1. Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights - James Peck (link)
"We divide the world in two. Those countries who choose democracy, we help. In those countries which do not choose, we create conditions where they will choose it."
-Morton Halperin, US State Department, 1994
"More can be won by illusion than coercion"
-Harold Lasswell, 1927
"Does freedom of the press extend to a paper's right to support armed, externally controlled forces (the Contras) attempting to overthrow an elected government? Human rights reports rarely delved into such questions.
In 1975, the Senate's Church Report on Cia operations against the Allende government in Chile had pointed to the funds that flowed to El Mercurio so that the paper could spread CIA-planted rumors and propaganda, showing how the CIA made Allende's censorship of the paper a centerpiece in a highly orchestrated campaign to accuse him of suppressing "freedom of the press." Did human rights groups assume such standard operation procedures of ideological intervention were myths? Irrelevant? Unworthy of investigation? They simply took no position."
-The Author
I started the new year off with an absurdly appropriate subject to dig into given *gestures around* literally everything going on right now. Based on a painstaking documentation of decades worth of American overtures towards "human rights," Peck's main accomplishment in this book is using this history to construct a fascinating synthesis. Per Peck's analysis, there are broadly speaking two existing conceptions of human rights: one that is focused on narrow, individualistic liberties, and another that speaks to more systemic and economic rights driven by material conditions. The apparent fecklessness of Western human rights organizations is repeatedly shown to be symptom of adopting a laser-like focus on the former current, largely at the behest of American hegemony. At the same time, the American government and its ilk are explicitly aware of this second current, and in fact use the concepts associated with this current in their analysis of how to keep such an ideology at bay. This contradiction between knowledge and action is made most explicit in an analysis (from none other than the CIA) of how a growing liberal bourgeois class will serve as a natural counterweight to the very possibility of insurgency:
"Yet Washington's managers were not too worried. They judged that "the widening income and regional disputes" would not be "incompatible with a growing middle class and increasing overall wealth," a situation not inimical to American power. If their guardedly argued economic predictions held true, CIA-funded task forces foresaw a planet of 2 billion somewhat-well-off people—enough to sustain the globalization process—living amid 4.7 billion others."
And yet, Peck's narrative reveals yet another level of contradiction that gives his work an additional richness. Despite the ruling class possessing a general knowledge of the ideology of their opposition, they have been bound by the shackles of their own ideology to never be able to properly synthesize their own shortcomings. Peck begins to hint at this in the introduction with this anecdote:
"Kennan, for example, puzzled over the contradiction between the Soviets' realism and their fanaticism. "I must say I admire" the Communist leaders, he said in his lectures to the National War College in 1947, "for the realism with which they look to the essential features of power and do not allow themselves to be carried away by the more petty sorts of human vanity." And yet, inexplicably, the Kremlin held fast to an ideological prism, distorting reality to suit its own needs (the class struggle, capitalism's decline, the certainty of revolution and of the economic development of Communist society). How could these men be at once so objective and yet so ideological? This was "the key question to understanding the whole system," Kennan concluded, "and I am frank to say I don't know what the answer is." Greater self-awareness might have suggested a place to start."
This is a wonderful example of how ideology (especially that of capitalism) often takes the form of unstated assumptions about how the world works; both in Kennan's inability to comprehend the Other, and in Peck's assertion that Soviet ideology was necessarily distorted. Peck subsequently demonstrates how the West's dominant conception of "freedom" is a critical part of this blinkeredness. Per the aforementioned narrow conception of "human rights," this ideal is seen less as a general humanistic freedom and more as a "freedom of capital" which "stood apart from and often against such other core values as equality, community, solidarity, and redistributive forms of justice." How a pursuit of such freedom sustains and reinforces itself is perhaps best understood through the West's usage and deployment of media. The commodification of images such an approach produces serves to "simplify and dramatize reality, disrupting the context of politics by focusing on an instantaneous present, and encouraging emotional reactions to events rather than reflective consideration of them." Within the context of the book, the treatment of human rights violations as individual events devoid of context ironically makes them easier to dismiss and to forget. And so yet again, as this blog has noted before and will continue to note ad infinitum, we can understand the American conception of freedom as fundamentally the freedom to forget. After all, when knowledge is commodified it takes on a cost; one for which few are willing (or even able) to pay the price.
2. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut (link)
"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed."
In the past, I've lodged mild complaints about otherwise great sci-fi novels giving short shrift to the story itself. So let me give full credit to Vonnegut for absolutely nailing that aspect, weaving an intricate yet simple tale while sacrificing little else. As is typical with his works, Vonnegut's wit and wisdom is worth it no matter what. That he's able to weave these strengths into a coherent story with a clear thematic purpose makes The Sirens of Titan something special. Rumfoord's plight (being strewn across time and space thanks to his encounter with a "chrono-synclastic infundibula") leads directly to founding his new religion on the basis of his knowledge of the future, while Constant's slower journey from profound ignorance to sublime wisdom leads to a wholly different relationship to "the truth." What this asks us to consider is the possibility that the only real "agency" we have as individuals (or perhaps even as a species) may be the decision of how to approach our fundamental lack of any real agency on a more cosmic scale.
3. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces - Seth Harp (link)
"One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff's warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, Robert Seward, a bearded black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam."
A useful piece of reporting on the terrifying levels of immediate blowback from the War on Islam Terror in the form of rampaging, drug-addicted special forces soldiers and veterans. The journalistic approach doesn't lend itself to any sort of analysis beyond the obvious, but it's still useful to understand how units like Delta Force operate with a level of impunity that would (and does) make the regular Army blush. It's also striking to observe the dialectic of these groups drawing people in with the promise of community (not just the obvious camaraderie but also in material concerns like the promise of free healthcare), and then, largely by means of the mental burden of performing their amoral mission, driving their operators to some combination of greed and ruin (ie. there's a story near the end of a military widow not receiving a life insurance benefit because her husband's overdose was deemed to be "misconduct").
4. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? - Gabriel Rockhill (link)
"If you demonstrate to someone that they've been ideologically inculcated, they may be able to overcome it. If you teach them how the system works that brainwashed them, they are given the tools necessary to liberate themselves and others because objective ideological criticism of this sort brings into relief the system that produces—and will continue to produce and reproduce—ideological subjects."
In many ways, this is the book I would write if I was so inclined to write a book. Not only does Rockhill's work draw extensively on some of my favorite reads from the past six years (The Cultural Cold War, The Mighty Wurlitzer), but it also ties the sordid history of our three-letter agencies' exploits into a broader Marxist analysis of knowledge production. Specifically, Rockhill looks at the "social totality, encompassing various state agencies, non-governmental organizations, and corporate soft power initiatives" to show how "socioeconomic conditions—in the macroscopic sense—are ultimately the primary driving forces, but they do not mechanically determine ideology." Put more simply, money is the language of capital, and thus, knowledge created at its behest will inherently be influenced and shaped by that social relation.
What is specifically fascinating about this approach is how Rockhill's own method (dialectical historical materialism) is simultaneously useful towards his analytical ends, and serves as a direct contrast with the methods of the titular Western Marxists. This is perhaps best exemplified by Rockhill's use of this blog's favorite watchword—complexity—in a constructive (and necessary) sense rather than reductive sense. Indeed, the process of knowledge creation can only be truly understood through a thorough accounting of al of its inputs, both material and ideological, which categorically requires something more than vulgar materialism or rank ideology:
"Unlike the extremes of idealism and empiricism, materialism draws on as much concrete data as possible to account for the socio-actual totality, but it concretely abstracts from the minutia of empirical details in order to integrate and synthesize them at a higher level by establishing the most coherent explanatory framework, which in continues to test and modify based on practical trials. It is important in this regard, and it needs to be emphasized, that DHM does not simply scrap all of the work done within the framework of bourgeois knowledge production. On the contrary, it draws on whatever aspects of it that can make valuable contributions, but it seeks to move knowledge to a higher level of synthesis, coherence, and practical relevance by developing superior explanatory and transformative Wissenschaft of human life on planet Earth."
