Yes, they do go together. In the case of the Indian rapists, like the horrible gang-rapists of Delhi last month, it's hardly about sexual expression or repression. It's about losing control and male domination at the hands of a modernity they can see but can't touch.
It's estimated that there are 200-300 million Indians, almost entirely in the cities, who have entered the global middle class. That's one of the reasons why international corporations will do almost anything to penetrate the growing Indian market: it has almost as many modern consumers as the US. They aren't the rapists.
But, India has a population that's well over a billion: that's at least 800 million who are NOT in the middle class. Rape expresses a barely repressed class war of the huge underclass, just beginning to awaken. What they see is an India they can hardly fathom and never reach, yet they see it daily on TV and in the Bollywood movies.
The traditional caste system repressed everyone, even a too numerous four-part aristocracy, but it was a stable society for almost 3500 years. Castes are still present, now, but the rules that bound them together, are not. Class often subsumes caste in "Modern India," and those left behind in India's scramble to the future are treated the way lower castes used to be. Yet, they are no longer submissive; they're rebellious, rejectionist, unmoored by tradition. Male violence against women is safer than outright revolution.
Sri Lanka's Tamils, to India's south, invented suicide bombing, which has become a signature of al Qaeda and its allies in the Middle East and North Africa. "Islamic militants," ironically, share the anger of (largely Hindu) Indian rapists; they take it out on their own people, especially women--with extreme purdah and stonings, as well as amputations and beheadings to keep the men in line. In both cases, it's the violent rejection of what they want, are terrified of and can't have: participation in modern secular society.
I don't pretend to know whether al Qaeda members are predominantly lower class, but they do have one thing in common: rejection of any trace of secular, i.e. modern, society. The savagery of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al Dine may not be just a will to destroy what their societies are becoming, but that's certainly a part of it; it's also an inexpensive means to control resisters.
What's happening now, globally, is the incipient rumblings of the left out, against the newly affluent, who are the new entrants to the global middle class. With climate change, the billions of surplus people aren't anchored to the Middle East, India, or China; eventually, they will flood lands with more moderate climates.
The angry masses could become the equivalent of the Germanic and Turkic hordes, barbarians who surged into the late Roman Empire, and finally, brought it down; Classical society fell with it.
Showing posts with label barbarians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barbarians. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Thursday, April 19, 2012
April's Afghan Outrage
Ah, April: time for another Afghan horror. Every month, it seems, someone in the military releases some damning news, or photo, or carries out a massacre or other Afghan scandal.
In January, soldiers urinated on the dead bodies of Afghans, claimed to be insurgents; in February there was the "inadvertent" burning of Qurans, in March there was the massacre of Afghan villagers by a deranged American sergeant.
Now, in April, the LA Times published the photos of American Airborne soldiers posing, and mugging for the camera with the body parts of suicide and IED bombers. The pictures were actually taken in 2010, but the soldier who released them, sent them to the Times this month.
First of all, these horrors were conscious acts by US soldiers. The first and last events: pissing on bodies, and posing, grinning, with body parts, reflects some American soldiers' attitudes towards Afghans, for whom supposedly they were sent halfway around the world to protect. Probably there are many American troops for whom this kind of cavalier disregard for the people of Afghanistan is not acceptable. It wasn't for the soldier who released those photos; he had complained to his superiors that such attitudes contributed to lax security.
The Quran burning, meanwhile, was not "inadvertent" at all. The Qurans in question had been seized from detainees at the large American detention center in Bagram, and according to accounts there, some at least had been used to send and receive messages between detainees: subversive messages.
If you want to prevent detainees from organizing, obviously, those Qurans had to be destroyed, or, at least, shipped out of the country. What was "inadvertent," was destroying them in plain sight, where our Afghan collaborators could see what to any Muslim would be supreme sacrilege and desecration. What was inadvertently revealed was Americans' total ignorance of the people they are supposedly there to protect.
