he is pragmatic. This is what I meant to convey about the whole process.

The Dump

To come to some sort of sober estimation though, we will need to dump some tenets that are useless to anything other than accusation, denunciation, and dismissal. One of those is that this new pope is not really Latin American, because his parents were Italian. This kind of cheap shot, if taken seriously and given the respect it does not deserve, would invalidate the hard-won citizenship of many millions of Italians across the Americas, myself included, and would play into the hands of xenophobia and racism. Moreover, it reduces the complexity of the Americas into a simplistic typology of authentic types, and treats identity as merely a matter of ascription. Going further, and casting Bergoglio as coming from a family of oppressors and Europeans who massacred Indigenous peoples, is just gross emotional hyperbole. The same is true if one hails him as a hero of the oppressed. Secondly, asserting that the RC Church is incapable of producing any “progressives” of its own (depending on what this amoeba term inspired by positivist and evolutionist ideas from Europe, is supposed to mean), would be an argument against history, against Vatican II, and against the career of Pope John XXIII. Third, we need to avoid base conspiracy theorizing, which shares with religion one unfortunate quality: belief without evidence, and belief against evidence. Fourth, can we have a discussion among supposed “friends” and “colleagues” without the usual social media garbage of takedowns, smackdowns, and only appearing on a site when you finally smell the chance of pouncing and asserting your own expertise? Also, can there be an analysis of large structural changes, of matters of history and geopolitics, that does not reduce to simply targeting a specific person, while ignoring everything else? If not, then count me out of the conversation.

While I did sense a shift that led me to the correct prediction that the new pope would be from Latin America, it’s also possible that will be the only thing about which I was right. About everything else, we’ll see. I encourage everyone else to do their own thinking, not rush to judgments, and consider all possibilities.

“The manifestations of so many men and women of Venezuela, of the whole world, and the presence of the heads of states are worthy expressions of appreciation from those of us today who say goodbye and thank you wholeheartedly. To the vast multitude of men and women who prayed for the president and continue to pray for him, we say to them that their prayers did not fall into the void, instead their prayers are like the grain of wheat that falls in order to bloom, and now bears fruit in the gift of life eternal that we pray for him. By clinging to Christ, who wanted a special dedication to the poor and the little ones in society who now raise a song of gratitude and loving prayer so that Christ may take hold of him for eternal life. “

[Monsignor Mario Moronta finally gave greetings to the national authorities on behalf of the Venezuelan bishops and Church.] “Mr. Vice President, Members of the National Government, the various powers, members of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, the followers and friends of President Chávez, we send a greeting of solidarity from the bishops of the Catholic Church in Venezuela”.~Monseñor Mario Moronta, Bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, speaking for the Vatican at the state funeral for Hugo Chávez Frías

Those of us who followed the live feed for the funeral of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías last Friday (March 8, 2013), might have paid attention to the very interesting remarks made by the Vatican’s delegate and speaker at the funeral. The message was one of unambiguous support for the preferential option for the poor and for social justice, reminiscent of a time when, within the context of the history of the Roman Catholic Church, there was a radical shift under Pope John XXIII in the 1960s. I personally sensed a change being announced or previewed at Chávez’s very funeral, the right location and time to signal such a turn. I told those following the funeral with me that I would not be surprised if the next Pope to be chosen would come from Latin America. Chávez, who was himself a devout Roman Catholic, was also honoured with a mass held in the Vatican itself, led by Jorge Urosa Savino, Archbishop of Caracas, and the Vatican had sent its condolences to Venezuela as well..

And now we have the news: Argentina‘s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit, has a few moments ago been announced as the next Pope, taking the name of Francis, in tribute to Saint Francis of Assisi, famous for his love of nature, and his consecration to poverty and charity. The Jesuits have probably been the most socially progressive, at times almost radical element of the Catholic Church in Latin America (which does not necessarily translate into an accurate summary of Bergoglio’s career). Bergoglio is known for his “personal humility, doctrinal conservatism and a commitment to social justice.” Like the President of Uruguay, José Mujica (a former guerrilla, an ally of Chávez) who is hailed for his humble lifestyle, Bergoglio was also known for preferring, “a simple lifestyle….He lives in a small apartment, rather than in the palatial bishop’s residence. He gave up his chauffeured limousine in favour of public transportation, and he reportedly cooks his own meals.” The point is that Bergoglio is part of a new alignment, a pattern, a framework that first broke onto the Latin American political and spiritual scene in the 1960s with Vatican II and the “preferential option for the poor,” accompanying the rise of Liberation Theology, all of which seemed to have been stemmed by the now defunct Pope Benedict XVI, the right wing theologian also known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The choice of Bergoglio for Pope is a major political and strategic decision taken by the Roman Catholic Church, a decision to begin to refocus on specific parts of the world where a majority of its following is to be found. I thus thought that U.S. news commentators, interviewing Americans in Rome, all hoping for a U.S. Pope (the expansionist nationalism never far away), were being quite unrealistic. Why would the Church wish to cater to a small and troublesome minority? Why would the Church wish to present itself to a world in fragmentation as yet another type of Bretton Woods institution, another symbol of U.S. power, as if to suggest that U.S. domination was absolute, eternal and divinely sanctioned? Well, we have some answers then after all.

Understanding that a socialist tide that has swept across much of Latin America, accompanied by the encouragement, aid, and leadership of the indefatigable Chávez, the Church was forced to reevaluate where its interests and a plausible future ought to be rooted. To reorient itself to Latin America, it could not opt for a high-handed, angry elitist snob, but for a new Pope that does not stand starkly opposed to the continental Bolivarian alliance–the assemblage of secular powers with which the Church must necessarily work, and whose messages overlap in some key respects with those of Bergoglio over the past few years. More important than Bergoglio the man, is the fact that the world is already one that is beginning to fragment into distinctive power blocs, and with the formation of numerous integrative institutions, led or motivated by Chávez and Venezuela, Latin America is gradually becoming a world of its own. This is a world that could also easily subsist without the rest of the planet, fully self-sufficient in everything it needs or could want. I believe we are witnessing the formation, anew, of plural world-systems, and the Church has chosen to integrate itself with one of the largest and most dynamic, and the home of most of its followers. This may then really be a new Pope for a New World.

Filed under: LATIN AMERICA Tagged: Argentina, Chavez, dignity, Hugo Chávez Frías, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis I, social justice, Vatican ]]> http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/03/13/a-pope-for-a-new-world-on-the-significance-of-the-choice-of-jorge-mario-bergoglio-pope-francis-i/feed/ 9 bergoglio1 maxforte HABEMUS PAPAM JORGE MARIO BERGOGLIO http://zeroanthropology.net/2013/03/13/a-pope-for-a-new-world-on-the-significance-of-the-choice-of-jorge-mario-bergoglio-pope-francis-i/