[For Dion] Good riddance to liars, hypocrites and trash

15 Responses to [For Dion] Good riddance to liars, hypocrites and trash

1. Jamie-R says:

   July 19, 2009 at 8:44 pm

   Sometimes I wonder how Gary Kasparov can face up to that empire’s rulers, but maybe his fame and legend status in Russia assists him, especially when so many who step over what seems to be a red line of protest get snuffed out by Putin and his cronies.
2. @ndy says:

   July 19, 2009 at 8:49 pm

   Gary’s celebrity protects him to some extent, yes, especially as he is known not only in Russia but throughout the world. That said, if the authorities calculate that they would be better off without him, he’s a dead man. Ideally, they could arrange for a fascist yoof to kill him.
3. Jamie-R says:

   July 19, 2009 at 8:51 pm

   Everyone I chat to regarding world politics considers Russia to have an outright and hostile fascist government today, but what seems to be missing is the sense of urgency about what it can be capable of with so many allies growing in support around the world. I mean I scour the Facebook groups and 10 to 1 are groups saying Dick Cheney is evil but as for Putin? 10 to 1 that he is a real cool dude.

   When you have 2000 plus nukes and no free speech it appears the world is your oyster and I don’t see why people should be shocked that other clearly thuggish regimes see such weapons as the prize upon which you can start getting away with targeted intentional murders of government critics, like this latest brave woman.
4. Jamie-R says:

   July 19, 2009 at 8:55 pm

   Gary’s celebrity protects him to some extent, yes, especially as he is known not only in Russia but throughout the world.

   I saw him on Bill Maher awhile back in 2007 I think and you just see Maher get taken aback by the depth of his intellect. But it’s not his intellect that gets him to go up against them, it’s big hairy balls. He’s got a pair that’s for sure. Probably the worst job ever, in my mind, would be critic of Putin regime in Moscow.
5. Jamie-R says:

   July 19, 2009 at 8:59 pm

   That said, if the authorities calculate that they would be better off without him, he’s a dead man.

   Did you see that picture that was released showing Putin undercover as a tourist meeting Reagan in East Germany? I bet ya a million bucks these were the reasons America finally signed a law never to assassinate foreign heads of state. I don’t know who to believe on JFK’s death but what I do know is that JFK was willing to do anything to fight the communists and he was involved in directly trying to murder Fidel Castro through assassination… To think the Soviets did that with Fidel’s help is not such a stretch considering JFK crossed that line first, he just failed at it.
6. @ndy says:

   July 19, 2009 at 9:54 pm

   Russia ‘fascist’? In one sense, perhaps (that is, there is a relative absence of basic rights and liberties), but I think it would be more accurate to note that the state is highly authoritarian, and ‘civil society’ very weak. I dunno if the Russian state/empire has many more ‘friends’ than Communist Russia done: rather, Russia (that is, the Russian state) along with the US, EU (some argue that Russia exercises its influence as part of the “quad” along with the US, EU and UN), China, Japan and even India, continues to function as one of several metropoles (centres of global power)…

   Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso, 2007)
   Reviewed by April R. Biccum
   Capital & Class
   Autumn 2008