So far, we have no General Dyer, who ordered machine-gunning peaceful Indian protesters during India's independence movement. However, these Afghan incidents are typical for imperialist militaries: the local people aren't quite real; they are so foreign. The incidents underline why Indians threw out the British and why Africans threw out all European colonials, despite the very real improvements all these imperialists made: roads, railroads, schools, hospitals. It's also, why we lost in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan before us.
These incidents again demonstrate why Americans and NATO have to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and why empire, especially now in the 21st century, is unsustainable.
Military might, the Romans discovered, is especially transient when the people are against you. Resistance to the Barbarians was ineffective in part because the peasants were already oppressed: they welcomed new conquerors.
Given the above, it's surprising we haven't yet been thrown out of Afghanistan. Better to go before we have to scramble for the helicopters.
In January, soldiers urinated on the dead bodies of Afghans, claimed to be insurgents; in February there was the "inadvertent" burning of Qurans, in March there was the massacre of Afghan villagers by a deranged American sergeant.
Now, in April, the LA Times published the photos of American Airborne soldiers posing, and mugging for the camera with the body parts of suicide and IED bombers. The pictures were actually taken in 2010, but the soldier who released them, sent them to the Times this month.
First of all, these horrors were conscious acts by US soldiers. The first and last events: pissing on bodies, and posing, grinning, with body parts, reflects some American soldiers' attitudes towards Afghans, for whom supposedly they were sent halfway around the world to protect. Probably there are many American troops for whom this kind of cavalier disregard for the people of Afghanistan is not acceptable. It wasn't for the soldier who released those photos; he had complained to his superiors that such attitudes contributed to lax security.
The Quran burning, meanwhile, was not "inadvertent" at all. The Qurans in question had been seized from detainees at the large American detention center in Bagram, and according to accounts there, some at least had been used to send and receive messages between detainees: subversive messages.
If you want to prevent detainees from organizing, obviously, those Qurans had to be destroyed, or, at least, shipped out of the country. What was "inadvertent," was destroying them in plain sight, where our Afghan collaborators could see what to any Muslim would be supreme sacrilege and desecration. What was inadvertently revealed was Americans' total ignorance of the people they are supposedly there to protect.
So far, we have no General Dyer, who ordered machine-gunning peaceful Indian protesters during India's independence movement. However, these Afghan incidents are typical for imperialist militaries: the local people aren't quite real; they are so foreign. The incidents underline why Indians threw out the British and why Africans threw out all European colonials, despite the very real improvements all these imperialists made: roads, railroads, schools, hospitals. It's also, why we lost in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan before us.
These incidents again demonstrate why Americans and NATO have to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and why empire, especially now in the 21st century, is unsustainable.
Military might, the Romans discovered, is especially transient when the people are against you. Resistance to the Barbarians was ineffective in part because the peasants were already oppressed: they welcomed new conquerors.
Given the above, it's surprising we haven't yet been thrown out of Afghanistan. Better to go before we have to scramble for the helicopters.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Fascism Now!
The Late Roman Empire was much like a Fascist state--without the populism. The Senatorial class was legally established as the class with power over government, but not the military. Not by coincidence, the Senators in the western empire monopolized wealth in the three forms in which it was recognized then: land, slaves and gold.
Because of their disproportionate wealth, Senators and their sons monopolized high civilian imperial offices: they bought them. Their wealth enabled them to exploit everyone else. Closeness to government and avoidance of taxation favored wealth accumulation among Senators. Since Senators as a class, also failed to reproduce themselves, estates tended to get bigger and fewer--inherited by the dwindling number of sons, nephews and cousins. They were the 0.01%.
Morally, culturally, or in the realm of "social issues," the Senators were extremely conservative or reactionary. Old ways were better, be it the old Roman religion over newfangled Christianity, social relations between landowner and coloni, performing meticulous rituals maintaining their class, or sucking up to the Emperor.
Fascism may be a mass movement--the Tea Party, for example--but paradoxically, it reveres class divisions with the 'best people' on top. The poor are either powerless, or the "masses" led by the best people. They don't talk of "classes," except as in leftists waging "class warfare," especially, when they try to assert their rights, or their own collective power.
Fascists in Italy and Germany incorporated large corporations in their economic system: they were major beneficiaries, even of the war-economy, with its need for armaments and its supply of slave labor.
