antipopper

I WANT TO DRIVE A STREET-SWEEPING MACHINE.
I WANT TO DRIVE A STREET-SWEEPING MACHINE.
I WANT TO DRIVE A STREET-SWEEPING MACHINE.
I WANT TO DRIVE A STREET-SWEEPING MACHINE.
I WANT TO DRIVE A STREET-SWEEPING MACHINE.

Perhaps I’m fantasising about strange utility vehicles as a kind of virtual antidote to my feelings of doom and inertia. Another war is around the corner, seemingly predicated on one of the biggest and reddest herrings in contemporary history — in the future, people are gonna look at George Bush’s impassive mask and recognise it as the crystalline face of the whole, terrifying “WAR IS PEACE” discourse. Following the success of supposed “American justice” in Afghanistan, this inexorable focus on pulverising Iraq feels like the inevitable pull of a black hole, like we’re following a really predictable script, but one in a Phillip K Dick novel, in which everything on the page is automatically made true. It seems nakedly obvious that the fascistic enthusiasts of Total, Endless War are creaming themselves that their dreams are finally coming true, and it profoundly saddens me that otherwise “reasonable” people are racing around trying to come up with Logic Glue to try and paste together some sort of dodgy Mind Vacuum Palace in which this situation could somehow be acceptable. A road to Damascus moment involving coffee, smelling and waking up is totally in order.

But waking up to what? It also saddens me that beyond acknowledging that this war drive hypocritically serves murderous interests under the false sign of justice, and will result in unimaginable death, nobody seems to have a clear understanding of the actual mechanics behind this conflict. Is it about good people unfortunately “resorting to violence to solve problems”? Is it about “being blind to becoming a terrorist target”? Is it about simply getting our grubby hands on “their oil”? Is it about identikit AmeriKKKans unleashing their Usual Imperialist Aggression? Too many anti-war voices have internalised a geopolitical model that fetishises nation-state actors, rather than seeing how the state may be implicated in various processes. Indeed, for or against the war, it all seems like a cartoon clash of ciphers, of competing national sovereignties that moderates on both sides say requires an umpire (e.g. the UN) that doesn’t ever fully challenge the state of play in the first place. There’s some great work by competent journalists on the depravity of the US war machine, but its utility is more descriptive, and never offers a timely and convincing picture of the mechanisms of this conflict.

Meanwhile, we live in a strange world in which concepts like “freedom” have been captured in the most spectacularly opportunistic way. Opponents of war aren’t fools — this situation, in which the “maintenance of our way of life” is seemingly generated by the direct enaction of repression, authority and war, appears ideologically familiar, but is achieved on an unprecedented scale and level of intensity that suggests a step into an arrangement that’s qualitatively new. It’s no wonder we’re all confused.

Perhaps there’s something in revisiting the scene of the crime. Many people who are against the war have arrived at their stance by thinking about the appalling double standards involved in US foreign policy, and indeed, the kind of logical Klein bottle that US policy on Iraq seems to have become over the last couple of decades. Give the dictator- for-hire some weapons of mass destruction one year, rhetoricise against him (oh, and pulverise his people on the side) the next. Leave the issue hanging with “low- intensity” bombing runs and blockades, seemingly oblivious to the obvious disparity between the dictator and his dying people. After a decade, return to the rhetoric of definitive oblivion under a pretense that nobody could truly believe as being the true motivation — everyone’s falling over themselves trying to justify the hollow outrage over Weapons of Mass Destruction, but it seems clear that for the warmongers, WMD is merely a great plot device, complete with moral continuity errors of complicity that disappear if you don’t think about them too much… all to ensure an inevitable sequel.

I get one important thing out of this game of Twister: in the scheme of things, the US Government can love or leave evil dictators, but throughout it all, the people of Iraq inevitably endure sickness, death and dismemberment, from whoever: Saddam or US forces. (During the Gulf War the Pentagon lied about a great many things, like the immense scale of “collateral damage”, but no doubt this is internalised by many as “necessary”, like Madeline Albright’s million dead children- of-the-blockade, who were apparently “worth it”.) Underneath the ciphers of competing national sovereignties lie real people. Real people who seem destined to suffer or die.

If it weren’t for the blinding co-option of the concept of “justice”, all this maveouvering would be downright embarrassing. Indeed, perhaps it’s a compulsion, an imperative to demoralise the people of the region, to which any ill-fitting justification must be made to fit, consciously or not. The triumphalist “hawks” of the White House talk about “full spectrum dominance”, and no doubt they truly believe in US military supremacy, but what if this belief is the (im)moral window dressing of something far more impersonal and amoral, something bigger than the might of the US? Nationalism is never to be taken at face value; it always involves the mobilisation of mythologies at the intersection of much less readable forces. What if the obvious congruence between aggressive national interests and warmongering rhetoric is papering over something more important, or at at least acting in parallel with the ascendancy of newer imperatives? What if we don’t accept at face value the cartoonish image of the simple imperialist aggressor? Instead, the US military machine may be simply the most convenient and receptive zombie for staging the greatest show of all-round repression the world has ever seen.

Repression for what? I’m currently quite interested in the explanations proposed by the Midnight Notes Collective, who assert that rather than being a grab for “cheap oil” by the United States, the Gulf War in essence served to demoralise and contain people’s resistance to the enslaving requirements of the oil industry in the region — a giant human resource management operation (why union-bust when you can bomb entire countries from above?) rather than a commodity pricing squabble or a national sovereignty issue. The Iraqi working class, against Saddam Hussein, once served as a rallying point for change in the region, and the Gulf War ended with the Allied destruction of a potential revolution. Perhaps this has marked them for humiliation and death (with or without Saddam Hussein), with this being the latest, compulsive round. Meanwhile, “we” are earmarked for a certain destiny, too: within Western “democracies”, we are expected to naturally welcome the new levels of surveillance, force and the perpetual logic of fear in the air, while some of us — various “illegal” non-citizens — languish in concentration camps. Policing all round. Preserving our way of life. If this is our way of life, maybe we need to get a refund from whoever sold it to us.

I WATCHED A RHESUS MONKEY DIE.