Subsequently, Rockhill draws on the work of Lukacs to generalize this idea. It is not just the process of knowledge production that is irreducible to simple concepts, but indeed, knowledge itself:
"...a dialectical approach recognizes that "objective reality is fundamentally richer, more diverse and more intricate than the best developed concepts of our thinking can ever be," while at the same time it strives to improve our apprehension of the real through an ongoing process of scientific elucidation. [...] One of the strengths of the materialist approach is precisely that it dialectically situates subjects within a broader objective world and understands full well that the former cannot completely and absolutely grasp the latter."
While this acknowledgement of (but not surrender to) complexity is critical to dialectical thought, the defining difference between it and Western Marxism is one of the fundamentals of the discipline: class struggle. In this light, the atomized views of Western Marxists can be read as a negation of class struggle, and indeed, thinkers like Adorno often explicitly address this in their works. But to what end? Let's start with Walter Rodney:
"The bourgeois class—the capitalist class—has an interest in specifically mystifying the application of scientific principles to society; because the same application of scientific principles to society would suggest that we must understand the changes—the transitions by which capitalism itself came into being, and by which the particular class in power will be removed from power."
Rockhill subsequently expands on this, and explicitly associates the two modes of thought with two separate value systems:
"These theoretical practices, one based primarily on exchange-value and the other principally on use-value, are largely incompatible. One is a product of the intellectual sector of the bourgeois superstructure. The other endeavors to develop a scientific apprehension of reality in order to transform it."
Where this leaves us is trying to understand how a thinker can possibly be "Marxist" while espousing (and furthermore, working to develop) an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to revolutionary praxis. Perhaps I have spent too much time learning about conservatives (peep the next book on this blog), but so much of the output of these Western Marxists (at least in Rockhill's accounting) reads as the fundamental conservative truism of valuing what's directly in front of your face above all else:
"Sense-perception is the lowest level of socialist consciousness. It simply consists in looking at the world and comparing it to a picture in one's mind, without necessarily understanding the nature of the world or the struggles at hand. This reductive approach is characteristic of imperial—and imperious—Marxists, and their analysis of socialism usually consists in comparing a preconceived image of socialism or communism to what they perceive in the world, which is powerfully mediated by the ideological propaganda that they consume via the bourgeois media and academic world."
Why then does this ultimately matter? On one hand it's very obvious: by borrowing from both the Marxist and the conservative traditions, these thinkers lend tacit support to the American empire while boxing in "the left" and preventing more radical thought. In a way, I would even go so far as to say Western Marxists synthesize the two poles to "dominate and transcend" the worse excess of either inclination, for better or worse. But given that the worse end of this distorts both the meaning and the causes of the most infamous crime of the right, I think it is clear that it represent a false and amoral equilibrium that should not be pursued by any serious Marxist:
"[The Holocaust] industry has distorted the history of the Nazi Holocaust, and fascism more generally, by promoting a cultural and exceptionalist misrepresentation of it that works to shore up imperialist interests (especially Zioimperialism), while obscuring the actual history of fascism as an anticommunist project bankrolled by the capitalist class and deeply rooted in Western colonial traditions. The Frankfurt school, for its part, caught the rising postwar wave of the Holocaust industry, under the forlorn banner of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, while writing theory that was funded in part by investments in the corporation that produced the poison gas used at Auschwitz."
5. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump - Corey Robin (link)
"This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior...is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."
The latest in the "Mike pulls a book off the shelf he might not have previously read to completion" series is a fun collection of essays that doesn't quite live up to the "book that predicted Trump" hype. While Robin's primary definition of conservatism (above) is indeed somewhat related to my own (an undying deference to that which is directly in front of your face), there is still plenty of material to support my simpler estimation. Most of that material is from Michael Oakeshott, which suggests maybe I should have just read him. Oops! In all seriousness, beyond the highly relevant quotes from Oakeshott's work ("[conservatism] is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition...to enjoy the present."), Robin synthesizes and builds on the work of others enough to make it a useful compendium nonetheless. Here, for example, we see how conservative thought is not merely counter-revolutionary in spirit but in its very mode of thought, where one must forego the very possibility of dialectical synthesis in favor of unending zero-sum games:
"Take Michael Oakeshott's famous definition in his essay "On Being Conservative": "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the super-abundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott's either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation."
6. America, América: A New History of the New World - Greg Grandin (link)
