A Colossal Wreck (72 page)

May 11

Has there ever been such a chilling launch to a re-election campaign? I take the kickoff to be April 27, when Obama produces his long birth certificate at a White House press conference. He says it’s time to abandon such idle distractions and face the big, serious issues. He knows something we don’t—that serious issue number one is a killing.

The Navy SEALs are on standby, primed with Obama’s orders for the summary assassination of Osama bin Laden. There’s cloud cover over Abbottabad, so bin Laden gets an extra couple of days puttering around the house listening to his old speeches. William and Kate won’t have to share Saturday’s headlines with the head of Osama.

Had all gone well, Sunday’s newspapers would have been freighted with the news that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed in the course of a NATO bombing strike on a “command and control” site in Tripoli. It had been on the cards from day one; indeed, on April 29 the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service leaked an accurate forecast to
Rex
, a Russian online news agency, whose Kirill Svetitsky quoted an anonymous source within the intelligence service: “There will be an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi on or before May 2. The governments of France, Britain and the US decided on it, for the warfare in Libya does not proceed well for the anti-Libyan alliance.”

The April 30, 2011, bombing attack, made in the direct aftermath of Gaddafi’s call for a cease-fire, was not burdened with fancy talk about Article 51. UN Resolution 1973, which simply established a no-fly zone, was the sole legal pretext for targeted assassination.

Obama is certainly not the first US President to have taken a keen interest in assassinations. We could start with the bid on Zhou Enlai’s life just before the Bandung Conference in 1955. Then we could move on to the assassination of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961. The Kennedy years saw the first of many well-attested CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

In his
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
, Bill Blum—one of Osama’s favorite authors—has an interesting list of US targets, starting in 1949 with Korean opposition leader Kim Koo and going on to Indonesian President Sukarno, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Philippines opposition leader Claro Recto, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres Ferrer, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine
comandantes
of the Sandinista National Directorate, prominent Somali clan leader Mohamed Farah Aidid, Slobodan Milo
ević …

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, like the ’60s, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true on either side of the executive order President Gerald Ford issued in 1976 banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall
engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” stated Executive Order 11905, now inoperative.

May 13

Pinko terror-symps and the “rule of law” gang may cavil and whine at the lack of legal propriety in the execution of Osama, but it’s not cutting much ice with liberal America. For long years what might be called the “progressive” segment of American voters have chafed at Republican gibes that their guy Obama is a wimp, all the more irritably because deep down many of them thought the charge had some merit.

It’s wondrous what two expanding bullets to the head of an unarmed man will do. The chorus of approval for the SEALs covers the liberal spectrum. The
Nation
’s Jeremy Scahill exulted, as did Gary Wills on the
New York Review of Books
site, with an ecstatic paean, “The President’s Crack Team,” concluding, “we should keep in mind what superb things can be done by our Navy Seals. And we should keep somewhere in the back of our minds a remembrance that the one ultimately pulling the trigger … was the President of the United States.”

May 20

The French are for the millionaire. The Americans are for the maid. Among the French, three out of five think the IMF’s former managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been framed. Here in the US there’s not been a reliable poll, but public sentiment is clearly against Strauss-Kahn, amplified by self-congratulation that America is a nation of laws, a maid’s word as potent as that of a millionaire, in contrast to the moral decay and deference to the rich prevalent in France.

The French, for their part, stigmatize America as a puritanical, omnipotent imperial police state, whose intelligence agencies are efficiently capable of any infamy. But even as they charge that Strauss-Kahn was set up, the French press is rather weak on identifying or
even suggesting the precise mastermind or group working to destroy a man who might have been the French Socialist Party’s candidate, evicting Sarkozy from the Élysée Palace.

May 27

Was there ever a nation so marinated in hypocrisy as America? At home and abroad President Barack Obama trumpets Uncle Sam’s virtues and dispenses patronizing homilies to other nations on how to behave themselves and honor freedom and democracy. This last week it’s been Europe’s turn to hear these self-righteous preachments.

A couple of weeks ago Secretary of State Clinton attacked China, contrasting untiring efforts by the US to encourage human rights around the world, at a time when the Chinese “are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible.”

A week earlier Obama signed an expanded trade pact with Colombia where in 2010 fifty-one Colombian labor organizers were murdered, many of them by government-sponsored death squads. As Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO remarked, he doubted the trade agreement would be moving forward if fifty-one CEOs had been killed.

If there’s one state in the Middle East where the US surely has clout it’s Bahrain, which just happens to be the base for the US Fifth Fleet. While Clinton was wagging her finger at China, details were surfacing of the ferocious repression of Bahrain’s Shia majority by Bahrain’s Sunni rulers, backed by Saudi troops.

