07 February 2006

Blogoverse

I don't read many blogs. I rarely read my own, although I visit frequently to use the links on the side over there --> to get places that I visit a lot. I did start reading a website that has a listing of the newest posts from local blogs. They general give me the creeps. Today, I was doing some perusing around looking for current events, got bored, and looked at the local blogs.

There are many such emergent threats today. The WTO. China. Our own neo-conservative movement. Al Queda is an after school club compared to these.


What can I say? I'm an American. I'm an Anarchist.


These are from the same post. These people are so fucking detached from reality it's no wonder that murderous dictators are seen as good guys.

Goe, against commies, even if they call themselves anarchists.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, the idea is that the insidious powers we're not actively fighting are more dangerous than the crazies.

Sort of like the recent conservative argument that the USSR was a greater threat than Nazi Germany or Italy.

Of course my folks, the Anarchists, were considered the most dangerous enemy in the world by both the Nazis and the Commies... Stalin and Hitler could respect the US government after a fashion. But the concept of universal freedom was about as abhorrent as either leader could imagine.

So those Anarchists who saved up, bought guns and shipped off to Europe to fight Fascism and Communism all by themselves long before the US decided to enter the war... well they got mass graves for their efforts. But after the fight they put up, Stalin got held up in the Ukraine and Franco decided he didn't have the strength left to help the other Axis powers.

So you know what? We might know a little about power and tyranny.

You want to fisk the Communist Manifesto? Fuck yeah. Need any help? 'Cause believe me, we've got some pent up issues with those bastards.

But don't fool yourself into thinking the Islamic world any greater threat than it is. They hate all of us. They're evil.

But they aint ever gonna manipulate us into thinking they should have power over us. It's the slimy ones that do that. The ones you can't shoot because they wear suits or hide behind trade policies.

Goemagog said...

Anarchists in most of the world were actively supporting the communists. Emma Goldman, for example, made a point of siding with socialist organizations in the untied states even after seeing the soviet union firsthand. most of the supporters of the republican spanish government were not anarchists, but leftists in general who opposed militarization and believed fascism was the opposite of communism (trotsky wrote that fascism is communism on the surface but run by the petty bourgeoisie instead of by the proletariate). anarchists have, and continue to be, one of the main sources of socialist agitprop, from wto riots to cannonizing mumia. in theory, anarchists would be militant libertarians, but in practice, anarchists are leftist goons.

Both Hitler and Stalin saw jews as the greatest threat, until hitler got bored waiting for britain to starve and attacked stalin.

the ussr was as big a threat as nazi germany, but italy hasn't been a threat since ancient rome was sacked. the wto is a trade organization, they don't have a police force, they don't have jails, and they don't imprison or beat people. neither do neoconservatives. China has attacked most of it's neighbors in the past 50 years, annexed two and openly wants to annex a third, and is laying the groundwork to annex two more. aggressive leadership, growing militancy, and huge population not permitted to question the leadership are not a good combination.

neoconservatives don't even have an ideology. it's like conservatism-lite. more social programs than paleoconservatives, but not so much as liberals. more foreign involvement than conservatives, but not so much as liberals. they'd just be considered regular conservatives if it weren't for their opposition to isolationism.

islam is a religion that requires it's believers to kill or convert any non-muslims they know. we may be able to dissuade them from doing this for a while, but eventually one of them is going to read the koran, notice that they're supposed to kill or convert, and start the cycle over again. it's not a question of living peacefully with different beliefs, it's a matter of what generation is going to have to destroy islam or be destroyed by it.

Goe, getting a headache from the screen glare

William said...

Islam as you describe it simply does not have the dynamicism to subvert liberal secularism as a dominant meme. The leaders can try force. But they have neither the power nor demonstrated intelligence to pose a more serious threat to us than, for example, China.

The WTO has no police but rather connections. It's an legally enshrined body gravitated to and controlled by much of the elitist upperclass that created the EU to take democracy out of the hands of the unwashed masses. Furthermore it has the terminally psychopathic corporatist forces of neo-liberal new money. It exists much as the UN does, but doesn't even bother maintaining the pretension of acting to some fundamental charter of human rights. Furthermore it has demonstrated great willingness to override national laws that were passed democratically. Unlike the UN it has accomplished this through an method of enforcement that is far more powerful than military action. It does all this while creating a distance from the media and general populace. People dismiss it as a removed bureaucrat economic body. Meanwhile it's been highly effective at centralizing world power.

