Pomophobia

There's an interesting footnote to Australia's culture wars happening in the Australian today.

A couple of academics have written a book arguing that Howard's brand of 'conservatism' actually incorporates some elements of postmodernism, such as social constructivism:

Howard's battler, melded from largely left-wing folk stories, but with the anti-imperialist strain omitted to suit Howard's vision, is a classic example of such social constructivism. (source)

Cue predictable gnashing of teeth from the right.

A Salvo Against Cruise-Missile 'Liberals'

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in light of 9/11 and the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, a number of self-identified leftists or liberals underwent a period of colonoscopic self-examination. Many emerged from the process as supporters of US, British, and, more locally, Australian imperialism. Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Pamela Bone, the Eustonites - collectively these people are known as the 'Decent Left'.

A rather indecent comrade, who happens to be arguably the best solo blogger on the intertubes, has just published a book looking at this very subject:





It's published by the excellent Verso, who also provide a good deal of other indecent stuff, such as anti-imperialist tomes, and exegeses on Lacan. Pre-order the book, comrades, and tell your Decent friends to return to their colonoscopic self-examination!

In the meantime, if you'd like a shorter rebuttal of Decentism, you could do much worse than this hilarious rejoinder.

Fact and Fiction in Indonesia

Shameless revisionism and dead, politically rightist, economically neo-liberal dictators seem to go hand in hand.

When Pinochet met his maker a year ago, the likes of Andrew Bolt (in Australia) or the Wall Street Journal (in the US) were falling over themselves to assure readers of Chile's economic prosperity, attributed to Pincohet's bloody rule. The deaths, torture, exile and disappearances of thousands were ignored as the apologists clamoured to give us a 'balanced' account of the tyrant's legacy.

It is difficult to imagine any mainstream media outlet eulogising a Castro or Khomeini in similar terms, despite comparable 'achievements', acquired with considerably less slaughter.

The MSM are not the only culprits when it comes to craven deference to elite opinion. Since at least Whitlam, it is arguably on foreign policy that the ALP is at its most repugnant, and this is particularly true in relation to Indonesia.

In light of the silence across one half of the political blogosphere, let us peruse a few examples:

Australia's Attorney-General Robert McClelland and former prime minister Paul Keating have made a flying visit to Indonesia to pay their respects at the funeral of former Indonesian dictator Suharto...The pair attended the funeral with Australia's Ambassador to Indonesia Bill Farmer.
"It respects the office that he held and effectively confirms the Rudd government commitment to an ongoing, strong and supportive relationship with Indonesia."
"We recognise also his achievements ... he brought Indonesia from a country that was subsistence to one with a developing economy...and a nation of significance in the world."
He said the government also recognised the "issues of controversy" with Suharto's rule. (source)

'Issues of controversy'? So delicately put!

Similar delicacy could be found in Wolfowitz, former US ambassador to Suharto:

"This ambassador didn't speak out about human rights here. He was perceived by the public as being close to the Suharto government," said Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, who headed Indonesia's legal aid foundation and now chairs the National Human Rights Commission.
Nusantara said Wolfowitz appeared to ignore abuses committed by Indonesian security forces, which were fighting separatist insurgencies in the provinces of Aceh and Papua. Nor did he raise public concerns about East Timor, which had been invaded by the Indonesian military a decade earlier. Wolfowitz also remained silent about the mounting corruption within Suharto's family and inner circle, Nusantara asserted. (source)

Downer, Australia's former foreign affairs minister, viewed Suharto in similar terms to Keating and Rudd:
"He certainly took a rather regal and, if you like, patronising view of Australia but on the other hand he did understand it was important to have a constructive relationship with Australia," Mr Downer told ABC Radio.
"He wasn't a bad thing for Australia in a lot of ways." (source)

The WSJ, as might be expected, did not hold back in its praise for the newly departed:
Suharto was guilty of hubris when he styled himself Bapak Pembangunan Indonesia, or father of Indonesia's development, and even had this title printed along with his portrait on the 50,000 rupiah note. But that is a pretty accurate summary of his legacy. Like Deng Xiaoping, he rescued his country from totalitarianism and poverty, and put it on the path to prosperity and a large measure of personal freedoms. For all his flaws, Suharto deserves to be remembered as one of Asia's greatest leaders. (source)

One of Asia's greatest leaders?

