"Oh my god, this War On Terror is gonna rule! I can't wait till the war is over and there's no more terrorism!"
"I know! Remember when the US had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can buy drugs anymore? It'll be just like that!"
"Right! God if only that War On Drugs hadn't been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana right now!"
-- Get Your War On, #1
Infernal Affairs = the best cop thriller I've seen in ages. Double-narc smackdown!
Speaking of cops, it's been a long time coming, but I've been catching up with a bit of Christopher Hitchens' "pro-war Left" rhetoric lately (e.g. flicking through his book Regime Change), and am amazed at the relentless identification with the State, the unquestioning liberal reduction of complex economic theatres to the playgrounds of coherent national actors, and the most appalling erasure of political possibilities, in which any challenge to an agenda of global militarized control must somehow involve support for other reactionary regimes. So where do cops come in? I think the populist reaction (since it was raised during, say, Panama and the first Gulf War) against "USA as global cop" has much truth to it. It's usually expressed in an uncritical, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but it doesn't end there: a cop for what kind of system? There's the opening.
Once you see the murderous farce of the last decade as a police action, the utter myopia of Hitchens' position (and his "fight against fascism during World War II" analogy) is made clear. Imagine: you have corrupt succession of mayors who've been effectively propping up the Mob in the poor parts of town, through which millions of dollars ironically pass via the drug trade; once the Mob starts to act outside its brief during a period of property market consolidation, City Hall plaster the town with propaganda about how evil the Mob are -- shock horror! -- and gets the trigger-happy Police Department to send in their entire SWAT division to put down and occupy the entire neighbourhood with live ammunition and concussion grenades under the banner of the War on Drugs, so they can lucratively "redevelop" the neighbourhood with the help of some rich pals and some other local rival gangsters. People who oppose this don't always agree: there are people who don't like yet more violence in the neighbourhood; there are people who think City Hall simply shouldn't interfere; there's a minority who support the Mob for various feudal reasons; there are some cop-lovers who just want confirmation that the Mob were planning to bomb City Hall before we actually send in SWAT to crush the region for "redevelopment"; the mayor of the next town is afraid the commotion will hurt commerce in the region; some respect the idea of a police force for fighting crime, but think that sending in SWAT to crush a neighbourhood in the current context has little to do with that; others fret about whether the proper warrant process was adhered to; and there are people who think that the cops are the hired thugs of the continuing regime of fatcats, of which the stupid mayor is the latest public face.
IMHO, all but the last of those positions {*twinkle*} are to some extent misguided or naive, and a few are actually crazy, but for Hitchens, people who hold any of them are effectively supporting organised crime. Of course, being against organised crime somehow must equal support for the War on Drugs, regardless of how corrupt the mayor is. Hopefully posterity will make clear how monumentally and stubbornly devoid of nuanced logic or perspective this argument is. Meanwhile, the very real and sometimes embarrassing confusion amongst the opposition to this police action isn't as terrible as it seems. Some people don't have a totalising intellectual analysis of why they feel queasy when they see the cops let loose with semi-automatic weaponry and random raids on a poor neighbourhood that happens to be run by rich gangsters who used to work for the mayor. They just have a generalised ethical problem with that kind of loaded violence. Other people have everything worked out, but could be a tad impractical when the situation is actually around them.
All such people can and do come together, not necessarily in a "united" way, and despite various analytical and tactical differences, when they specifically oppose police violence, class and ethnic criminalisation and community deprivation under the War on Drugs. Hitchens, meanwhile, obviously lives on Planet Aging Enfant Terrible (otherwise known as the Public Sphere), in which he gets to hobnob with dignitaries and other essayists, otherwise he'd know that supporters of rich gangsters who do come to community meetings about police violence aren't exactly welcomed with open arms. By analogously implying this, Hitchens spits in the face of every mother whose opposes a militarised police presence on her street because her son has been bashed and put away for years after a petty offence. Because she loves the mafia, obviously. She wants more crack babies born in the area, and hey, while she's at it, according to Hitchens, she gives succour to the violent abuse of women via the criminal management of prostitution in the area, too. My god, that's what they do in that neigbourhood! The corrupt mayor must be a saint in comparison! Why doesn't she support his War on Drugs and murderous law and order reforms? Oh, her crazy next door neighbour does. And funnily enough, so do the rival "gangland" figures -- geez, they must have turned over a new leaf! Others are resigned to the violent "cleanup", and want to maintain a stake in the neighbourhood's future. See, there's support in the local area! It's the right thing to do, you armchair leftists! Call in SWAT! They welcome the paramilitary liberation from "drugs" with open arms over there, I tell you.
And what about the people protesting the fatcat developer friends of the mayor, who are going to build a mall when the neighbourhood is "cleaned up" of indiscriminate riff raff (especially anybody who'd want to organise industrially while working in said mall), and also build a nearby prison to house them -- all after a long ban on supplying basic goods and services to the local area (which City Hall justified with the rhetoric of "beseigeing the mafia")? To Hitchens, such protestors are working against the poor by blocking the only conceivable aid the neighbourhood could see. Yep. (How much more reactionary can Hitchens get? It's not so much him becoming a quitter because of a crumbling of internal psychological morale under external pressure, as the Spartacist League explain every swerve to the right by ex-radicals, but instead a conceptual extinguishment of hope on the abstract plane over which both desire and analysis play.)
So it is with the conquest of Iraq. Yeah, the extended analogy sounded a bit patronising, but I've only belaboured it to hammer home the systemic reality of global policing that the inane terminology of international relations and national sovereignty -- used by both liberals and conservatives, for and against the war -- serves to mask. This is the crux of Hitchens' error, where hope is extinguished because the only thing that acts in the world is the nation-state, or at best, a compromised-yet-still-civilised Western Capitalism versus a generalised Something Worse (which for me is implicitly as racist as "those gangstas and their crack ho's in the ghetto who suffocate their own babies", to use a drugwar trope). The whole dodgy situation of corrupt mayors and mafia bosses, under which everybody loses, vanishes in the face of this State fetishisation. It is the error of Identification. So rather than the antiwar Left supposedly supporting the old Saddam status quo, it's Hitchens who is nostalgically fixated with the mirages in the current desert called "politics" -- the real status quo, under which Darth Vader's plea, "join with me -- it is the only way" seems so seductive. Like Luke, I'd recommend jumping into the ventilation shaft at that point -- for some fresh air, after the stench of Hitchens' embalmed political absolutism.
The only thing I'd agree with Hitchens about is that some liberals and centrists who are nominally against the war are really better off in the pro-war camp. If you happily agree with the systematic war on poor neighbourhoods as long as the warrants are all correctly stamped, you should probably rethink your petty position on the UN, international law and the War on Terror/"Saddama"/Evil, too, and get the fuck out of the antiwar movement. I do acknowledge that conversely, there are people who are sincerely appalled by the murderous prospect of "full spectrum dominance", but can only habitually couch this opposition in terms of adhering to various international rubber-stamping procedures. These people still have much to offer, even if they're "wrong". Meanwhile, note that neither oil nor weapons of mass destruction have any clear equivalents in my War on Drugs analogy, not because such things are irrelevant, but because people's characterisation of this war as a repressive police action does not in fact hinge on such things, but rather on recognising the cynical application of repressive violence when they see it -- something Hitchens and the rest of the pro-war Left seem incapable of doing. Meanwhile, the rest of the multitude who for various reasons refuse the current situation will continue to converge. And often not in the "public sphere", because many of us know it's a divorced-from-reality sandpit, where certain essayists like to hang out.
+ + +
Now that I've probably lost most of my new readers, I'm going on holiday. See you soon.