Since I'm an Anarchist I see power and the concentration thereof as the greatest threat to freedom. Killing individual people with suicide bombings may immediately snuff out every last drop of freedom the victims may have had, but little decreases in freedom when spread out across the whole globe are far more scary.

It's the devious and insidious evil we allow ourselves to ally or simply ignore that's far more dangerous than the babbling barbarians.

So yeah, I agree. Even though Emma was a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks and ranted endlessly about what evil anti-revolutionary bastards the USSR was, it was still a mistake on her part to tactically work with the more easy-going socialists at home. The starry-eyed lefty may be a very nice and caring person, but their ideology is a dangerous and corruptive one that needs to be called to attention.

Occasionally, on the battlefield of everyday life and before such tyrants as Hitler, its understandable that one may lose one's focus and settle with the lesser evil. But Anarchism is irreconcilable with Communism and even when we forget the Communists have never.

In the Spanish civil war, with the "republican" counterforces almost entirely consisting of Communist and Anarchist armies, the split was very tight. Orwell and others who volunteered and served with both the POUM and CNT saw this as the primary friction of the war and the ever-present Anarchist critique of Communism directly inspired his later works.

(As to writers, I'm always amused at how much the neoconservative bloggosphere liked and associated their conflict with LotR even though it was written by an Anarchist whose moral was the rejection of power rather than adoption.)

But what do you need?

Anarchists and Communists have pretty much hated each other ever since Marx kicked Bakunin out of the International for questioning authoritarianism.

Though they later tried to steal the holiday, the original May Day executions of Anarchist labor organizers was cheered on by communists who wanted to turn labor into a fourth column.

When the Bolsheviks took power Lenin was very clear in his messages that the first to be purged should be the Anarchists, as their ideology would never accept totalitarian rule and would seduce the peasants into overthrowing the new state.

The Ukrainian revolutionaries, bless their little hearts, were overwhelmingly Anarchist. So the Red army marched on the Black army before they dealt with the White. And the Ukrainians in the trenches against the communists largely saw themselves as Anarchists fighting those who would exchange one form of oppression for another.

Though the hippies were somewhat indiscriminate in their associations, I've met with dozens of Anarchist collectives, blocs, and broader movements in various cities across America and... you know what? The FIRST thing they rant about is the goddamn Left. The second, Bush.

Even holding the CNT's classic red & black banner at a protest can incite anger for appearing too conciliatory to those statist bastards. Red bandannas, despite being generic "anti-capitalist" and easier to find of better material are often the butt of harsh jokes or deeply suspicious looks.

I have NEVER heard of or met an Anarchist who didn't feverously hate the authoritarian left. Sometimes it seems like weekly get-togethers with one another are simply outlets to rant and rage about how the Left and Right are evil bastards. About how that bastard Maoist professor is another stupid fucking example… etc.

But there are sometimes, because we're seen as part of the same movement, varying degrees to which some @s will form ranks behind folks like Cindy Sheehan or Palestinian dissidents when presented with what they view a common enemy.

I don’t make excuses. Time will tell if those strategic choices were wise. And I do agree that the Neo-conservative ideology of “national leadership” or empire by any other name needs to be opposed, needs to have its errors shown for what they are. Afterall, if I joined ranks with them, I’d be just as bad as the Anarchists who allied with Lenin’s pawns.

Except I think western civilization is smart and strong enough to deal with the Islamic extremist threat. It’s the things trying to position themselves behind our backs that I think are the most dangerous.

Goemagog said...

the ukranians weren't crushed because they were anarchists, they were crushed because they were nationalists, and crushing nationalism is an important part of socialist ideology.

as for the islamic threat, since islam isn't led as a religion by singular figures, they don't need singular figures of authority to wage war against non-muslims. we can crush groups, but everytime a muslim reads the koran, there is the risk of them taking the convert or kill part to heart and starting a new group to make war on non-muslims. there is no central figure with which to make peace, the religion is centered on a book which forbids it.

even libertarians agree with neocons on national leadership, they just disagree on what national leaders should do.

Goe, can't be a libertarian cause he doesn't use drugs.

William said...