Masked squads raid Shia villages at night. At least twenty-seven Shia mosques and religious meeting places have so far been wrecked or bulldozed flat. If this was Libya, Clinton would trumpeting the repression as further justification for NATO’s onslaught. Not so in Bahrain. Peter Lee recently described the repression in the country: “In one sequence, a Human Rights Watch representative directs the reporter’s attention to a crime scene that has come to symbolize the worst excesses of Bahrain’s riot police: the place where a young man, Hani Jumah, was beaten. Apparently, he was not a demonstrator; he
was just in the wrong place at the wrong time as riot police swept the area. The camera pans on the bloodstained floor of a deserted construction site as the HRW staffer relates with forensic detachment: ‘We found fragments of his kneecap … we also found one of his teeth.’ And you’re left to wonder: how does someone get beaten so severely a piece of his kneecap is dislodged from his body? The young man was taken to the hospital for treatment, then got disappeared from the hospital. His family was summoned to retrieve his body four days later.”

Amid Obama’s grandiose eloquence about freedom, he has effectively excluded Palestinians from his supportive embrace and, amid meaningless verbal froth, collapsed yet again in the face of Israeli intransigence, and the lobby. US diplomacy, supervised by Obama and Clinton, will of course be dedicated to efforts to hold back history while strong-arming the UN into attempting to do the same.

June 16

Here’s Trotsky on Céline—“Louis-Ferdinand Céline walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes. A mature man, with a colossal stock of observations as physician and artist, with a sovereign indifference toward academicism, with an extraordinary instinct for intonations of life and language, Céline has written a book which will survive, independently of whether he writes other books, and whether they attain the level of his first.
Journey to the End of the Night
is a novel of pessimism, a book dedicated by terror in the face of life, and weariness of it, rather than by indignation. Active indignation is linked up with hope. In Céline’s book there is no hope … Decay hits not only parties in power, but schools of art as well. The creative methods become hollow and cease to react upon human sensibilities—an infallible sign that the school has become ripe enough for the cemetery of exhausted possibilities—that is to say, for the Academy … Céline will not write a second book with such an aversion for the lie and such a disbelief in the truth. The dissonance must resolve itself. Either the artist will make his peace with the darkness or he will perceive the dawn.”

I like the cemetery of exhausted possibilities. Put it next to Robert Browning’s lines in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:

What’s the vague good o’ the world, for which you dare

With comfort to yourself blow millions up?

We neither of us see it! we do see

The blown-up millions—spatter of their brains

And writhing of their bowels and so forth,

In that bewildering entanglement

Of horrible eventualities

Past calculation to the end of time!

Round out the funeral bouquet with this, from Adorno: “The injunction to practice intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling the reader to follow the process through and, where possible—in the academic industry—to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.”

From
Minima Moralia—
and as succinct a critique of the culture of the internet as one can find.

June 29

How many nails does it require to whack down forever the coffin lid on European social democracy? Lenin, outraged in 1914 at the sight of Social Democratic parties across Europe rallying behind their national flags and voting war credits to unleash the horrors of World War I, would have been caustically unsurprised just over a century later at the current spectacle in Athens.

Here, last Wednesday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou won a no-confidence vote for what Michael Hudson describes as a program for national suicide, which can only be thwarted by a national referendum. The confidence vote was to ram through an
austerity package, amounting to over €78 billion, against the furious protests and resistance of the Greek people. Around €28 billion of the total is to be raised through spending cuts and increased revenue, while €50 billion will be raised through the privatization of state enterprises.

It really is a bit rich to hear preachments from Germany about the importance of paying debts. Ninety percent of all Germans oppose a bailout for Greece on the grounds of the latter’s aversion to paying reparations for its supposed profligacy. Never has a country flourished more mightily than Germany from flouting reparations and debts.

Albrecht Ritschl, a professor at the London School of Economics, points out in an interview in
Der Spiegel
that Germany welshed on loans from the US to pay the reparations levied by the Allies after World War I. After World War II, a divided Germany was excused reparations to countries such as Greece that it had invaded. Under a 1953 treaty, the issue of reparations was on the table after reunification in 1990. But, Ritschl says, “With the exception of compensation paid out to forced laborers, Germany did not pay any reparations after 1990—and neither did it pay off the loans and occupation costs it pressed out of the countries it had occupied during World War II. Not to the Greeks, either.” Ritschl reckons Germany was “the biggest debt transgressor of the twentieth century.”

July 18

On August 2, the United States could start defaulting on its obligations as the Tea Party crowd in the House of Representatives refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

America is in love with Apocalypse. It always has been. Every couple of years someone says the End Is Nigh. When I came to America’s shores in 1972 Hal Lindsey’s
The Late Great Planet Earth
had just been published and sold thirty million copies over the next twenty years. Lindsey wrote, rather presciently, that the Antichrist would rule over a ten-nation European Community through the 1970s until the Rapture—scheduled for the 1980s—and the Second Coming.