In the US, we haven't gone quite that far, but the ground has been laid: unions weak or nonexistent, prisons privatized, a defense industry subsidized by government, the largest defense industry in the world; strengthening security services to the point of arrogance--getting away with strip-searching almost anyone by decision of the Supreme Court! The same court gave corporations the lever to regain control of government, after a 97-year hiatus, and perhaps corporations will--in the person of Mitt Romney, and a Republican leadership in both houses of Congress. Certainly, they are, transparently, the marionettes of the most aggressive anti-government billionaires the world has seen.
The question, the 6 billion dollar question, is: will money and media control buy the election? Or will people finally see, will Obama and Democrats finally articulate the rejection of this overweening security state, this demonizing of the jobless and women, this CLASS WAR being waged by the equivalents of the Roman Senators, waged on all the rest of us.
When the Senators won Roman governance, they reduced everyone else to serfs, and then were swept away by Germanic upstarts, the beginning of feudalism. Where we're headed, though, looks more like Fascism, its modern, mafia equivalent.
Unless Americans can wake up.
Because of their disproportionate wealth, Senators and their sons monopolized high civilian imperial offices: they bought them. Their wealth enabled them to exploit everyone else. Closeness to government and avoidance of taxation favored wealth accumulation among Senators. Since Senators as a class, also failed to reproduce themselves, estates tended to get bigger and fewer--inherited by the dwindling number of sons, nephews and cousins. They were the 0.01%.
Morally, culturally, or in the realm of "social issues," the Senators were extremely conservative or reactionary. Old ways were better, be it the old Roman religion over newfangled Christianity, social relations between landowner and coloni, performing meticulous rituals maintaining their class, or sucking up to the Emperor.
Fascism may be a mass movement--the Tea Party, for example--but paradoxically, it reveres class divisions with the 'best people' on top. The poor are either powerless, or the "masses" led by the best people. They don't talk of "classes," except as in leftists waging "class warfare," especially, when they try to assert their rights, or their own collective power.
Fascists in Italy and Germany incorporated large corporations in their economic system: they were major beneficiaries, even of the war-economy, with its need for armaments and its supply of slave labor.
In the US, we haven't gone quite that far, but the ground has been laid: unions weak or nonexistent, prisons privatized, a defense industry subsidized by government, the largest defense industry in the world; strengthening security services to the point of arrogance--getting away with strip-searching almost anyone by decision of the Supreme Court! The same court gave corporations the lever to regain control of government, after a 97-year hiatus, and perhaps corporations will--in the person of Mitt Romney, and a Republican leadership in both houses of Congress. Certainly, they are, transparently, the marionettes of the most aggressive anti-government billionaires the world has seen.
The question, the 6 billion dollar question, is: will money and media control buy the election? Or will people finally see, will Obama and Democrats finally articulate the rejection of this overweening security state, this demonizing of the jobless and women, this CLASS WAR being waged by the equivalents of the Roman Senators, waged on all the rest of us.
When the Senators won Roman governance, they reduced everyone else to serfs, and then were swept away by Germanic upstarts, the beginning of feudalism. Where we're headed, though, looks more like Fascism, its modern, mafia equivalent.
Unless Americans can wake up.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
America's Legacy in Iraq
So, we've removed all but 50,000 of our troops from Iraq. That's the good news. The bad news: it's not over. The American legacy in Iraq is a shaky Shiite government. Nothing is resolved.
About the only improvement over Saddam Hussein, is that there is no dictator enforcing arbitrary power. Instead, there are warring factions, a caretaker government because of the dissension, bombings--more Iraqis are being killed now, than were killed by, or under Saddam Hussein--corruption and war-profiteering, and still less than half the services, like electricity and water, available during Saddam's despotic rule. The US destroyed Iraq's utilities in the first phase of the war but it never adequately rebuilt them.
American servicemen and women served extraordinarily well, given the awful conditions. But we should also remember: Americans were ordered to kill civilians, encouraged to humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners, and did both.