Well, ignoring the fascist connotations of "nationalism" or any other worship of one's immediate nation state, Ukraine got crushed because the commies saw their autonomy as a threat. There couldn't be two revolutions because then the Soviets would be exposed to their own people as a bunch of needlessly authoritarian asswipes. There were plenty of other independent nationalist countries around Russia, Ukraine was the one with an Anarchist revolution. Which is why they went after the Black Army while the White Army still controlled a good chunk of Russia. The Anarchist ideology was a bigger threat than the plain old military threat of the Loyalists.

I may no excuses for Islam. Nor do i make excuses for any religion. They may, as you say, be near the worst, but any Faith-for-faith's-sake movement obscures the mind and inevitably promotes violence and oppression.

As to Libertarians agreeing with National Leadership? Almost none of the major figures in the Libertarian bloggosphere bought into the idea of national-greatness or leadership that Project for a New America Century promoted. And every Libertarian I know is pissed off about our newfound drive for empire.

But then I am not a Libertarian after all. I don't wear suits, trade on wallstreet or drink starbucks.

Goemagog said...

helping those who like us and hindering those who don't doesn't mean we have a drive for empire. we invaded iraq for reasons i believe to be legitimate, and we put chavez, a stalinist who believes the united state should be destroyed, back in power after a coup. if we were really trying to build an empire, we would have supported the venezuelan military and not chavez. if we were really trying to build an empire, we'd be the ones crossing the border with mexico in large armed groups. if we were really trying to build an empire, we'd not be letting the president of brazil, who started a nuclear weapons program to stop what he believes is u.s. interference in brazilian society, go to the white house and hang out with the president. the claim that the united states foreign policy is inherently imperialistic is itself stalinistic. we need raw resources and we have stuff that other people are eager to take from us with force, neither of which permits a policy of isolationism.

Goe, sleepy.

William said...

too tired to fisk your examples

if the US wasn't out for long-term ingrained and un-contestable "leadership", then just about every commentator on present day geopolitics is wrong. Stratfor, etc... as jefferson said, power strives after more power.

When I think of the core "neo-conservative" movement I think Project for a New American Century and the LGF armchair cheerleaders. Obviously there are competing interests in the Bush admin, but seriously, you guys got him to swear to your invasion-iraq plan before 9/11. don't go pleading that PNAC isn't the crucial force in the admin's foriegn policy. And we all know how open PNAC's been about their dreams of US imperialism.

Goemagog said...

Bush didn't swear to any plans to invade anywhere before 9/11. PNAC isn't the crucial force in adminstration policy, and neocons being the driving force behind anything is something made up by a newsman who doesn't know what a neocon is. a neocon is someone who was a socialist but switched to opposing socialism. usually they kept the socialist belief in international solutions to everything, which is why they advocate participation in everything international. if the us was out for uncontestable world leadership, we would have taken over iraq, iran, syria, afghanistan, sudan, and maybe libya and would be discussing options to prevent the emerging genocide in zimbabwe. the belief that any action we take must be derived from some conspiracy is childish to the extreme. removing saddam hussein from power became official u.s. policy in 1998 because he was violating the cease-fire agreement from 1991. stop repeating socialist rhetoric.

Goe, bases his opinions on facts, not fiction.

William said...

Have you looked at the people who signed the PNAC documents?? Go over to their website, read around. They're damn proud of it.

Secondly the entire internal discourse of the higher-levels in the neoconservative movement is around the necessity of imperialism. Opposition to imperialism is knee-jerk, they say And then they go on and on about realpolitik. Neorealism is accepted by the vast majority in the field of international relations and, as a result, the vast overarching movements of the US, as a Nation, have been committed to securing national power. This doesn't mean marching red-shirts into every country that openly claims to oppose us. What it means is solidifying our absolute power so that it can never be challenged.

It means that if the Middle East is developing as a region then various local powers are in danger of exceeding their power-level, as neorealism would put it, and entering the international stage as full-fledged bargainers. To stop such an emergence and allow for more proxy conflicts with Russia and China, the US could easily invade Iraq and establish themselves concretely in the region. Using Osama as a relatively unthreatening (he'll only kill people, not show up one day as an actual geopolitical power) focal point to attract the radical cultural elements, the US can move the continuing conflict with Russia and China into the much more fluid territory of unending war. What's more, the relatively limited nature of strategy being planned by leaders of the middle east means that we'll always have the advantage because they don't have think tanks and chess fanatics devouring every detail and composing counter-plans.