Hiding out in the dense, humid jungle, Markus Talam watched Indonesian soldiers herd manacled prisoners from trucks, line them up and mow them down with round after round of automatic weapons fire.
"They gunned them down and dumped their bodies in a mass grave dug by other prisoners. I remember the sound of the guns clearly: tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat ... over and over again," said Talam, 68, who was later jailed for 10 years after being named a leftist sympathizer.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power — from 1965 to 1968 — range from a government figure of 78,000 to 1 million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history. It was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade union members, intellectuals and schoolteachers, many of whom were executed or sent to remote prisons. (source)

Score one for the CIA in another Cold War triumph.

Australia's ALP also had no problems in turning a blind eye to the regime's 'issues of controversy':

A political tempest...erupted in Australia over leaked official documents showing that the leaders of the former Labor government covered up casualty figures from the 1991 massacre carried out by Indonesian troops in the East Timorese capital of Dili.
The facts are that more than 200 people, mostly pro-independence demonstrators, were slaughtered in Dili in November 1991. The then Labor government supported claims by an inquiry set up by the Suharto regime that only about 50 were killed and that the deaths were the responsibility of a few individual officers and soldiers.
The truth is that the Labor leaders had compelling reasons of both "national interest" and "party political interest" for whitewashing the Dili massacre, and every other bloody crime carried out by the Suharto regime. For "national interest" read the profit interests of Australian big business.
In the case of East Timor, the Labor leaders backed the regime's repressive grip over the former Portuguese colony in order to provide BHP and other oil companies with guaranteed access to the immense resources of the Timor Gap--estimated to hold up to 1 billion barrels of crude oil. Just two years before the Dili massacre, Evans and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, signed the Timor Gap Treaty in a champagne drinking ceremony as they flew over the Timor Sea, making Australia the only country in the world to legally recognise the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. (source)

Naomi Klein, in her latest outing, also spent some time discussing Suharto's Indonesia, and its wonderful economic prosperity:

Since the Second World War, the country [Indonesia] had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth, and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals. While Sukarno was a nationalist, not a Communist, he worked closely with the Communist Party, which had 3 million active members. The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno's rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities."
After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country's leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto's hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his "shooting lists," as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on t heir progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesia left had been annihilated. One of the people involved in the operation was Robert J. Martens, who worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. "It really was a big help to the army," he told the journalist Kathy Kadane twenty-five years later. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad [my emphasis]. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." (source)

Indeed, Indonesia's leftists, secular democrats and trade unionists were all 'struck hard', leaving the Islamists, organising through one of the few non-banned institutions (the mosque), to resist. It is an inconvenient truth for the ruling elites that Islamic extremism emerges from the same globalised milieu as 'free trade' corporate rule.

So vale, Suharto. Te futueo et caballum tuum.

The Middle East, and that War on Terror

Since World War II, wars of aggression have brought an odour of ill-repute to their perpetrators, since such wars are the crystallisation of all of the crimes wrought by the 20th Century's fascist regimes.

To that end, it is heartening to see, (in today's Age), that at least some people can think through the false distinctions between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Typically, the former is seen as the 'bad' war, a disaster, more or less, whilst the latter is 'good', and praised as a legitimate war of liberation. As I've argued elsewhere, the historical facts do not bear out this thesis, but this has not stopped the myth from circulating all the same. Simon Jenkins' article begins to question (all too gently, in my view), the standard propaganda:

Iraq is post-imperialism for fast learners, Afghanistan for slow ones.
While the concept of a benign outcome in Iraq is strictly for armchair crazies,
such an outcome remains received wisdom in Afghanistan. The British ambassador,
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is building himself an embassy to compare with
America's in Baghdad and has forecast a British military presence in the country
for 30 years. Brigadier John Lorimer in Helmand says he can suppress insurgency
in 10 years but will need "longer than 30" to establish good governance. Such
things were being said in Iraq until two years ago, when the body bags began to
talk.

A number of other interesting articles have emerged in recent days. In an article that provides a reasonably succinct beginner's introduction to modern US foreign policy, Der Spiegel reports that, last week, Washington officials announced a deal to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Saudi Arabians. This was met with consternation on the part of the much-maligned Europeans, such as German official, Karsten Voigt. 'The Islamic kingdom might be a US ally in name, but it wasn't "particularly democratic," said Voigt, and its oppressive family regime continued to be a fertile breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.' He added: 'The region is not suffering from a lack of arms, but from a lack of stability'. Who'd have thought?



Also on the receiving end of US military savoir-faire were those other bulwarks of Middle Eastern democracy, Egypt and Israel. In fairness, Israel is a legitimate democracy for the citizens under its aegis, at least, as long as those citizens are not Arabic Israelis, or, worse still, Arab Palestinians.



