Ian Welsh

I recently read a Guardian piece on Gitmo. Here’s an excerpt:

Gen Miller suggests reorganising the prisons so that the guards help the interrogators “set the conditions for … successful interrogation”.

It was following his visit that torture and humiliation by the guards began in earnest. Prisoners were hooded, threatened with rape, threatened with torture, had pistols held to their heads, made to strip naked, forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, beaten till they bled – sometimes with implements, including a broom and a chair – hung from doors by cuffed hands, deceived into thinking they were to be electrocuted, ducked in toilet buckets, forced to simulate masturbation, force to lie naked in a pile and be photographed, urinated on, menaced and, in one case, severely bitten by dogs, sodomised with a chemical light, ridden like horses, made to wear women’s underwear, raped, deprived of sleep, exposed to the midday summer sun, put in stress positions and made to lie naked, in empty concrete cells, in complete darkness, for days on end.

Here is another:

The worst may be to come. Little has yet emerged about conditions inside the prisons run by the US in Afghanistan, where eight deaths in US custody remain unexplained, and an internal military report remains unpublished. In an essay accompanying the documents, Danner draws attention to the language of one of the official investigators of Abu Ghraib, James Schlesinger, who wrote in his report of “five cases of detainee deaths [worldwide] as a result of abuse by US personnel”. Danner points out that Schlesinger could as easily have written: “American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death.”

Another:

Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a teacher of Islamic law with Palestinian citizenship, describes how he was arrested in Pakistan, in May 2002, handed over to the Americans and taken to Afghanistan.

While at Bagram air force base, Hussain said, he was blindfolded, tightly handcuffed, gagged and earplugged and sodomised with a stick while three soldiers held him down. “It was excruciatingly painful,” said Hussain. “I have always believed that I am not a person who would scream unless I was really hurt. Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop screaming when this happened. This torture went on for several minutes, but it felt like hours, and the pain afterwards was almost as bad as anything I experienced at the time.”

Feel free to read the rest.

Now, let’s talk a little about Iraq. We don’t know how many people died in Iraq. Why?  Because the US didn’t count, and did their best to make it impossible for anyone else to count either. We don’t know the number of orphans, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands (one of the readers of this blog, MFI, will probably supply a good estimate.) The killing is ongoing. Every week, even the Western press covers some bombing or massacre killing dozens, and every day people are killed, tortured, and raped in less newsworthy fashions.

Now let’s talk about democracy. In the the year 2000 A.D., the United States elected George Bush, a man who, as a child was known, at the time of his election, to have blown up frogs by putting firecrackers in them. This is, if you’re unaware, one of the classic childhood signs of psychopathy. Electing Bush was malfeasance, but let’s be honest: He stole the election. I know it, and anyone who’s taken the time to properly investigate what happened in Florida and with the Supreme Court, and who can also add and subtract, knows it.

So up until 2004, the rest of the world kept saying, “It’s not America, it’s not Americans.”

Then in 2004, America re-elected Bush. An argument can be made that that election was stolen too, though not as blatantly as the 2000 election (I was almost part of writing a book on the subject, but the publisher decided Americans didn’t care). But let’s examineit: If the election was stolen, it was stolen by a few hundred thousand votes.

About 122,349,000 Americans voted in the election. Even assuming fraud, 61 million Americans voted affirmatively for a vicious war based on lies, and for torture (and that America was torturing was widely known by 2004). Now, one can make the argument that approximately 97 million Americans didn’t vote. But not voting is a choice; it is a choice that says, “I don’t care that the US is torturing people enough to go out and vote.” Again, you can finding mitigating arguments: voter suppression, that the vote takes place on a working day, etc…but those arguments don’t add up to 97 million.

In 2004, America said: “We don’t care about torture, it’s just not that important to most of us.”

A lot of people will hate this post. Every time I write something like this, I’m told some version of “I opposed it,” or “Grow up, many of us opposed it.”

But Americans did have the right to vote against Iraq and Torture. They didn’t. It may be that Kerry would have kept torturing, it may be that Kerry would have continued the Iraq war for as long as Bush did (and as incompetently). But the question was not even put to the test: Americans did not, when it matters and where it matters, in the ballot box, say, “We don’t agree with torture and war.”

For that matter, in 2004, Democratic Primary Voters did not vote for the most anti-war candidates. Instead, they went with Kerry. The opposition party nominated a man who had voted for the war (albeit a man who said he’d made a mistake doing so).

This does not mean YOU, personally, are responsible for Iraq. Probably, if you read this blog, you were against it. It does not mean you, personally, were for torture. Again, my readers are mostly against torture and vote consistent with that principle. But it does mean that the rest of the world judges the US by the 2004 election–because you didn’t take that chance to repudiate Bush.

