cheese it, the cops!

we are them

as we banter about registering muslims, imposing religious tests on immigrants, and so on, i want hit us over the head with what i take to be a fundamental political/moral fact: we are the very same sort of people as the people who enacted the holocaust or the killing fields. those people were under the impression that they were doing something good and striking a blow for progress and civilization. whatever your political vision - especially right or left - what i want from you is a chastened sense of your own liableness to be wrong. a little bit of that might be enough to keep you from confidently imposing your nightmare on the world.

the genocidal killer in the mirror

keep it burning

i think what is most disgusting about marxist communism and related developments is the idea that thinking independently, or for example listening to the deliverances of your own conscience, is the merest bourgeois individualism and must be crushed. well, any power-mad ideologue or self-deluded fanatic might recommend that you believe all and only what he tells you. individual conscience is indeed a a barrier to collective action, such as genocide. but what is really amazing is that millions of actually bourgeois people, and maybe a few others, decided that made sense and tried to destroy their own independence of thought, and overcome all conscientious individual qualms. it was like they performed lobotomies on themselves, using steak knives from down at the rustler. it's a mindless endorsement of mindlessness. even if it wasn't in the service of a farrago of jive, that is a formula for astounding doltishness, profound evil, and non-stop mass murder for no reason at all.

genocide tourism

well, i am in krakow. an amazingly lovely city, with astonishing medieval and after architecture, great street life, etc. i have never felt so jewish as when i was contemplating this journey, however. and it strikes me that this whole region - which includes auschwitz, the schindler factory, and so on - is dependent on holocaust tourism. the jewish quarter, which i just walked in the surprisingly blistering heat, was crowded; tours everywhere.

the holocaust sucked for some folks, of course, but it has turned out to be quite the cash cow. perhaps this is what hitler had in mind in the long run: an economic development plan for a united europe. i wonder if this is true in other genocides: take the killing fields tour; hey let's go visit some mass graves; here's the forced collectivization of agriculture conference center and golf course. alright there are very good reasons for this and we should never forget, etc. (as a matter of fact i live 15 miles from gettysburg, where it seemed like the whole nation gathered a few weeks ago.)

on the other hand the tourists look the same as anywhere: germans and americans and japanese snapping pictures and buying holocaust souvenirs. up in the square or in the antique shops, there is much much antique nazi and soviet merchandise: well, we're all nostalgic for non-squishy totalitarianism, when someone would really tell you what to do, even if it was just die.

now on the other hand, the anarchy 'a' is ubiquitous, indicating that there are people here who might actually have drawn the obvious conclusion from this deranged statist history.

 

nyt reports stuff like this:

Distrustful of even his own generals, Colonel Qaddafi has for years quietly built up this ruthless and loyal force. It is made up of special brigades headed by his sons, segments of the military loyal to his native tribe and its allies, and legions of African mercenaries he has helped train and equip. Many are believed to have fought elsewhere, in places like Sudan, but he has now called them back.

Witnesses said on Wednesday that thousands of members of this irregular army were massing on roads to the capital, Tripoli, where one resident described scenes evocative of anarchic Somalia: clusters of heavily armed men in mismatched uniforms clutching machine guns and willing to carry out orders to kill Libyans that other police and military units, and even fighter pilots, have refused.

meanwhile nick kristof, whose reporting from the middle east has been courageous by any measure , suggests steps to "nudge" gaddafi from power, such as...sanctions? (well at least also a no-fly zone.) um, well, then we're going to be watching an unbelievable bloodbath. i really think the u.s. and britain, or the u.s. and the eu, or nato, needs to nudge gaddafi from power with high explosives and special forces operations.

meanwhile, obama upped the ante yesterday, deploying 'outrageous!,' which i'm sure caused gaddafi much pain and embarrassment, just as it did for cee lo when commentators applied it to his performance at the grammys. they still haven't escalated their rhetorical intervention to 'inappropriate,' which they're holding for the moment when no rational course of action remains but mutually assured destruction.

