Horrorism on a grander scale. posted by Richard Seymour

This is an argument for terrorism. It isn't only that, of course. I only point out that it is because terrorism is one of the few inexcusable crimes in bourgeois ideology. Suicide attacks in Israeli and American cities, recall, are said to communicate a genocidal intent, and are without extenuation unforgiveable assaults on civil society. Well, any argument that suggests that it is reasonable to use nuclear strikes and dispose of over 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to intimidate a government into surrendering is an argument for terrorism at the very least. To that, I will add that it is despicable and outrageous and implicitly racist, since it applies a standard to an Asiatic society that I submit would not be applied to a largely Anglo-Saxon apartheid society. However, the main thing to note about the article is that it is niche writing. It panders to a small audience of establishment-oriented liberals who like their contrarians to be as conformist as possible. It is written in the house style - despatching "popular mythology", exposing Guardian readers to "surprise" if not outright scandal. Yet it affirms that "alternative history" is bunk. It picks off a couple of historians who essentially (or for Kamm's purposes) affirm Henry Stimson's account, which was written for "that rather difficult class of the community which will have charge of the education of the next generation, namely educators and historians." This is what the author is for, and it is why The Guardian decided to publish it. Truth, ethics, human life - these aren't values. It is demeaning to even consider the argument, so I won't: I rule it out. Whatever the historiographical arguments, the conclusion that it was necessary and right to use nuclear weapons against civilian population centres requires such a conspicuous contraction of historical possibility that it can only be apologetic. It cannot be the result of a rational engagement with the evidence. I would only add to that the author is an advocate of continued nuclear armament on the grounds that Western states are civilised (while Iran is not): chew on that for a while.

It is more sensible to consider the implications of the historical research. For example, if the historian Barton Bernstein is correct that "avoiding the use of the bomb was never a real concern for policymakers" because they were "inured to the mass killing of the enemy", what does this tell us about a) the dehumanising effects of war; and b) the dehumanising effects of racism? American state planners were, then as now, steeped in the crudest racism toward non-white populations. (Recall the State Department's insistence before the Iraq war that "the towelheads can't hack" democracy, and thus must be ruled by a "strongman".) But they were particularly steeped in anti-Asian racism. This is a country that had experienced the ethnic cleansing of Chinese Americans from California and the Pacific North-West. It is a country whose imperial ambitions had been stoked very early on by what China could provide in the way of markets. It is a country that produced a body of literature devoted to the 'Yellow Peril', and which sought to restrict migration from the Asian continent because of labour competition (and, as usual, racial purity played its part). It is above all a country in which the domestic Asian population was considered a menace, an enemy, an extension of the other side. They were thus interned, arbitrarily, for the duration of the war. Of course, all minority racial groups in the US are suspected of having sympathy with the enemy, perhaps because of a disavowed thought that they have every reason to: during Wilson's intervention in World War I, the state was obsessed with the idea that African Americans were suffused with pro-German sentiment (even though some prominent NAACP aligned black intellectuals argued in favour of the Allies in the war, not least - to my immense surprise - W.E.B. Du Bois). This conviction resulted in spying and legal harrassment, even if on a much smaller scale than was applied to Reds. So, with all that in mind, what are the probabilities about the weight of a Japanese life in a white American ruling class mind? How likely is it that Truman, a retrograde racist himself, conducted a serious pro-con analysis of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

One might update this question. How much does a "towelhead's" life weigh in the mind of Dick Cheney? How much does Hillary Clinton care about a dead Iranian, since she threatens possible nuclear attacks on Iran? We have already seen Muslims rounded up and imprisoned by Bush. We have seen secret Stasi-style prisons and industrial torture centres set up. Civil rights do not apply to Muslims, or apply less than they do to others. For, as long as there is empire, it will require ways of distinquishing one human being who can claim protection from arbitrary harm, and another who can't. Racism is the single most potent doctrine that has thus far been elaborated to legitimise this, and white supremacism persists to this day even though a strange mutant variant, Islamophobia, now feeds from it. If another state - for example, China - was able to achieve a portion of what Japan did, by building up its own vicious local empire, what are the possibilities for an American president faced with that? Isn't it obvious that we ought to limit their possibilities (ie precisely by forcing an end to the policy of thermonuclear blackmail)? What is most disturbing today is the attempt to rescue nuclear weapons from the pall of opprobrium and hostility that they inevitably attract - through the slow degrading of the strict barrier between nuclear and conventional weapons, and the generation of mini-nukes - which can be used to reintroduce the prospect of nuclear terrorism by degree. The smoking gun, as Bush said in a different context, may well be a mushroom cloud.