The consequence of not repudiating Bush in 2004, by the way, is that Obama has substantially continued to implement Bush’s policies. Oh, to be sure, there’s probably less torture than there was (though force-feeding prisoners you know to be innocent, while keeping them in solitary confinement, and refusing to free them is pretty heinous), but in its place, Obama has gone whole hog on drone killing, and, in the process, killing far more people than Bush did. Obama, and Washington, concluded from the results of the 2004 election, that you didn’t care about most of the stuff Bush did. Just as DC concluded from the fact that there were no mass protests in 2000, when the Republicans and the Supreme Court stole the election, that Americans don’t really care about democracy, and that its present form is generally sufficient. (Well, except for those Republicans elected by the Tea Partiers, because the Tea Partiers have guns and threaten to use them. Republicans are terrified of their base.)

The flip side of responsibility, and many readers won’t understand this (because by now they’ll be so defensive or outraged they can’t think clearly), is that it implies power. If you have responsibility, you have power. If you have a democracy in the United States, then that means Americans as a group don’t just have the responsibility for what happens, they have the ability to change it.

Now, of course, one can argue that the US is NOT a functioning democracy. I think that argument is, right now, credible, though it does need to be made, and cannot be assumed. If that is your argument, if you believe that American citizens are effectively subjects, and that democracy is dead in the US, then you can also argue that Americans are not responsible for what happened in Iraq, for torture, or much of anything else. (Though, of course, it begs the question: “Was the US ever a democracy, and if it was, are Americans responsible for losing that democracy?”)

But if you believe you don’t live in a democracy, if you believe that change cannot come through politics, then you’ve got bigger problems.

This argument about responsibility is an important one, and it touches on many different countries throughout the world. It also has to do with the question of consumer politics, of choosing from a slate of candidates and policies chosen by the elites, rather than creating your candidates and polices, and the question of whether that creation is possible. (For example, when primaries are not actually open or can be nullified by leadership, is a state actually democratic?)

That point, then, touches on the character of the people of a nation and of the changes in the character of developed nations and is too big to go into now (though should my book ever come out, it is something I’ll go into).

A people who do not control their own politics will have someone else do it for them. If they are not willing to do the work to keep control, then they will lose everything: their liberty, their prosperity, their democracy, and in many cases, their very lives. Along the way, if those people are the citizens of the hegemonic power, millions of people will suffer and die.

The blog does good work, and Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) does work that is simply not found anywhere else, in depth analysis no one else does.  If you can afford to give (never give if your own food or rent is iffy), please consider doing so.

(Fundraising post).

I want to get some notes down on the reasons for certain literary tropes and intellectual beliefs in the late 19th and early 20th century.  The difference in how our ancestors thought about the world really smacks you in the face if you read 19th and pre-WWII fiction.  This is true from pulp fiction to high fiction—Robert E Howard’s Conan series draws on the same roots as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Nietzche is speaking to an experience that influenced both of them.

The Superman

If you were a white man who wasn’t lower class in the 19th century, you were a superman.  At home, because you received proper nutrition during childhood you were taller, stronger, smarter and healthier than most of the lower class.  If you put your mind to it, you were better than them at nearly everything.  Overseas, European military forces could wipe out armies ten to a hundred times their size, and take remarkably few casualties while doing so.  You had better machines and more understanding of the natural laws that ran the world.  Your experience was of being a superman—you were simply better than non-Europeans, and the lower class, either because of the benefits of your society, or because of superior nutrition during the formative years.

The White Man’s Burden and the Heart of Darkness

European civilization was, to you, simply superior.  Any who opposed you, you could crush.  We can cavil, we can say there are other more important virtues, we can find corner cases and talk about appropriate technology, but at the end of the day Europeans had superior agriculture, industry, science and military force.   The experience of being supermen leads to two main responses: one was to say that it was mostly a matter of civilization and that others should be raised to the European level and that it was European’s duty to do this (the White Man’s Burden), the other was to deeply abuse that power.  In many cases, it was both—abuse covered up by claiming virtue.

Still, if you look at the history of, say, Hong Kong, what you see is that it starts out with a very low population (a few thousand) and grows very fast—Chinese flock there.  Why?  Because the Manchu are worse, far, far worse.  In Hong Kong if you’re Chinese, you’re a second class citizen, but you do have access to some sort of law which is not entirely corrupt: it is a better place to live, a safer place with more opportunity than China is at the time.

In other places, the Congo being the most notorious, the natives are treated as subhuman, and a huge body of racial theory grows up in the 19th and 20th centuries to justify seeing non-whites as subhumans.  That theory allows you to feel that treating them inhumanely is fine, since they aren’t fully human.  This can combine with the white man’s burden “white men must do what they can for the inferior races, but that inferiority is biological and can never entirely be overcome” or it can act in opposition to it, if one believes it is a question of civilization.  Some see it as the latter, those who know that both Islamic and Chinese civilizations were superior to Western civilization for most of history, but the need to believe oneself superior is deeply human.