   Benedict Anderson’s follow up to Imagined Communities takes us back, in historical detail, to the fin de siecle anti-colonial mobilisation in the Philippines. The focus of Anderson’s study are the connections made between two nationalist insurrections in Cuba and the Philippines through a dense interpersonal network of novelists, activists and scholars with near-global reach, and it thus weaves a complicated web of personalities, documents, events and narrative. In Under Three Flags, Anderson offers us a work of history and a close reading of key figures, their seminal texts, and detailed accounts of their production and circulation. Anderson’s study is anchored around three Filipino men who were instrumental to Filipino nationalism, and who were engaged in this dense, transcontinental exchange of letters, pamphlets, articles, academic studies and novels. Anderson’s detailed account of the lives and works of novelist Jose Rizal, anthropologist and journalist Isabelo de los Reyes and coordinating organiser Mariano Ponce comprises a complex combination of literary criticism, sociological and political study and historiography that includes Anderson’s own translations of texts and detailed erudition of archival material. Anderson returns us to the theme of print media explored in Imagined Communities, and his study demonstrates the importance of the novel form to burgeoning nationalisms–a fact also explored through postcolonial theory. Anderson sets out to supply us with a ‘political astronomy’, attempting to ‘map the gravitational force of anarchism’ between opposing poles of nationalism as they emerged at empire’s end. Anarchism, for Anderson, overcomes many of the shortcomings of Marxism, which were apparent at the time of Anderson’s focus and have continued to echo through debates between neo-Marxism, anti-imperialism, single-issue movements and identity politics. Anderson is drawing our attention to the textuality of these encounters across time, space, language and culture in an era he refers to as late-nineteenth-century ‘early globalisation’. His point is that this is the first time in history that such a transglobal coordination of political events has become possible thanks to the technology and circulation of print media and the mobility of cosmopolitan, elite, and multilingual personalities, all connected in some way or another to the hub of European anarchist activism. The very slight argumentative frame of Anderson’s account is that it is through this transglobal ‘imagined community’ that activists on different continents learned how to ‘do’ revolution, and that the most reliable allies of Filipino and Cuban anti-colonial agitators were this hub of European anarchists. I say ‘slight argumentative frame’, because while Anderson emphasises it in the introduction, any evaluation or analysis of the importance of this claim falls away completely in his dense reading of events, texts and personalities. But in fact, this is an important claim for a few reasons.

   First, because of the kinds of schisms that have occurred in the last twenty years in the academic left with the rise of post-structuralist epistemological frameworks across the social sciences. Post-structuralism has had a particular impact on postcolonial theory, which has quite broadly examined the historical, sociological, geographical and literary configurations of anti-colonial, nationalist and postcolonial state formation. These histories have highlighted the incommensurabilities of anti-colonial mobilisation and the framework of classical Marxism, which has produced a scepticism toward postcolonial studies on the part of contemporary Marxist scholars, exacerbated by the post-structuralist inflection of much postcolonial scholarship. This has led to infield schisms and to formerly-Marxist-turned-postcolonial theorists such as Robert Young writing the history of postcoloniality in a way that inscribes an organic affinity between the complex tradition of Marxism and the anti-colonial imagination (Young, 2001). Anderson’s claim that it is anarchists’ activism that had the most affinity with anti-colonial nationalists complicates any easy assumptions about counter-hegemonic activity in the metropole, particularly because there are fundamental ideological differences between Fabian socialists, Marxists, and anarchists that bear out different relationships with the periphery, from solidarity to assimilation to further intervention. This simultaneously corroborates and problematises both postcolonial critiques of Marxism and the assumption that anti-colonialism is a singularity of sentiment, either in the metropole or in the periphery.

   The second reason Anderson’s claims are important has to do with the ambivalent relationship between communications and globalisation that is a function of the multiple interfaces produced by the networked character of its territorial configuration. Anderson stresses that readers will ‘not be mistaken to find resonances with their own time’, because some of the same patterns we witness today will have their origins in his study. The networked patterns of communication and transportation of capitalist globalisation that enable its patterns of accumulation are the same networks that can be deployed to recapture surplus (i.e. the shadow economy), and can be hijacked to service counter-hegemonic or counterinsurgent activities: witness the ‘Battle of Seattle’ or the phenomenon of ‘cyber-conflict’ (see Karatzogianni, 2004). The network bears an ambivalent relation to capital and empire–something eloquently demonstrated by Anderson’s study and born out by contemporary developments. The question, then, is one of historiography. Given the voluminous recent literature on both globalisation and empire, it seems that historicity is in crisis. While Anderson’s locus of study is certainly legitimate on its own terms, his claim that ‘early globalisation’ begins at this juncture would surely be called into question by many historians of the longue duree. The migration of people, ideas and the networks these furnish are as central to nineteenth-century empires as they are to twentieth-century globalisations. This has implications for whether one theorises contemporaneity as a ‘new’ US imperialism, or as an empire bearing continuities with empires past (see Mabee, 2004). Following the emphases of much postcolonial theory, it seems that one could say that it is more than that history-writing has political implications; rather, it is that writing history is itself politics. In this sense, every account of politics has embedded in it a narrative of history, and every account of history works to delineate subjective agency, making Anderson’s lack of a more abstracted level of analysis and evaluation a significant shortcoming.