One of the arguments used by the slender group of defenders of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Holocaust is that the actual war by the US wasn't all that civilian-friendly anyway. It is a strange cue: the obvious response, it seems to me, is to examine whether the brutality of America's campaign was warranted. Possibly, an iniquitously savage bombing campaign might well have contributed to the savagery of the nuclear attacks themselves. Arguably, even if the campaign was necessary (and I deliberately introduce that as a question and not a conclusion), the way in which it was waged was not. Indeed, the tactic of firebombing Japanese cities is certainly a deliberate form of terrorism against the civilian population. One of the failed tactics was the attempt to use bats to convey incendiary matter to the eavings of the houses in towns and villages, thus burning the population alive. The successful ones were the ones that went on to be used in Korea and Vietnam: dropping explosive and incendiary matter on populations, with the hope that they would be terrorised into supporting Western strategies and regimes.

Today is Hiroshima Day. But who knows what cities we will have to remember next? They have already destroyed Fallujah, and can go further, and almost certainly will. That's horrorism.

Labels: end of history, hiroshima, horrorism

Perpetual Peace and the End of History posted by Richard Seymour

Have a look at the following charts, the first from a study by the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management entitled, 'Peace and Conflict 2003' (click to enlarge):





From these, you would gather that there has been a rapid drop in warfare of all kinds since 1992, and that wars are a risk principally in poor countries without liberal institutions. On that basis, you might concur with the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit that, while the risks of war will resurge in context-specific settings, 'globalisation' is slowly guiding us toward a more stable (and less impoverished) future. In this view, the role of stable liberal capitalist states is to manage the occasional crises as societies graduate toward fuller integration into the global economy with liberal institutions and guaranteed property rights. The 'old battles' of left and right thus dispatched, it will be a relatively simple matter to maintain perpetual peace and remove the means of coercion to the background of human societies. This is the kind of doctrine that the former diplomat Robert Cooper promulgates: "there are pre-modern states - often former colonies - whose failures have led to a Hobbesian war of all against all: countries such as Somalia and, until recently, Afghanistan. Second, there are post-imperial, postmodern states which no longer think of security primarily in terms of conquest. A third kind are the traditional 'modern' states such as India, Pakistan or China which behave as states always have, following interest, power and raison d'état." It goes without saying, which is why he doesn't say it, that liberal European and North American capitalist states are the 'postmodern' ones who never think about things such as conquest (but should, in his view).

It is not quite so simple, according to Christopher Cramer's book Civil War Is Not A Stupid Thing. For instance, consider another set of figures devised through a different lens. The Uppsala Conflict Database provides an invaluable amount of free data on the level, range and types of global conflict. Here are couple of charts from their site (click to enlarge):





The trend in the rate of conflicts is the same for both high and low-intensity warfare. While it is clear that the rates of warfare did decline after 1992, the drop is nowhere near as sharp, and it remains at roughly the level it was before the highest point of conflict during the 1980s. The number of interstate wars declines, while the number of 'internal' wars increases. As Cramer observes, these analytical frames are not merely descriptive: to describe a war as 'internal' is to direct the focus to a particular aspect of conflict and away from others. If a war is largely fought within a given terrain, largely by actors indigenous to it or nearby, this does not mean that international forces are not powerfully involved: consider the 'civil war' in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, or indeed any number of conflicts in which the US, UK and France in particular have intervened in or stimulated, or orchestrated. Their armies may not be involved, and increasingly we rely on private mercenaries (as per Sandline International or Blackwater USA). Yet they are directly involved. There are also wars waged by states against non-state movements, and in the past these would have been classified as 'extra-systemic' (anti-colonial wars in particular). This category has disappeared largely as imperial territories acquired the character of nation-states. Yet what if Chechnya were to win its war for independence? What is now considered a civil war within Russia would be an extra-systemic one. When did war begin, and when did it end, in Iraq? The US had been rapidly escalating a campaign of systematic bombing coupled with sanctions throughout the 1990s, arguably a state of de facto low-level, highly asymmetrical war, with Iraq's luckless inhabitants as hostages. There are forms of mass state-led orchestrations of violence, such as Gujarat in 1992 and 2002, which are not classified as civil war because they are directed against civilians and pose no threat to the state at any stage. Additionally, some wars that originate as civil wars progress into genocide rapidly, as in Rwanda. A further observation is that the extraordinary peak of conflict during the 1980s and at the end of the Cold War doesn't represent a sharp increase in the outbreak of wars so much as an accumulation of them over fifty years, which suggests that these wars have been extremely difficult to end once initiated. In other words, the two perceptions that war is becoming less frequent and less intense, and that war is limited to areas with weak states and 'underdeveloped' economies, are fundamentally unsound. Cramer adds there are too few observable trends to make many useful generalisations about what we might expect in the future. The variety of wars characterised as civil wars is far too broad in terms of origins, casualties, battle intensity, social actors involved, causes etc to produce secure categories.