Naturally, these proponents of American capitalism, and sowers of peace and stability have good reasons for selling all these weapons, as:

[S]uch arms deals have a long tradition in Washington. "The enemy of my
enemy is my friend" was a maxim of several US governments during the Cold War.
Washington's foreign policy often sanctioned selling weapons to questionable
regimes promising to help contain the communist threat regardless of the
potential consequences... US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the
latest string of weapons deals during her recent diplomatic tour of the Middle
East. "We are determined to maintain the balances -- the military and strategic
balances -- within the region," she said.

It is refreshingly honest on Rice's part to drop any pretences of 'democracy-spreading' in her apologia. Obviously, the 'balance' of which Rice speaks is one tilted rather heavily in the direction of Washington's 'strategic' interests. On this form, the much-demonised Hugo Chavez (among others) is only behaving rationally when he attempts to increase his arms spending, and seek allies. History points to his people (among others) being liberated via bombs, or being massacred and mutilated by some new Contras.



Over in Iraq, the Coalition of the Drilling continues to win 'hearts and minds', by exerting direct influence (and indirect influence, by way of the Vichy-esque regime installed in the country) over Iraq's oil. Two-thirds of Iraqis, across religious, ethnic, and sectarian lines, want to see Iraq's oil retained under Iraqi control, and not 'opened up' on the ironically-titled 'free market' of the Western world. According to John Hilary, (inter alia) the Coalition itself has drafted the oil laws of Iraq, and the Iraqi government has been complicit in this 'democratic' takeover of its country's resources, by banning trade unions from participating in any debate over the laws. So there we have it - Iraq's future prosperity sacrificed at the altar of global (or in this instance, Western) capital, and the influence of unions completely shut down.



Of course, there remain those stragglers, those last few, degenerate imbeciles who have their doubts as to why 'the left' opposed the invasion of Iraq, and who continue to block their eyes and ears, and shout apologias for bloodshed. Surely, by now, ignorance can no longer be an excuse for the scales upon their eyes.



With that theme in mind, I was interested to read this piece by Neil Clark, calling for a reckoning of the pro-war 'liberal interventionists' and 'neoconservatives'. He writes from a UK perspective:

Both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition supported the Iraq war.
So too did their front benches. Tony Blair may have gone, but warmongers still
abound in the Palace of Westminster, with Iran next in their line of fire. And
in the media, pro-war commentators such as Nick Cohen, Niall Ferguson and
Melanie Phillips continue to impart their "wisdom" on international affairs as
if the humanitarian
catastrophe in Iraq had never happened.

The lesson for Australians should not be lost, as our 'opposition' and media differ from the British only in degree, rather than type. The humanitarian disaster of Iraq, with levels of bloodshed that nobody (other than vilified medicos) even bothers to count, with malnutrition at epidemic levels, and with infrastructure collapsed, are all obvious and entirely predictable consequences of war. This fact is ignored, as ever, by the likes of Sheridan and Bolt, for whom the invasion was a raving 'success'. One wonders what degree of annihilation would constitute failure for this cheersquad of brutality.



It ought to have been obvious, really, that war is a bloody thing, leading to many of the 'unintended consequences' that so-called conservatives like to warn us about. The occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is portrayed almost as nothing more than affable nightclub bouncers, tossing out the riff raff on behalf of patrons. If one were to take this delusional view of occupation and apply it, say, to Russia's involvement in Chechnya, or to China's in Tibet, one would shunned as a dribbling idiot. Our victims are unnamed, and unnumbered, and to compare their suffering to that experienced by invaded, occupied peoples elsewhere in the world is to invite allegations of 'moral relativism'.



Perhaps Fukuyama, (always more idiot than savant), was right after all, and we have reached a kind of Hegelian 'end of history'. Everything is 'relative', even as regards death and destruction. The 'sublated' exception, of course, is the Coalition, which has apparently evolved through the various stages of spirit, and whose will and dictates now constitute das Absolut.

What's Right? A Couple of Rejoinders to the Pro-war Left

Division over the so-called 'War on Terror' has led to the emergence of a new species of second-rate, 'third way' spivs and turncoats, who theoretically consider themselves the True 'liberal left', whilst aligning their sympathies with US neoconservatism. Christopher Hitchens is probably the most famous example, a close second being Nick Cohen, whoring out his services to the cluster bomb cause. For the most part, neither writer has much to say, other than a few snide remarks on the perceived failings of the left, and some assertions on the wonderful character of World Bank grande fromage, Paul Wolfowitz. For this reason, this particular breed of 'liberal' is particular popular with hard-right commenters, who excitedly think they've found a new stick with which to beat the left.