The upside of all this is that it might be able to neutralize the very real genius of Putin (though his centralization of Russia has allowed him to be far more squirrelly because his plans come from his head alone and not squabbling committees) and it also means we maintain our security on the big stuff, like nukes, because we're pushed up so close against the major possible destabilizers in the world. But mostly this is an end-game plan to use our rowdy agility to end the century with China as our lapdog and not the other way around.

The Anarchist Critique is as such:

The human spirit doesn't like the feeling of oppression. By playing for world domination (or "leadership", whatever) as a Nation they instill a feeling of team sports into the rest of the world's population and then the feeling that their teams are losing. Thus, the tighter the US tightens its grip, the more violent rebellion thre will be against it. Regardless of whether the Neoconservatives mean to use their national "leadership" to everyone's advantage. Continuing acceleration of technological development will fuel a too-the-death race between individualistic freedoms (to the benefit of terrorists/rebels/whathaveyou) and state security. Power desires more power and oppressed people in us-v-them conflicts don't tend to think straight. So the two futures of this "New American Century" are either the violent failure and fall from grace of the US or an endless deepening of power structures until, with the ever presence of technological power, ANY individual freedom becomes a threat to security.


As to your comments regarding libya, sudan, et alia... Just because a state is seeking power doesn't mean it acts like a stupid blunt-minded school-yard bully about it. (Well, it can, but only when it's decided that's an intelligent thing to do.) Bush did get his massive concession from Libya on WMD by pressuring the fuck out of him. Sudan doesn't come off as an immediately efficient expenditure of resources. We'd win some international goodwill, but invading countries is something you want to do sparingly and only when the payoff is really, really good.

Every geopolitics or international relations expert in the nation can tell you everything I've already said.

PNAC is the smartest of the think-tanks doing this stuff, the best connected into washington and the most powerful presence in the White House. Cheney agrees entirely with their plan, even if a bunch of individuals disagree over the details. Furthermore, PNAC was directly at the back of the neoconservatives who emerged into the public spotlight when Bush took power. You're, of course, right that much of the movement came out of disaffected hippies. They totally fit the profile. And I wouldn't expect the rest of the right to have accomplished anything like this. Domestic issues are just small-minded power jockeying for the most part. Dems and Repubs are just a bunch of corrupt, power seeking politicians and demagogues. Alone they couldn't open a cookie jar. But with the impassioned, but bitter idealism of the neoconservatives, Rove's party has provided an excellent springboard for the strengthening of national power.

Such interplay of politics in DC is how things work, not conspiratorial. No one has to sit behind closed doors and cackle manically to one another about this stuff. They just have a geeky attitude about geopolitics and a low opinion of the general media. Ever since 1950s realism, US international politics have been about elite academic and think-tank discussions rather than open debates. No one wants to deal with the unwashed public. (probably a good thing) And the topics being discussed don’t fit easily into the childish American political divide, so they’re ignored or revised by pundits to fit into their own agendas. But Bill O Reilly doesn’t write American Foreign policy and neither does any ballot box. Professors, career wonks and geeks in DC think-tanks and decide our strategies.

Or at least they do when the president lets them. Clinton, by and large, didn’t and just about everyone in those circles hates him rabidly for it.

Clinton did all kinds of things in office. Making it policy to remove Saddam is just one small little detail. It was also our policy to instigate democratic revolution in Burma. Saddam was obviously all kinds of bad, but we would not have gone to war without pressure and plans from the PNAC/neoconservative front.

Goemagog said...

for starters, there isn't a "neoconservative movement". there are neoconservatives and there are organizations that have a lot of neoconservatives, but there's no movement.

