Prometheus 6

from James MacLean of Hobson's Choice

I cannot recall being so distressed by world events as I am now. I suppose the events of 2003, horrifying as they were, were only a lower course of cut stone in the pyramid of evil. It was a previous step, before things got really awful. . I read it before and wrote a series about it (here).

Also, recently I watched a superb German movie Downfall, about the last days of the 3rd Reich (mainly told from the point of view of Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge). The story takes place mostly from inside the rapidly shrinking area of Nazi control in Berlin; much of it in the claustrophobic warren of tunnels under the Chancellery. I had always regarded the Nazi Movement in Germany as a sort of cancer--an opportunistic disease that attacked Germany, rather like exotic cancers attack people suffering from AIDS. In the movie, the Nazi leaders do increasingly reveal their predatory relationship with German society:

Joseph Goebbels: I feel no sympathy. I repeat, I feel no sympathy! The German people chose their fate. That may surprise some people. Don't fool yourself. We didn't force the German people. They gave us a mandate, and now their little throats are being cut!

The neoconservatives feel just this way about the Usonians (US nationals) and Israelis. If their insane scheme to liquidate the Arab nations erupts into global pandemonium, they won't harbor any particular sorrow. This isn't nationalist chauvinism run amok, although that's certainly the case with the poor deluded enablers. It's not some insidious Jewish conspiracy, although a lot of the frustrated European jingoists, at last free to assert their long-thwarted anti-Semitism, are delighted to say so.

I strongly suspect the neoconservatives grew out of the "developmental state" racket, in which the former colonies of European powers were supposed to be assisted in their economic development by technocratic (puppet) leaders like the Shah of Iran, Ayub Khan, the 1964 Brazilian junta, and most spectacularly, the Suharto Regime in Indonesia. The object was to stop the cycle of poverty, corruption, peasant evictions, insurgency, civil war, repression, and post-war devastation. The part of the cycle the neoconservatives focused on was insurgency; this was to be repressed more completely so the process of capital accumulation could occur really fast (regardless of the human consequences).

At the same time, however, capital accumulation a la 19th century England was pointless if the industrialized world rejected the output of a future, industrialized, 3rd world. If the Philippines were going to catch up to [say] Germany or the USA, then there would be a long, long period of time when firms based in the RP would be beating those in North America or Europe at their own game. For a long time the RP would be a terrifying threat to industrial managers in the developed world as Philippine industrial executives contrived superior methods of competing and winning in the global marketplace.

Obviously, a bloc of countries essentially governed by its industrial managers (viz., OECD member states) was never going to allow such a thing. The neoconservatives therefore used the rhetoric and the fantasy of development, while focusing their energies on ever-more ferocious repression of insurgency.

Today, I am constantly noticing examples of the amazing audacity and mendacity of the neoconservatives and their jingoistic enablers.  I believe other countries have a similar malady, partly in reaction to their anxiety about the future plans of the US polity.  But the most alarming situation is the complete inability of the opposition anywhere to confront them.  The antiwar movement in the USA, for example, has no endgame in mind and cannot even begin to discuss one. 

I think the problem is that the neoconservatives actually represent a tradition of industrial management from the USA. The "American System" of manufacturing emerged from the refining of petroleum and the production of machinery (which accounted for nearly all US exports from the late 19th century to the mid-20th); it involved firms that had a large, professional system of modular, bureaucratic management in distribution, development, and production. By the 1920's these industrial bureaucracies had replaced the old powerhouses of investment bankers. They were no longer families of bourgeoisie, like the "House of Morgan," but rather, men who had a mixture of college and on-the-job training. These men would develop the weltanschauung of people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, despising or actively loathing all constraints on the power of the industrial corporation. At the same time, they were conditioned by the adversarial nature of American law and politics to pursue their objectives relentlessly, relying entirely on the despised adversary to contain the consequences of them getting their way.

Industrial managers tended to take a far harder line towards rival interests and considerations than did their shareholders or scientific researchers. Many of the latter have joined the ranks of the Army of Obfuscation, fighting the Republican war on science. Advertising has shifted from seduction of the national population to its rape by aggressive telemarketers. At the same time, there was a pattern of absolute solidarity with US business managers in foreign countries. Please note all of the insulting references to European customs or attitudes are targeted specifically at those practices that interfere with the industrial managers' mastery of society. For example, social welfare programs, regulation of toxic chemicals, public works, and worker involvement in management are denounced as evidence that Europe is both behind the curve and unfit to compete legitimately.

The problem with American systems of industrial management was that they were entirely devoted to the problem of coping with size. Increasingly this mimicked the coping methods of Soviet enterprise. You may, perhaps, have wondered how the Bolsheviks coped with the huge, demanding technical problem of preparing five-year plans without computers. Even today, the one computational task known to be beyond the power of the largest computer processing systems is the management of large economies (even if money were abolished and consumers were issued a homogenous bundle of goods). The answer is that the Bolshevik economy had no reliable system of central planning; it was actually an extremely aggressive form of monopoly capitalism. The industrial managers (including, by the way, military officers in the old Russian Army) were originally trained from the czarist period, often by Western European or North American businesses, then "supervised" for loyalty and productivity by political officers. In other words, the Soviets created a hierarchy of agents whose job was to shadow the actual productive managers. The Red Army was originally officered by captive czarist officers who were shadowed by Soviet co-officers. The latter lacked the military ability of their shadow-ees, but ensured they acted loyally with respect to the Soviet regime.

This pattern of managing by threats and shadows is the Bushist method. Bush is a paradigm of the US industrial manager who has no comprehension of process or industrial method; his approach consists purely of the "do it or I'll punish you" tactic. His famous gaffe at the G-8 Summit exemplified this:

George W. Bush: See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over.

This was false. "They" was the Iranian leadership, which Bush imagines controls Syria, which he also imagines controls Hezbollah. In fact, the neoconservatives who constitute the inner circle of decision-making in the White House, the men who have blindsided both Powell AND Rice, are themselves running out of people to intimidate. They cannot actually GET anyone who plausibly has the ability to get the insurgency to stop, the death squads to stop, Hizbullah to stop, the Palestinians to stop, or domestic carping to stop.

However, this cannot be said to be the case inside the USA. And there are still plans the neoconservatives have yet to try. Their object is to eliminate entirely any prospect of radical resistance to themselves, and as always they are determined to confront their failures by overreaching. They know that their most dangerous enemy is the US population, and their only hope is to make sure US nationals are more afraid of a downfall, than we are of their monstrous vision for our own society.