With that in mind, it's worth noting this review of Cohen's recent book, What's Left?, the 'most substantial work of a pro-war left intellectual' (found courtesy of Crooked Timber). Reviewer Johann Hari (once a pro-war bedfellow of Cohen's) mounts a systematic and scathing rebuttal of some of Cohen's most flawed arguments. The review is relatively lengthy, and I won't enter into all of it here, but a few points are worth noting:

It's painfully conspicuous that Cohen's statements about neoconservatism consist
solely of assertions, primarily about the personal niceness of Paul Wolfowitz.
The overwhelming contrary evidence is simply ignored. A policy of systematic
torture? The immediate imposition of mass privatisations, causing mass
unemployment and sectarian unrest? The barricading of civilian men aged between
18 and 60 in Fallujah, a city the size of Baltimore, before attacking it with
chemical weapons? Cohen does not say how these neoconservative tactics have been
"fighting the Left's battles for them".

Hari also lays into Cohen's 'Enlightenment' pretensions, exposing the Realpolitik beneath the increasingly tarnished veneer:

It is increasingly clear that the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by
Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve US control over the Middle
East's oil supplies. After September 11th, especially since it was now plain
that the House of Saud's vast oil fields were vulnerable to an Iran-style
internal Islamist revolution - and Iraq's were the most appealing alternative.
As long ago as 1991 - back when the only thing George W Bush tortured was the
English language - Dick Cheney said about Iraq,: "We're there because the fact
of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." Yet
the only times Cohen mentions oil is to mock the madness of the left for
bringing it up. Is his explanation - that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were
suddenly gripped by Wilsonian idealism - more plausible?

Hari seizes on Cohen's imbecility in asserting that those who choose neither Saddam, nor Bush, are 'the greatest villains of all':

This injuction to "pick a side" is Cohen's way of ironing out the cognitive
dissonance that comes from being aware of crimes by the Bush adminstration, but
supporting them anyway. As for the idea that people who do not pick one of two
forces are "the biggest villains of all", using this logic, the greatest
villains in the Cold War were India - a rather eccentric judgement.

All in all, Hari is a little too charitable for my liking, considering the foolishness that Cohen has wrought upon the Anglophone world's op-ed pages. He also, inexplicably, fires a (wayward) salvo at Lenin (the blogger, not the Russian), which gets the requisite treatment here.

Complaints notwithstanding, the review serves as a creditable attempt by a pro-war intellectual to rethink his position, and to make evident the intellectual vacuity, and mercenary morality of the cruise missile 'liberals'. Cohen deserves nothing less than contempt; one of his latest opinion pieces is an idiotic attempt to argue that we need more Islamic villains on film and television, lest we 'liberals' be seen as trying to 'appease and deny' terrorism.

Whilst it is unfair to take the most contemptible elements of the pro-war right, and hold them as exemplars, it may nonetheless be worth illustrating for Cohen (and friends) precisely the sort of ideological company he is keeping. Perhaps considerations of 'fairness' ought to be jettisoned, when Cohen himself accuses anybody who refuses to endorse the war of having terrorist sympathies. We can find the same 'logic' on any number of pro-war right websites.

I despise linking to such sites, but here is an example of a pro-war rightist waxing lyrical, pondering a possible Muslim Holocaust:

"Muslims are being put on trains and sent to concentration camps, gassed
and buried in mass graves I suppose." We can only dream. (source).

Notably, the comment goes unchallenged. Another example can be found in this botched creature, who relishes the 'war on terror' as a suitable outlet for his violent racism:

Waging war militarily on the islamists certainly radicalises more
muslims.So what are we supposed to do, tolerate their murderous ways and hope
they go away? They won’t.
And here’s why the screams of outrage begin: The
more muslims it radicalises the better, because sooner or later they’ll detonate
a nuke or a dirty bomb, which will cause a devastating response from the
West...Ryadh and Mecca will do for a start. (source).

This, in a post entitled 'Affirming reality'. 'Tis a pity the warmongers have so little appreciation of irony.

The message is clear - Cohen wants us to hold our noses, disbelieve our senses, dull our intellects, and sacrifice the last of our principles for the sake of Bush's wars. We see the motivations of some of the war's supporters. Such 'humanitarian interventionism'. Such commitment to freedom. Such Enlightenment principles on display.

So to all of the cruise missile liberals, please take a closer look at your Faustian pact. These are the scum that Cohen and his ilk have chosen as bedfellows. These are the violent, bigoted cretins with whom he lies.