"This doesn't mean marching red-shirts into every country that openly claims to oppose us. What it means is solidifying our absolute power so that it can never be challenged."

we couldn't have absolute power without having a large military presence in every part of the globe. tossing out marxist complaints of american policy isn't supporting your position.

our foreign policies have been decided by foreign policy geeks almost since the country was founded. clinton's foreign policies are not that much different than bush's foreign policies. the differences are mostly how the press portrays them. more countries supported our invasion of iraq than supported clinton's involvement in the yugoslavian breakup, but the latter is always described as multilateral and the former as unilateral. it's not a function of foreign policy but the difference in how the press chooses to portray republicans or democrats.

foreign policy is never complicated. we're either ignoring someone, helping someone, or hindering someone. which we do depends on how likely they are to kill us, ignore us, or help us. people who are very likely to help us are our friends and we'll adjust our opinions of others based on how they treat our friends as well. ignoring everyone isn't an option because we have stuff, it's nice stuff and we like it, and they want it but don't want to make it themselves, so a great many people in the world want to come here and use force to take it from us. encouraging people to get their own stuff without killing anyone isn't imperialism as you claim it to be.

Goe, cause apparently anarchists don't know about the monroe doctrine.

William said...

“we couldn't have absolute power without having a large military presence in every part of the globe.”

See the @ critique. But remember that military power is only one very small detail of a larger matrix of diplomatic, political, and economic power. The dream is that we can have absolute power without having to invade everyone or run around with over-sized armies.

“it's not a function of foreign policy but the difference in how the press chooses to portray republicans or democrats.”

Stop spouting blind partisan rhetoric. The media practically sucks the presidency’s cock. As well as occasionally the Dems’. They like the corrupt system the way it is, they hate truly opposing power and they like stirring up irrelevant issues to put themselves in the forefront. The press is lazy and childish. They’ve always been, but they’re getting worse. If this was twenty years ago Bush would already be impeached.

There IS a difference in foreign policy. Clinton’s geeks had no clear vision whatsoever about what to do and where to go after the cold-war. Bush’s geeks have a very clear vision and it’s based in hardline realism, not the relatively doe-eyed neoliberalism of the Clinton admin.

“foreign policy is never complicated.”

In fact it is. Radically so. This isn't about the interactions of equal parties. Foreign policy is devoted to accomplishing a goal. It’s about turning international relations into a really complicated chess game. It only differs as to the intent of the game and how many details you take into account. Relative power. Idealism. Security. There are all sorts of important details. And the geeks currently reigning in DC are of certain distinct and dangerous opinions regarding what the intent of IR should be.

Goemagog said...

almost every media outlet has been extremely critical of bush, two to the point of fabricating information politically harmful to him, all with repetition of things that aren't true (mostly leftist propaganda), and bending over backwards to ignore anything good. that you believe they are obsequious shows how far from reality you are.

Goe, because CNN has admitted trying to sabotage Bush's foreign policy.

William said...

maybe I should clarify, as a whole (old school journalists are liberal elitists but it's more about snobbery than passion, and the race-to-the-bottem of statist commentators seen at CNN, MSNBC and FOX is a major counterweight) ... the media is not critical of Bush in any way or degree that matters.

They want to show off their own trademark journalistic skills without actually dealing with the major issues. When they start behaving sanely and calling for either assasination, revolution or just impeachment... then I'll consider them critical. ;)

Giving air time to a few airheads who chough up dumb criticisms and calling attention to bad stuff the admin does isn't being "critics" of Bush. It's trying to appear as if they're doing their fucking job.

As to ignoring good things. The media's been doing that for decades. No one cares about hospitals in Iraq, they care about blood splattered corpses. That sells copy.

Goemagog said...

again, your showing ignorance. most of the press is heavily anti-bush no matter what he does. hardly any of the ones supporting him support his domestic policies, even though they strongly support his foreign policies.

Goe, getting calls.

William said...

Well, it looks like we're spinning in circles, so I'll take my leave.

What little "opposition" to the Bush Admin I see in the press has been largely cosmetic. So I don't take them seriously anywhich way. But, hey whatever, maybe it's a blue/red culture thing. I mean I grew up in a city where Greens and Dems compete evenly and republicans make less than 5%. So color me biased if I think a few papers doing nothing more than 'tut-tutting' over utterly reprehensible actions constitutes effective support for his regime. It's the same old "Bush is stupid" bullshit that's kept him in power. If the media stopped actually grilling him rather than asking stupid softballs we'd get somewhere.

Take care, william.

Goemagog said...

try reading national review's the corner, it's freely accessible on their website and is neither a blanket endorsement or opposition to bush. they agree or disagree on issues and ideas, and usually explain why they agree or disagree on any given matter.

Goe, wishes he could shoot lawyers...