 

here's an important piece on sudan, from the latimes: "state-sponsored pyromania." i remember susan rice, now the ambassador to the u.n., saying that the one thing she learned from serving in the clinton admin, with regard to rwanda, is that you can't dick around while the genocide goes forward. it's amazing how fast the political calculations set in when you actually have the power to do something. for that matter, obama really seemed to pledge to intervene during his campaign. there is nothing happening. ok i'm an anarchist blah blah blah, but i believe that if you actually do have to power to intervene in a genocide, you are morally obliged to do so. we do, and we are obligated. but we aren't doing a damn thing, i believe. the success of our diplomatic effeorts to isolate the regime and so on will coincide with the final emptying of the region of its living human beings.

it's amazing that when people discuss genocide, as in daniel goldhagen's new book (at least as it's represented in the review; i intend to read it), or in the alternative views mentioned in the review ('“Mobilizing the Will to Intervene,” a study by leading Canadian and American figures, identifies “poverty and inequality, population growth and the ‘youth bulge,’ ethnic nationalism and climate change” [climate change!] as the chief “drivers of deadly violence”'), they ignore the breathtakingly obvious. all of the events mentioned are the acts of states. states possess the resources (derived from coercive taxation and weaponry) to be effectively irresistible when they turn to mass slaughter. we are all potentially their victims throughout our lives.

really, this blindness to what is jumping up and down right in front of you waving its arms and screaming is a testimony to what our era really is: we cannot imagine life without the state; we cannot imagine our own lives except as nurtured, controlled, or subject to the extermination by the state. it has to be . . . what we want, who we most deeply are. it could extinguish the whole planet and the omega man would still be trying to blame the whole thing on...whatever: climate change, the youth bulge. the yout bulge? he'd be in despair because there was no one left to be subordinated by.

correction: actually, goldhagen evidently mentions 9.11/alqaeda. ok not a state. other "eliminationist" disasters mentioned in the review: the holocaust, rwanda, stalin. mao, colonial kenya and guatamala, sudan, srebrinica.

I do hope the Obama administration takes some action on Darfur, and takes a more active role in combating genocide. The Albright commission writes: "Genocide is not the inevitable result of 'ancient hatreds' or irrational leaders. It requires planning and is carried out systematically. There are ways to recognize its signs and symptoms, and viable options to prevent it at every turn if we are committed and prepared." And, we might add, in the modern era it is always perpetrated by states. The Post piece points out that "Most modern U.S. presidents have had to confront some mass violence against civilians, from the killing fields in Cambodia during the administrations of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter to the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda during the Bill Clinton years to the Janjaweed militia attacks on villages in Darfur during the Bush tenure." I would add Chechnya, actually as clear a case as Rwanda or Cambodia.

silence kills .on the other hand, so does infinite empty yapping.

what you have to understand about the rise of totalitarian/proto-fascist russia - potentially a world disaster - is that it has all been driven by chechnya. in a way, this could have been a remote, obscure independence movement. but yeltsin tried to put his foot down: it was the almost-arbitrary point at which he decided to stop his empire disintegrating. the russian army, the russian nation, and the russian president were humiliated there in the way a tiny, fierce, cohesive people can humiliate a decaying empire. that humiliation led to the election of putin, and to the route he has taken to creating and preserving power: a crypto-fascist nationalism. his fundamental early strtategy was to do absolutely whatever was necessary to crush chechnya, a task he accomplished with a brutality which, even at this late date, was notable: russia literally leveled and depopulated groszny with thermobaric weapone, set up a string of blacksite torture/internment facilities and associated mass graves, emptied the area of much of its population, displacing the women and children (they killed most of the men) into neighboring provinces, then displacing them from there. meanwhile, putin used the terrorist response, both the real paroxysms of violence of a dying people and the agent provocateur simulations, to create a police state in russia's cities, seize control of the media, economy etc. each new killing in the worldwide campaign of murder will, one finds, trac e back to criticism of the chechen genocide, or to revelations of the reality. the extremely unfortunate thing is that this coincides with a boom in the russian economy, which floats putin essentially above any international criticism. by the time we really take stock, we will have a world fascist superpower to contend with.
    an odd fact is that the nationalist crypto-fascist mood has been mirrored in washington through this decade, and if anyone can understand putin, it's bush: the oil, the money, the flag, the militaristic assertion of national pride and vengeance, the secret prisons. it's a little like the little nascent signs of fascism in thirties america: huey long and father coughlin, lindbergh, the bund, etc, though these people never got control. but these things do sweep the earth as a mood. at any rate, i vibe the us turning away, though the consolidations of executive power will hardly be reversed. on the other hand, one possible response to the iraq debacle would be: we are now going to level your cities with thermobarics. but in russia you have a truly grave situation for wthe world and for one thing, every murder that putin commits with impunity will make him grin and commission five more. we're goling to wake up one morning and suddenly see that the russian army is a lot, lot better than it was in 1992. 

