Comment of the Day

Comment of the Day: Oops! Apocalypse Edition

Published on February 2, 2007

Today’s is from That American Chap following Digby’s excellent post about the US media’s suggestion that a war with Iran would somehow occur accidentally, and that the moment to act is NOW.

The Chap’s comment echoes what I’ve been saying for some time, but does so a damned sight more concisely and urgently.

It’s been clear to me for at least two years that we would be going to war (and a nuke one at that) with Iran and that nothing, not the failure in Iraq, not the clear evidence of how they lied the Iraq war into existence, would stop it.

When you say that “we’d better get ready to see our lives change in fundamental ways”, you’re spot on… but I doubt that you really grasp how dark the future is (you’d be screaming at the top of your lungs if you really knew), just how devastating our nuking of Iran will be for the US! The rest of the planet will regard us (for the next couple of hundred years) as the guys who one-upped the Nazis in the contest to see who could be the most despised villains in history.

The neo-cons (why aren’t these clowns serving life terms in prisons for the criminally insane?) still think that the best route for us is to grab up as many of the world’s oil fields as we can (yes, all of that sniping at Venezuela is a tip-off that we’ll be going there in the “cause of freedom”, aka- stealing their oil) and that all of this bullying will make us the world’s hyper-power for a thousand year reich.

The problem with this theory is that, like all neo-con thoughts, it is only “thunk” from the perspective of people who have an exceedingly incomplete picture of reality. Remember how the whole middle east was going to bow down to us and surrender when the awesome majesty of our military might was shown to them? What steaming-hot bullshit THAT turned out to be! We’ve shown them *way* too much and now they see us as a paper tiger (and outside of nuking the rest of the planet, we simply aren’t good at these long distance, long-termed wars, are we?) who can be ground down with snipers and IED’s.

They (the neo-cons) picture the rest of the world as helpless victims of our power when, in fact, *we’re* the fragile ones. Once we nuke Iran, the rest of the world will understand, without any doubt, that we’re out to grab the oil…and this will outrage them. They will band together against us and simply boycott every American product and turn in the dollars they’re holding for the currencies of China and the European Union. This will vaporize the buying power of the dollar and shatter our economy beyond repair. Martial law and civil war will occupy the American homeland and the troops that the neocons envisioned blitzing through the middle-east will be called home to patrol their own country.

Trust me on this, we’re in for a shitstorm the likes of which you only ever pictured reading about in some absurdly dark novel. If you have any brains (and I assume that your presence here is an indicator that you do), you’d better wave off the fog of “it can’t happen here” because it, in fact, IS happening here. Take whatever disposable cash you have and turn those faltering dollars into something real, canned food, shotguns, batteries, medical supplies, motor oil, anything practical that you’ll be able to use or to barter with in the future. If this sounds like hysteria to you, think again, the most powerful weapon that the rest of the world has to use against us is our own dollar, and when we make ourselves into complete monsters by nuking Iran, they will use that weapon to paralyze us, to defang us, to cause us internal agonies that will stop our aggression.

Don’t just stand there slack-jawed, watching this go down in a state of horrified fascination, get your ass in gear and do what you can to position your family and friends to be able to survive the coming nightmare as best they can!
That American Chap | 02.01.07 – 4:28 pm | #

Quite.

Oy, the number of posts I’ve written in the past, bewailing the smug complacency of the mushy middle of American left politics and warning grimly. but knowing the innefectuality of it, that although Bushco might be incompetent they are also utterly ruthless and without conscience; that America was going to be in a very bad place indeed before the populace woke up and that when they did it’d be too late; and so it’s proved.

Published on January 31, 2007

At Atrios:

Watching Mash, I have a basic question. If the officers have to bunk together, how come Corporal Klinger seems to have his own tent?

He needed the closet space.
watertiger | Homepage | 01.30.07 – 9:36 pm | #

Heh.