   At a moment in which the figure of empire has resurfaced, it seems prescient to focus instead on a close empirical analysis of anti-colonial mobilisation. In so doing, Anderson deftly demonstrates both the complexity of the characters, locations and movements, and the way globalisation exceeds the twentieth century in its scope and origin. Anderson illustrates the push and pull of three spheres of influence, several acts of betrayal and different trajectories of critique and alliance, which should easily give the lie to statist assumptions about how international relations were conducted prior to the Second World War. The truly global span of Rizal and company’s communicative stretch and alliance resonates profoundly with contemporary issues of migration, citizenship, extra-territorial allegiance, economic remittances, and diasporic mobilisation in today’s war on terror.

   References

   Karatzogianni, A. (2004) ‘The politics of “Cyberconflict”‘, Politics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 46-55.

   Mabee, B. (2004) ‘Discourses of empire: The US “Empire”, globalisations and international relations’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 8, pp. 1359-78.

   Young, R. (2001) Postcolonialism. An Historical Introduction (Blackwell).
7. @ndy says:

   July 19, 2009 at 10:12 pm

   PS.

   Re US use of terror: the US state does whatever it likes, basically. That is, I’ve got no idea what the law is you refer to, but even if it exists, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to the exercise of violence by the US state. Dunno who killed JFK, but James Ellroy‘s account in American Tabloid (1995) is certainly entertaining.
8. ["Tony"] says:

   July 20, 2009 at 7:27 pm

   And so would frame my question to the author.

   After all, the organized (and unbalanced) social construction of whiteness as the only evil “race” largely originates, not with Latin culture, or black culture, but rather with Ms. Sontag’s Jewish culture (since he quoted that author).

   In fact, if one looks at American politics, after WWII, during which an influx of Jewish people (many of them Bolsheviks, communists, the parents of the future “red diaper babies”), you can see the growing organization of this social construct: in the 60s, the blacks were the main ‘targets of oppression,’ then the homosexuals, then the [L]latins, and soon, another group will arrive—for the list of oppressions are never-ending.

   (The Jewish people are the most oppressed, and from decade to decade, the “transcendental signifier” the common term with which they identify with fellow “oppressed peoples,” is expanded or changed: Eg: they are “slaves” like the blacks, Asiatics like the Asians, “outsiders” like homosexuals, etc.[)]

   Why is it evil TO CHO[O]SE NOT TO TALK THIS WAY?

   Whites have, in reality, been oppressed many times. But they value taking their knocks in world history—and trying to move on. And, being thoughtful people, they see danger in perpetuating “victim identities”—and endless visions of in-group/out-group dynamics, preferring transcendental ideas.

   Marx/Mordechai could see through the window of his persecuted identity (perhaps as a Jewish man). He then saw the world in terms of greed, exploitation, oppressed-oppressor.

   HE WAS NOT WHITE. It was Hegel, who preceded him, who expressed the ethnic German idea of dialectic spiritualism (v Marx’s dialectic materialism, since Marx boiled everything down to money).

   And yes, one could say that doctrines s/a “Manifest Destiny” could have come from Hegel’s idea of thesis/anti-thesis/and synthesis=progress history toward manifest spirituality and good for all. HOWEVER, the same could be said of Eastern mysticism, which shares the yin/yang (action and reaction) and perfection through reincarnation.

   At any rate, it is the Jewish thought system that is rooted here in “greed, materialism, oppression”—not the [G]entile one.

   And where that sense of persecution and “thwarted drives,” was the underpinning for Freud (another Jewish system), the [G]entile corollary was Jung (who looked for commonality in man, transcendence, light, and beauty—in his ideas of “archetypes”).

   The author has allowed others to pour salt into his wound, and he has bought the Marxist view hook, line and sinker—preferring a Jewish-generated sense of scape-goating and targeting (whites). The first scape-goat, after all, is in the book of Leviticus, in the Jewish Torah.

   The priests prayed the sins of the Jewish community into a goat, then took it from town and threw it off a cliff.

   Whites are your scapegoat.

   You constructed it—out of a Jewish thought system (Marxism), a thought system that could never have come from a [G]entile author for many reasons, (b/c scape-goating is not a deep motif in our cultures), and you take no responsibility for the pain and suffering this has caused.

   You are socialized to feel justified in whatever you perpetrate.

   You, not the “whites” (those socially constructed as such).