The End of Going Native

The Sepoy rebellion is the end of one way of ruling Empire and the beginning of a different way.  Before the Sepoy rebellion India is ruled by men who marry native women, have mixed-race children, who learn the language: men who stand between India and the Empire.  When that method fails, and fails in very bloody fashion (the wives, the mixed raced children, the friends—or if you wish collaborators are especially targeted by the rebels), the method changes: the British believe that the rebellion happened because the administrators became too close to the Indians, were not harsh enough, did not apply discipline sufficiently.  The new imperial service strongly discourages marriages with natives, close friendships, and even learning the language is often viewed with suspicion.  Combined with racial theory, which makes them regard mating with non-whites as mating with subhumans, going native declines, and marrying a local will dead-end your career.

This has widespread effects.  The Metis rebellion in Canada, for example, is a result of the clash between the new Victorian morality and method of governance and the older method.  The Metis are, essentially, the most important people in most of unsettled Canada.  The Scots and French who manned the fur trade married local women, their children continued to manage the relationship between white and native, and prospered doing so.  The new Victorian administrators, as the West is colonized, regard the Metis as subhuman, in many ways, as worse than the native Americans, since they are the product of miscegenation.  Instead of working with them, or through them, as Canada expands in to the West, they cut them out. This results in rebellion, which is crushed (in part because Riel, the leader, refuses to fight the war properly, and cut the rail lines.)  This history, of course, is not taught properly in Canadian classrooms, the textbooks make it out as if the Metis rebel for almost no reason at all.

The tragedy, of course, is that if the Metis had been worked with, instead of against, both they and the native Americans would have been better off, and Indian reservations might not, today, be the shame of Canada, 3rd world hovels.

The Decline Into Barbarism

At the same time as Europeans are expanding to every corner of the world, they are finding magnificent ruins.  Monuments like the pyramids, great ruined Mayan cities, brilliant Chinese literature and art, and so on.  They become very aware that civilizations rise and fall.  In many cases the people who live in the same area as the greatest ruins are very primitive indeed.  Combined with racial theory, many come to assume that the collapse of civilization is caused by the declining of racial stock—that the people themselves start becoming more and more “beast like” and thus are unable to maintain high civilization.  Some fiction takes it so far as to assume that humans can descend back to being apes.

This combines with the heart of darkness effect of great power, to lead to European enclaves.  Even if a man can’t change biologically in one generation (though some theorists think he can) when surrounded by savages, Europeans believe they are more likely to themselves become savages.  Women, white women, are a civilizing influence, they believe, and so wives and daughters are brought with colonial enclaves.  And indeed, where white men are not alone, but have their women, it is true that fewer atrocities tend to be committed.

The decline of civilization doesn’t just have to do with dark skinned people though.  The British and Americans are deeply enamored by classical Greece and Rome, but they notice that modern Italians and Greeks aren’t much like the people they read of when they read Cicero or Homer or Plato.  So even whites aren’t immune to this collapse of civilization, and the search for the causes consumes much of 19th century scholarship and fiction, and underlies the emphasis on discipline and fortitude, for the British become very aware that their supremacy rests on military might, and that that might rests not just on having the best weapons but upon organization and discipline of the troops.

The Noble Savage

Right through the Victorian era, alongside all the racial theories of how inferior the other races are is the myth of the noble savage.  This, too, is based on experience.  To be sure a milk and meat fed middle or upper class Briton or American is physically superior to the underclass and many of the peasants of the agricultural societies they are conquering but anyone who travels quickly becomes aware that those savages who live on the land and get a good diet, with enough calories of the right kind, are their physical superior.  Native Americans from some tribes can carry 500 pound packs for days, something virtually no white man can.  Kalahari desert trackers can run for days, and track animals across terrain in which no European can even see tracks.  South American Indians and Nepalese mountaineers climb terrain that seems impassable to white men, displaying strength, agility and hardiness that puts almost any European to shame.  Australian aborigines likewise perform physical feats that amaze.

You thus have a theory of civilization which posits the pinnacles of humanity being northern Europeans and certain groups of hunter-gatherers and nomadic tribesmen.  The noble savages are physically superior and civilization in the “oriental” style enervates them, taking away their primitive virtues.  Again, this arises, at its heart, from lived experience.

Freudianism, Oedipus and Electra

Those who are old enough, or who have read widely in early to mid 20th century literature and literary theory understand just how influential Freud was.  His theories look absurd to us, but they were a secular religion for millions during much of the 20th century, and those million included amongst them much of the literary and artistic class of the West.