just in case you thought the putin administration had lost its taste for killing.

oh and then there's this.

and this.

from the archives: dick cheney is white.

to call vlad the poisoner the lucrezia borgia of the present day, would be unfair to lucrezia, who was also much cuter.

some stuff on chechnya and the russian dictatorship:
an editor gets five years for critical articles.
a piece on the dire human rights situation.
fun with poison.
borat does chechen theater.: All schools in Grozny were invited to participate in the competition under the slogan: "I protect my health keeping hygiene"

chechnya

torture in chechnya? seriously?

so i just want to remind you of the basic argument, now so profusely illustrated as to be obviously irrefutable. there were two major justifications for invading iraq: eliminating wmds and lending a helping hand to the oppressed. north korea shows exactly how, say, dick cheney or john bolton respond to a country with actual nuclear weapons: dude: let's assemble a coalition and enter into multilateral negotiations. if they had thought iraq had the weapons, they'd still be all blah blah blah yackety smackety today. darfur shows exactly how they respond to actual genocide, what they do when true monsters of oppression are in the middle of slaughtering their people: yapyapyap. both these situations, among others, were in full flower at the moment they started shocking and awing those poor suckers in iraq. they're cowards and hypocrites. that's not merely my opinion: it's theirs. they shove that shit in your face every day all day. they could not be clearer about it.

just in case you were wondering whether vlad putin is a genocidal murderer.

The shooting occurred on Putin's birthday and closely followed the birthday of his anointed leader in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Angry journalists here could not let the coincidence pass.

"Apparently, this was a present for the two leaders," Yakovenko said.

"Why do I so dislike Putin?" Politkovskaya had asked in her book, "Putin's Russia." "I dislike him for . . . his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies . . . for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as president."

 

definitely.  no one really gets behind a holocaust like its victims.

basayev

the life of shamil basayev is in some sense beyond tragedy: an idealist shatttered by the destruction of everything he ever loved into a sheer annihilator of life: transformed by evil into nihilism. he killed many people. but vlad putin has killed incomparably many more.

eventually, more and more evidence will emerge of death camps in chechnya.

chad

you know, if the motive for intervening were actually humanitarian, we'd have selected the sudan for regime change. obviously.

adopt-a-warzone

and this will entail expunging every trace of the human beings who once lived here.

"Cleanness  must  become a cult respected by all Chechens," Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov told Interfax on Sunday.

it must be confusing to be

a milosevic or a saddam. what can they do but maintain that they remain (until, er, death) the president? christ when they did all this shit they had impunity. by definition they cannot be held responsible now. indeed, the basic functions of government, such as taxation or imprisoning people (much less invading countries or ordering airstrikes and stuff), would be crimes if anyone other than the authorized agents did them, and political power is definable as impunity (of varying degrees and over varying subject-matters). dude: you are trying a judge for having condemned people to die. this could make judges nervous. the world is certainly topsy-turvy when the law is a crime. on the other hand you might let this teach a little something about...law.

girlish hysteria

the psychosis might seem less unaccountable if we allowed ourselves to use the term "genocide." the truth will be told.

likvidatsia

liquidation

chechnya

obviously , the chechen "election" is bullshit. unless the jews would have voted enthusiastically for hitler in 1943...

Kabardino-Balkaria

one way you can tell that russia is a totalitarian state: check out the "coverage" from itar-tass or pravda. 

more on kabardino-balkaria

coverage is sure sketchy with regard to the astonishing events in kabardino-balkaria, but that link is a dispatch from the times of london's moscow guy. i'm going to go digging a little. seems like maybe it was an extreme prison break?

yow

have y'all seen this story ? time for a few home truths: russia is a dictatorship that is still prosecuting genocide in chechnya. there are resistance movements in several corners, in particular the southwest. one thing i would immediately expect: a vicious wave of repression directed against non-combatants in the region.

necklace of ears

i don't vouch for the authenticity of this interview with a russian soldier who served in chechnya, but it is consistent with what is known. he describes horrific events: drawing and quartering a woman, for example, necklaces of human ears. it has the flat ring of truth, in particular because it also describes horrors perpetrated by the resistance.

one thing that puzzles me about the coverage of john garang's death: why in the world is everyone, includingn the media, assuming it was an accident? possibly because the government of the sudan would never kill anyone?