   In reality: we are your mirror.
9. @ndy says:

   July 20, 2009 at 9:52 pm

   Dear Dickhead,

   1. The above comment has nothing to do with my post.
   2. It is a quote.
   3. The quote is from a thread on Stormfront, and was written in response to something written by another blogger.
   4. The title of the SF thread in question is ‘An Anti lets the mask slip’, posted on July 19, 2009.
   stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=621375
   5. The quote was composed by a pseudonymous anti-Semite, “Friend of Stormfront” and Sustaining Member using the handle ‘WestByGodVa’, and posted on July 19, 2009.
   6. The subject of the original criticism is a blog called ‘Principles Of Progressive Politics’ by someone called ‘Fernando Pena’.
   7. In total, ‘Fernando Pena’ has written 7 posts, all of which concern his conception of what constitutes ‘Principles Of Progressive Politics’:

   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> Elimination of all borders and dissolution of the nation-state concept
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> Elimination Of The “Nuclear Family”
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> The Elimination Of All Religions (Religion = Organized Oppression)
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> Only whites are racist; people-of-color cannot be racist since they are oppressed
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> The teaching & promotion of alternate sexual lifestyles
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> Minority crime is caused by white oppression
   PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS —> For Peace And Justice To Be Realized, White People Must Be Reduced To A Minority

   Obvious Nazi trollbait.

   8. You’re a dickhead.
10. @ndy says:

    July 20, 2009 at 10:11 pm

    PS.

    “WestByGodVa” joined the bonehead forum for the Keystone State Skinheads [sic] on March 9, 2009. A post on a bike forum (dated November 28, 2002) from someone using the same handle states that the author’s name is Mike, and he is from Huntington, West Virginia. Mike adds that he is employed as “an optometry resident at a local hospital”. Finally:

    Submitter: Doug Park ([email protected])
    Date: 20 Aug 2001
    How did the city Hurricane, WV get it’s name? Historical references? Thanks!
11. ["Tony"] says:

    July 20, 2009 at 10:25 pm

    White pride [h]as nothing to do with Nazism murders socialist cowards [sic]. their [sic] is nothing wrong with being a pro white [sic] but most of the white Americans are corrupted by the Natzi [sic] idealism, which is not supposed to be cause [sic] America is not designed to be under the Iron Eagle and Natzisim [sic] ideology. [W]e believe in our own history southern history we don’t need to believe in any [E]uropean bad habit crap from elsewhere. [W]ith respect to Europe.
12. @ndy says:

    July 20, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    Blah blah blah.

    On the Keystone State Boneheads:

    Keystone United (formerly Keystone State Skinheads KSS)

    A well-organized, well-established and increasingly violent group that formed in early 2001 in the Harrisburg area. The original impetus for the group’s founding was a melee that took place in York, Pennsylvania, in late January of that year, when several hundred racist skinheads were attacked by anarchist groups at a rally sponsored by the World Church of the Creator (now known as the Creativity Movement). Over the next two years, KSS transformed itself from a mainly Harrisburg group to a network of seven regional crews that had members from every major city in the state and associates in New Jersey and Maryland…

    

    See also : OPP profile on Keystone bonehead Keith Carney:

    …From talking with some folks from around the Philly area, Carney was one of those familiar fencewalking punks people used to see a lot of. By “punk” we mean mohawk and everything, not just him being a punk in the insulting sense. After not seeing him around for some time, he started being seen hanging with boneheads, and he became one himself. He’s also into black metal not to mention the punk and rockabilly scene in the South Jersey/Philly area…
13. Jamie-R says:

    July 21, 2009 at 8:43 pm

    I dunno if the Russian state/empire has many more ‘friends’ than Communist Russia done: rather, Russia (that is, the Russian state) along with the US, EU (some argue that Russia exercises its influence as part of the “quad” along with the US, EU and UN), China, Japan and even India, continues to function as one of several metropoles (centres of global power)…

    I can’t say I agree. Weapons technology and of course nuclear weapons themselves remain highly concentrated to USA and Russia and one can say that USA has its area of allies and Russia has theirs, including China, whom has ideologically appeared to tag behind the political changes in Russia since Communism.