Yet, one such category has proven to be rather popular with a certain kind of post-Cold War liberal - people like Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw and Hans Magnus Enzenburger, who had been Leftists while there remained a Soviet Union - and that is the 'new war'. In this view, wars are unpolitical, usually organised around 'identity' rather than a clear programme of social change, brutal beyond any limit that might be imposed by international law or political norms - essentially a form of extended criminal activity, leeching off global financial and commodity networks in what is ominously described as 'black globalisation'. The theorists of 'new wars' also look to a post-military age, even if they are slightly less willing to accept overt empire than people like Robert Cooper. However, the empirical basis of their claims has been comprehensively undermined, as discussed here. The rate of civil wars was certainly not increasing during the period of the 'new wars'; their barbarity was on the whole a little bit less intense than Cold War ventures; the prominence of 'identity' politics wasn't absent in the Cold War period and was then, as it is now, intermingled with other political programmes (the Anglo-French axis in African politics has long outlived the colonial era and the Cold War, while the secessionism of Croatian leaders was not more important than the secessionism of Moise Tshombe in the Congo); and transnational financial and commodity flows were at least as important if not more so than during the Cold War ('conflict diamonds' being an analogue of 'conflict heroin').

Cramer has an interesting approach, which is to regard these wars on a continuum of violence that extends right into liberal democratic polities, from outright civil war in Mozambique, in which the establishment of property rights was every bit as conflictual as it was in Cromwell's Ireland, to sustained low-level class violence in Brazil, with perpetual clashes with the MST and favelas for instance, to sporadic clashes between strikers and the army in South Africa and ongoing forms of social violence in Europe and the United States. Social peace is maintained in advanced capitalist societies by organised violence that is usually extruded from the explicit theatre of politics. Yet there are examples of extreme domestic state violence, usually where population groups are seen to disrespect the fundamental (until then, apparently harmless) boundaries of property-based societies. The attacks on Waco or on the MOVE organisation in the US are two such instances. But the most violent periods in the history of modern liberal polities has been in the prolonged transition to capitalism: the enclosures, the revolts, the enslavement and colonisation, the class warfare, the mass hangings, the genocides and so on. Contempory conflict in 'developing' nations can thus be understood as part of the process of the "primitive accumulation" of capital. The 1975-1992 Mozambican civil war, mentioned before, is thus seen as being driven by a conflict over the accumulation of land and the establishment of conditions for successful capitalist agriculture. Aside from the specific business of acquiring and converting property into capital, the overal process of transition produces turmoil. Karl Polanyi observed that without the intervention of Tudor and Stuart states, the conversion to a market society, the enclosures, the transformation of humanity and land into capital, would have been a disaster sufficient to wipe out most of Europe's human beings.

Several new phases in this so-called "primitive accumulation" have been opened up in recent years: the clean sweep in Russia and Eastern Europe; the neoliberalisation in India and Latin America; the reconstitution of private capitalist class power in China; the rapid acceptance of neoliberalism by nominally leftist parties in most advanced capitalist states etc. The aggressive programmes of the happily defunct Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and similar initiatives by the World Trade Organisation, seek to extend this process. These policies don't necessarily cause wars in and of themselves any more than they cause the process of "primitive accumulation", but they have the capacity to aggravate an already existing set of conditions, or interact with other elements (such as arms and commodities markets, financial flows, 'ethnic' or identitarian tensions etc). Cramer's argument thus rebukes both the liberal view of violence as something surpassed by (post)modern states, and the liberal view of development as something that is technical, and can be achieved with a careful management of pain and consequences by very knowledgeable graduates from Oxford or MIT. Development is a deeply political process with powerful motors toward violent conflict, and capitalist development is not less so than any other kind despite the formal disavowal of political violence in capitalist ideology. The process of transition, it should be said, is not one with a determinate end. At no point is every form of commons enclosed and privatised, and nor could it be: there remain struggles over who will possess how much, what will belong to all and what will belong to a few, what conditions will apply to the labour force and how oppressed groups will be treated within the social hierarchy. And, as it is a crisis-ridden system, managed and sustained in large part by the projection of extreme force, the fantasy of perpetual peace and a post-military society is (at least this side of the socialist revolution) a dense revisionist palimpsest that papers over centuries of historical reality.

Labels: capitalism, civil war, clash of civilisations, end of history, peace, war