Holocaust 2.0

The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article "Obama's Endless Kill List." In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama's drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of "the enemy" as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror's of Obama's drone program. 

In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: "The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror." 

The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst "respectable" circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration's drone program was born. (Obama's Endless Kill List)  

This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein's statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn't okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama's drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is "collateral damage."

The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.

Reactivating the Social Body: Interview with Bifo

In my view, ima­gin­a­tion is the cent­ral field of social trans­form­a­tion in the age of semiocapital.[2] Capitalist dom­in­a­tion is sus­tained by the per­sist­ence of men­tal cages that are struc­tured by the dog­mas of growth, com­pet­i­tion and rent. The epi­stem­o­lo­gical dic­tat­or­ship of this model – its grip on the dif­fer­ent spheres of human know­ledge – is the very ground of power.  So the task of trans­form­a­tion requires us to ima­gine and make sens­ible a dif­fer­ent con­cat­en­a­tion of social forms, know­ledge, and tech­no­logy. Of course, ima­gin­a­tion will never be enough on its own.  We need to build forms of social solid­ar­ity that are cap­able of re-​​activating the social body after the long period of its isol­a­tion and sub­jug­a­tion to com­pet­it­ive aggress­ive­ness.  Solid­ar­ity – in con­trast to this aggress­ive­ness – is based on empathy, on the bod­ily per­cep­tion of the pres­ence of the other...

We con­tinue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to ima­gine new forms that are cap­able of actu­ally strug­gling against fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship. In my opin­ion, the first task – which we have begun to exper­i­ence over the last year – is the react­iv­a­tion of the social body that I have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough.  We will also have to begin to learn to cre­ate new forms of autonomy from fin­an­cial con­trol and so on.  For instance, in Italy we have been talk­ing increas­ingly of “insolv­ency.” Of course, insolv­ency means the inab­il­ity to pay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in mon­et­ary terms. There is also a sym­bolic debt that is always implied in power rela­tion­ships. Ima­gin­a­tion might mean the abil­ity to cre­ate the pos­sib­il­ity of insolv­ency – to cre­ate the right to be insolv­ent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semi­otic and a sym­bolic level.  We need to ima­gine forms of social rela­tion­ships that escape mon­et­ary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks, new forms of cur­rency, com­munity cur­rency and so on. Do you see what I am try­ing to say? The pro­cess of ima­gin­a­tion begins with the react­iv­a­tion of the social body but next this body has to cre­ate new levels of social inter­ac­tion.  Escap­ing fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship, in other words, means ima­gin­ing new forms of social exchange.  I don’t know what form eman­cip­a­tion will take in the com­ing years.  I can only pro­pose this little meth­od­o­lo­gical start­ing point from what we already know.

Reblogged  from Critical Legal Thinking 

Alexander Cockburn

A few months ago, on July 21 to be exact, the world of journalism lost one of its bright lights. At the time I was completely unaware, was unaware in fact until a few days ago, that Alexander Cockburn even existed. It is probably a testament to my own erratic reading habits that I discovered Cockburn through Robin Blackburn's obituary of him in the New Left Review. Blackburn attributes to Cockburn the founding of a new kind of radical journalism and says

Alexander saw journalism as a craft or trade and brooked no excuses for those who out of laziness- or cowardice- endorsed the idees recues of the age. (Blackburn NLR 76, p.68) 

The article goes on to tell the story of a challenging and insightful journalist who read the signs of the times with wit and accuracy. Cockburn was the founding editor of a political newsletter CounterPunch, a publication which I had heard of, but never paid any attention to; the loss it turns out was mine. I have since been going back and reading old articles, including some rather vitriolic exchanges with Christopher Hitchens. Vis-a-vis the whole Mother Teresa fiasco Cockburn comments:

Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity. (CounterPunch) 

Now, maybe everyone else knows who Alexander Cockburn is, but we all almost certainly know about Hitchens. I can't help but feel a little bit sad about that.