    The power to recruit in the future will lie with commodities I believe, and Russia has hinted at this, commodity wars are the future, and energy supplies are the prize. No military can survive once its energy supplies are cut, and both the USA and Russia are wooing other nations in this regard. For example, I for one believe the Georgian situation had nothing to do with ethnic conflict at its core, but a simple energy supply route from the Caucasus; and on that point, fair to say not much has changed since the time of Hitler’s pursuit of it.
14. @ndy says:

    July 21, 2009 at 10:16 pm

    You disagree?!? That’s OK Jamie-R — you will be shot after the revolution, not before.

    In terms of nuclear proliferation, nine states are known to possess such weapons:

    USA – 9,400
    Russia – 15,000
    UK – 200
    France – 350
    China -130
    India – 50-200
    Pakistan – 50-92
    Israel – 75 – 200 (undeclared)
    North Korea – 1-10

    Useful sauces of infos:

    The Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia)
    International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
    Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission

    Hans Blix, Chairman (Sweden)

    See also : The Nuclear Landscape in 2004: Past Present and Future, John Simpson,
    Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission disco paper no.3 [PDF].

    According to such sauces, there are approximately 26,000 nuclear weapons in existence; more than 9 in 10 are being cuddled by the Russian and Yanqui states.

    While the modern nation/state is only so many centuries old, states have been warring with one another ever since their inception. Or as Randolph Bourne puts it: War Is the Health of the State. In other words, there is constant competition over territory and resources (‘commodities’ in the general sense of the term), including of course energy supplies. A collective in the US called ‘Midnight Notes’ (which was originally conceived in 1979 in opposition to the nuclear industry) has written loadsa neat stuff about this malarky which I find useful. I also thought that Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War by the Retort collective (Verso, 2005) was neat-o in terms of arriving at a more nuanced understanding of contemporary conflicts. In which context, see also : AFFLICTED POWERS: The State, the Spectacle and September 11, New Left Review 27, May-June 2004: “The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and spectacular warfare after September 11, in the view of the Bay Area’s Situationist collective.”

    Bonus Nietzsche!

    XI. The New Idol.

    Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.

    A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.

    A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”

    It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

    Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

    Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.

    This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understandeth not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs.

    But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.

    False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its bowels.

    Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicateth this sign! Verily, it beckoneth unto the preachers of death!

    Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

    See just how it enticeth them to it, the many-too-many! How it swalloweth and cheweth and recheweth them!

    “On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God”–thus roareth the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees!

    Ah! even in your ears, ye great souls, it whispereth its gloomy lies! Ah! it findeth out the rich hearts which willingly lavish themselves!

    Yea, it findeth you out too, ye conquerors of the old God! Weary ye became of the conflict, and now your weariness serveth the new idol!

    Heroes and honourable ones, it would fain set up around it, the new idol! Gladly it basketh in the sunshine of good consciences,–the cold monster!

    Everything will it give YOU, if YE worship it, the new idol: thus it purchaseth the lustre of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes.

    It seeketh to allure by means of you, the many-too-many! Yea, a hellish artifice hath here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honours!

    Yea, a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!

    The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all–is called “life.”

    Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft–and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them!

    Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.

    Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money–these impotent ones!

    See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

    Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness–as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.–and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

    Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.

    My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air!

    Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous!

    Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices!

    Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.

    Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

    There, where the state ceaseth–there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.

    There, where the state CEASETH–pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?–

    Thus spake Zarathustra.
15. Jamie-R says:

    July 22, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    That’s OK Jamie-R — you will be shot after the revolution, not before.

    WOOHOO! Take THAT John F Kennedy!

    On that… I have more, just wait… and referencing your fascist youth Putin hitsquad point… Lee Harvey Oswald, to me, and Oliver Stone aside with his conspiracy theories… Oswald was a well known commie who even went to the Soviet Union and lived, we’re supposed to believe he had ‘a change of heart’ because they didn’t have ‘bowling alleys and fun stuff’, so he wanted to come back to the USA, which the idiot media there swallowed whole, they held him up as proof of Communism’s failure in the eyes of an American. But for some reason he continued with his ways, kind of like Che Guevara but retarded. Anyways, I think he was the lone gunman and his skills were not amateur, if you ask me, he was more valuable to the KGB in America and it’s not a stretch to think they trained him.

    Although it was a Kennedy mob-tied ally who killed him before we could find out more in the trial – or if Cheney was Vice President back then, wonderful info-spilling torture! – I think Kennedy found out the Commies did assassinations with pizzazz and had better inside men committed to their cause.

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