Again, they are based on lived experience—the lived experience of the Viennese middle class in the time of Freud.  The first key thing to know is this: living space was precious, people had very small living spaces.

One of the key parts of Freudianism is the assertion of the Oedipal complex (boys want to have sex with their mothers) and the Electra complex (girls with their fathers–strictly speaking Jungian.)  In a small space, there is no way to conceal sex from children.  The first sounds and possibly sight of sex a boy or girl will have, is sex between their parents.  Assuming heterosexual orientation (the majority of the population), that sex will be associated with opposite sex parent.  Add in a bit of operant conditioning (sexual feelings coincident with the parent having sex) and  you have the appropriate complex.  Freud took this as a universal law, but it was contingent: in Vienna it was probably most people, but in societies without that operant conditioning (such as our own, where children’s first experience of sex will probably be watching porn on the internet) that loop doesn’t occur nearly so often.

Concluding Remarks

Much of what is distinctive in an age’s literature and intellectual thought is based on the lived experience of the class that does the writing and theorizing, and the experience of their peers.  The experience of the middle and upper classes of Europe was of superiority to the lower classes, overwhelming superiority to foreign societies and of the fragility of civilization, seeing and reading of so many great civilizations, who had created great art, literature and monuments which no longer existed.   Likewise the noble savage and the obsession with incest were a result of the actual way that the middle class (Freud’s patients) lived in Vienna.

(Obligatory note: because I write about racism, the white man’s burden, sexism, colonialism, or anything else doesn’t mean I approve of it.)

One of the reasons, today, that we have such mediocre progress on important issues, is the unwillingness to put up with geniuses who don’t have “soft skills”, aka. who don’t play well with others. (Obligatory note, this isn’t a post about me.)  There is this odd belief that 10 very smart people can do what one genius can.  They can’t.  There are thresholds of ability (not intelligence, ability) and if you’re below them, you just can’t do the things that people at that level can do.  Period.

Related, but not the same: in terms of intelligence, there are levels at which you can learn everything, but not anything (ie. you can’t be a real polymath) and without that knowledge, in one person, not spread out through a team, many connections cannot be made and when they can, the process is vastly slower. (Aka. no, you can’t look it up.)

True genius, and I’ve known a few, is alienating.  Geniuses perceive the world in a different way than other people do, and as a result they have trouble interacting with other people.  One acquaintance told me that it takes him six months to tool down from high level work to the point where he can talk to bright normals and have them understand him.  Genius is also about obsession, about living with a subject till you breath it, till it’s obvious to you.  Even on a pure IQ level (and again, genius is not always about IQ) once you move more than 2 standard deviations in either direction, communication becomes very hard.

In the old days, geniuses were tolerated, even coddled.  If it was necessary for GE to hire a secretary to act as interface between a genius and the rest of the world, that was done.  Geniuses were surrounded with other geniuses, their eccentricities tolerated, and allowed to run.  Today it’s “if you don’t play well with others, even if you can do things they can’t, you’re out.”

This is the symptom of a society that doesn’t really care about progress.  We live in a courtier’s society, where ability is secondary to social skills, where who you know and who you blow (as the cynical saying at one of my ex-employers ran) is far more important than how good a job you do, because your job isn’t to actually solve problems or get things done, it’s to manage your superiors and get along with your peers.

One might say “it has ever been thus”, but this is only partially true.  The brilliant mavericks were far more tolerated in the war era and cold war period, because they were needed.  The possibility of losing a war, or of there even being a war which was an actual risk to the western powers, kept us honest.

Now those people are sidelined.  Socially skilled mediocrities fail to the top, our society shudders from crisis to crisis, out actual scientific and technological process has slowed to a crawl, and deployment of what technological progress we do have is slow and uneven and often happens faster in other nations.

Genius, actual genius, is uncomfortable.  They do things for reasons they often can’t explain to people who aren’t geniuses. They’re obsessive, and they’re often alienated from other people who simply can’t or won’t understand what they’re doing and why.  If you want to benefit from society’s geniuses, you have to tolerate much of this.

I will add that not only do we not tolerate geniuses any more, we largely don’t even cultivate genius.  The people who go to the “best” colleges in the US these days are not geniuses, not in any creative sense.  They are exactly chosen to be conformists who have done exactly what they were supposed to do for their entire lives.  They are courtiers in training, the senior servants to the oligarchy.  Again, in the old days (we’re talking all of 25 years ago), while those people made up most of the Ivy League, broad exceptions were carved out for the truly brilliant, whether intellectually, artistically, or otherwise.  Some of those exceptions still exist, or slip through, but they are the exception now.

And this, this is another reason why the future does not happen, and when it does happen, it mostly does not happen in the US any more.

(note that it was rejected for publication during his lifetime. The truly important writings often are or sell atrociously.)

The War Prayer

By Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory —

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.