Comment of the Day

Published on January 25, 2007

From a discussion at Lenin’s Tomb about why so many people who were so right-on when they were young become rightwing when reaching middle age, this comment by ant:

Psychologically speaking, i think that the phenomenon of the young middle class student radical who soons “outgrows” his early Leftism once his career becomes settled, can be explained in terms of the narcissism to which you rightly allude.

While “working class” proletarians know throughout their lives that they are just one of many workers, many “middle class” proletarians tend to remain in denial of this fact.

Thus the young student radical, on entering the world of work – say, in middle management or whatever – does not conclude that he is one of the working class and there is still a long way to go until the Revolution. Rather, he concludes – wrongly – that since the Revolution (with himself, of course, playing a key role) has not yet happened, then Marxism must be false.

Rather than saying to himself, “i am just another worker who must sell his labour power to a capitalist in order to survive”, he reasons to himself in the following way:

“i would never work for a capitalist (because i – unlike all those other people – am talented enough to be able to have the choice); therefore how do i explain the fact that i am clearly now having to look for work?; it must be because all that Marxism stuff was false, and hence entering this employment position is not entering into wage-slavery, but rather – as a talented and dynamic young person with highly sought-after skills – simply entering into free contract with another party.”

Hence while “working class” proletarians tend to see jobs as jobs, and themselves as workers, “middle class” proletarians tend to see jobs as careers.

Comment of the Day

Published on January 22, 2007

I don’t really have much in the way of criteria for CoTD, other than it makes me laugh or go “Exactly!”.

This comment falls into the latter category.

I had been planning a long post on the legal issues surrounding the cash for honours inquiry and arrests but it’s a dismal Monday morning, threatening to snow, and I really need to go and at least stock up on bread and milk before all the shelves are cleared by the waddling, babushka’d, apple-dumpling-shaped grandmas who, with unexpected speed, descend en masse on the shops at this time of day. But battling the sharp-elbowed old dears for bread and milk will at least take my mind off dwelling on the stench emanating from Westminster.

Call me a starry-eyed old legal idealist but every time I think about this enquiry I get angrier and angrier at the way Blair and his circle of sofa-sitting incompetents treat the law as yet another infinitely malleable tool to prop their power up with. Then I become incoherent.

So thanks Downsman. whoever you are, for saving me some angst with your comment to columnist Jackie Ashley in the Grauniad, .

downsman

January 22, 2007 01:27 AM

My own collage of New Labour this week would consist of the following:

1. The entirely normal practice of arresting a suspect on a ‘conspiracy to pervert the course of justice’ charge being met by allegations of ‘theatrics’ from a twice discredited former Home Secretary who knows perfectly well it is standard police procedure. A man whose sensational autobiography sold in pitiful numbers because no-one can tell when he is telling the truth.

2. The same line being plugged by the Culture Secretary, a woman guilty of serious non-disclosure of personal interests, cleared only by the intervention of Mr Blair. A woman whose family wealth is mainly based on setting up carousel tax-evasion measures around various tax-havens, then admittedly lying about it. A woman who then proceeded on Any Questions to state her absolute confidence Ms Turner is not guilty of any wrongdoing, thus placing intolerable and inappropriate pressure on the police during a legitimate investigation. Making you wonder why she did not similarly intervene during the Soham investigation to say that Ian Huntley was “not guilty and should be released”.

3. Reminding myself that a government which supports both ‘extraordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ rendition, and which regards Guantanamo as an “understandable anomaly” is now concerned about a suspect being arrested at home before leaving for work and released by lunchtime.

4. The Attorney-General writing to a select committee to assure it in strong terms that he will be exercising the final discretion whether a cash-for-honours prosecution, of his own close political colleagues and personal friends, will proceed to trial. Who does so despite the opinion of the Lord Chancellor that this obvious conflict of interest requires him to stand aside. Who has some form for similar chicanery, in his Iraq advice and BAE intervention.

Not a pretty picture. But this is the hypocritical, lawless, bandit Britain of Mr Blair and his cabinet in January 2007. It is one more proof of Acton’s axiom that “all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Exactly.

Where Are All The Kids At?