I was struck by the TV commentariat's treatment of President Obama's speech, either deriding his remarks on the economic effects of the war, or completely ignoring them. Yet we have squandered almost a trillion dollars, lost 4,400 American lives, ruined the lives of 100,000's more through injuries, especially psychological ones, killed 100,000's of Iraqis, displaced millions--and what have we bought for all this?
The American oil companies are in a minority among the firms who won contracts to "service" Iraqi oil fields, so Americans didn't even get the oil. We didn't create a functioning democracy; we didn't create a prosperous, safe Iraq. There is also no guarantee that the Iraqi government will be our friend. The political consequence of America's temporary dominance is the empowerment of the Shiite majority, but its leaders are very closely tied to our greatest competitor in the Mideast: Iran.
Further, in Iraq, majority rule does not mean democracy: it could mean majority tyranny. Iraq's leaders don't seem to understand that a minority should participate, and have rights. They didn't learn politics from Americans; they learned from the Baath Party, which dominated on behalf of the Sunnis, the minority favored by Saddam and Iraqi governments before him. The US invasion enabled a revolution favoring Iran's mullahs.
Obama restated his commitment to the Afghan war, but our effect upon Afghanistan, may be even worse than in Iraq. Afghanistan's government is more corrupt and dysfunctional; we can't avoid civilian casualties and resulting anger. We drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban and strengthen al Qaeda--no matter how many leaders we kill with drones. Al Qaeda has already spread to Pakistan, a nuclear state, as well as Somalia and Yemen. US popular anger at all Muslims (expressed in the "ground zero mosque" controversy) will simply strengthen both even further.
Perhaps, Muslim extremists are comparable to Rome's barbarians, but we will bankrupt ourselves before they could ever take over--as the barbarians did in 476.
About the only improvement over Saddam Hussein, is that there is no dictator enforcing arbitrary power. Instead, there are warring factions, a caretaker government because of the dissension, bombings--more Iraqis are being killed now, than were killed by, or under Saddam Hussein--corruption and war-profiteering, and still less than half the services, like electricity and water, available during Saddam's despotic rule. The US destroyed Iraq's utilities in the first phase of the war but it never adequately rebuilt them.
American servicemen and women served extraordinarily well, given the awful conditions. But we should also remember: Americans were ordered to kill civilians, encouraged to humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners, and did both.
I was struck by the TV commentariat's treatment of President Obama's speech, either deriding his remarks on the economic effects of the war, or completely ignoring them. Yet we have squandered almost a trillion dollars, lost 4,400 American lives, ruined the lives of 100,000's more through injuries, especially psychological ones, killed 100,000's of Iraqis, displaced millions--and what have we bought for all this?
The American oil companies are in a minority among the firms who won contracts to "service" Iraqi oil fields, so Americans didn't even get the oil. We didn't create a functioning democracy; we didn't create a prosperous, safe Iraq. There is also no guarantee that the Iraqi government will be our friend. The political consequence of America's temporary dominance is the empowerment of the Shiite majority, but its leaders are very closely tied to our greatest competitor in the Mideast: Iran.
Further, in Iraq, majority rule does not mean democracy: it could mean majority tyranny. Iraq's leaders don't seem to understand that a minority should participate, and have rights. They didn't learn politics from Americans; they learned from the Baath Party, which dominated on behalf of the Sunnis, the minority favored by Saddam and Iraqi governments before him. The US invasion enabled a revolution favoring Iran's mullahs.
Obama restated his commitment to the Afghan war, but our effect upon Afghanistan, may be even worse than in Iraq. Afghanistan's government is more corrupt and dysfunctional; we can't avoid civilian casualties and resulting anger. We drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban and strengthen al Qaeda--no matter how many leaders we kill with drones. Al Qaeda has already spread to Pakistan, a nuclear state, as well as Somalia and Yemen. US popular anger at all Muslims (expressed in the "ground zero mosque" controversy) will simply strengthen both even further.
Perhaps, Muslim extremists are comparable to Rome's barbarians, but we will bankrupt ourselves before they could ever take over--as the barbarians did in 476.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)