Published on January 20, 20072 Comments

The kids are all right

Today’s Comment of The Day is at Hullabaloo and is a somewhat testy response to a post by Poputanian and subsequent commenters’ wondering what it will take to get today’s youth to rebel:

what kind of youth movement would satisfy you sanctimonious boomers? how would you like us to express our outrage? we live with a terrible future hanging over our heads, where we will be paying for YOUR social security, YOUR healthcare, and THIS FUCKING WAR! adults have spent nearly three decades consolidating their own wealth and now kids are supposed to feel guilty for not being able to stop an illegal war that the entire world couldn’t stand in the way of???

in 2004, voters below 30 were the ONLY age group in the nation that voted for Kerry. i firmly believe that before you can start telling us about political activism, you should straighten out your own fucking generation.
Utica | 01.20.07 – 12:18 am | #

Go Utica! God, how I loathe boomers and I’m not even a kid.

I was born in 1959 which makes me an in-betweenie; neither Boomer nor Gen X. We’re not hippies: we’re the generation of disco and punk, the generation that were left no crumbs to scrabble for once the entitled generation their greedy mitts on the money and the levers of power. Once elected, for the boomers it was ‘get all you can and after that pull up the ladder’.

They had free schools and universities, the NHS, riches through property and the welfare state: we got unemployment, a housing shortage, double-digit inflation, insane rightwing government, death squads, drugs and the threat of nuclear war. And now Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush. And for our own children it looks to be even worse.

Cheers, boomers.

The Watergate and Vietnam scandals that they harp on about so much happened when we were in our early teens; mostly, to us it was all so much background noise – and it’s not as though they got the rightwing out, anyhow. The movement was a failure.

No, the defining political events of our times were Iran-Contra, mutually assured destruction and the death squads and the cynicism of those times has informed our politics for ever. As a result, we’ve never trusted anyone in politics and we’ve taught our kids to do the same – so is it any wonder they don’t want to be politically involved in the formal channels provided, when it’s plain for anyone to see that the existing political institutions are so irredeemably corrupt?

There is an assumption made (t’s common wisdom now, it’s been repeated so often) – that leftists are dirty hippies. No, no and again no.

Our rebellion started in the eighties, against Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, to whose rightist legacy Bush et al are the heirs. We created our own political space by being early adopers of technology – we were posting to listservs, bulletin boards and usenet and chatting via IRC before the web was even a glint in anyone’s eye.

I feel so sorry for my children’s generation – not only are they expected to be well-rounded individuals, successful in their careers and in their personal lives, but they’re expected to also somehow sort out the mess their grandparents have made of the world – to clean up Washington, solve global warming, rescue the environment – as though there’s some sort of generational magic wand that would wipe the slate clean, if only those damned kids would take their attention away from MySpace and show some gumption for once.

For one thing, why the hell should they? They didn’t break it, why should they be expected to fix it? They’ve got enough to do just surviving.No, fuck that, let the boomers clean up their own messes.

Secondly, it’s all very well for bloggers of a certain age to pontificate to the young for their inaction – but who is it on the barricades at G8 protests, blocking the gates at Faslane nuclear base, pie-ing politicians or putting their lives on the line by lying in front of bulldozers in Palestine? Who is it that’s the mainstay of the antiwar movement? It’s not middle-aged bloggers continually harking back to the sixties.

My sons’ generation, those in their teens and twenties now, are taking the use of technology for political purposes much further than we could ever have concieved of. Just because young people don’t choose the political channels the boomers choose and the boomers can’t see them doing it, doesn’t mean they’re not political, or active.

Perhaps those complaining about political inactivity and apathy on the part of the young should stop reading the likes of ageing fake-liberal HuffPo and Salon and take a look at the Social Forum movement or Globalise Resistance or Schnews, or Indymedia. That’s where the kids are: they want to change the system, not just become more vote-fodder for the existing parties.

Get over yourselves, boomers. You are not the sine qua non of political activism to whom all later activists must genuflect – those days are long gone and so have those outdated modes of protest.

What the younger generation is looking for from you is active leadership and support, not envious blog-criticism.